The Beasts in the Void Read Free Page B

have helped her. It happened in the lounge. She was in
there alone. I was in the control room. I don't know where the rest
were.
    I was working uselessly with the controls when I heard a terrible
scream mixed with a hideous snarling. I ran into the companionway and
stared toward the lounge. Murdo appeared from somewhere and we were
shouldering each other on the companion ladder. Murdo fell heavily.
Then we were both looking into the lounge.
    It was too late to help Jane. We saw her there, still and bloody. A
shiny black leopard was crouching gory-mouthed over her body with its
paws on her breast. It's eyes were black magnets, holding mine.
    I said, "Get a gun," trying to speak without moving my lips.
    "But—"
    "Damn you—get a gun!"
    Murdo staggered away. It seemed a year before he came back with a
Hinzie Special .442. The leopard was tight, ready to spring. I didn't
dare move a muscle. I said, "Over my shoulder. Get him. Don't miss."
    That last was a little silly. How could a man miss with a Hinzie at
ten feet? Murdo fired and tore the leopard's head off. It was down
already so it didn't move. It sat there headless, its tail twitching
slightly. Then it was still.
    I didn't hesitate this time. I said, "Come on. We've got to get this
out of here before the others show."
    We put the dead leopard into the forward storage bunker. Then I picked
up poor Jane and carried her to her room. Murdo helped me up the
ladder. The others were in the companionway and they pressed back in
horror to let me pass. For the first time since we'd started, Keebler
was sober. Ashen, shaking, stone sober. He broke; screamed and ran for
his bottle, the world of reality too terrible for him to bear.
    There was no huddle, no conference, no meeting of the minds. Everyone
else went to the galley and sat staring into space; stared at the
dancing little sparkles in the air.
    I went to my cabin.
    When confronted by a reality no matter how crazy and improbable, a man
must not turn from it. He can not carry the mangled body of a woman in
his arms and then say to himself:
This isn't real because it doesn't
make sense.
It
does
make sense—some kind of sense or it would not
exist. A man must say rather:
I don't understand this and maybe I
never will but God gave me a brain and I must try. I can't sit back
and deny reality. I must try to understand it.
I cleared my mind and
tried to rationalize the things around us.
    Out in the darkness there was a terrible roaring and yammering. The
thuds and bellows of violence. I went to the port.
    There, in the light from the ship, the ice bear and the water buffalo
were fighting. It was a terrible and magnificent thing but to me it
was anticlimax; a sideshow of almost casual interest.
    The ice bear outsized the water buff by too much to be in any danger,
but the buff fought savagely and the ice bear had no easy time. The
buff opened a long deep gash in the bear's throat when the bear missed
a lunge and the Plutonian mammal fell back with a roar of pain and
fury. They came together again and this time the bear got the buff in
a hug and it was all over. The buff's spine broke and the bear bent
the body double, then tore it to pieces. I wondered if the others were
watching.
    I went back to pacing; back to my thinking.
    I have been thinking, thinking, thinking; wracking my brain. And of
one thing I am sure. Some invisible intelligence is trying to help me;
trying to give me knowledge. The sparkling fog?
*
    A great and wonderful thing has happened.
    And I know.
Do you realize what that means? To know in a situation
like this? And to be wonderfully and wildly happy? The knowledge was
not all given me. There was a thought process of my own developing.
The thing given me was the basic knowledge upon which to build. And
proof of this knowledge. Absolute and indisputable proof.
    The sparkling fog is mind stuff.
    I will not defend that statement. I will not rationalize it. But I
will seek explanations; consider possibilities.
    Known: