Bloodsport
(out of print; action-chapter excerpt)
C H A P T E R N I N E
The car lost airspeed and nosed over. Now the crowns of the big coli trees which dotted the plain were higher than the cockpit. The airspeed indicator read forty km. As I watched, the needle drifted down. Thirty-eight, thirty-three.
LaChoy concentrated on his driving. He banked around a stand of thorncane and eased between two huge colis. Past the trees, the land fell away in undulating waves. Maybe a kilometer away, black in the dim morning light, solid timber marked a watercourse. We angled left across the falling ground. A stretch of smaller trees came up, straggling up from the watercourse. My mouth was dry. Here it came.
“Got yourself located?” LaChoy said without turning.
“Yes.” The word sounded scratchy in my dry throat. Only the third day of this, and the tension was beginning to get to me. “Yes,” I said again. That was better.
“Right. Sorry about the melodramatics, but this fella begs ’em. I’ve had hell’s own time trying to get a client a fair shot at him. No one’s squeezed a shot on him yet. This fellow’s a shrewdie, all right.”
“How many have tried him before me?”
“Three. Three good men, too. One a vacationing Rim Patrol type. Scouter, you know. Civil Service and all that, but damned tough job. Seen any amount of nastiness out on the Rim. He was First-In on Carbonal. Jacks, that was. Claimed hunting greer relaxes him! Then a high-finance type from Inside, and one world president. Jacks came closest. Got one glimpse of him, moving the wrong way in heavy brush. Refused the shot. Didn’t want to wound.”
“Three,” I said. “Then he knows he’s wanted.”
“He knows. They catch on damn quick. But this is his urine holding, and nobody has bothered him enough to hie his bladder off elsewhere. He likes it here. I sometimes get the strange notion he likes our little dance as well as we do. Never changes his habits enough to duck me completely — just enough, you know, to keep me hot behind him, but luckless. Almost decided to take a crack at him myself.”
“What stopped you?”
“Voice-post from a guy named Ramsey. Heard of him? Wanted to come out and pot a greer. Decided I’d give one more client a go. Big name in literature and all, you know. Needed to impress this Ramsey chappie a bit. Can’t have bad media, or they’ll all start spending their money somewhere else.”
As he spoke, he maneuvered the boat in a silent drift, clearing the arm of brush, dropping back at an angle toward the watercourse.
“Drop in ten minutes,” Nail’s voice said over the com.
“Righto,” LaChoy said. He glanced across. “Ready?”
I nodded, not trusting my alkaline vocal chords. My hands were sweaty on the rifle between my knees. I caught myself leaning forward, tight. Today was it. I wasn’t in a pleasure bubble or virtual palace anymore. No mind-expanding technicolored clouds, no blood-heating alcohol. No phony talk or phonier sex. I had got away from civilization, all right. All the way away. I had asked for it, and here it was.
The doors on both sides of the car slipped back out of the way and cold air burst in. LaChoy spoke, keying the robopilot, and the trim of the car changed minutely as it took over. He gathered his big frontier blaster and a little kitsack.
“Just land light and jog right on toward that brush just ahead,” LaChoy said. “Take up whatever momentum you need that way. You’ll see a little break in the branches dead on. Steer in there and you’ll see the blind. Go straight on in with a minimum of fuss. I’ll be just behind.”
The car slipped gears, and now we were coasting. “Now,” said LaChoy, and pivoted his seat, swung his legs overboard, and stepped out.
I was moving in a hurry, afraid to be left behind, and stumbled when I hit. A couple of quick strides and a hop pulled me out of it and into a jog, the ground pounding up through my legs and knocking the tension out of them. LaChoy was pacing me in that peculiar crabbed stride of a fit man matching his stride to somebody who wasn’t. I opened up a little, my breath easy, and it was okay now, as if I could go on up the sloping ground and clear back to camp if I needed to. It wasn’t true after all the soft years, but it felt good, and then the break in the branches was there, and the blind, and I was in, dropping into a dry, springy mass of coli leaves, LaChoy hitting his knees right beside me.
