Partners

by Joseph H. Delaney

Illustration by Dell Harris

Alice Simmons emerged from the kitchen door, wiping her hands on her apron. Her day had been busy. It had started at dawn, and now, at mid-morning, she felt the need of a break.

She stepped out into the Sun, which blazed hot already. The air felt damp, not quite humid enough to be called muggy, but close. It held a definite promise of afternoon showers.

Soon Mel, who had left home on his tractor before sunup, would be coming in from the cornfield to eat his lunch. Alice had been keeping watch on the grape arbor, her project, part of the garden which is every farm wife’s private fief, and she knew that some of the bunches were already making sugar and tasted sweet and juicy.

Upon that thought she retreated momentarily into her kitchen, found her shears and hustled off to pick some of the fruit to go with their lunch.

Her objective was the sunward side of the arbor, the final row, where the light was unobstructed and mother nature had been pampering the vines since the first thaw. She made for that like a bee after honeysuckle.

There they were, dusty blue, plump and heavy, already drooping against the inexorable cling of gravity as for as their stems would allow them. Alice was pleased to see no signs of rot, or of bird predation, which had so badly mauled last year’s crop.

She brought no basket. She would take only a couple of bunches, just what they needed for lunch, no more than a double handful. She searched out the ripest bunch and reached a hand under to support it while she cut the stem.

That was when she saw IT!

IT slithered away from her.

Alice screamed, and recoiled, drawing back against one of the arbor posts, which, rotten at the base, would not support her weight. It promptly broke and dumped her backward across the trailing vines. Alice screamed again.

The creature seemed to have heard. It glared at her for a moment but did not appear to be alarmed. It turned complacently back to its feeding, seized another grape in its jaws, pulled until the stem came out and strained to swallow it.

Alice struggled to her feet, outraged at its brazen behavior. She still wasn’t quite sure what kind it was, or whether it was poisonous, but there was no doubt in her mind that this was a snake. And Alice, like most people, was not particularly tolerant of serpents of any kind.

Her thoughts immediately turned from flight to defense, and from there she began to contemplate offensive possibilities. Alice resolved she would not be intimidated, she would not be robbed. She would arm herself and she would fight for what was hers.

She ran to the barn, where her gardening tools hung on a rack behind a creaky, immobile door that Mel kept promising to fix but never had. She selected a well-worn hoe, although its handle was cracked and bound with friction tape that made her hands black when she used it, was nevertheless clean and shiny and sharp where it counted.

Armed thus, she ran back to the arbor, creating enough disturbance to wake up the dog, Brutus, an old and mostly deaf beagle, who then followed along.

The snake was still calmly eating grapes when she got back, and seemed not to fear Alice armed and vengeful any more than it had feared Alice in flight—not until she took her first swing.

Then it fled, her swing having missed so narrowly that the breeze it made blew something off the creature.

In an instant the snake was gone, its pale white and curiously undulating form wiggling first along a thick vine and then dropping to the ground, where it retreated rapidly in a sort of combination scurry and slither.

Brutus caught a scent, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. It was as if it simply failed to excite him. He looked bored.

Alice tried to sic him on the creature, as she might have done to any other varmint, but unlike rabbits, which Brutus loved to chase in his own peculiarly leisurely way, this creature was clearly not prey to him.

With disgust, and promising herself that she would catch the creature later, when it got hungry and returned, Alice picked what ripe grapes the creature had left and took them in the house. She left the hoe on the porch, ready for instant use.

“Alice, I’m ashamed of you. You’re a farmer’s daughter and a farmer’s wife. You know snakes only eat meat. There aren’t any vegetarian snakes.”

“I only called it a snake because it looked like one, even if it was snow white and had these. ” She held up a tiny object.

Mel leaned over to study it. “Feathers? It had feathers?”

“I guess so. I saw this one fall off when I swung my hoe at it.”

“Looks like a chicken feather to me,” Mel shrugged.

“The chickens are all penned up. None of them have been loose for weeks…”

“Maybe Big George lost it, or somebody’s stray, or maybe it came off a wild bird, like a pigeon. The barn’s always full of them even with those owls hanging out in there.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I never said that. I said as far as I know snakes don’t eat grapes or have feathers. I don’t doubt you saw something, but—”

“Then I’ll catch it, or I’ll kill it, one or the other, but I won’t let it gobble up my grapes and I won’t let you tell me I’m losing my grip.” Alice stood and went to the sink to do the lunch dishes. She turned her back on Mel and wouldn’t look at him even though he hugged her from behind and tickled her neck with his mustache, something that always got her going when she wasn’t sore at him.

“I’m serious, Mel. Now, why don’t you get on your kiddie car and ride off into the sunset before my imaginary snake decides to crunch your corn crop?”

Mel was not a fighter. He was, however, a pretty good farmer and he knew Alice was right—if he didn’t finish the spraying he’d have all kinds of beasties living off his toil.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, giving her a chaste peck. “Be careful, will you? Just because that snake of yours is a vegetarian doesn’t mean he won’t bite.” Mel waddled off in his clunky boots, leaving Alice with a sobering thought; what if it did bite—and what if it was venomous?

Three days passed. Alice and Mel had pretty much made up, and both were smart enough to keep quiet about Alice’s experience. Mel never had believed that what she had seen was a snake and she was herself beginning to concede the possibility of mistaken identity.

Nevertheless, Alice kept a close watch on her garden, particularly the grape arbor, and never went anyplace without her hoe. She also prepared a forked stick, which she kept handy, though out of sight, because unlike the hoe the stick was something whose purpose Mel would guess immediately. He wouldn’t approve of such intimacy with a wild animal.

She could kill the snake with the hoe, of course, but the stick’s noose of baling wire might enable her to take it alive. She wasn’t about to try handling it bare handed, but if the noose worked she could drop it into the big thirty gallon trash can she was reserving especially for that purpose and prove to her stubborn husband that she wasn’t just seeing things.

But, no sooner had she prepared herself to do battle with the snake than she discovered she was armed against the wrong enemy. Another, even stranger varmint appeared, a cloud of ravenous litde creatures that crept across the ground with frenetic speed and behaved like a school of fish or a flock of swallows. It moved as one. It started and stopped in unison. When one turned they all turned, and the final turn they made was straight into Alice’s lettuce patch.

The “flock,” silent as a shadow and almost as quick, swarmed over three rows on one corner, and Alice was horrified to see that it operated almost like a buzz saw. Whatever these creatures were, they were behaving just like the leaf-cutting ants Alice remembered from the National Geographic programs on TV The only difference was they didn’t carry the leaves off, but consumed them on the spot. Greenery was disappearing with alarming speed, and these soft brown lumps were reappearing in its place.

Alice didn’t have any idea what they were. Like the snake, they were new to her experience and she didn’t know what to do about them. Certainly, there were far too many for her to simply stomp, and they were pretty clearly not insects, so even if she’d had insecticide prepared it might not bother them.

Fortunately, in a genuine flash of genius Alice realized she had allies, a whole yard full of them, her chickens. She wouldn’t have to fight alone this time.

She raced to the chicken house, which formed a part of their pen, and frantically grabbed a scoop of grain with which to lay a trail to the lettuce patch.

With this bait, she opened the gate and let the flock follow her. She ran out of grain just before they reached the creatures, who had by now penetrated into the center of the patch. Fortunately, chickens are dumb and they didn’t know that, and so they followed her in the expectation that she would throw them some more grain.

They got a better treat. They loved it. Once the first chicken spotted the first “bug” and sampled it, there was no stopping them. Greedy for more, the dominant hen took over, leading the assault deep into the plot where the birds quickly surrounded and exterminated the invaders.

Alice could not find one survivor. She still didn’t know what they were, and under present circumstances didn’t have a prayer of capturing a sample. Worse, her saviors now began to turn on her. Some were still hungry and eager to forage, so Alice had to get them back into their pen before they gobbled up what was left of the lettuce. Some of them really liked lettuce.

The task took nearly half an hour. When the job was finally done Alice surveyed the damage. One whole corner of her lettuce patch was now utterly bare, the plants clipped off at the ground. Half of what was left was trampled or badly pecked. Mel was certain to notice that, and ask what happened, so Alice decided she had finally had enough of his skepticism. She knew there was one way to get a sample before he got home, though it would be dead, not living.

“What’s this? Chicken on Tuesday? Chicken’s for Sunday, Alice.”

“That’s not chicken, Mel, that’s crow.”

“It is, huh? What’s got you riled up now, Alice? Has your snake been back?”

“Something worse, Mel. Go look in the freezer.”

“Look in the freezer? For what?”

“There’s a coffee can in there with something in it that I think you should see. Go get it.”

Puzzled, Mel did. When he returned he had the lid off and was poking around inside with the point of his pocket knife. “Alice,” he said grimly, “I know this is a chicken crop—on the outside—but what are these things inside?”

“Figments, Mel. Imaginary varmints, like that snake I didn’t see. Mel, didn’t you notice the lettuce patch? You walked right past it to get from the barn to the house. Didn’t you see anything strange?”

“Yeah. I did. Why’d you pick so much lettuce? Who’s gonna’ eat it all?”

Alice exploded. At times Mel could be very obtuse, and the only way to get him out of it was to use brute force. “Those ‘figments’ ate it already, Mel,” she shrieked, “and if it hadn’t been for the chickens I’d have lost it all!”

Mel still looked puzzled. He was covering his ears.

Alice changed her tack. “Mel, aren’t you listening? I said these little varmints just swarmed in and started eating, like locusts—well, maybe even worse than locusts, because they’re faster and bigger and they can eat more. They picked all that ground clean in less than five minutes. Mel, what’s going to happen to us if they start on the cash crops?”

Now, it registered. Mel understood. He stepped over and gave Alice a hug, and said he was sorry.

But Alice still wasn’t pacified. “Something strange is happening here, Mel, and I think it’s time for us to tell somebody on the outside about it. I don’t know what those tilings are and you don’t know what they are, but I’ve seen what they can do and we both know that if they ’re anything at all like locusts it’ll take more than our chickens to stop them if they decide to come back.”

“You’re right,” Mel answered somberly. “I’ll call Eddie and ask him to come over.”

Alice cringed. She didn’t particularly like Eddie Whitman. Eddie had once been a suitor, back in high school, and he never had married. He was the community’s most eligible bachelor and he seemed to want to stay that way. He liked to hit on the married women and avoided the single ones.

Alice knew she would have to endure his visit and his attention. Eddie was the county agricultural agent, and she had to admit, though grudgingly, that in his own line of work Eddie did possess a few smarts. “I just hope we ll be able to get rid of him at a reasonable hour,” she sighed.

“They’re not insects, Mel. They have only four legs. Also, this hair, if that’s what it is, means they’re mammals, because only mammals have fur. But whatever they are they’re an entirely new species, and the smallest yet. None of these is bigger than a junebug. Even shrews are bigger than that, at least the kind we have around here.

“No,” Whitman grunted, after a short, but thoughtful pause, “this is definitely a new one on me. Maybe the boys at the state ag lab will know what they are, but I can’t identify them.”

“You can keep the sample, Eddie,” Alice said. She had been silent for some time, thinking, letting the men talk, letting Mel get himself solidly impaled on the hook. “Ask Mel to tell you about my imaginary snake, Eddie.”

Mel’s look was pure terror. He knew Eddie’s character pretty well, and he knew Alice was baiting him. The tactic was a familiar one from the old days, the wily female pitting the males against each other.

Since Eddie was more than ordinarily susceptible to such manipulation, he bit on it this time, too. “Snake, you say? What kind of snake would this be, Alice?”

“White, Eddie, snow white. And it was uppity. It sat there eating grapes like it owned my arbor.”

“Aw, come on, Alice, snakes don’t eat grapes.”

“Nor do they have feathers—ordinarily,” Alice replied, putting some English on the word “ordinarily,” mostly for Mel’s benefit. “This one, however, was exceptional. Here’s the feather. You can send that to your state lab too, if you like.” She paused, and glared at Mel before turning back toward Eddie to finish her remarks. “I will admit I don’t know any more than the two of you do, but at least I have sense enough to be scared. I think we’re going to be seeing more of these creatures and I don’t think they’re going to be much fun to be around.”

Alice rose from her chair. “Now,” she announced, “I’m pretty tired of all this. I got up early and it’s been a tough day. I’m going upstairs to sleep. You two can talk this out and Mel can let me know in the morning what you’ve decided to do.” She turned and stomped off.

It wasn’t long after that Mel came up to bed. Alice’s pouting had accomplished one thing, it had gotten rid of Eddie quicker than ever before.

For two days a steady but gentle rain had fallen. Though it was more drizzle than downpour the fields became too soft for Mel to go into with the tractor. Thus, though the storm had passed, he spent the next day close to the house, repairing and servicing his equipment.

Except for the chickens, Brutus, Big George, the gander, and a couple of half wild cats there were no other animals on the place. Time was that Mel and Alice had raised a few hogs and kept a small dairy herd, but they quickly discovered the meager profits weren’t worth the effort. The domestic market had been depressed since government subsidies had been abolished. Imported meat was cheaper, and dairy farming was a job for specialists, usually agricultural corporations whose diversified operations enabled them to grab enough market share to compete.

So, thanks to the rain, Mel was close at hand when Alice needed help, as she did when she encountered the snake again.

She had been working near the arbor, reseeding the corner of the devastated lettuce patch and using her hoe to dig furrows. The pattern of strange tracks in the mud of a drying puddle, which she took at first for those of a dung beetle, alarmed her as soon as she realized these had toes, which insects lacked. The toes were in a birdlike pattern, three pointing ahead, and one backward.

She didn’t connect these with the snake until she glanced ahead and saw the snake crawling up one of the posts toward the grapes. Clearly, these were its tracks.

Mel came running over in response to her call, and when he arrived she said nothing, she simply pointed.

“It was real,” he gasped. “And,” he added, “he really doesn’t seem to care much that we’re watching him.”

“I told you he was uppity, Mel. Here, take the hoe. Watch him until I get back with my snare. This time, I’m going to get him.”

Mel took the hoe, knowing from experience that if he didn’t go along with Alice’s plan it would be a long while before he heard the end of it. Besides, her plan was a good one, provided… Mel suddenly realized the snake’s uppity attitude might be justifiable confidence.

After all, it suddenly dawned on him, that’s exactly the same smug attitude you find in the average skunk. The biggest danger a skunk faces is getting smacked by an eighteenwheeler—because skunks are so used to things running away from them that they just can’t imagine an enemy that stands its ground.

Proof of that was the thousands who annually strolled out onto highways to feast on road kills and who never made it back to the shoulder.

Alice returned with her stick, prepared to move in on the snake.

Mel stopped her. “Wait a minute,” he said, “something about this thing bothers me. Since he isn’t in any rush to leave let’s not take any chances, let’s get some more firepower.” He reached out for the stick. “Let me hold that. You run inside and get my twelve-gauge pump.”

“That’ll pulverize it, Mel—”

“And that, Alice, is the general idea. If it gets away from me or looks like it might strike you can pulp it, OK?”

Alice nodded, and decided Mel was right. Besides, it sounded to her that he planned to let her do any shooting that might be necessary. She wouldn’t kill the snake if she could help it.

A moment later she was back, shotgun in one hand, bandolier in the other. She found it was fully loaded, so she hung the bandolier over her shoulder. “I’m ready, Mel, anytime you are.”

“I’m waiting until he starts to gobble another grape,” Mel answered. “It’ll be hard for him to bite anybody with a grape stuck in his throat. There he goes—now!”

Mel lunged. The fork of the stick caught the creature by surprise but it didn’t quite pin him to the post. He slipped loose and dropped to the ground, simultaneously coughing up the grape.

It started toward Mel, though not with any deliberate speed. It looked almost like it was expecting Mel to flee. When he didn’t, the snake stopped, and that was when Mel pounced again.

This time Mel’s aim was better and he could shove the points of the fork deep into the soft dirt. As he did so, drawing the noose tight and immobilizing the head, the snake coiled the rest of its body around the end of the stick.

“Look out, Mel,” Alice screamed, training the shotgun on the snake. “Mel, it’s not the head that’s dangerous, it doesn’t bite, it stings, like a wasp.” She pointed to a couple of glistening amber beads on the dull colored stick. “Those have to be poison. Get back, I’ll blast it.”

“No, Alice! Just keep it covered. I think I can manage.” Mel took the hoe in his other hand and used it to pin the tail to the ground. He held it in such a way that by bearing down he could have cut the tail section and the sting off if the snake tried to free itself.

Then, he manipulated the noose in front of the head and slipped it over. The snake did not seem to care. It did not resist, but instead concentrated on trying to free its tail.

“I got it, Alice.”

“I think we should kill it, Mel. It’s too dangerous.”

“Nothing doing, Alice. Come on, let’s get to the can, then you can run inside and call Eddie.”

“The can might not hold it, Mel.”

“I’m going to keep the noose on it too, Alice. Now go, I’ll be fine.”

Alice made the call and rejoined Mel outside, clutching the shotgun like a rag doll. She was already beginning to regret not using it.

In a few more minutes they heard a siren. It was the sheriff, whose office was across the hall from Eddie’s. The squad car came roaring up into the driveway and screeched to a halt, scaring the pants off Brutus in the process, even though he wasn’t wearing any.

Eddie literally tumbled out of the back seat. He was followed an instant later by Jake Fletcher, who was generally regarded as the county’s most experienced snake handler. “You got him, huh?” Jake exclaimed as he approached. “Guess there’s nothing for me to do unless you’ve got some more.”

“Believe me, Jake,” Alice answered, “this one’s enough. We re pretty sure it isn’t a snake, though, and that it stings instead of biting.” She paused, realized that might not be so, and added, “At least we’ve seen it stinging—it might bite too, but—”

“That’s no snake, Alice,” Jake replied.

“Or anything like a snake,” Eddie added, “except in the way it’s shaped. It’s warmblooded, and it’s got legs, and it’d be my guess that it’s almost blind.”

“How do you know that?”

“Those feathers are to keep it warm. Cold-blooded animals don’t have them, and they’d be a distinct disadvantage because they’d make it harder for the animal to warm up to active state. They’d block out sunlight, and insulate the body underneath so it’d stay cool.

“I’d bet it’s a burrower, at least for most of the time, though it clearly doesn’t hesitate to come out and forage. Its shape, and those little feet would make it easy to get around in tunnels. Underground, where eyes are next to useless, they generally atrophy—and, there’s a sort of horny shield above the thing’s snout that would make a pretty good spade.

“The creature probably prefers soft ground, maybe only a few inches below the surface, making tunnels something like what moles live in. Since it’s a vegetarian the sting is probably for defense only, but even so, it’d be my guess the venom’s uncommonly potent. I can’t wait to get a sample.”

“Here you are,” Mel said, handing the stick to Eddie. “There’s some of it drying right down there.” He pointed to the two amber blobs on the shaft.

Eddie turned to Jake. “What do you think? Is it safe to drop him in the can?”

“I don’t think I would, Eddie. Tell you what, let’s get some cord and lash him to the pole, then put him in the can. That way we can open it again later without having to fight it off.”

They followed Jake’s advice. A couple of minutes later, as Mel and Alice watched the squad car drive away they both suddenly realized this wasn’t the end, that life on the form would get a whole lot more complicated than it had ever been before.

Bedlam followed. Not only did the state ag people get into the act, so did Uncle Sam. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sent a whole platoon of eggheads out for a look. They got in Mel’s way, often forbidding him to enter onto parts of his own farm. Mel took to carrying the twelve-gauge around with him. That improved their attitudes but they were just as firm.

After about a week of this the restrictions were relaxed a bit. Mel had no more difficulty getting around in the outlying fields and the official investigation became concentrated on the area around the house, which was the only place where any of the strange creatures had been seen.

By now, everybody in the immediate neighborhood knew there was something wrong at the Simmons place even if they didn’t know precisely what. The Simmons’s credited that to Eddie, of course, but even Eddie was smart enough not to let things get out of hand. Too much talk, even he realized, could get the sensational press aroused.

“Looks like we not only have two new species to name,” he told Mel proudly, “but two different genera, probably a new class and maybe even a new phylum. There are lots of similarities with our familiar animals but they seem to be caused by adaptation to similar ecological conditions instead of biological relationships.

“That ‘snake’ for instance, is really more comparable to a lizard, except that it’s vegetarian, and in that respect resembles a gopher. But then, only arthropods have so many legs, and only avians have feathers.”

“I don’t know what half the stuff you’re talking about is,” Mel confessed.

Alice, who was sitting there quietly listening, suspected that it was probably Eddie’s intention to make Mel look dumb in front of her. Still, and because she knew Mel wouldn’t take offense, she wanted to satisfy her own curiosity. “Just what do the experts think these things are, Eddie?”

“The ‘experts’ are baffled, Alice. Those little ones, for instance, are not anything like mammals despite the hairlike growth, which is not true hair but modified feathers. We found what we think are fertile eggs in some of them but haven’t had any luck yet in hatching anything.

“The snake? Well, the snake doesn’t seem to have any recognizable reproductive system at all. We probably won’t be able to tell whether it’s male or female until we catch another one. We have been able to analyze the venom, which is unlike anything else we know of. It’s a protein, of course, but that ’s the only similarity it shares with the usual animal toxins. Otherwise it’s different from anything else we’ve ever seen. We’re still studying tissue samples from both species and they promise to be bizarre.”

