Asimov's Science Fiction: August 2013 by Penny Publications

Author:Penny Publications
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Asimov's #451
Publisher: Penny Publications
Published: 2013-07-31T12:00:00+00:00

1982

The beetle-looking thing stepped haltingly away from the office on its jointed stilts.

"What is it?" I whispered.

"I don't know for real sure," the woman said. "I call them hunters. Keep down and keep quiet, or you'll see why. That one does nothing but stand quiet as a tombstone, right up till you hear those three echo sounds. It comes a little bit more alive with each one. Those sounds, they're like a doorbell. Somehow that one there answers it and opens the door. But that's not all it does. I believe it transmits some kind of signal to the others, whenever a fresh victim turns up. That's what you are, kid. The fresh victim."

I didn't like her calling me kid, especially since she didn't look all that much older than me, with her little upturned nose and brown freckles. While she whispered, the beetle walked into the middle of the runway and stopped. Each leg had a joint about in the middle, like a knee, except they bent the opposite way a human knee would bend, inward instead of outward. Now the knees all bent at once, and the beetle squatted low to the tarmac. After a moment, the air in front of the thing became blurry, like the way air looks above a hot road in the distance, almost a liquid appearance of rising heat. In no time the air swirled into a white mist screen, hanging there on the tarmac, wafer thin.

"That's the door."

Out of the mist three more of the beetle things came stalking forth. One ran directly to my Cessna. I mean, it really was like a giant silver bug, moving in that quick scuttle on its set of backward-jointed legs. The sound of those legs clacking on the tarmac gave me an awful feeling. It was such an alive sound. A cable extended from the nose of the thing's body and probed through the open door of my plane. I imagined it was sniffing around, trying to pick up a scent. Trying to pick up my scent.

The cable withdrew from the cabin—and it was holding my lunch bag. It brought the bag close to its body for a moment, then dropped it. The other two beetles had remained motionless after their initial appearance. The cable slithered back inside the third one and it clickity-clacked back over to join them. They stood in a close circle, motionless, as if discussing what to do next. After a moment, my head started to hurt. I closed my eyes, like that would help. It didn't. The ache worsened, a drilling, hot, yellow pain.

The freckle girl nudged me. Her eyes were the blue you see in a fire. "Now you listen to me," she whispered. "We can block whatever it is they're doing in our heads. You just got to concentrate real hard on something else. I mean concentrate like you're gonna bust a vein. Do that and it backs off."

"I don't understand. " My voice trembled.

"Do it. Concentrate."

Shapes, vague and eager, humped foreward in my mind.

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