Nobody saw the Ship

                          A POWERFUL NOVELET

                          by Murray Leinster

             _It was only a tiny scout ship from somewhere
          beyond the stars; only one alien creature occupied
            it. But the ship's mission spelled life to its
          fellow creatures and death to all living creatures
         on Earth. And against the super-science of the raider
             stood one terrified old man and his dog...._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
      Future combined with Science Fiction Stories May-June 1950.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


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.

[Illustration: A great ship would come, wiping out the entire
population of cities before anyone suspected 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.




                                   2


Near noon, four miles from their former grazing-ground, there were
mountain-peaks all around them. Some were snow-capped, and there were
vistas of illimitable distance everywhere. It was very beautiful
indeed, but Antonio did not notice; Salazar came upon buzzards again.
He chased them with loud barkings from the meal they reluctantly
shared with blow-flies and ants. This time it wasn't a rabbit; it
was a coyote. It had been killed and most painstakingly taken apart
to provide at a glance all significant information about the genus
_canis_, species _latrans_, in the person of an adult male coyote. It
was a most enlightening exhibit; it proved conclusively that there was
a third type of animal, structurally different from both mountain-lions
and rabbits, which had the same general type of nervous system, with a
mass of nerve-tissue in one large mass in a skull, which nerve-tissue
contained the same high percentage of the desired hormone as the
previous specimens. Had it been recorded by a tiny colored flame in the
hidden ship--the flame was now being much admired by small red bugs
and tiny spiders--it would have been proof that the Qul-En would find
ample supplies on Earth of the complex hormone on which the welfare of
their race now depended. Some members of the Qul-En race, indeed, would
have looked no farther. But sampling which involved only three separate
species and gave no proof of their frequency was not quite enough;
the being in the synthetic mountain-lion was off in search of further
evidence.

Antonio was hardly equipped to guess at anything of this sort. Salazar
led him to the coyote carcass; it had been neatly halved down the
breast-bone. One-half the carcass had been left intact; the other half
was completely anatomized, and the brain had been beautifully dissected
and spread out for measurement. Antonio realized that intelligence had
been at work. But--again--he saw only the pad-tracks of a mountain
lion, and he was literally paralyzed by horror.

Antonio was scared enough to be galvanized into unbelievable energy. He
would have fled gibbering to Ensenada Springs, some forty miles as the
crow flies, but to flee would be doom itself. The devils who did this
sort of work liked--he knew--to spring upon a man alone. But they can
be fooled.

The Qul-En in the artificial mountain-lion was elated. To the last
quivering appendage on the least small tentacle of its body, the pilot
of the facsimile animal was satisfied. It had found good evidence that
the desired nervous system and concentration of the desired hormone
in a single mass of nerve-tissue was normal on this planet! The vast
majority of animals should have it. Even the local civilized race might
have skulls with brains in them, and, from the cities observed from the
stratosphere, that race might be the most numerous fair-sized animal on
the planet!

It was to be hoped for, because large quantities of the sought-for
hormone were needed; taking specimens from cities would be most
convenient. Long-continued existence under the artificial conditions
of civilization--a hundred thousand years of it, no less--had brought
about exhaustion of the Qul-En's ability to create all their needed
hormones in their own bodies. Tragedy awaited the race unless the most
critically needed substance was found. But now it had been!

       *       *       *       *       *

Antonio saw it an hour later, and wanted to shriek; it looked exactly
like a mountain-lion, but he knew it was not flesh and blood because it
moved in impossible bounds. No natural creature could leap sixty feet;
the mountain-lion shape did. But it was convincingly like its prototype
to the eye. It stopped, and regarded the flock of sheep, made soaring
progression to the front of the flock, and came back again. Salazar
ignored it. Neither he nor the sheep scented carnivorous animal life.
Antonio hysterically concluded that it was invisible to them; he began
an elaborate, lunatic pattern of behavior to convince it that magic was
at work against it, too.

He began to babble to his sheep with infinite politeness, spoke to
blank-eyed creatures as _Senor_ Gomez and _Senora_ Onate. He chatted
feverishly with a wicked-eyed ram, whom he called _Senor_ Guttierez. A
clumsy, wabbling lamb almost upset him, and he scolded the infant sheep
as Pepito. He lifted his hat with great gallantry to a swollen ewe,
hailing her as _Senora_ Garcia, and observed in a quavering voice that
the flies were very bad today. He moved about in his flock, turning the
direction of its march and acting as if surrounded by a crowd of human
beings. This should at least confuse the devil whom he saw. And while
he chatted with seeming joviality, the sweat poured down his face in
streams.