He was grinning, breathing evenly. He laid his kitsack down in the corner of the blind and carefully twisted to rest his back against the trunk that formed the rear wall of the blind. He stretched his legs out and cradled the short, heavy stopper on his lap. I leaned the seven gun forward against the notched shooting stick and wormed around until I was close enough to kneel up behind it in one slow motion when the time came. LaChoy made a thumbs up and pointed with his chin.
Nail’s car was ghosting in from the direction of camp with the two plains bison slung beneath it, dangling loosely, legs free. They were still unconscious. The car settled deftly until their legs touched, halted, and eased lower until they were down completely. One end of each sling dropped free, and the winches quickly reeled them under the bodies and up. The car jinked around, and first sun glittered on a silver barrel at the driver’s window. Nail was supplying the restorative. Then the car was gone.
It took them awhile to come around, and finally regain their feet. They checked each other out first, sniffing and grumbling like a couple of Mickey Finned senior citizens. Then they backed off and banged heads an experimental time or two, but gave up without cows to give it sexual impetus. Finally the larger one lowered its head to browse. The other one kept moving about fretfully, testing the wind, and couldn’t seem to settle down.
I wiped my hands carefully on a small dun-colored towel LaChoy had provided. The younger bull’s fidgets were giving me the fidgets, too. I figured an hour had drifted by since Nail had dropped them in. The sun was clear of the timber now, cutting the chill somewhat. It looked like another of those limpid, absolutely windless and almost warm days LaChoy said we were almost out of for the season. The satellites already were tracking polar storm systems. He said the equinox would hit almost overnight. First with wind that would try to blow the tents down, and sometimes succeed, and then with driving rain or snow, depending on elevation, and we would have maybe two weeks before the real cold hit and the herds moved south and most of the greer with them.
The cold-birthing of their young would be coming, and the season would be over.
Eliot, the other hunter in LaChoy’s camp, intended to stick it out until the end for a first-class trophy, or go home without. I could feel the tension of the deadline working inside my nervousness about the hunt itself.
I looked at my watch. Time had slowed to a crawl. The waiting, and my growing nervousness, had fooled me. If I had come here straight from Acme in my youth, I wouldn’t have been fooled. It took an awful lot of patience to outwait an Acme fragle and you never even saw a mature one if time could trick you into thinking it was passing faster than it was. If you let the time fool you, or work on your nerves, it would finally seem to take forever for even an hour to pass, and maybe the movement of checking the time had spooked off the doe you never saw, and the buck wouldn’t be coming that day, after all.
That was the way it was hunting on Acme, and I grew up with it, and learned to wait, and wait what seemed an hour longer, and then count backwards from one hundred, and then forward, and then check the time. Anybody who doubted time was relative should have hunted Acme fragle.
I killed my first young buck when I was eighteen after four solid years of teaching myself how to wait. Finally I could just sit motionless while a jarnbug spun one of those three-dimensional cone webs from the barrel of my rifle to my boots and back again, until it was completely satisfied with its construction and hid to wait for those big fat stupid honeybees to be lured by the jarnice it secreted on the web. I could wait while the first honeybees began to drone around and around the web, trying to find the nectar that just had to be there somewhere.
The jarns were my luck and my teachers, though sometimes I rooted for the bees to get away. They never did, not all of them, and one jarn took three of them once while I waited near a swamp for the herds to feed into range. The fragle never came that day. But the day I killed the imperial stag I wrote into my first book, there was a jarn building a cone off the bill of my cap, and almost done, when I took the shot. I had put all that in the book, too. I found myself wishing for a jarn now, to build a lucky trap in a thorn blind six hundred light years from Acme.
LaChoy touched my shoulder. I controlled a spasm of released nerves by main force, and eased pressure on the seven gun’s safety where my thumb had landed before I could control it. I had gone so far into my memory of the jarns I had forgot LaChoy, and why I was here. If a fragle had appeared in front of the blind, I would have killed it cleanly and without conscious thought, I had been so lost in memory. If a greer had shown at that precise moment, I would have been so surprised I would have refused the shot, because greers didn’t stalk the Acme highlands of my mind.
I turned my head slowly. He was watching me intently. Slowly his lips shaped the individual letters G-R-E-E-R. He was listening so hard his ears seemed to curve forward under his hat. He gestured minutely with his chin at the bison.
They knew it, too.
They both were standing four-square, nostrils flared, reading the breeze that came up through the timber. A ridge of muscle in the young bull’s shoulder was quivering uncontrollably.
