The Legacy of Heorot
Chapter 22

THE LAST GRENDEL

The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of cause.
WILLIAM JAMES

    Number six was the last. All the other bolt-holes had been all the other underground rivers mapped. If there was another grendel left on Avalon, it had no interest in blood, no fear of hydrostatic shock. It never turned on its supercharger at night, when Geographic's thermal scan dissected every square meter of the island.
    No, this one was the last, and here in the highlands, the farthest south on the island that any human had been, Cadmann felt a minute sense of loss.
    He listened to the live tone in his ear from the radio link, and to his own breathing. He plucked a sprig of avalonia grass, chewed on it absently and spit out the faintly sweet fibers.
    He was propped on his elbows at the edge of a bluff overlooking a marshy stream, just upriver from one of the largest hot springs. The thermal gradient had thrown the scans off for a little while, giving this last monster a temporary reprieve.
    Skeeter Two had lured it out with grendel blood and fresh meat. The monster had come sniffing out, growled weakly up at the Skeeter before it snatched the joint of raw beef. It looked and acted starved: much thinner than the others, and only two thirds the length.
    The Skeeter's tape had been played back at the Colony. Cadmann vividly remembered the image of a gaunt, hollow-chested reptile tearing at the meat as if it hadn't eaten in a week.
    Jerry had taken the podium and fought for the creature's life.
    "We don't know we can find more of them on the mainland. Think about it--an animal which can produce a high-grade organic oxidizer. Imagine a herd of them. Hobble the legs or even amputate them. Breed them to get that oxygen-bonding stuff, that super hemoglobin, like cows give milk!" 
    Grendels, serving man? It might be. They would try it . . . , once.
    But Cadmann wondered to himself, wondered about the sadness that he felt. What if this was the last grendel in the universe? After all, there were earthly species restricted to just one subcontinent or group of islands.
    On the mainland there were monsters. Big things, as large as anything that ever walked the Earth; creatures reminiscent of Tyrannosaurus rex, things that man would hunt only with robots and advanced weapons. They glowed in infrared. Easy to guess, now, that there were small, fast things too. Grendels or worse, blazing in infrared, then subsiding before a telescope could find the sources; mistaken for giants until now.
    Cadmann tried to imagine Jerry's pet scenario: a single freshwater grendel, pregnant, clinging to a piece of driftwood after some natural disaster swept her out to sea, a clutch of eggs protected within her body or in an external case, to be deposited in safe territory.
    These had to be freshwater creatures, didn't they? Nothing that could effectively compete with the grendels had been found in the oceans, and the oceans held plenty of food. The eggs, hatched downstream, would produce a brood of insanely competitive monsters who fought each other for the prime hunting grounds, driving their weaker siblings farther and farther south.
    It didn't seem quite plausible, somehow. But if it had happened once, it could happen again.
    The mainland was worth a look. Jerry was working on a possibility. Maybe a grendel could be triggered into releasing its super hemoglobin, by sonics or by the smell of an attacker. It would be forced to cook itself before it reached any vulnerable target.
    When Jerry had something to test, then they would seek grendels on the mainland. Only for testing. The mainland belonged to another generation.
    Today Avalon belonged to humankind.
    A pregnant grendel on a piece of driftwood. A tricky, temporary current. What's wrong with this picture? Why was there a piece of the puzzle that seemed so distant, so lost? Hibernation Instability?
    Damn, there it was--the possibility that he had kept from himself for so long. Certainly, anybody could suffer from Hibernation Instability. Anyone but Cadmann Weyland. And he could discount the mood swings, the inability to adapt to a changing social situation when adaptation meant survival, the need to move himself away from the Colony. Free men thought like that. Such symptoms could hardly be construed as symptoms of H.I.!
    And he'd been scanned . . . but that could only diagnose gross structural damage. There were subtler problems, some of which only a battery of psychological tests would reveal.
    He had taken no such tests. Cadmann didn't need them--no.
    He brought his attention back to the bend in the river. As in the case of the second monster, the hole was difficult to see. It might have been no more than a fold in the shadow, but it was more. A quarter ton of death lurked there. 
    The last monster . . .
    They would try to bring it back alive. And if a human being was put in the slightest danger, that would be that. They would return home with a leaking corpse. No woman would mourn her man, no child cry for its mother.
    "Stage one," Cadmann whispered into his microphone.
    Skeeters Two and Four rose up from behind the ridge, carrying the net between them. They lowered it into the water where its weighted edges settled quickly to the bottom. The two autogyros braced the hole, humming there like dragonflies hovering over a pond in summer. He smiled grimly at the lazy image. That image was about to explode.
    Grendel-blood sacs were punctured and tossed into the water upstream from the hole. As the dark stain began to spread, Cadmann started a slow count. "One . . . two . . . three . . . fo--"
    The water erupted. A clawed, toothed demon exploded from the depths. Both Skeeters juddered violently as it struck the nets, twisting and yowling.
    Stu's radio voice screamed triumphantly from Skeeter Two: "We've got it!"
    Engines whined with exertion. The Skeeters hoisted the creature free of the water. Cadmann watched carefully, ready to bark a command: if the grendel's struggle threatened the Skeeters, it would be released, dropped netted onto the land, and charred with flame-throwers.
    The Skeeters bobbed and twisted like paper airplanes for the first few hideous moments. Then Stu Ellington masterfully regained control of his craft, and the grendel was secured. The two autogyros maneuvered the creature over the far bank and set it down.
    The net was a Tasmanian Devil of crazed motion, the creature's legs and head so entangled that it looked as if it was trying to break its own limbs. It wouldn't break the net. Of this they were certain. But it didn't know that, it couldn't know that, and when the Skeeters touched the net down, it burst into furious action and the grendel's roar of anger and . . . fear?
    (Was that what it felt? Could it feel fear? He had never thought of them in those terms. Grendels were living death, and that was all. But something in its screams, its frantic, helpless contortions, flashed the sudden, dreadful image of a tortured child into Cadmann's mind. He squeezed his eyelids tight to make it disappear.)
    Stakes had already been pounded into the ground to form a circle around the netted creature. Hooked cables ran in from each stake. From his position on the bluff, Cadmann saw his crew run up and connect each line into the net to stabilize it. Now the Skeeters were disconnected, and Stu flew back across the river, hovered over Cadmann and extended his hoist cable.
    Cadmann wrapped the cable around his arm and hooked the bottom clip to his belt buckle. "You've got me. All right, Stu. Up." He had barely repositioned his rifle on his shoulder when Stu swooped up, yanking him into the air.
    As he swung across the stream, the ring of colonists moved in to surround their captured grendel. Jerry rushed in with a tranquilizer pistol. His hand jerked up as he fired.
    The creature twitched as the dart hit, then exploded back into movement.
    Stu touched Cadmann down, and he unhooked himself. The grendel was in continuous motion, growing more frantic by the moment.
    "What do you think?" Cadmann yelled.
    Jerry's limp yellow hair whipped in the backwash from the autogyro. "All I can do is pump it full of tranquilizer. We sure can't move it like this." 
    "I--"
    As if in response to Cadmann's question, the grendel lunged toward them. One of the stakes groaned and popped free from the ground. Faster than conscious thought, Cadmann unshouldered his rifle and thumbed off the safety.
    But the other stakes held. The beast hissed and thrashed crazily, but couldn't come any closer. It began to convulse, its movements without direction or aim.
    Jerry's eyes narrowed. "It's not slowing down--" 
    He loaded another tranquilizer dart, and then another. They lanced into the grendel's sides with dull phutts. It shrieked and twisted more frantically, clawing furrows in the rocky soil, snapping and glaring balefully through the tangled netting.
    Jerry jumped back and shook his head. "Each of those carried enough somazine to knock over a rhino. I'm afraid I just don't understand how it's wired--" The thing snarled and lunged at them, sending fragments of rock spinning through the air. Another stake popped from the ground. Heat rose from its body in palpable waves, but it no longer seemed a threat to anyone but itself.
    "It's dying," Jerry said softly.
    Its labors were pitiful. It tried to head back toward the river, but the last six stakes held, and it just struggled at the end of the lines. And struggled. And struggled.
    "Isn't there anything that we can do?" Cadmann said. 
    "We could let it go." 
    "No, thank you."
    The large body movements were growing spastic now, replaced with a kind of overall tremble, a desperate, dying convulsion.
    It exploded back into motion, moving so quickly that it scarcely seemed to be anything made of flesh, seemed more an engine with a shattered governor, a dark whirlwind. Its screech spiraled up and up and up the scale, clawing toward a terrifying crescendo. It bounced and thrashed at the end of the cables. The incredible effort went on and on, as if the creature were draining everything left in its body in one last all-out effort, nothing held back, nothing in reserve for the functioning of any organ, just the now, now, now of a creature with no way to tell its cortex that there is no threat.
    Then it was still. Only its tail tremored. The hunting crew moved back in and re-anchored the loose cables. Jerry, his face glum, poked at the thing's tail with a long stick. It twitched reflexively. 
    "Asleep?" 
    "Dead." Jerry waved the Skeeters down.
    The netting was refastened, the cable hoists reattached. Cadmann watched the Skeeters hoist the body, so hot it was almost sizzling, from the ground and into the air.

    Cadmann was one of the last back to the camp. He supervised the final disarming and removal of all unexploded mines, and accounted for all weaponry. Then he commandeered a Skeeter and spun it up toward the eternally gray bed of clouds pillowing the sky. The campfires had been quenched, the tents packed and folded away. In days or weeks the underbrush would grow in to obscure the scars, to conceal the fact that this effort had ever taken place. That a group of determined, prepared human beings had journeyed together into the darkness, to meet and destroy the greatest natural predator the children of Earth had ever faced.
    He breathed deeply as the Skeeter rose and headed north toward the mist-shrouded bulk of Mucking Great Mountain. The light of a setting Tau Ceti diffused redly through the clouds.

    At first the landing pad was an indistinguishable part of the sprawling camp, then a postage stamp, and then cracker-sized, and finally the familiar square studded with radio beacons and lights.
    Mary Ann stood there, looking a little rounder than when last he'd seen her. A little warmer, more vulnerable. She shielded her face from the wind and dust. The smile beneath her forearm shadow was wide and bright and welcoming.
    She came to him, held him, and he buried his face in the warm notch between her neck and shoulder and felt her cool, moist teardrops against his skin.
    They kissed in a roar of dying Skeeter engines. The whipping air began to still, and at last he could hear her whispered words.
    "--you so much," she said, and kissed him again. She looked up to him, eyes shining with pride and relief. "You're done now," she said. 
    "Yes." 
    "Then let's go home."
    He kissed her this time, marveling at the simple pleasure it gave him. He nodded. "Let's go home."