Salazar took no part in this deception. The sheep were fairly docile,
once started; he was able to pause occasionally to scratch, and once
even to do a luxurious, thorough job on that place in his back between
his hind legs which is so difficult to reach. There was only one time
when he had any difficulty. That was when there was a sort of eddying
of the sheep, ahead. There were signs of panic. Salazar went trotting
to the spot. He found sheep milling stupidly, and rams pawing the
ground defying they had no idea what. Salazar found a deer-carcass on
the ground and the smell of fresh blood in the air and the sheep upset
because of it. He drove them on past, barking where barking would serve
and nipping flanks where necessary--afterward disgustedly tonguing bits
of wool out of his mouth.

The sheep went on. But Antonio, when he came to the deer-carcass, went
icy-cold in the most exquisite of terror; the deer had been killed by a
mountain-lion--there were tracks about. Then it, too, had been cut into
as if by a dissector's scalpel, but the job was incomplete. Actually,
the pseudo-mountain-lion had been interrupted by the approach of the
flock. There were hardly blow-flies on the spot as yet. Antonio came
to it as he chatted insanely with a sheep with sore eyes and a halo of
midges about its head, whom he addressed as _Senorita_ Carmen. But when
he saw the deer his throat clicked shut. He was speechless.

To pass a creature laid out for magical ceremony was doom indubitable,
but Antonio acted from pure desperation. He recited charms which were
stark paganism and would involve a heavy penance when next he went to
confession. He performed other actions, equally deplorable; when he
went on, the deer was quite spoiled, for neat demonstration of the
skeletal, circulatory, muscular and especially the nervous system and
brain-structure of genus _cervus_, species _dama_, specimen an adult
doe. Antonio had piled over the deer all the brush within reach, had
poured over it the kerosene he had for his night-lantern, and had
set fire to the heap with incantations that made it a wholly impious
sacrifice to quite nonexistent heathen demons.

Salazar, trotting back to the front of the flock after checking on
Antonio and the rear-guard, wrinkled his nose and sneezed as he went
past the blaze again. Antonio tottered on after him.

       *       *       *       *       *

But Antonio's impiety had done no good. The tawny shape bounded back
into sight among the boulders on the hillside. It leaped with infinite
grace for impossible distances. Naturally! No animal can be as powerful
as a machine, and the counterfeit mountain-lion was a machine vastly
better than men could make.

The Qul-En now zestfully regarded the flock of sheep. It looked upon
Salazar and Antonio with no less interest. The Qul-En explorer was an
anatomist and organic chemist rather than a zoologist proper, but it
guessed that the dog was probably a scavenger and that the man had some
symbiotic relationship to the flock.

Salazar, the dog, was done a grave injustice in that estimate. Even
Antonio was given less than he deserved. Now he was gray with horror.
The blood in his veins turned to ice as he saw the false mountain-lion
bounding back upon the hillside. No normal wild creature would display
itself so openly. Antonio considered himself both doomed and damned;
stark despair filled him. But with shaking hands and no hope at all,
he carved a deep cross on the point of a bullet for his ancient rifle.
Licking his lips, he made similar incisions on other bullets in reserve.

The Qul-En vehicle halted. The flock had been counted; now to select
specimens and get to work. There were six new animal types to be
dissected for the nervous organ yielding the looked-for hormone.
Four kinds of sheep--male and female, and adult and immature of each
kind--the biped, and the dog. Then a swift survey to estimate the
probable total number of such animals available, and--.

Antonio saw that the devil mountain-lion was still. He got down on one
knee, fervently crossed himself and fed a cross-marked bullet into the
chamber of his rifle. He lined up the sights on the unearthly creature.
The lion-facsimile watched him interestedly; the sight of a rifle meant
nothing to the Qul-En, naturally. But the kneeling posture of the man
was strange. It was part, perhaps, of the pattern of conduct which had
led him to start that oxidation process about the deer-specimen.

Antonio fired. His hands trembled and the rifle shook; nothing
happened. He fired again and again, gasping in his fear. And he missed
every time.