“Does that mean the poison wouldn’t hurt us?”

“Definitely not, Alice. In fact, it should cause a really horrendous immune reaction. If you ever get near another one be careful, the bite would probably be just as bad as a sting if any of its saliva got into the wound.”

“Where did they come from?”

“From off your farm, Alice.” Eddie shrugged. “That’s the only answer I can give you. Nobody else has seen any.”

Alice and Mel had to be satisfied with that explanation. It never got any better. As time wore on and nothing else happened the eggheads packed up and left, to do what eggheads do best, refine their understanding of things already familiar. To them, these incidents were an interesting but inexplicable experience that didn’t seem likely to be repeated anytime soon. If it was, they promised to return.

Mel and Alice reverted to habit as well. Mel got the corn in shape just in time to harvest their wheat, after which it was time to concentrate on the soybeans. Their strange visitors began losing their reality, becoming more myth than memory—until one night in late October, Halloween arrived slightly ahead of schedule.

Something was wrong outside. Mel was awakened by the foghorn honking of Big George, the gander. From the sound of it George was in some kind of fight.

Mel slid out of bed, just as Alice began to stir.

He had been keeping his twelve-gauge, boots, and a heavy robe by the bed ever since the government people left, and had stashed other weapons at strategic places around the house. A big five-celled flashlight was taped to the gun barrel, positioned so that its beam would coincide almost exactly with the shot pattern. He slipped into the robe and boots, picked up the gun and started for the door.

“Wait, Mel. I’m coming too.” Alice had her own arrangement laid out, though her weapon was a lighter twenty-gauge.

“All right,” Mel answered. “But hurry—it sounds like George is in real trouble.” Actually, he would feel a lot better with Alice along, not only because he would know where she was, but because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her miss.

On the way out they flicked on the extra yard lights, adding to the pool of light from the big fixtures on the poles on either side of the barn.

The noise gave Mel a vector, which he followed to the other side of the barn, where the big elm tree spread out between it and the hen house. He didn’t believe what he saw when he got there.

Big George, far too big and heavy to fly, had somehow made it up into the tree. He was struggling to maintain his balance in the lower fork and was obviously anxious to climb as high as he could. His right wing was drooping, as though it might be broken, and blood was dripping off the tips of the big flight feathers. At the sight of the humans he seemed to relax a little and the frantic honking stopped.

Below, on the ground, now glaring at the approaching humans with eyes that glowed greenish-blue in their flashlight beams, was the strangest looking creature either had ever seen.

It was big, more than three times as large as Big George, covered with what looked like stiff, stubby feathers. It was four footed, but the rear legs were much larger than the front. Both sets were armed with long, curved claws. The tail was as long as the body, flexible, and in constant movement, twitching almost like a tiger’s. There was a spiked ball on the end that looked just like a medieval knight’s mace.

The two humans watched the creature for a while in frank disbelief, but the creature soon tired of this and obviously did not like having the beams in its eyes. It dropped its front paws off the tree trunk and faced them, standing on its haunches like a kangaroo, thirty feet away. It held this posture for about fifteen seconds, then its jaws gaped open, baring fearsome teeth, and it leapt.

That was its first, and final, mistake. Two heavy blasts struck it in unison, both at the center of mass, then the twelve-gauge roared again. The creature was blown in two, the top half falling backward and the bottom half, in an involuntary movement, leaping like a decapitated chicken. The body landed off to one side.

Mel approached to take a closer look at this part. Alice headed for the tree, where Big George had resumed his honking.

“Mel, I think he’s hurt bad, bleeding a lot. We have to get him to the vet.” When she said this she didn’t even know how they would get him out of the tree but she was sure of one thing, if Big George died from his wounds it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t tried to save him.

Alice ran to the barn and got a stepladder, which she propped against the tree. She carefully wiggled a hand under George’s feet to support him, then carried him down to the ground. He could walk, and he moved the wing back up to its normal position without apparent difficulty. It couldn’t be broken, Alice realized, emitting a sigh of relief.

While Mel checked the rest of the grounds for more of these beasts, Alice took George into the house. Along the way she found Brutus, asleep under the back porch, and brought him inside, too. She couldn’t find any of the cats, but reasoned that with their nocturnal adaptations and climbing abilities they would be all right.

There was a worried look on Mel’s face even though he reported that everything else seemed to be OK. The chickens weren’t making any noise and the door and windows on the hen house were intact. He joined Alice inside the house, where she sat drinking coffee and scratching the two dissimilar heads of her animal companions.

“George seems to be all right, Mel, except for a cut on the inside of his right wing, which seems to have stopped bleeding. I know he’ll make a mess but I think he’s earned a night in and I’d worry about him if he was outside. I guess we can let the vet sleep. I wish I could. I know I’m going to be awake all night.”

“Maybe we can find something to do to keep busy,” Mel replied, with a wink.

“Maybe we can,” She answered, and shooed the two animals away while gulping the last of her coffee.

The harried couple had gotten little sleep, nevertheless they met the Sun at rising, anxious to study the remains of the devastated creature. They found only its head and a maze of strange tracks, one of which was clearly the mark of the rest of the body being dragged off.

Mel and Alice, still armed to the teeth and accompanied by Brutus, followed the trail as far as it went, which left them even more perplexed than before.

“It—it just ends, Mel. There re no tracks away from it, except for those we followed here. Do you realize what that means? It means they’re still around.” Terror washed over Alice’s face. “Mel, we can’t handle this, we—”

“I know, I know. You’re right. I always intended to call Eddie back, but I wanted to check things out myself first. Alice, I don’t think they’re still here. I think something, their owner, maybe, picked them up.”

“Their what?”

“I didn’t tell you this last night, Alice. I didn’t want to worry you, and frankly, in the excitement I wasn’t really sure I’d seen it. Now that all the tracks lead to the same place I guess it was real after all. I…

“What, Mel? What was real?”

Mel cringed. “Just—just a light, Alice. A kind of dim one at that. It was a long way off from where I was. I thought maybe I just imagined it…”

“You said, ‘their owner.’ Mel, what else did you see?”

“Nothing, Alice. Nobody. I didn’t see anything but this faint light.”

Alice had been around a bit herself, and knew a little something about tracking. She took another look at the jumble of tracks on the ground. Nothing she could see suggested a vehicle had been here. Even a helicopter, had it landed, would have left some sign. She finished her examination and gazed up at Mel. “Mel, either there’s some other explanation or these things took off and flew away. And I don’t remember seeing any wings on the one that attacked George.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Alice. I don’t know what I’m going to tell Eddie, and the rest of them, either.”

“We tell them these things are dangerous, Mel,” Alice answered. “We do the neighborly thing and warn our friends so they don’t get hurt.”

Mel glanced back, contritely, and answered, “Yeh, Alice, I guess we do. Come on, let’s break the news.” He took her arm and walked her back to the house.

“Well,” Sheriff George Shuler sighed, “The head’ll be enough to convince any sober person I know that you’re serious. And, then there’s the tracks, and these’ll probably tell us a whole lot more even than the head will. I’ve sent for Aberg.”

“Who’s he?”

“The world’s leading expert on fossil footprints, according to the people at the university. He’s been studying a place over in the west end of the county where a volcano erupted way back when, and wiped out a whole bunch of dinosaurs. I never met him but he’s supposed to be the last word on tracks. He ought to be here about lunch time.”

