CHAPTER -1

The landing of the Qul-En ship, a tiny craft no more than fifteen feet in diameter, went completely unnoticed, as its operator intended. It was armed, of course, but its purpose was not destruction. If this ship, whose entire crew consisted of one individual, were successful in its mission then a great ship would come, wiping out the entire population of cities before anyone suspected the danger.

But this lone Qul-En was seeking a complex hormone substance which Qul-En medical science said theoretically must exist, but the molecule of which even the Qul-En could not synthesize directly. Yet it had to be found, in great quantity; once discovered, the problem of obtaining it would be taken up, with the resources of the whole race behind it. But first it had to be found.

The tiny ship assigned to explore the Solar System for the hormone wished to pass unnoticed. Its mission of discovery should be accomplished in secrecy if possible. For one thing, the desired hormone would be destroyed by contact with the typical Qul-En ray-gun beam, so that normal methods of securing zoological specimens could not be used.

The ship winked into being in empty space, not far from Neptune. It drove for that chilly planet, hovered about it, and decided not to land. It sped inward toward the sun and touched briefly on Io, but found no life there. It dropped into the atmosphere of Mars, and did not rise again for a full week, but the vegetation on Mars is thin and the animals mere degenerate survivors of once specialized forms. The ship came to Earth, hovered lightly at the atmosphere's very edge for a long time, and doubtless chose its point of descent for reasons that seemed good to its occupant. Then it landed.

It actually touched Earth at night. There was no rocket-drive to call attention and by dawn it was well-concealed. Only one living creature had seen it land—a mountain-lion. Even so, by midday the skeleton of the lion was picked clean by buzzards, with ants tidying up after them. And the Qul-En in the ship was enormously pleased. The carcass, before being abandoned to the buzzards, had been studied with an incredible competence. The lion's nervous system—particularly the mass of tissue in the skull—unquestionably contained either the desired hormone itself, or something so close to it that it could be modified and the hormone produced. It remained only to discover how large a supply of the precious material could be found on earth. It was not feasible to destroy a group of animals—say, of the local civilized race—and examine their bodies, because the hormone would be broken down by the weapon which allowed of a search for it. So an estimate of available sources would have to be made by sampling. The Qul-En in the ship prepared to take samples.

The ship had landed in tumbled country some forty miles south of Ensenada Springs, national forest territory, on which grazing-rights were allotted to sheep-ranchers after illimitable red tape. Within ten miles of the hidden ship there were rabbits, birds, deer, coyotes, a lobo wolf or two, assorted chipmunks, field-mice, perhaps as many as three or four mountain-lions, one flock of two thousand sheep, one man, and one dog.

The man was Antonio Menendez. He was ancient, unwashed, and ignorant, and the official shepherd of the sheep. The dog was Salazar, of dubious ancestry but sound worth, who actually took care of the sheep and knew it; he was scarred from battles done in their defense. He was unweariedly solicitous of the wooly half-wits in his charge. There were whole hours when he could not find time to scratch himself, because of his duties. He was reasonably fond of Antonio, but knew that the man did not really understand sheep.

Besides these creatures, among whom the Qul-En expected to find its samples, there were insects. These, however, the tiny alien being disregarded. It would not be practical to get any great quantity of the substance it sought from such small organisms.

By nightfall of the day after its landing, the door of the ship opened and the explorer came out in a vehicle designed expressly for sampling on this planet. The vehicle came out, stood on its hind legs, closed the door, and piled brush back to hide it. Then it moved away with the easy, feline gait of a mountain-lion. At a distance of two feet it was a mountain-lion. It was a magnificent job of adapting Qul-En engineering to the production of a device which would carry a small-bodied explorer about a strange world without causing remark. The explorer nested in a small cabin occupying the space—in the facsimile lion—that had been occupied by the real lion's lungs. The fur of the duplicate was convincing; its eyes were excellent, housing scanning-cells which could make use of anything from ultraviolet far down into the infra-red. Its claws were retractable and of plastic much stronger and keener than the original lion's claws. It had other equipment, including a weapon against which nothing on this planet could stand, and for zoological sampling it had one remarkable advantage. It had no animal smell; it was all metal and plastics.

On the first night of its roaming, nothing in particular happened. The explorer became completely familiar with the way the controls of the machine worked. As a machine, of course, it was vastly more powerful than an animal. It could make leaps no mere creature of flesh and blood could duplicate; its balancing devices were admirable; it was, naturally, immune to fatigue. The Qul-En inside it was pleased with the job.