The cross-marked bullets crashed into red earth and splashed from
naked rock all about the Qul-En vehicle. When sparks spat from a flint
pebble, the pilot of the mountain-lion realized that there was actual
danger here. It could have slaughtered man and dog and sheep by the
quiver of a tentacle, but that would have ruined them as specimens. To
avoid spoiling specimens it intended to take later, the Qul-En put the
mountain-lion shape into a single, magnificent leap. It soared more
than a hundred feet up-hill and over the crest at its top; then it was
gone.

Salazar ran barking after the thing at which Antonio had fired, sniffed
at the place from which it had taken off. There was no animal smell
there at all. He sneezed, and then trotted down again. Antonio lay flat
on the ground, his eyes hidden, babbling. He had seen irrefutable proof
that the shape of the mountain-lion was actually a fiend from hell.




                                   3


Behind the hill-crest, the Qul-En moved away. It had not given up
its plan of selecting specimens from the flock, of course, nor of
anatomizing the man and dog. It was genuinely interested too, in the
biped's novel method of defense. It dictated its own version of the
problems raised, on a tight beam to the wavering, color-changing flame.
Why did not the biped prey on the sheep if it could kill them? What
was the symbiotic relationship of the dog to the man and the sheep?
The three varieties of animal associated freely. The Qul-En dictated
absorbed speculations, then it hunted for other specimens. It found
a lobo wolf, and killed it, verified that this creature also could
be a source of hormones. It slaughtered a chipmunk and made a cursory
examination. Its ray-beam had pretty well destroyed the creature's
brain-tissue, but by analogy of structure this should be a source also.

In conclusion, the Qul-En made a note via the wavering pin-point
of flame that the existence of a hormone-bearing nervous system,
centralized in a single mass of hormone-bearing nerve-tissue inside
a bony structure, seemed universal among the animals of this planet.
Therefore it would merely examine the four other types of large animal
it had discovered, and take off to present its findings to the Center
of its race. With a modification of the ray-beam to kill specimens
without destroying the desired hormone, the Qul-En could unquestionably
secure as much as the race could possibly need. Concentrations of the
local civilized race in cities should make large-scale collection of
the hormone practical unless that civilized race was an exception to
the general nervous structure of all animals so far observed.

This was dictated to the pin-point flame, and the flame faithfully
wavered and changed color to make the record. But the tape did not
record it; a rather large beetle had jammed the tape-reel. It was
squashed in the process, but it effectively messed up the recording
apparatus. Even before the tape stopped moving, though, the record
had become defective; tiny spiders had spun webs, earwigs got
themselves caught. The flame, actually, throbbed and pulsed restlessly
in a cobwebby coating of gossamer and tiny insects. Silverfish
were established in the plastic lining of the Qul-En ship; beetles
multiplied enormously in the air-refresher chemical; moth-larvae
already gorged themselves on the nest-material of the intrepid explorer
outside. Ants were busy on the food-stores. Mites crawled into the
ship to prey on their larger fellows, and a praying-mantis or so had
entered to eat their smaller ones. There was an infinite number of
infinitesimal flying things dancing in the dark; larger spiders busily
spun webs to snare them, and flies of various sorts were attracted by
odors coming out of the ventilator-opening, and centipedes rippled
sinuously inside....

Night fell upon the world. The pseudo-mountain-lion roamed the wild,
keeping in touch with the tide of baa-ing sheep now headed for the
lowlands. It captured a field-mouse and verified the amazing variety
of planetary forms containing brain-tissue rich in hormones. But the
sheep-flock could not be driven at night. When stars came out, to move
them farther became impossible. The Qul-En returned to select its
specimens in the dark, with due care not to allow the man to use his
strange means of defense. It found the flock bedded down.

       *       *       *       *       *

Salazar and Antonio rested; they had driven the sheep as far as it was
possible to drive them, that day. Though he was sick with fear and
weak with horror, Antonio had struggled on until Salazar could do no
more. But he did not leave the flock; the sheep were in some fashion a
defense--if only a diversion--against the creature which so plainly was
not flesh and blood.

He made a fire, too, because he could not think of staying in the dark.
Moths came and fluttered about the flames, but he did not notice. He
tried to summon courage. After all, the unearthly thing had fled from
bullets marked with a cross, even though they missed; with light to
shoot by, he might make a bullseye. So Antonio sat shivering by his
fire, cutting deeper crosses into the points of his bullets, his throat
dry and his heart pounding while he listened to the small noises of the
sheep and the faint thin sounds of the wilderness.