“OK,” Eddie added, gathering Mel and Alice around him in a huddle. “Uh, there’s something I think I ought to tell you.”

“Yeah. You know something new, Eddie?”

“I was going to call yesterday about it, Mel. Something came up, and I didn’t get around to it. But, the tissue samples we took? Mel, the tests results came back and they’re weird. These creatures—they don’t seem to be related to anything else on Earth. I mean they’re just—”

“Just What, Eddie? Are you holding out on us?”

“No, no Mel. This gets complicated, but if I had to oversimplify I’d say that none of the animals we’ve seen could have evolved on Earth. If they had there d be signs in the fossil record, and there aren’t. The chemistry’s basically the same but everything else is different.”

“Are you trying to tell me these things came from another planet?”

“I’m trying to tell you I don’t know, Mel. That had occurred to me, of course, but the theory has its own set of problems, not the least of which is that the aminos are exactly the same ones terrestrial life uses, down to the very last one.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Amino acids, Mel. Aminos are the basic stuff of proteins. There’re lots of them, but terrestrial life only uses a small number. You’d expect a few to overlap but chance can’t account for what we found. The odds of that happening are—well, astronomical.

“And that means that the simplest explanation is the most plausible—that somehow they’re related to everything that evolved here on Earth, that they’ve been here all the time but somehow we missed them.”

Eddie paused and his face started to flush, as though he was embarrassed by his next remark. “Sherlock Holmes, Mel.”

“What?”

“Holmes—the detective who always had the answer. He said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ That is pretty much how orthodox scientific logic works.”

Mel stared at Whitman, waiting for an explanation. None came, so he asked, “What is all that supposed to mean?”

“I—I’m not really sure I have an answer, Mel. If this had happened a hundred years ago, or even fifty I might have bought it, because even that late in history there were still places on this planet that were complete mysteries to science.

“What if they haven’t been here all along, Mel? What if somebody brought them, just now, millions of years after the animals we’re used to evolved here on Earth? What if in the beginning all life had a common origin?

“There’s an old theory, called panspermia, which assumes that life originated in space, even before any planetary bodies were formed, that there are primitive organisms that drift around, dormant, until natural processes move them into environments where they can evolve into more complicated forms.

“The trouble with panspermia is it could only explain the chemical similarity, not the physical similarities—and there are some of these that chance can’t account for. There is another possibility that could account for this—that Earth was visited by aliens, who brought these creatures along and left them here. In that scenario the most troubling mystery would be, why?”

Mel’s face was sober, but he said nothing, he just stared at Eddie.

Whitman felt very awkward, caught as he was without a pat answer. His tone became more aggressive. “Look, Mel, it’s not as farfetched as it seems, considering the alternative. I mean, this is the twenty-first century. Except for new insect varieties and an occasional marine species modern science is pretty well out of surprises. We know so much about land animals, even jungle animals, that nobody expects to see anything new.

“But now, suddenly, three totally new creatures pop up in the space of one summer, in a temperate climate that’s been crawling with people for the last ten last millennia. The theory is not only tempting, Mel, it’s the only one that fits the facts.”

“Why would anybody do a thing like that?”

“What?”

“Why,” Mel repeated, “would an alien visitor bring animals like these along even if he did come here? One was big and mean, one was poisonous, one ate everything in sight—they were all pests, Eddie.”

“Who knows? Crazier things have happened. Here on Earth man has screwed up lots of ecologies by moving animals around, rabbits to Australia, for instance, African bees to South America, sparrows and starlings to North America, walking catfish into Florida, the list is endless.

“As far as the basic pattern of life is concerned, panspermia is one of the oldest ideas in science—that life originated in space, not on planets. It’s just as logical to assume it happened once, and spread everywhere matter did, so that primitive organisms rain down on planets as they form, as it is to assume it evolved over and over again on individual worlds.”

“So all life has to be related?” Alice had arrived.

“And locked into the same blueprint, Alice,” Whitman answered. “Anything that later utilized that blueprint would be very close chemically, but there would be many differences in structural organization. And that,” he added, “is precisely what we actually do see here.”

“Whoever brought these—” Mel abruptly stopped talking and gawked skyward, eyes searching for the source of the slapping sound of rotor blades which had just become audible.

“That’ll be our expert,” the sheriff announced as he strode by, heading for the pasture just east of the Simmons farmhouse. “I called the governor, too, and now we’ll have some help searching the farm. He promised me enough men to do a thorough job. If there are any more strange critters around we’ll find them now. Excuse me, I have to go meet Dr. Aberg.”

Once again, there had been a short period of furious activity, government people underfoot everywhere, including, this time, military people. The neighbors got into the act. So did not only the sensational press but the orthodox media. After all, they had one live specimen and two dead ones as proof that something out of the ordinary was going on.

The trouble was that nothing was reproducible. No new specimens turned up. Aberg couldn’t match any of the tracks to anything that had ever lived on Earth, and the tracks stopped in the middle of nowhere. The military had had no unexplained radar contacts. The several national space agencies all professed their ignorance of any unusual occurrences. The space station, which as a matter self-preservation scanned constantly for vagrant objects in orbit, reported near space was absolutely clear of anything big enough to have transported even a tiny animal to Earth.

Because the creatures couldn’t be explained through natural means, even bizarre ones, a new theory evolved, that somebody here on man’s home planet was making monsters.

It caught on. After all, the people had been psychologically prepared with a steady stream of monster movies, and everybody knew that there were many who had the skill to do such things.

Geneticists had tamed the killer bees that way. They routinely created food plants that poisoned the insects that preyed on them, and were on the brink of producing animals that could do the same to insect pests. In Africa, two species of tsetse fly were extinct, victims of a virus man had made.

So, the theory had some scientific support. Had there been any obvious wide-spread infestation it might have generated a panic—but being confined, as it was, to the Simmons farm, only they suffered.

The farm had become a shrine to a number of offbeat cults, pseudo-scientists, assorted loonies, publicity hungry eccentrics and other strange beings.

Mel and Alice got used to dealing with crank telephone calls and weird proposals, and to ejecting trespassers from the farm. The sheriff mounted a special patrol on the county road that lead to the Simmons place, which helped a little, and gradually all but the most persistent of the nuts gave up.

Because they felt the need of more security and couldn’t afford one of those expensive electronic systems, Alice found Big George a consort. Pretty soon she had a fair-sized flock of geese patrolling the homestead. It meant a lot of nocturnal alarms to investigate, but they both felt this was preferable to more surprises like their last one. Getting past old Brutus would have been easy. Getting past these geese was impossible.

When the really scary aliens came, the trouble was more than worth it.

Alice was home alone when it happened. On this early April morning Mel had driven off on the tractor pulling a planter, to re-sow a forty acre field with late soybeans to replace the crop that had been washed out by rains earlier in the month. But Mel carried a cell phone as well as his twelve-gauge, just in case.

When it rang he throttled down so he could hear better, and the machine barely crawled along. What he heard made his blood run cold.

“They’re not animals this time, Mel! They’re not men, either, and they’re carrying spears.”

“Stay in the house, Alice, I’m coming. I’m gonna’ cut the planter loose and come right in. I’m doing it now, Alice. Don’t hang up, you hear?”

