Savage Galahad

He studied her with curious and new emotions through the thick, heavy-hanging mists, his long serpentine form curled out along the global swamp, undulating between the spongy swaying trunks of two bulbous trees, half-buried in the thick iridescent mud, and effectively hidden from her alien eyes by interlocking crinoids and gigantic towering ferns.

Monstrous insects droned broodingly through the sultry vapors and ventured to light on his gleaming hide. A quick twitch of long steely tendons blotted them out in lightning grips. But his thickly lidded eyes remained fixed on the girl who had come from Earth.

He was not disappointed in her beauty of form. It had a soft, rhythmic smoothly-flowing curvature. It seemed to him a perfect aesthetic creation of its kind. The contrast, too, impressed him--her frail, delicate form treading so fearfully among gigantic flora and fauna of endless varieties, each vying with the others in size and ferocity. Because of this contrast she seemed more beautiful here, perhaps, than she might on her own world. But she should not be here; she would find only death here. She did not understand this world, and she never would.

He felt the pangs of an emotion utterly strange to him. He plunged the supersonic fingers of his brain deeply into hers and found an expression there that would vaguely define that emotion. LOVE. It was an abstract symbol that on her own world meant the crystallization of celestial ideals.

And that is what I must feel for this alien creature, he mused. LOVE.

The many other emotions that accompanied the symbol, LOVE, on her world--hate, jealousy, hope, ambition, despair, courage--these did not enter his massive neural circuits. She felt this great emotion for another being somewhat like her, very close by. This other being, he examined only briefly for he was ugly, a frantic figure pacing nervously in something they both knew as a SHIP that rested not far away in the swamp. She had wandered away from the SHIP and could not find her way back to it through the mists. And this other organism--MAN--was being driven into complete disintegration with anxiety and fear for her.

But he knew that the man would never find her. There was no jealousy or hate or envy as he curled through the swamp, watching her. That would spoil the beauty of this moment. She would be destroyed soon; other emotions must not distract from the few moments he had in which to absorb this aesthetic thrill of her movements.

Gruoon! The symbol was etched in his mind as a blob of dark dread. His body tensed into rippling steel. The Gruoon was dropping down through the mist; his brain could follow every flapping motion of its great leathery shape as it dropped in a straight driving plunge directly for the girl.

His triple-lidded eyes could not see it, but that was not necessary; because of his supersonic brain, he was a ruler of this swamp world, and that was why he would survive the dull grey aeons that stretched ahead. So long as his supersonic brain guided his actions he would rule.

He tensed, arched high in taut waiting, while the Gruoon plummeted down in a sighing blur of speed.

Now he could sense the Gruoon's naked, yellow-scaled claws outstretched, its toothed beak yawing, and its red-disked eyes shining with that insatiable blood-thirst that was the scourge of this world. The scourge of all but himself.

He tensed the full length of his mighty corded body, his twelve flippers digging into the glowing mud, his gigantic corded tail curled in feral silence around into a taut S that could spring outward in a blinding explosion of power.

She was experiencing great fear, but still not as much as she should. This surprised him. Now that he knew how completely helpless and alien she was on this world of his, how frail and delicate she was, and how she belonged on a much different sphere than this one. She had no conception that the Gruoon was even now falling down upon her like a comet. That those poisonous claws would wrap about her creamy body and rip her to shreds and carry her away into the smoking peaks.

She was ignorant of all the countless dangers surrounding her. Fifty kimm away, hardly more than the length of his own body, was the SHIP which she was trying to find. But she had not the dimmest concept of where it was. Such appalling lack of basically protective intuition was incomprehensible to him.

She knew nothing of the Vreed, and its painless bite which bloated a living organism rapidly until it burst. And the venomous stinging of the Kristons that paralzyed to a slow unmoving death. Or the semi-organic Trumask tree that waited for her approach even now, immobile, without any visible sign to its victims that its crimson appendages could suddenly whip into action to trap them, dragging them into its trunk that opened to reveal a slightly pulsating cavern full of half-devoured forms. These were only a few of an endless horde of huge and hideous things, yet she suspected none of the things waiting in the mists. She could only believe what she saw through her beautiful eyes. And the mist was thick.

Suddenly the taut S of his body unleashed itself, whipping straight upward in an unbending line. His sharp snout speared up through the swirling vapor until he was balanced momentarily on the tip of his stiffened tail. Then, at the apex of his spring, his three-jawed mouth unhinged, gaped and crunched shut on the Gruoon. The vapor was whipped into fretful whirls. The girl sank down, her eyes searching upward, but blindly through the gloom.

He sank down once more on his scaled belly, wriggled deeper in the mud. He dropped the mangled leathery blob that had been a Gruoon. Then he turned his eyes once more on the bit of strange beauty which he had preserved a little while longer for his aesthetic pleasure.

Her eyes kept searching above her. Now the dread silence that had followed, for an instant, after the piercing shriek of the dying Gruoon, seemed to affect her more than the sound had. She shook her head, her eyes lowering to look apprehensively about her, then back to the thick greyness above. She turned indecisively in several directions, took a few steps in one direction, then hesitated, turned in another; then abruptly and hysterically changed her previous course entirely and was running directly toward him.

Yes, she was completely lost, and that was indeed a strange weakness in an organism. Only fifty kimm away was the intricate machinery that had brought her here, and which sheltered more of her kind, including her lover whom she ached to see again. Incredible.

And this SHIP mechanism full of her kind, aliens, were intending to remain here on his world! It was an amazing paradox. They intended to rely for their survival on a number of synthetic defense methods, constructed from basic elements and powered by various energy principles. This girl had just unsheathed such a device for her own protection--just now, long after the Gruoon had attacked and died! If she had any inborn protective instincts at all, they were so weakened from lack of use or by heredity that only now had they gotten around to warning her.

And these beings had mechanical detectors based somewhat on his organic equipment. But they were utterly inadequate to meet the predatory ferocity of his world. Why had these irrational creatures ventured from their own comparatively safe world to this? If they actually intended to remain, their chances of survival depended on almost immediate adaptation. But that would be impossible, of course.

He watched her with a lonely and hungry eagerness. She had slowed her pace to a walk and had already begun edging unwittingly to the right in what would prove to be a long erratic circle leading away from the SHIP. But she would not go far, even on the wrong course. She was walking headlong and blindly into the silently waiting arms of the bloated, motionless Trumask.

He waited, too, watching her. Somehow she seemed more a thing of beauty as she approached death. Death lent a sadness that added to her beauty a kind of poignancy. His eyes half-lidded dreamily as the full softness of the emotion flowed through him.

The synthetic defensive mechanism was held out in front of her as she edged along. She was beautiful as she moved. And on this world of his, no warmth or softness of her kind could exist. It would die. On his world the only living thing that remotely suggested this girl from another planet to his hungry mind was the delicate soft petal of the Minon blossom. But on close inspection of the unwary or forgetful, even this spit out a deadly white venom.

He slid his long writhing length, slithering soundlessly between the Trumask and the girl.

Her deeply buried instinct functioned better this time, but not nearly quickly enough. Not for this environment. She paused, her head jerking from side to side, the weapon in her hand clutched tightly and swinging with the direction of her head. But her eyes swept unsuspectingly past the Trumask. Seemingly, on her world, only organisms promised real danger.