Salazar dozed by the fire. He had had a very hard day, but even so
he slept lightly. When something howled, very far away, instantly
the dog's head went up and he listened. But it was nowhere near; he
scratched himself and relaxed. Once something hissed and he opened his
eyes.

Then he heard a curious, strangled "_Baa-a-a_". Instantly he was racing
for the spot. Antonio stood up, his rifle clutched fast. Salazar
vanished. Then the man heard an outburst of infuriated barking; Salazar
was fighting something, and he was not afraid of it, he was enraged.
Antonio moved toward the spot, his rifle ready.

The barking raced for the slopes beyond the flock. It grew more enraged
and more indignant still. Then it stopped. There was silence. Antonio
called, trembling. Salazar came padding up to him, whining and snarling
angrily. He could not tell Antonio that he had come upon something
in the shape of a mountain-lion, but which was not--it didn't smell
right--carrying a mangled sheep away from its fellows. He couldn't
explain that he'd given chase, but the shape made such monstrous
leaps that he was left behind and pursuit was hopeless. Salazar made
unhappy, disgusted, disgraced noises to himself. He bristled; he whined
bitterly. He kept his ears pricked up and he tried twice to dart off
on a cast around the whole flock, but Antonio called him back. Antonio
felt safer with the dog beside him.

Off in the night, the Qul-En operating the mountain-lion shape caused
the vehicle to put down the sheep and start back toward the flock. It
would want at least four specimens besides the biped and the dog, but
the dog was already on the alert. The Qul-En had not been able to kill
the dog, because the mouth of the lion was closed on the sheep. It
would probably be wisest to secure the dog and biped first--the biped
with due caution--and then complete the choice of sheep for dissection.

The mountain-lion shape came noiselessly back toward the flock.
The being inside it felt a little thrill of pleasure. Scientific
exploration was satisfying, but rarely exciting; one naturally
protected oneself adequately when gathering specimens. But it was
exciting to have come upon a type of animal which would dare to offer
battle. The Qul-En in the mountain-lion shape reflected that this was a
new source of pleasure--to do battle with the fauna of strange planets
in the forms native to those planets.

The padding vehicle went quietly in among the wooly sheep. It saw
the tiny blossom of flame that was Antonio's campfire. Another
high-temperature oxidation process.... It would be interesting to see
if the biped was burning another carcass of its own killing....

       *       *       *       *       *

The shape was two hundred yards from the fire when Salazar scented it.
It was upwind from the dog; its own smell was purely that of metals
and plastics, but the fur, now, was bedabbled with the blood of the
sheep which had been its first specimen of the night. Salazar growled.
His hackles rose, every instinct for the defense of his flock. He had
smelled that blood when the thing which wasn't a mountain-lion left him
behind with impossible leapings.

He went stiff-legged toward the shape. Antonio followed in a sort of
despairing calm born of utter hopelessness.

A sheep uttered a strangled noise. The Qul-En had come upon a second
specimen which was exactly what it wished. It left the dead sheep
behind for the moment, while it went to look at the fire. It peered
into the flames, trying to see if Antonio--the biped--had another
carcass in the flames as seemed to be a habit. It looked....

Salazar leaped for its blood-smeared throat in utter silence and
absolute ferocity. He would not have dreamed of attacking a real
mountain-lion with such utter lack of caution, but this was not a
mountain-lion. His weight and the suddenness of his attack caught the
operator by surprise, the shape toppled over. Then there was an uproar
of scared bleatings from sheep nearby, and bloodthirsty snarlings from
Salazar. He had the salty taste of sheep-blood in his mouth and a
yielding plastic throat between his teeth.

The synthetic lion struggled absurdly. Its weapon, of course, was a
ray-gun which was at once aimed and fired when the jaws opened wide.
The being inside tried to clear and use that weapon. It would not bear
upon Salazar; the Qul-En would have to make its device lie down, double
up its mechanical body, and claw Salazar loose from its mechanical
throat with the mechanical claws on its mechanical hind-legs. At first
the Qul-En inside concentrated on getting its steed back on its feet.

