Against Infinity Read Free Page B

warpscooter crumpled. He shifted to the next and saw it disintegrate as Old Matt got it. Then the group must have heard or felt something because they dodged this way and that, skipping along on their fast little legs, scrambling into the blue shadows. Manuel led one of them and fired three times, kicking up a quick jet of vapor from the ice each time where he missed. He caught the thing just as it got into the shadow of a boulder. The bolt went clean through its brown armor. Good, he thought. He swung the gun back and there was nothing left to shoot at. Old Matt had hit the rest.
    He felt proud on the long march back to the camp. They got another flock in late afternoon, surprising muties in a gully, but then the mutants ran and got in among the regular scooters and Old Matt pushed the boy’s popper aside before he could shoot any more.
    “Bio’s strict about killing the reg’lars.”
    “Okay.” Manuel walked on, cradling the gun, watching the dumb forms scuttle for cover.
    “Safety.”
    Manuel replied, “I might get a squint at one if it breaks cover.”
    “It’s then, when you’re trying for the one extra, that bellies get sliced and feet blowed off.”
    Meekly he powered down and slipped on the safety, deliberately looking away from the jittering, mindless flock still seeking shadow. He sloughed on, a half step behind the man, through the glinting Ganymede morning, homing on the endlessly beeping directional for the camp.
    It was more than a week before he and Old Matt heard the animals. They were out on their own, running flocks of scooters when they could find them, the man teaching Manuel how to move and where the crusted-over deadfalls were that had been hollowed out years before by the fusion caterpillars and how a man could fall through the thin ice and break a leg even in the fractional gravity of this moon. A flock of scooters had sprung up in front of them and the boy had got two of the warped ones—discolored things, ugly, that lurched away and scrambled over the others to get away—before the mutations got in amongst the rest.
    “Bad sign. They already know enough to do that.”
    “Why doesn’t Bio program the reg’lars to turn on the muties?”
    “Don’t want to give them highly developed survival traits. Be just that much harder to kill them off when we introduce the good lifeforms, the ones we want to make the stable ecology.”
    “Ah, well,” Manuel said, full of himself and with an elaborate casualness, “that just makes for more huntin’ and—”
    “Listen.”
    Over their short-range came a. sputtering, a low murmur, almost blending with the static of Jupiter’s auroral belts. Yet Manuel caught the fervid yips and cries of the pack, a chorus blurred but with a high, running keening to it, each voice a distinct animal but each responding with its own fevered energy. He did not need to ask what drew cries from them. He reached down and thumbed on his gun, though he knew it was useless and a mere gesture. But it was important to make the gesture, just as it was to wait breathless and see in his mind’s eye what the yelps and grunts and chattering pursued: the thing that moved smokelike through the icefields, running with blind momentum, the shifting alabaster shape. Old Matt had taught him to tilt his gun high and wait, motionless, watching by using his peripheral vision, not moving his head. He stood and tried to sense an expectant tremor, a rumble, some twinkling of the light that would tell him, warn him. The animals were louder now, but not stronger—their cries had risen too high and had taken on a tone of confusion and submission to the inevitable, not tired yet but flagging in some way the boy could not name but felt.
    He touched his helmet to the man’s and whispered, not awakening the suit radio, “It’s coming?”
    The blended murmur of the cries peaked without ever resolving into a clear voice, and the sound dissolved as Manuel listened. Old Matt did not answer. He