Garlock took the Hodellian equivalent of a bus to the center of the city, then set out aimlessly to walk. The buildings and their arrangement, he noted--not much to his surprise now--were not too different from those of the cities of Earth.
With his guard down to about the sixth level, highly receptive but not at all selective, he strolled up one street and down another. He was not attentive to detail yet; he was trying to get the broad aspects, the "feel" of this hitherto unknown civilization.
18
The ether was practically saturated with thought. Apparently this was the afternoon rush hour, as the sidewalks were crowded with people and the streets were full of cars. It did not seem as though anyone, whether in the buildings, on the sidewalks, or in the cars, was doing any blocking at all. If there were any such things as secrets on Hodell, they were scarce. Each person, man, woman, or child, went about his own business, radiating full blast. No one paid any attention to the thoughts of anyone else except in the case of couples or groups, the units of which were engaged in conversation. It reminded Garlock of a big Tellurian party when the punch-bowls were running low--everybody talking at the top of his voice and nobody listening.
This whole gale of thought was blowing over Garlock's receptors like a Great Plains wind over miles-wide fields of corn. He did
not address anyone directly; no one addressed him. At first, quite a few young women, at sight of his unusual physique, had sent out tentative feelers of thought; and some men had wondered, in the same tentative and indirect fashion, who he was and where he came from. However, when the information he had given Atterlin spread throughout the city--and it did not take long--no one paid any more attention to him than they did to each other.
Probing into and through various buildings, he learned that groups of people were quitting work at intervals of about fifteen minutes. There were thoughts of tidying up desks; of letting the rest of this junk go until tomorrow; of putting away and/or covering up office machines of various sorts. There were thoughts of powdering noses and of repairing make-up.
He pulled in his receptors and scanned the crowded ways for guardians--he'd have to call them that until either he or Lola found out their real name. Same as at the airport--the more people, the more guardians. What were they? How? And why?
He probed; carefully but thoroughly. When he had talked to the Arpalone he had read him easily enough, but here there was nothing whatever to read. The creature simply was not thinking at all. But that didn't make sense! Garlock tuned, first down, then up; and finally, at the very top of his range, he found something, but he did not at first know what it was. It seemed to be a mass-detector ... no, two of them, paired and balanced. Oh, that was it! One tuned to humanity, one to the other guardians--balanced across a sort
of bridge--that was how they kept the ratio so constant! But why? There seemed to be some wide-range receptors there, too, but
nothing seemed to be coming in....
While he was still studying and still baffled, some kind of stimulus, which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone's far-flung receptors. Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed to Garlock, directly toward him. Simultaneously there was an insist-ent, low-pitched, whistling scream, somewhat like the noise made by an airplane in a no-power dive; and Garlock saw, out of the corner of one eye, a yellowish something flashing downward through the air.
At the same moment the woman immediately in front of Garlock stifled a scream and jumped backward, bumping into him and almost knocking him down. He staggered, caught his balance, and automatically put his arm around his assailant, to keep her from falling to the sidewalk.
In the meantime the guardian, having landed very close to the spot the woman had occupied a moment before, leaped again; this time vertically upward. The thing, whatever it was, was now braking frantically with wings, tail, and body; trying madly to get away. Too late. There was a bone-crushing impact as the two bodies came together in mid-air; a jarring thud as the two creatures, inextrica-bly intertwined, struck the pavement as one.
The thing varied in color, Garlock now saw, shading from bright orange at the head to pale yellow at the tail. It had a savagely-tearing curved beak; tremendously powerful wings; its short, thick legs ended in hawk-like talons.
The guardian's bowed legs had already immobilized the yellow wings by clamping them solidly against the yellow body. His two lower arms were holding the frightful talons out of action. His third hand gripped the orange throat, his fourth was exerting tremendous force against the jointure of neck and body. The neck, originally short, was beginning to stretch.
For several seconds Garlock had been half-conscious that his accidental companion was trying, with more and more energy, to disengage his encircling left arm from her waist. He wrenched his attention away from the spectacular fight--to which no one else, not even the near-victim, had paid the slightest attention--and now saw that he had his arm around the bare waist of a statuesque matron whose entire costume would have made perhaps half of a Tellurian sun-suit. He dropped his arm with a quick and abject apology.
"I should apologize to you instead, Captain Garlock," she thought, with a wide and friendly smile, "for knocking you down, and I thank you for catching me before I fell. I should not have been startled, of course. I would not have been, except that this is the first time that I, personally, have been attacked."
19
"But what are they?" Garlock blurted.
"I don't know." The woman turned her head and glanced, in complete disinterest, at the two furiously-battling creatures. Garlock knew now that this was the first time, except for that instantly-dismissed thrill of surprise at being the actual target of an attack, that she had thought of either of them. "Orange-yellow? It could be a ... a fumapty, perhaps, but I've no idea, really. You see, such things are none of our business."
She thought at him, a half-shrug, half-grimace of mild distaste--not at the personal contact with the man nor at the savage duel; but at even thinking of either the guardian or the yellow monster--and walked away into the crowd.
Garlock's attention flashed back to the fighters. The yellow thing's neck had been stretched to twice its natural length and the guardian had eaten almost through it. There was a terrific crunch, a couple of smacking, gobbling swallows, and head parted from body. The orange beak still clashed open and shut, however, and the body still thrashed violently.
Shifting his grips, the guardian proceeded to tear a hole into his victim's body, just below its breast-bone. Thrusting two arms into
the opening, he yanked out two organs--one of which, Garlock thought, could have been the heart--and ate them both; if not with extreme gusto, at least in a workmanlike and thoroughly competent fashion. He then picked up the head in one hand, grabbed the tip of a wing with another, and marched up the street for half a block, dragging the body behind him.
He lifted a manhole cover with his two unoccupied hands, dropped the remains down the hole thus exposed, and let the cover slam back into place. He then squatted down, licked himself meticulously clean with a long, black, extremely agile tongue, and went on about his enigmatic business quite as though nothing had happened.
Garlock strolled around a few minutes longer, but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Wherefore he flagged down a "taxi" and was taken out to the Pleiades. Belle and Lola were in the Main.
"I saw the damndest thing, Clee!" Lola exclaimed. "I've been gnawing my fingernails off up to the knuckles, waiting for you!"
Lola's experience had been very similar to Garlock's own, except in that her monster was an intense green in color and looked something like a bat about four feet long, with six-inch canine teeth and several stingers....
"Did you find out the name of the thing?" Garlock asked.