“Mel, we’ll need help. I should call the sheriff—I would have, but I wanted to warn you first.”

Mel was out of his cab, phone clamped to his ear with his left hand while with his right he struggled with the coupler. The pin came loose all at once and he dropped it on the ground. He left it there, and turned the valves that shut off the flow of hydraulic fluid to the planter’s control system.

“Wait on that, Alice. Wait until I have the house in sight.” He paused, and twisted loose the last coupling. Then he continued, “Tell me how many there are and what they’re doing.”

“I’ve started counting but lost track when some of them went around behind the house. It looks to me like there are at least ten of them. They’re not all the same size, but every one of them has a spear, and some of them have other things that could be weapons…”

“The planter’s loose, I’m on my way, Alice. What are they doing?”

“Mostly gawking around. A couple of them went into the barn. I saw a couple more chasing geese. There’s a couple trying to get into the chicken house but they don’t seem to know what to make of the wire.”

“I’m out of the field, Alice, making good time now. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. What do these things look like?”

“Two arms, two legs and a head, Mel. No tentacles, no fangs, no claws. They’re all wearing ragged-looking clothes. These could be skins, and they look dirty. None of them have gotten close enough for me to tell much about their faces, if they have faces. All I can really be sure of is that they aren’t human.”

“I’ve got the house in sight, Alice. Hang up and call the sheriff, then call me right back, OK?”

“OK. Be careful, Mel. I think the tractor’ll scare them off when they see it but you never can tell about aliens.”

“I’ll be careful. Now do what I told you.” Mel waited for the click, then he hung up too. Alice’s last quip, as though she was experienced in dealing with extraterrestrials, was typical of her. Alice was soft and cuddly most of the time, but hard as nails when circumstances demanded. No alien was likely to get in the door without getting his hide riddled. Besides, Mel knew from watching Star Trek that aliens weren’t dangerous unless they had cranial deformities.

It seemed like an eternity before his phone buzzed. Mel answered immediately.

“I didn’t tell him much, just that there were about a dozen armed strangers here,” she said. “He’s calling Eddie, and they’ll bring enough muscle to control things without any outside help. At least, that’s what he hopes. I don’t think the sheriff much cares for the feds.”

“Who does?” Mel quipped. “Oh-oh, they see me.”

“They sure do, Mel. They’re scared. They’re gathering. One of the cats is dead. I saw an alien come out of the barn holding it up by the tail. But he dropped it when you showed up and now he’s in the crowd somewhere.”

“You know what I think, Alice? This bunch didn’t come on any space ship, they’re savages. I don’t think they’re hostile, either. I think we ought to call the sheriff off, at least for now, and try to make friends with them.”

“Make friends? Mel, they’ve invaded our home. They’re after our animals. They killed our cat.”

“They might be starving for all we know, Alice. The cat was meat, and they wouldn’t know these aren’t wild animals. I’ll bet they don’t even know what a farm is, or a house, for that matter. They may not realize there’s an inside to it. I think it’s worth a try, Alice.”

“No, Mel…”

“You can cover me from the second floor window—and I’ll take the twelve-gauge. They won’t know what it is. They’ll probably figure it’s some kind of club.” Mel was already out of the tractor’s cab, and walking slowly toward the house and the crowd.

Before Alice could say anything more he added, “I’ll call you back before I get too close, Alice. I’m going to hang up and call the sheriff—tell him to surround us but not to move in. We’ll be all right, Alice.” There followed a click.

By the time Mel was within shooting range of the crowd he had finished his call and was back on the line with Alice. “They’ll cooperate, Alice. I talked to Eddie, too. He agrees this is a good idea.”

“Naturally, he would,” Alice replied sarcastically. “He’s not the one who’ll get shish-kebobbed if you guessed wrong.”

“If we don’t do it this way the government will move in and take our farm away from us. They’ll hog everything. We’ll be ruined. This way, we keep control. We can count on our neighbors, but not on strangers.”

“Maybe we can,” Alice argued, “but are they up to it? We don’t know where these people came from or how many there are.”

“Eddie thinks it’s a parallel world,” Mel beamed. “He says it’s as good an explanation as any, especially considering nobody saw anything in space. He says there’s probably a hole that’s been there for billions of years, that opens and closes periodically. That’d let things mix a little, if animals went in both directions. Eddie says that explains some of the structural similarities; animals that originated here went through and took totally different evolutionary paths from what they had here. Some that went extinct here thrived over there. All we’d have to do to find out for sure is go through and have a look around.”

“I’m not curious enough to risk becoming the widow Simmons,” Alice replied, the sarcasm gone front her tone. “You’d better find a way to warn these things that I’ll blast the first one who raises a spear at you.”

“They’d have done it before now if they planned to, Alice. Only some of them have real spears. The rest have atlatls—they can throw them. Probably coulda’ hit me a long time ago. They didn’t even raise them. I don’t think these people are looking for trouble.”

Mel continued his advance until only about 100 feet from the nearest of the strangers. He had unfolded the phone’s head clamp so he could talk with both hands free. “I’m sure this is just a hunting party now, Alice. And from here, I can see that all the weapons have stone points.” He raised his arm and waved at the strangers.

When every one of them waved back and none raised a weapon Mel was sure he was right, and he told Alice so. “You said TV was a waste of time, Alice, but I learned a lot from the nature programs, including that most primitive people usually aren’t very warlike.”

“And here I thought you watched because you liked to see the naked women,” came her riposte. “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep my finger on the trigger.”

“Fine, just don’t shoot anybody. Uh—Alice, do you think we could spare a couple of chickens?”

“Now you want to give them my chickens?”

“No. I want to throw a party, and we’ll need some refreshments. Why don’t you come on out, Alice?”

“To do the cooking?”

“The sheriff’s got the crowd covered, Alice. Every one of these guys is in the sights of somebody’s rifle by now, there’s no danger.”

“Sez you? OK, Mel, but I’m not only keeping my shotgun, I’m bringing your thirty-eight.”

“Bring some matches too, Alice. That ought to impress these guys.”

It did indeed. It scared them at first and left the savages in reverent awe of everything else Mel did afterward. He had become, in one faint spark, and with a whiff of sulfur, the most accomplished magician they had ever seen.

Alice was completely disgusted, and went off to select a couple of chickens for the feast. She too, created a sensation when she disemboweled these with a stainless steel knife and washed them under the stream of water from the backyard pump. By the time that was over there wasn’t any danger of violence, the strangers were in total awe of their human hosts.

So they sent for Eddie, who arrived in a timely fashion, shortly after the eating started. Gerald Aberg was with him. The fact that both of them agreed with all Mel’s theories disgusted Alice almost as much as the smug attitude this had produced. Mel could be insufferable at times, and this was one of them.

Nobody understood anything the other bunch said, of course, but there did turn out to be plenty of common gestures. Sticks provided the means for crude drawings, which soon appeared to confirm Eddie’s parallel world idea.

The entrance to Earth, it seemed, was like a tunnel between two soap bubbles, apparently surrounded by a halo of some sort, which Eddie believed was simply daylight showing through. “It probably works the other way, too,” he remarked, “and that would explain the glow you saw when that last monster came through. Their days are out of synch with ours.”