That was the first time I recognized the fear.
It had been gnawing around the edges of my mind, and here it was outright. I was scared as hell. I was afraid with a crawling nasty little fear that turns your insides cold and your bowels to jelly, and cramps your hands like frost.
I stared at the young bull in fascination, my eyes fixed on that jerking writhe of muscle. The old bull just stood his ground, horns up, waiting. His eyes were a little walled, but that was all. The old bull knew it was coming, and knew there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop it.
I looked back at LaChoy. The cold killer’s eyes still were vacant, looking at nothing, the ears still cocked. His face had the look of someone listening to something far off. The moan of a tornado funnel, maybe, or distant growl of an enemy armored column. Something just on the verge of audibility, but capable of being on him before he could think what to do. He still was outwardly relaxed, like a cat that comes out of sleep with an alien noise in its lair.
My palms weren’t damp any more. They were as dry as my throat and lungs, and my fingers were cold. They were so cold it was hard to resist an urge to blow on my trigger finger to ease the numbness.
The old bull remained at full ready, and so did LaChoy. The younger askari bull didn’t want any of this, not any of it. Now, way too late, I wasn’t sure I did. I hadn’t expected this cold awful fear of something unavoidable that was coming out of the timber to get me. Death and taxes kept running through my brain. Nothing’s certain but death and taxes. And this, whatever this was. This was just as certain.
The bulls knew they were on unfamiliar ground and couldn’t run. If they ran, it would come on faster and they would never see it come, nor have any chance to strike a futile blow against it. They knew it as surely in their instinct-centers as man learns it every generation. Running wasn’t the answer.
It was close now, an almost audible shock-wave of fear rolling up out of the watercourse. Say three hundred meters. Close enough range for anything but this. This was the old way, the real old way. You had to be sure, and then be twenty meters closer. You did not half-shoot a greer, or they came and tore you. You didn’t reveal your position by any nervous twitch, or they vanished like bog mist.
My seven gun seemed like a futile toy against the awful push of my fear. The greer-mock had been nothing compared to this. That had been reflex; target practice. This was something else entirely. I knew now beyond all doubt why greer came so high, and why this one had escaped three of the better guns. They didn’t cough, or roar, or bugle, when they came for you. They just brought the fear, like a cello note, strummed once and dying, and all your courage dying with it.
LaChoy was intent on the timber line, eyes almost glazed with the effort of trying to materialize the beast. The younger bull pawed the ground nervously.
It was taking too long. LaChoy was looking the wrong way.
If the greer had been coming from that direction, the bulls would have winded him and known which way to turn, or to run. If he was stalking through the brush along the watercourse, they would have turned on him like compass needles as he moved, trying to keep him in front of them because he would have been too close to run from. They might even had heard something moving.
I had heard something moving.
Behind me.
That’s when I got it. I knew LaChoy was fooled, but I wasn’t. The bulls were fooled, too. They were waiting for something in the timber to show itself, but nothing was going to.
The action was going to come from the one specific place we had arranged for it to be impossible to come from. From directly behind us, down our spoor that appeared out of nowhere where the car had put us down, and straight into the blind, moving like a ghost with steel, steam-driven claws.
Not quite a ghost. That had been a pebble scraping on rock, starting to roll and chafing to a stop, as it would beneath a soft-soled hunting moccasin. I had caught pebbles like that myself, under my feet, stopping the sound. If I did it well, I still had a chance to get into position on the fragle, but if I failed, they were gone, and the day’s chance with it.
So: a pebble grating, not under a moccasin, but beneath a leathery paw, almost not a sound, the mistake sensed by the stalking beast and corrected quickly. My kidneys felt like they were suddenly trying to shrink into walnuts under my rib cage. My buttocks were clenched as if by force of sphincter I could keep a muscled, claw-tipped piledriver from ripping my bowels out.
My hands were on the seven gun, but a weird kind of lassitude settled over me. It had been coming and coming and now here it was. My ears were strained to popping for the first faint rustle of breath or heavy smash of a charge. I would get one shot. One shot, and it would have to be the hardest one, the brain shot. I wished I could magically swap the hollow-point in the chamber for one of the pencil-bombs.
