Выбрать главу

Toward the nver and the tall cliffs beyond it the animal flew.

And then it and the screaming were gone. But, airborne, it had been seen and heard, and now the crowd was gathering.

On the rim of Colin's consciousness the voice of Ed was shouting.

"Now don't worry. We know exactly where they are. The transmitters, the police can home in on the data transmitters…"

But Colin wasn't really hearing him. Colin was staring at his jerry-rigged monitoring screen. The pattern of light darting and swirling across its face was a strange one for this particular animal, but one not strange at all to Colin. He'd seen it before, many times, constantly almost, with Ato's Pride, and he recognized it now with a growing horror.

Somewhere, greedily, slaveringly, the Bullitt beast was at long last feeding.

Hunched, wrapped in blankets, holding steaming mugs, Colin and Ed, in the cockpit of the patrol boat that had pulled them out of the river. Ed still shaking his head.

"It went for us. Did you see how it went for us?"

Colin didn't answer him, knowing that Ed wasn't looking for him to. Remembering the two of them in the police copter, with the pilot and the man with the heavy carbine.

Tracking their animal, homing in on the emitting signals of its data transmitters until, on the rocky face of the cliffs, halfway up, they caught the glint of the sun on its gold-green skin.

"There!" Ed shouted, pointing, and the copter hovered close.

Crouched it was, on the jutting shelf. The great wings half unfurled, opening, closing, twitching,

"Do you think she's still alive?" the man with the carbine said, then, "Forget it."

It rose to meet them. Hurling itself at them with a ferocity that brought to Colin's mind the vivid image of its dog-sized predecessor.

"Move!" the man with the carbine was shouting at the copter pilot. "Swing this thing around! Give me a clear shot!"

But the pilot had already swung his craft. Hanging on its screw, he'd fumed it like a pendant bubble and the man was firing.

Again and again Colin saw him jerk with the recoil of his heavy weapon, but the great flying animal was still airborne.

Upon them now it was. Circling around them, great wings flailing. Lips drawn back from its bloodied teeth.

Claws. It looks like it's got claws on those feet and not hooves.

And then it struck. Like the huge beast of prey that it was.

It struck, swooping down upon them from above and behind with a speed impossible to evade; with a whistling and a shrieking that Colin was sure he heard even above the clatter of their own copter blades.

And into those blades it plunged, and the impact was tremendous.

They hung there in the clear sky for a heart-stopping moment; the screaming animal and the maimed machine.

Then they fell. Fell the few hundred feel to the river and into its chilling waters.

Beside Colin the copter pilot shivering in his blankets called out to the man at the patrol boat's wheel. "See it yet?"

"No," someone called back to him, and the man who had lost his carbine pulled his blankets closer and said. "Forget it. He's not floating with all the lead I put into him."

They were waiting for them on the jutting dock when the patrol boat swept close. On the dock and coming oat to meet them in their hovering craft. The vidcasters, the reporters, the curious.

And after them the TriV coverage of the inquest, the investigations, the public's blatant, and their colleagues' more discreet, inquiries into how they produced their miracle, until at last even Ed turned to Colin in their office one morning and said in genuine dismay, "I know I wanted publicity to put us over the top, but enough is enough." Colin smiled and waved the pale blue vac-tube message his secretary had just handed him.

"The Commodore says thank you but he doesn't think he ought to accept Ato's Pride from us, not as a gift anyway."

"Why not?" Ed said. "It's the least we can do to show him our appreciation for the contracts he's wangled for us."

Colin laughed. "Those he says he doesn't need to defend, not any more. But he doesn't want to get fouled up with any committee investigating expensive presents to government people."

"Tell him to take the horse and stop worrying," Ed said, and from his expression Colin could not tell if he was kidding or not. "If they fire him, a growing organization like ours can always use a good man who knows his way around Procurement."

Phoenix

To early agricultural peoples, whose lives depended on the regular and reliable succession of seasons, it became clear thai these in turn depended on the motion of the sun in the heavens. In the regions of the Middle East where agriculture and civilization first developed, the midday sun was always in the southern half of the sky. From noon to noon it rose higher and higher in the sky, but never reached the zenith. By the date we know as June 21, it got as high as it could and began to sink again.

For half a year if sank, until it reached its low point on December 21. and then began to rise again. As it sank the summer passed and ended and it grew colder and colder.

It was clear that if the sun continued to sink indefinitely, all would freeze and life would come to an end. The time of the low point and the turnabout was therefore a time of rejoicing, so many cultures had a period of unrestrained celebration of the winter "solstice" ("sun standstill"). The modern version of this celebration is Christmas.

Naturally, this annual resurrection of the sun, with the promise of a coming spring and a new period of growth, gave rise to all sorts of death-and-resurrection cults. The Egyptians pictured a bird that died annually and was reborn out of its funeral pyre-an obvious sun-figure. The Greeks picked up the legend and visualized the bird as the size of an eagle, and as being gold, red. and purple in color. (These are the colors of the noonday sun, of the setting sun, and of the sky at twilight.) They called it the "phoenix" from a Greek word for "red-purple" and had it die and be resurrected every five hundred years, rather than every year. Since the phoenix was its own parent, it needed no mate, and was pictured as one of a kind.

The following story gives us a very modern version of the myth.

Caution! Inflammable!

by Thomas N. Scortia

When the City Editor of the Gazette received word that a phoenix was building her nest on the very peak of the dome of the city hall, he naturally sent his best reporter speeding to the scene. The reporter, an intrepid young man known for his resourcefulness, decided that little was to be gained by observing the coming immolation from the pavement below and, after bribing a janitor, gained access to the ledge surrounding the base of the dome and climbed the narrow metal ladder to the peak where the bird was engaged in her labors.

"You realize," he said, accosting the phoenix, "that this is a very unorthodox place in which to build a nest, especially with the end you have in mind?"

"I do," the bird said, pausing in its work, "but there is no higher point in this area and I don't have enough strength remaining to make it west to some peak in the Rockies."

"Tell me," said the reporter, remembering his professional duties, "is it true that there is only one of your kind?"

"That's quite correct," said the phoenix, selecting a long shred of cellophane from a pile of debris balanced delicately on the slope of the dome. She began swiftly to weave it into the nest, following an intricately beautiful pattern.

"And when you become old, you build a nest and set fire to it while you are in it?"