LIZARD WAS on the radio immediately, "Houston! We've got a problem!"
Colonel Danny Anderson replied immediately, "Go ahead, ELDAVO."
"We've got worms. More than a dozen of 'em-" Lizard screamed, "-and they're reading the label on this package. Canned people!" She yelped again as something rocked the chopper.
I scrambled out of my seat and crawled back looking for the rocket launcher or the freeze gun. Maybe I could hold them off until the blimp arrived.
There were scrabbling sounds at the door. Something was scraping across the roof The chopper bumped as if something else were pushing it from behind. It lurched so hard I stumbled against the wall.
Duke was moaning! He was waving his arms, trying to get up. He was mumbling and reaching- "Torsh-whah mah torsh?" A pair of giant black eyes was peering in at him through the left side bubble.
I didn't think. I grabbed the shelterfoam gun and sprayed the window. Did the worm look surprised? Did it back away? I didn't see. I turned and sprayed the other bubble.
I crawled over to Duke, pushing him back down onto the deck. "Stay still," I commanded.
"Huh-? Whuh-?"
"Stay still! That's an order, Captain!"
"Yessuhm-" And he lapsed back into unconsciousness.
As I scrambled back to Lizard, she tossed me a sidewise glance. "Gave yourself a little promotion, huh?"
"So court-martial me. Where's the goddamn blimp?" I looked at the clock. "They're overdue."
"I don't know-"
"We're eight minutes away," boomed Colonel Anderson's voice from the radio. "Keep your pants on."
"Why-?" I snapped back. "Will that taste better to the worms?"
"Listen up, Lieutenant!" Colonel Anderson had his father's same angry tone. "Anchoring a blimp is tricky. How you feel about it is irrelevant. It's going to take the same amount of time whether you're calm and rational or panicky and screaming. So it's up to you-how do you want to play it?"
Something in the rear of the chopper creaked ominously. It sounded like a Kevlar strut crackling under pressure. Something else went thump against the door. The door bulged. A piece of shelterfoam spronged off and ricocheted off the opposite wall.
I turned back to the radio. "That's real reasonable, Colonel, sir-but you don't have several tons of worm trying to climb into your ship. We do."
"I'm aware of your problem, Lieutenant. But we don't have any more time to talk about it. You'll have to have your little hissy-fit after we pick you up."
A worm was staring at us through the windshield-but it didn't push through. It just goggled its eyes and blinked. Sput-phwut. A second worm slid up beside it.
I opened my mouth to reply to Colonel Anderson-and then shut it. I realized how stupid I was about to be. I was going to argue for my right to be terrified and upset. The worms were still only inspecting us. If they'd wanted to come in, they would have. Time enough to scream then. "Go ahead," I gulped.
"We've got you on our horizon now. Stand by-" There was a pause. "Nope. There's still too much schmutz in the air. We'll have to do this on instruments." Another pause. "All right, we're dropping the crab. I'll give you the video-"
Lizard reached out and switched on the main display. She punched through the channels quickly. A bright clear image came up on the screen.
We were looking down from the blimp. A round, spidery-looking robot-it had a lot of arms and legs and attachments-was dangling from four lines that looked too, slender to support it. It was caught in the spotlights of the blimp, and it flashed with spotlights of its own. The only indications of motion were the pale and luminous clouds sweeping past below.
Lizard touched her controls again and a second screen lit up to show the view from the crab's camera. There were pink trees swinging wildly below us.
I leaned forward to peer out the front windshield. "Shouldn't we be seeing them soon?"
Lizard asked the radio, "Can you eyeball us?"
"Not yet. Stand by. We'll give you the computer-scan. Channel three."
Lizard punched up a third display screen. The image was plasticlooking, without detail; the blimp's computer had compiled all its sensory data-sonic, infrared, radar, visual and who knew what else-into a single three-dimensional portrait. The landscape looked rippled and uneven; the computer had painted it a dull orange. A wide depression angled diagonally through the image; we were sliding toward it.
There! Just left of center-that bright white object! That was us! A tiny gunship half-buried in a furrow of red. There were dark shapes crawling all over it. I wished I hadn't seen that.
Lizard studied it for a moment, then pointed back over my shoulder. "The blimp'll be coming in from that angle. You'll see them first from the turret."
I climbed back to the turret and pulled myself up into it. I pulled the shutter back-
-and I was suddenly staring into the large round eyes of a large round worm. It blinked. I blinked. It blinked again. I made a face at it. It blinked a third time. I shined my flashlight at it. It blinked. But it didn't attack.
