Carol's expression was pure misery. Moran walked deliberately across the
control-room. He glanced out of a port. A face looked in. It filled the
transparent opening. It was unthinkable. It was furry. There were
glistening chitinous areas. There was a proboscis like an elephant's
trunk, curled horribly. The eyes were multiple and mad.
It looked in, drawn and hypnotized by the light shining out on this
nightmare world from the control-room ports.
Moran touched the button that closed the shutters.
III.
When morning came, its arrival was the exact reversal of the coming of
night. In the beginning there was darkness, and in the darkness there
was horror.
The creatures of the night untiringly filled the air with sound, and the
sounds were discordant and gruesome and revolting. The creatures of this
planet were gigantic. They should have adopted new customs appropriate
to the dignity of their increased size. But they hadn't. The manners and
customs of insects are immutable. They feed upon specific prey--spiders
are an exception, but they are not insects at all--and they lay their
eggs in specific fashion in specific places, and they behave according
to instincts which are so detailed as to leave them no choice at all in
their actions. They move blindly about, reacting like automata of
infinite complexity which are capable of nothing not built into them
from the beginning. Centuries and millenia do not change them. Travel
across star-clusters leaves them with exactly the capacities for
reaction that their remotest ancestors had, before men lifted off
ancient Earth's green surface.
The first sign of dawn was deep, deep, deepest red in the cloud-bank no
more than fifteen hundred feet overhead. The red became brighter, and
presently was as brilliant as dried blood. Again presently it was
crimson over all the half-mile circle that human eyes could penetrate.
Later still--but briefly--it was pink. Then the sky became gray. From
that color it did not change again.
Moran joined Burleigh in a survey of the landscape from the
control-room. The battlefield was empty now. Of the thousands upon
thousands of stinking combatants who'd rent and torn each other the
evening before, there remained hardly a trace. Here and there, to be
sure, a severed saw-toothed leg remained. There were perhaps as many as
four relatively intact corpses not yet salvaged. But something was being
done about them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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