We were completely outflanked, as neatly as by a Zion guerilla, and nearly out of it entirely. I drew my legs ever so slowly under me. Blood marched like snare drums in my ears. I wouldn’t be able to hear anything for the pounding of my blood. Low survival characteristic; how had I survived this long, for Christ’s sake?
LaChoy glanced slowly at me, and pointed again with his chin toward the worried bison. He was almost grinning in his glee that his ambush had worked. He didn’t have a clue, and I couldn’t believe it. It had worked, all right. It had almost put us out of work entirely. But it was too close now to worry about that. To think about that would mean I would be too slow. It was here.
I don’t know what I was waiting for. I knew it was here, right behind us, and I knew LaChoy was completely fooled, but still I was afraid to react and be ridiculously wrong. A lot of things had changed since Acme. Too many. I never would have considered deferring to another about a hunting question back then, no matter how much the fat cats paid him for his ability. I was no longer the hunter I was then, and that was likely to get me eaten before this sun went down today on this misbegotten plateau.
That one image — of being torn limb from limb without even getting off a shot — broke my paralysis, and I came up in a lurch, like an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box, with the rifle gluing to my cheek as I spun with only the most fleeting side glance of LaChoy’s shocked, angry face. He thought my nerve had broken.
The greer was in the air. He was in the air, it was that close, a huge shape hurtling down the path we had taken into the blind.
He had found us, searching carefully and thoughtfully, and allowing for the aircar, and selected his best line of attack, and he was in the middle of a leap that would have matched the best effort of a Bengal Tiger when I shoved the rifle through the blind and blew the top of his head off at point blank range.
His leap carried him right past, slamming the rifle out of my hands and brushing me to the ground like a runaway truck.
The ear-busting smack of the seven-millimeter in close quarters, the impact of my landing and the crash of the greer’s fall seemed to occur at the same moment. The next moment I was digging frantically for my rifle and LaChoy was out of the blind, crabbing sidewise, the big Colt-DuPont flamer rammed nearly against the vast thrashing bulk in its death throes. My sleeves were soaked in steaming, stinking wetness, and the blind was drenched. By the time I came upright with my rifle, the greer had finished its unplanned dying.
LaChoy straightened. I had a death grip on the stock of the seven gun, which was coated and slippery from the near passage of that ruined head.
The fear was gone, obliterated by the violent action of the kill. The older bison bull still was standing his ground. The younger one was making long tracks to somewhere far away. I took a deep breath, trying to steady down. LaChoy hunkered by the steaming carcass, fumbling in his bush jacket for his pipe. I noticed a slight tremor in his hands.
“Well,” I said.
“Sweet St. Ernie!” LaChoy said. “I told you he was prime. Didn’t I tell you he was prime? I told you all right. I must say I didn’t realize quite how prime, myself. You seem to have reversed the tables a bit, old man. Shot the beastie off my back instead of the usual and approved manner. How in hell did you know he was doing that? Just how in hell did you know that, when I didn’t even have a clue? He certainly has never even thought of doing that before.”
“I didn’t really know. Not really. Not until it was too late.”
“Almost too late,” LaChoy said. “There’s the world of difference, chappie, between too late and almost too late.”
I had not seen him this talkative before. It was a sign, I supposed, of the degree to which he had been affected by the kill. By the time he put fire to his pipe tobacco, his hands were steady again. Well, he was used to this.
“Old Bwana One-Shot,” he said, puffing aromatic clouds of tobacco around. “Last of the hairy-chested. Sweet Karamojo and Ernie, just sweet all but forgotten Jesus Christ! I supposed I truly am born to be flamed after all. But didn’t I tell you, though, how prime he was?”
I still was having trouble with my vocal equipment, so I walked over and looked down at the beast which almost got me. Got LaChoy, rather; I would just have been a bonus. The fur on the huge carcass was luxurious and fine, but befouled with dark blood and brain tissue. That would clean up. The huge head was a bombed-out ruin. He was as dead as he was ever going to get. His brains and blood on my sleeves and gun were cooling now, and really beginning to reek.
I still was trying to process the awful fear which had come out of nowhere and almost paralyzed me. Almost like something outside of myself. Did that always happen? Was this what that crazy tramp, Python, had been raving about in camp?