Why not-?
What was going on here?! "Shoo!" I shouted. "Shoo!" The worm blinked at me again.
"Goddammit! Get out of my way-! You big fat hairy bag of pustulant pink pudding!"
The worm backed away from the turret.
I blinked. In surprise. I didn't know my own strength.
I swiveled around quickly. The worms were all over the chopper-and all around it on the ground. They were huge dark shapes in the night, moving quickly and silently across the pale glow of the dust drifts. The lights of the ship struck highlights off the powder crusted on their sides.
Another worm raised itself up to peer at me-one of the biggest. It leaned its weight against the chopper-and pulled us sideways! Lizard yelped. Duke moaned. I heard it over my own scream. The worm loomed ominous and black outside the turret. It swiveled one eye high and the other eye low to look at me from a very cockeyed angle. It only wanted to study me. It was curious!
These were not ordinary worms. They weren't hungry.
I'd never met a worm before that wasn't crazy with hungeror rage. This was a whole new mode of behavior. We were going to have to rewrite the book.
We'd always assumed that the worms were like the millipedes-so much a victim of their own hunger that everything was perceived as food. But these worms were-beyond that.
How did that happen? How much food did a worm need to eat to be satisfied?
How much did it take to stuff a worm? Seattle? North Dakota? Or maybe the answer was all around me. First, you bury California under two meters of cotton candy powder, so the worms are surrounded by food. Then let them out for a walk, so every time they take a step they get a mouthful. The issue of hunger is taken care of.
Maybe.
Maybe we were safe for as long as there was pink snow on the ground.
Or maybe that was just a false connection. Maybe there was something else going on here too
We just didn't know.
A pink light in the sky pulled me back to the present. It looked like a warm glow behind a veil of smoke.
"I can see the blimp!" I hollered.
As I watched, the glow began to assume brilliance and color and even a hint of size and form. Then it became a cluster of lights. They grew brighter. The blimp moved out of the darkness and became a gaudy, cigar-shaped, rose-enveloped presence. The air glowed pink around it. Its brightest lights were banked along its belly; rows of spotlights, swiveling and pointing in all directions. The crab was a smaller cluster of beams and auras hanging just below.
The ship hung in the sky like a vision-like an angel. Its rays came sweeping through the pale haze like fingers from heaven, turning everything luminous. The beams poured from the sky. They were beautiful! One of them touched me in passing and it was almost too bright to look at.
The whole world glowed with the light-the land, the drifts, the stark and barren trees. Everything looked ghostly and iridescent. Even the dark worms and the darker body of the chopper. A line from something floated through my head. God came out at midnight. I could see him floating in my sky.
All around us, the worms were stopping what they were doing, turning and looking upward. Some of them even backed away from the chopper for a better view. They were puzzling at the light in the sky, trying to make out what it could be-but there was no focus there. No edges, no shapes, no lines-only the light. The beautiful, brilliant, dazzling light!
I felt a surge of joy in my chest and in my throat. My eyes started to water. "It's beautiful," I said.
"What?" asked Lizard.
"It's beautiful!" I called: "I can see the lights of the blimp! It's the most beautiful sight I've ever seen."
"How far are they?"
"Uh-" I brought myself back to reality again. "It's hard to tell. Maybe a kilometer. Maybe two."
"They're past the trees," Lizard said. "They can fire the harpoon any time now."
Something puffed from the bottom of the crab. It hit the ground with a muffled thump and a large cloud of pale powdery smoke rose from the point of impact. The crab slid down the line and disappeared into the cloud, leaving four thin lines hanging in the air, stiffening against the pull of the blimp.
"They got it!" I called. "They're moored."
"Not yet!" Lizard called back. "Two more to go."
The crab released the anchored line and scuttled sideways across the pink drifts. Almost immediately, it disappeared into them, marking its passage by the three lines still anchored to it. They cut through the powder like fishing lines through water-they trailed a moving cloud of brightly glowing dust.
Abruptly, the crab appeared again, coming up suddenly on a rise. Its motion was mad-even comical-but it was fast. It scrambled quickly across the ground, varying its gait to match the terrain: it bounced, it crawled, it scuttled sideways; it paused, it backed up, it dipped and tilted; it tiptoed around a pink lump that once had been a bush-then dashed down the opposite side of the slope in a rapid spurt of action.
The bunnydogs were frozen. The worms stared.
The crab picked its steps like a ballet dancer. It moved like a lunar walker. It raced like a thoroughbred. If it could have cooked, I'd have married it.