To confirm the theory Mel used his cell phone to call the sheriff and give him the vector. Only a few minutes later the news came back—there was indeed an opening between the worlds. Also, there being a strong probability that pesty little creatures might wander through it and infest local crops they put a guard on the hole. If it developed that the site was stationary they would later consider installing some kind of door on it.

The feast went on.

Mel and Alice had retired as soon as the aliens had bedded down for the night. Their farm was like a boy scout camp, with about half of the sheriffs posse sacked out in the barn and two men up at the site of the hole, watching for other varmints that might come through.

The geese had not had time to become completely comfortable with the situation so whenever there was any movement down below they continued to give their alarm. Alice had no trouble sleeping through this. Mel did.

He looked at the clock when the latest interruption came, groaned at the time, four o’clock, and thought about how he would feel out on the tractor in this condition next day. He still had to finish that planting that was already late.

Nevertheless, when the honking continued beyond what he thought was normal, he got up and went to the window.

There were four or five men milling around outside the barn. The sheriff was one of them. He could see Eddie and Aberg were too, and the two aliens that Eddie had begun to call the “alpha pair.” The latter were gesticulating wildly but nobody seemed to be paying any attention to them.

Mel decided to go down. He put on his robe and slippers and tiptoed out, pausing by the door to grab his shotgun.

The sheriff seemed quite surprised to see him. The sheriff looked very upset.

“What’s happening?” Mel asked naively.

“Something got Dave Bridges,” the sheriff replied. “And his brother’s missing. They were on guard at the hole, but when the relief went up Bobby was gone and all that was left of Dave was his right foot.”

Mel was visibly shaken. He clutched his gun a little tighter and shivered. “Any idea what it was?”

“Not a clue, Mel. If I could talk to these—these alien ape men—” he paused and sighed. “I’m sure they’d know what we’re up against but there’s no way I can ask them. We got the word over the radio but they don’t even know there’s anything wrong yet.”

“If you’re going up I’ll get dressed and go with you.”

“Then hurry up. Eddie and the tracker already left. I was gonna’ try to explain to the aliens and get a couple of them to come along. We might need another gun before we’re through.”

Mel disappeared and returned less than five minutes later, all ready to go. By then, the sheriff had the alien heads nodding over a drawing in the dirt that showed the hole as a circle and a couple of stickmen with their limbs broken or severed. Mel couldn’t read any of their facial expressions, of course, but the faces were animated in an entirely different way than before.

When the sheriff and Mel started for the hole the two biggest aliens fell in and marched off with them. They talked to each other in hushed voices, which suggested they might already suspect what had happened but couldn’t figure out how the humans knew about it.

At the hole Dr. Aberg was in a highly agitated state. His big electric lantern lit a wide circle around the barely discernible periphery of the hole. There were tracks, lots of them, and a great deal of fresh blood.

A gasp went up from the aliens, followed by much murmuring. They knew at a glance what had happened, and they wanted to tell the humans what they thought.

Aberg already suspected the guards had been attacked by a cat. The signs were clear, he said, with claw marks appearing only intermittently. This indicated that the claws were retractable, as in all Earth’s large felines except the cheetah. These were, however, very much bigger than even the Siberian tiger’s pawprints, and the Siberian tiger was the biggest modern cat there was.

One of the aliens squatted, and smoothed out an area of bare ground before upending his javelin to draw. The drawing was crude, of course, like the sheriff’s stick figures, but there was one special feature that nobody could miss, the saber fangs. The alien had drawn a Similodon.

“There haven’t been any of those on Earth since the Pleistocene,” Eddie gasped.

“This was a big pussy cat,” the tracker added. “We better hope it went back through the hole instead of off on our side of it.”

“It’d be easier to find Bobby if they were over here,” the sheriff replied glumly.

“They’re not, Sheriff,” Aberg answered. “See those scuffs? The cat couldn’t hold Dave clear of the ground for very long at a time, so he intermittently dragged him.” He paused, flashed the light ahead. “Bobby was still OK when this happened. There’s his tracks following. Uh, Sheriff, we’re gonna’ have to go on through.”

The sheriff glanced around. Besides himself, the tracker, Eddie and Mel, and the two aliens, he had the two deputies who had relieved the missing guards. You guys stay here,” he said. “Get on the radio and tell the rest of them what we’re doing. I’ll take my handset along and report back to you on that. As long as we’re in range, that is.”

“What about getting some more help?” One of them asked.

The sheriff thought a moment. He studied the aliens. “No, not yet. I’ve got a feeling these guys are used to dealing with the cats, and we have the firepower to handle them once we know where they are. We’ll wait.”

The party started through, with the two aliens and Aberg in the lead.

The character of the land on the other side was radically different, the air a little cooler despite the fact that on this other world dawn was just beginning. Much of the vegetation closely resembled terrestrial types, at least to the untrained eye, but seasonally, that world seemed to be behind Earth. Here, it was still winter, and this vegetation was dry, with withered leaves, and there were occasional patches of ice and crusty snow.

“Blood!” the tracker shouted. “And spent brass.” He shined the light on the ejected cartridge, then picked it up. “Bobby was still alive and kicking when they got here.” He paused, flashed the light some more. “The cat stopped and turned on him, but didn’t chase him. Bobby ran back a ways.”

He followed the human tracks until they too stopped and turned, then bent down and picked up two more brass casings. “He got off two more shots, too. Let’s move ahead and see if he hit it.”

They crept forward, and as they did the aliens became very nervous. Both of them were sniffing the light dawn breeze, nostrils twitching as if to gather more of the scent. Mel began to see more and more of the logic in Eddie’s new theory. These aliens did seem to be more a pack than a tribe, and they did seem to share a close relationship to an old and honored terrestrial species.

As Mel watched he caught a little of their concern and checked to see that the shotgun’s safety catch was off. The aliens didn’t know about guns, of course. None had been fired when they were around, which left Mel wondering what they would do when all of a sudden they had that experience. He expected panic, and that the aliens would be useless as allies until this cooled.

Another thought gave him more comfort; he had a twelve-gauge shotgun, whereas Bobby had been armed with a thirty-eight caliber pistol. Up close, even a tiger shouldn’t be able to take more than one load of that.

“Up there,” the tracker yelled. He was shining his light in the direction in which the aliens pointed, into a jumble of bushes and boulders far to the right. “It’s like a cavern. The aliens must think the tiger’s in it.”

“Then, where’s Bobby? Unless the cat turned on him again, and got him, he ought to be around.”

Before anymore could be said, or anything decided about how they would approach the cat’s lair, assuming that was what this was, the aliens took the initiative. One of them guided Aberg’s arm, and the light, to the crest of this little rise from which the outcropping protruded. Four glowing eyes, not just two, appeared in the beam; two cats, not one. With this intrusion, came a jumble of low roaring. Both cats then rose, saber teeth glistening, muzzles dripping red.

Mel now realized that Bobby had become dinner for the second cat, just as his brother was for the first. He raised his gun, ready to start forward.

The aliens had other plans. The air whistled. Two dark streaks raced toward the cats. Two agonized howls followed. Both cats suddenly lurched and stumbled. It was over in an instant. They both dropped lazily to the ground and moved no more.

The aliens turned to gaze at the startled humans, as though they expected to be congratulated.