That took time, because whenever Salazar's legs touched ground he used
the purchase to shake the throat savagely. In fact, Antonio was within
twenty yards when the being from the ship got its vehicle upright. It
held the mechanical head high, then, to keep Salazar dangling while it
considered how to dislodge him.

And it saw Antonio. For an instant, perhaps, the Qul-En was alarmed.
But Antonio did not kneel; he made no motion which the pilot--seeing
through infra-red-sensitive photo-cells in the lion's eyeballs--could
interpret as offensive. So the machine moved boldly toward him. The
dog dangling from its throat could be disregarded for the moment. The
killing-ray was absolutely effective, but it did spread, and it did
destroy the finer anatomical features of tissues it hit. Especially,
it destroyed nerve-tissue outright. So the closer a specimen was when
killed, the smaller the damaged area.

The being inside the mountain-lion was pleasantly excited and very
much elated. The biped stood stock-still, frozen by the spectacle of a
mountain-lion moving toward it with a snarling dog hanging disregarded
at its throat. The biped would be a most interesting subject for
dissection, and its means of offense would be most fascinating to
analyze....

Antonio's fingers, contracting as the shape from the ship moved toward
him, did an involuntary thing. Quite without intention, they pulled
the trigger of the rifle. The deeply cross-cut bullet seared Salazar's
flank, removing a quarter-inch patch of skin. It went on into the
shape of plastic and metal, hit a foreleg. Although that leg was
largely plastic, what metal it contained being mostly magnesium for
lightness there were steel wires imbedded for magnetic purposes. The
bullet smashed through plastic and magnesium, struck a spark upon the
steel.

There was a flaring, sun-bright flash of flame, a dense cloud of
smoke. The mountain-lion shape leaped furiously and the jerk dislodged
the slightly singed Salazar and sent him rolling. The mountain-lion
vehicle landed and rolled over and over, one leg useless and spouting
monstrous, white, actinic fire. The being inside knew an instant's
panic; then it felt yielding sheep-bodies below it, thrashed about
violently and crazily, and at last the Qul-En jammed the flame-spurting
limb deep into soft earth. The fire went out; but that leg of its
vehicle was almost useless.

For an instant deadly rage filled the tiny occupant of the cabin where
a mountain-lion's lungs should have been. Almost, it turned and opened
the mouth of its steed and poured out the killing-beam. Almost. The
flock would have died instantly, and the man and the dog, and all
things in the wild for miles. But that would not have been scientific;
after all, this mission should be secret. And the biped....




                                   4


The Qul-En ceased the thrashings of its vehicle. It thought coldly.
Salazar raced up to it, barking with a shrillness that told of terror
valorously combatted; he danced about, barking.

The Qul-En found a solution. Its vehicle rose on its hind legs and
raced up the hillside. It was an emergency method of locomotion for
which this particular vehicle was not designed, and it required almost
inspired handling of the controls to achieve it. But the Qul-En inside
was wholly competent; it guided the vehicle safely over the hilltop
while Salazar made only feigned dashes after it. Safely away, the
Qul-En stopped and deliberately experimented until the process of
running on three legs developed. Then the mountain-lion, which was not
a mountain-lion, went bounding through the night toward its hidden ship.

Within an hour, it clawed away the brush from the exit-port, crawled
inside, and closed the port after it. As a matter of pure precaution,
it touched the "take-off" control before it even came out of its
vehicle.

The ventilation-opening closed--very nearly. The ship rose quietly and
swiftly toward the skies. Its arrival had not been noted; its departure
was quite unsuspected.

It wasn't until the Qul-En touched the switch for the ship's system
of internal illumination to go on that anything appeared to be wrong.
There was a momentary arc, and darkness. There was no interior
illumination; ants had stripped insulation from essential wires. The
lights were shorted. The Qul-En was bewildered; it climbed back into
the mountain-lion shape to use the infrared-sensitive scanning-cells.

The interior of the ship was a crawling mass of insect life. There
were ants and earwigs, silverfish and mites, spiders and centipedes,
mantises and beetles. There were moths, larvae, grubs, midges, gnats
and flies. The recording-instrument was shrouded in cobweb and hooded
in dust which was fragments of the bodies of the spiders' tiny victims.
The air-refresher chemicals were riddled with the tunnels of beetles.
Crickets devoured plastic parts of the ship and chirped loudly. And
the controls--ah! the controls! Insulation stripped off here; brackets
riddled or weakened or turned to powder there. The ship could rise, and
it did. But there were no controls at all.

The Qul-En went into a rage deadly enough to destroy the insects of
itself. The whole future of its race depended on the discovery of an
adequate source of a certain hormone. That source had been found. Only
the return of this one small ship--fifteen feet in diameter--was
needed to secure the future of a hundred-thousand-year-old
civilization. And it was impeded by the insect-life of the planet left
behind! Insect-life so low in nervous organization that the Qul-En had
ignored it!

       *       *       *       *       *

The ship was twenty thousand miles out from earth when the occupant of
the mountain-lion used its ray-beam gun to destroy all the miniature
enemies of its race. The killing beam swept about the ship. Mites,
spiders, beetles, larvae, silverfish and flies--everything died. Then
the Qul-En crawled out and began to make repairs, furiously. The
technical skill needed was not lacking; in hours, this same being had
made a perfect counterfeit of a mountain-lion to serve it as a vehicle.
Tracing and replacing gnawed-away insulation would be merely a tedious
task. The ship would return to its home planet; the future of the
Qul-En race would be secure. Great ships, many times the size of this,
would flash through emptiness and come to this planet with instruments
specially designed for collecting specimens of the local fauna. The
cities of the civilized race would be the simplest and most ample
sources of the so-desperately-needed hormone, no doubt. The inhabitants
of even one city would furnish a stop-gap supply. In time--why--it
would become systematic. The hormone would be gathered from this
continent at this time, and from that continent at that, allowing the
animals and the civilized race to breed for a few years in between
collections. Yes....

The Qul-En worked feverishly. Presently it felt a vague discomfort; it
worked on. The discomfort increased; it could discover no reason for
it. It worked on, feverishly....

Back on Earth, morning came. The sun rose slowly and the dew lay heavy
on the mountain grasses. Far-away peaks were just beginning to be
visible through clouds that had lain on them overnight. Antonio still
trembled, but Salazar slept. When the sun was fully risen he arose and
shook himself; he stretched elaborately, scratched thoroughly, shook
himself again and was ready for a new day. When Antonio tremblingly
insisted that they drive the flock on toward the lowlands, Salazar
assisted. He trotted after the flock and kept them moving; that was his
business.

Out in space, the silvery ship suddenly winked out of existence. Enough
of its circuits had been repaired to put it in overdrive. The Qul-En
was desperate, by that time. It felt itself growing weaker, and it was
utterly necessary to reach its own race and report the salvation it
had found for them. The record of the flickering flame was ruined. The
Qul-En felt that itself was dying. But if it could get near enough to
any of the planetary systems inhabited by its race, it could signal
them and all would be well.

Moving ever more feebly, the Qul-En managed to get lights on within
the ship again. Then it found what it considered the cause of its
increasing weakness and spasmodic, gasping breaths. In using the
killing-ray it had swept all the interior of the ship. But not the
mountain-lion shape. Naturally! And the mountain-lion shape had killed
specimens and carried them about. While its foreleg flamed, it had even
rolled on startled, stupid sheep. It had acquired fleas--perhaps some
from Salazar--and ticks. The fleas and ticks had not been killed; they
now happily inhabited the Qul-En.

The Qul-En tried desperately to remain alive until a message could
be given to its people, but it was not possible. There was a slight
matter the returning explorer was too much wrought up to perceive,
and the instruments that would have reported it were out of action
because of destroyed insulation. When the ventilation-slit was closed
as the ship took off, it did not close completely; a large beetle
was in the way. There was a most tiny but continuous leakage of air
past the crushed chitinous armor. The Qul-En in the ship died of
oxygen-starvation without realizing what had happened, just as human
pilots sometimes black out from the same cause before they know what is
the matter. So the little silvery ship never came out of overdrive. It
went on forever, or until its source of power failed.

The fleas and ticks, too, died in time; they died very happily, very
full of Qul-En body-fluid. And they never had a chance to report to
their fellows that the Qul-En were very superior hosts.

The only entity who could report told his story and was laughed at.
Only his cronies, ignorant and superstitious men like himself, could
believe in the existence of a thing not of earth, in the shape of a
mountain-lion that leaped hundreds of feet at a time, which dissected
wild creatures and made magic over them, but fled from bullets marked
with a cross and bled flame and smoke when such a bullet wounded it.

Such a thing, of course, was absurd!


                                THE END