It stopped inside another pink drift. The whole powdery area glowed with its light. There was another bright puff-another harpoon-and another line was anchored. This time when the crab came scuttling out, it was trailing only two lines back up to the blimp.
It headed directly toward the chopper now, directly toward two of the largest worms. Their eyes blinked as it approached.
It hesitated only a moment-then dashed directly between the two of them. Their eyes swiveled to follow this small presumptuous machine. It passed between them so rapidly they nearly twisted their eyes off. Only after it passed their tails did they remember to be surprised and leapt around to stare at it again. Was that a Chtorran double take?
One of the worms cocked its eyes curiously-the "hand-puppet expression" was getting very familiar-and started to follow the crab tentatively. The crab swiveled a spotlight toward it-and the worm backed away quickly. I started to giggle. It was funny. These monsters had to mass several tons apiece-and they were startled by a hyperkinetic machine?!
The crab had already scuttled sidewise around the chopper. I swiveled around to watch it disappear over-no, through-one of the steepest drifts of all. Its powdery light gleamed in the distance. It was moving as far from the chopper as it could to provide a long third leg for the tripod of mooring ropes. After a moment, I saw the now-familiar puff of smoke, and a few moments later, the crab scuttled back, trailing only a single line. Our lifeline.
"All right," called Lizard. "They're ready if we are."
"Wait a minute," I called. "Something's happening."
The worms were swiveling their eyes upward again-to stare at the blimp. The airship was moving onto station directly overhead. Mother! That thing was huge! And bright! The air around it didn't just glow-it shimmered.
The blimp was a giant pink egg that filled the sky. It hung there like a gorgeous UFO, pouring light down on all of us-the pale powdery drifts, the stubby bunnydogs, the darkened chopper, and the curious worms.
The worms
I couldn't tear my eyes from them. They shone incredibly in the glare from above-they looked luminous. They looked like they were made of electricity. Their fur rippled in waves; the stripes on their sides seemed to shiver and shift with red and purple iridescence. They looked as if they were lit from within. They glowed with pink auras.
The airship was pulling itself into position by adjusting the length of its mooring lines. It was a tricky maneuver because the pilot also had to keep the ship pointed into the wind. The display boards on its sides were flashing with bright stripes and colored patterns and even a crawling message: HEAVY LIFTING IS OUR BAG. OREGON AIR-LUMBER. Then a moment later: PAUL BUNYAN RESCUES U.S. ARMY. PICTURES AT ELEVEN.
The worms were fascinated by the sight. They turned around and around under the blimp; their eyes were angled upward, blinking furiously. They circled in the clearing, oblivious to everything else; they bumped into each other again and again as they tried to track with the airship. The bunnydogs had to scramble to keep out of their way.
"They're going crazy," I called. "Something about the blimp-"
And then one of the worms stood up. It raised itself almost its entire length. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. It reached futilely, frantically for the blimp. It stretched its arms upward in a pleading gesture-
I thought of pictures I'd seen of New Christians trying to touch the robes of The Apostle.
-and then the worm opened its mouth and let loose the most incredible sound I'd ever heard from the throat of any creaturea long, high-pitched, warbling-wavering, strung-out-forever wail of hope, desire and despair. The sound was maddening.
And then the worm fell back down into the dust. It toppled backward, writhing; its two rows of pitifully tiny feet waved in the air for a moment; and then it scrambled around madly trying to right itself-trying to reach for the blimp again.
I felt sorry for it.
The other worms were trying to lift themselves toward the blimp too. They stretched their arms and cried. They wailed. They worshiped.
"I don't get it-" Lizard said.
"I do. The blimp looks like a worm. A big bright friendly worm-" And then the second, deeper part of that realization hit me. "-A giant, floating, dazzling, vision of a worm! An angel hanging in the sky! Pouring light! In their own image! It looks like a god to them!"
"Oh, my God," said Lizard softly. She saw it too.
"Tell the blimp to cut their lights!" I called forward. "It's the lights that are doing it. We're going to have to do this in the dark." I looked upward again myself The blimp was beautiful. I could see why the worms were so crazy underneath it. How would you feel if an angel opened the sky and shone its light down on you? And then the blimp doused its lights and disappeared. It vanished completely, cloaked by the night and the thick powdery gloom in the air.
The worms shrieked.
They screamed like all the tortured souls of Hell. The sound was hideous.
"Oh, no-" I'd made a mistake.
How would you feel if an angel opened the sky and shone its light down on you? How would you feel if-when you called to that angel-it disappeared and left you behind? Alone.
You'd feel damned.
Outside, the worms were raging.