Mel was sure that had he been able to read their expressions these would have been grins of pride. They had done an amazing thing. With these primitive weapons they had overcome two ferocious beasts that had defied the efforts of men with guns. How? He wondered. It didn’t look to him as though the javelins had struck in particularly vulnerable places.

“The javelin heads were poisoned,” the tracker gasped. “Perhaps with something like the curare the Amazonian Indians use.” His thinking was far ahead of Mel’s. “Let’s go up.”

Cautiously, they did. Mel found himself wishing he hadn’t. His stomach was not prepared to meet the challenge. The sight of the gnawed bodies was more than it could take. Mel found he wasn’t the only one.

They were looking for the hole and couldn’t find it. During the time it had taken to bury what was left of the Bridges brothers daylight had arrived on both worlds, and that complicated the problem somewhat. But it wasn’t the entire explanation, since backtracking their own footprints should have led them right to it. And it hadn’t, and that meant the hole had moved.

While the humans muddled around, cursing their luck and in near panic, the aliens were busy solving the problem. It wasn’t very long until, to the chagrin of the humans, one of them winked out like a light. The hole, it seemed, had migrated to local south, some 200 feet from where it had been the night before. So much for an idea Mel had been cooking—to put a big, strong door over the hole.

In a few seconds they were through, and they could see that there had been a similar migration on the other side, although the distance was disproportionate. The Earth-side hole was only about six feet off the mark.

Back at the farmhouse the rest of the aliens and the posse watched their approach with trepidation. The aliens relaxed as soon as they saw they had suffered no casualties, and ran out to great their returning pack leaders with much sniffing and face licking.

With the humans, the reaction was mixed relief and horror, but they bore the news stoically.

“We’ve got to get the community together and decide what to do about all this,” the sheriff announced grimly, after briefing the posse. “And,” he added, “we have to keep all of this strictly to ourselves.”

He picked out two deputies. “Go into town,” he said. “Get hold of everybody you can. Don’t tell them why, but say there’ll be an emergency meeting on the town square at four o’clock. Tell them we want at least one adult from every family but to leave the kids at home. Got that?”

The deputies answered with nods.

The sheriff turned to Mel and Alice. “I hope you understand, this isn’t just your problem anymore, it’s everybody’s. With that hole floating around like it is it could be anywhere within a month, and we have to be in a position to control what goes in and out of it.”

“I just want to get my beans in,” Mel replied.

They sat in a small circle in the center of the crowd. The community wasn’t a large one, only about seven hundred people in all, counting children, so Athenian style democracy usually worked out pretty well.

All of them knew about the strange varmints, of course, but the secret of last night’s events had been well kept. So even with forewarning the sight of the aliens emerging from the sheriff’s van raised a murmur.

“They’re friendly,” the sheriff assured the crowd. “We can’t talk to them yet but so far we’ve been getting along fine.”

The crowd settled down.

“We have to figure out what to do. That’s why I asked you to come here. We haven’t got much time to do that, and if we make the wrong choice all of us could lose everything we have. But Dr. Aberg’s got an idea so I’ll let him explain it.”

The tracker stepped forward. He had been up all night. He looked haggard. But his voice was firm. “I know people who would kill to be here,” he began. “This is without a doubt the biggest scientific breakthrough in history. It not only can change the course of that history, it already has. The very knowledge that this anomaly exists will change every cosmological theory man has ever conceived.

“It has a dark side too. This community is about to get a demonstration of just how greedy human beings can get. You have something worth stealing. It will be stolen, that is a certainty. This is the way things are. The best you can hope for is to save something from the wreckage. That means you have to plan. You have to pit one greedy guts against another, and you have to do this not only to save yourselves, but to save them.” He pointed to the aliens.

“These people are primitives, as innocent as our own aboriginal people were when we stole all this from them. We did it all wrong before. This time we have to do better.

“If we do nothing to stop them then as soon as the news leaks out, as it inevitably will, Big Brother will move in and confiscate it, and instead of society as a whole gaining the benefit of this discovery the bureaucrats will descend on it like a cloud of maggots.

“The only counterweight to big government is big science. They can’t match the federal bureaucracy moneywise, because they don’t have the power to suck up your tax money like the government does. But they’re pretty well-heeled even so, and more importantly, they have an awful lot of clout with the news people.

“This is what I propose we do.” He paused, and a smile washed over his face. It was contagious. As he continued it migrated out into the crowd. Pretty soon everybody had one, even the aliens, who although they didn’t understand any of it, mimicked their human friends.

When Aberg finished, the history of both races had been determined for the next millennia—all in one afternoon.

“It worked!” Norman Simmons was ecstatic. Ahead of him, on the gigantic screen that served the transport module as a front windshield, the magnified image of the Milky Way Galaxy gleamed sharp and clear, though minuscule in comparison with the rest of the image. Norman had expected this, of course. Their view was from within Andromeda, from the surface of a cold and airless world circling a dying sun.

In the couch next to him Borah Kahn was no less enthusiastic, no less elated at their accomplishment, though she had subdued the urge to climb into his lap and lick her companion’s face. By nature, Canis sapiens was more demonstrative and team-oriented than Homo sapiens. They had, after all, evolved from different species of cooperative hunters. In the end, the civilized side of her won out. She regained her composure and let her practical, female side mask the lapse. “We still have to get back, you know.”

“I know. But we’ll have a couple of minutes to enjoy this, Borah. This hole is stable, just as they predicted. Look at the figures for the drift.” He pointed to a window on the screen of the armrest console between them. “It’s the distance, Borah. A galaxy is far less mobile than a single planet. You know what that means.”

She did. It meant that with refinement of the mathematics the location of anomalies could be predicted, and many more worlds would be accessible. More than they could ever visit in their lifetimes.

“The sensors are mapping everything,” Norman added. “We’ll be important people when we get home.”

“I know. It scares me.” And it did, really. Borah Kahn was more than a little sensitive to the fact that hers was the junior of the two races, that hers did not have the hundred centuries of civilization behind it that Norman’s did. It had been his people, not hers, who possessed the scientific knowledge to keep the anomaly between their worlds more or less open. Her grandparents had truly been savages by comparison. She was only three generations out of the stone age.

“It’s time to start the return program, Borah. Are you ready?”

“In a moment,” she replied. She turned her attention to the console, where the transfer data was now appearing in a steadily creeping scroll, in numbers and symbols that would have made no sense whatsoever to her recent forebears.

Borah felt suddenly humbled by it all, by the thought that almost none of what she saw was really hers, that nearly all of it was man’s doing. What a fantastic turn of luck it was, she thought, when we encountered humans. How wise they are. How generous. “Ready,” she said, and stabbed the “enter” key.

The transformation was all but instantaneous. Once back on Earth they had only to open the hatch and meet the crowd of well-wishers.

Norman’s grandparents were there. He went to them and embraced them while Borah stood nearby.

“For once,” Mel said, turning to Alice, “it looks like humanity finally got something right.”

Borah was puzzled, even a little hurt. There were subtle differences in the thought processes of the two species, she knew, but not enough to explain this. What did it mean?

No matter. To her the humans were the same as always, fine and noble and wise. They would always be the leaders, and she would always be content to follow. Man was the alpha. That was the way things were meant to be.

Content

Partners
by Joseph H. Delaney