That night Antonio and Salazar bedded down their sheep in a natural amphitheatre and Antonio slept heavily, snoring. He was a highly superstitious ancient, so he wore various charms of a quasi-religious nature. Salazar merely turned around three times and went to sleep. But while the man slept soundly, Salazar woke often. Once he waked sharply at a startled squawking among the lambs. He got up and trotted over to make sure that everything was all right, sniffed the air suspiciously. Then he went back, scratched where a flea had bitten him, bit—nibbling—at a place his paws could not reach, and went back to sleep. At midnight he made a clear circle around his flock and went back to slumber with satisfaction. Toward dawn he raised his head suspiciously at the sound of a coyote's howl, but the howl was far away. Salazar dozed until daybreak, when he rose, shook himself, stretched himself elaborately, scratched thoroughly, and was ready for a new day. The man waked, wheezing, and cooked breakfast; it appeared that the normal order of things would go undisturbed.

For a time it did; there was certainly no disturbance at the ship. The small silvery vessel was safely hidden. There was a tiny, flickering light inside—the size of a pin-point—which wavered and changed color constantly where a sort of tape unrolled before it. It was a recording device, making note of everything the roaming pseudo-mountain-lion's eyes saw and everything its micro-phonic ears listened to. There was a bank of air-purifying chemical which proceeded to regenerate itself by means of air entering through a small ventilating slot. It got rid of carbon dioxide and stored up oxygen in its place, in readiness for further voyaging.

Of course, ants explored the whole outside of the space-vessel, and some went inside through the ventilator-opening. They began to cart off some interesting if novel foodstuff they found within. Some very tiny beetles came exploring, and one variety found the air-purifying chemical refreshing. Numbers of that sort of beetle moved in and began to raise large families. A minuscule moth, too, dropped eggs lavishly in the nest-like space in which the Qul-En explorer normally reposed during space-flight. But nothing really happened.

Not until late morning. It was two hours after breakfast-time when Salazar found traces of the mountain-lion which was not a mountain-lion. He found a rabbit that had been killed. Having been killed, it had very carefully been opened up, its various internal organs spread out for examination, and its nervous system traced in detail. Its brain-tissue, particularly, had been most painstakingly dissected, so the amount of a certain complex hormone to be found in it could be calculated with precision. The Qul-En in the lion shape had been vastly pleased to find the sought-for hormone in another animal besides a mountain-lion.

The dissection job was a perfect anatomical demonstration; no instructor in anatomy could have done better, and few neuro-surgeons could have done as well with the brain. It was, in fact, a perfect laboratory job done on a flat rock in the middle of a sheep-range, and duly reproduced on tape by a flickering, color-changing light. The reproduction, however, was not as good as it should have been, because the tape was then covered by small ants who had found its coating palatable and were trying to clean it off.

Salazar saw the rabbit. There were blow-flies buzzing about it, and a buzzard was reluctantly flying away because of his approach. Salazar barked at the buzzard. Antonio heard the barking; he came.

Antonio was ancient, superstitious, and unwashed. He came wheezing, accompanied by flies who had not finished breakfasting on the bits of his morning meal he had dropped on his vest. Salazar wagged his tail and barked at the buzzard. The rabbit had been neatly dissected, but not eaten. The cuts which opened it up were those of a knife or scalpel. It was not—it was definitely not!—the work of an animal. But there were mountain-lion tracks, and nothing else. More, every one of the tracks was that of a hind foot! A true mountain-lion eats what he catches; he does not stand on his hind paws and dissect it with scientific precision. Nothing earthly had done this!

Antonio's eyes bulged out. He thought instantly of magic, Black Magic. He could not imagine dissection in the spirit of scientific inquiry; to him, anything that killed and then acted in this fashion could only come from the devil.

He gasped and fled, squawking. When he had run a good hundred yards, Salazar caught up to him, very much astonished. He overtook his master and went on ahead to see what had scared the man so. He made casts to right and left, then went in a conscientious circle all around the flock under his care. Presently he came back to Antonio, his tongue lolling out, to assure him that everything was all right. But Antonio was packing, with shaking hands and a sweat-streaked brow.

In no case is the neighborhood of a mountain-lion desirable for a man with a flock of sheep. But this was no ordinary mountain-lion. Why, Salazar—honest, stout-hearted Salazar—did not scent a mountain-lion in those tracks. He would have mentioned it vociferously if he had, so this was beyond nature. The lion was un fantasmo or worse; Antonio's thoughts ran to were-tigers, ghost-lions, and sheer Indian devils. He packed, while Salazar scratched fleas and wondered what was the matter.

They got the flock on the move. The sheep made idiotic efforts to disperse and feed placidly where they were. Salazar rounded them up and drove them on. It was hard work, but even Antonio helped in frantic energy—which was unusual.