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LURKING DEATH

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David Drake


Breyer had never met this district commissioner before but he had no reason to be concerned. The aide who met him outside the building was a young fellow with dark blond hair. “Commissioner Erskine wanted me to warn you that you’ll be meeting not only him but also some American gentlemen,” the aide said.

The Indian servant was already jerking open the door. Breyer asked, “Is this about the tiger last June?”

The aide bowed at him through the door. “It may be, sir,” he said.

Erskine rose from behind his desk when Breyer entered, as did the three other men in business suits sitting in chairs along the wall.

“Sir,” said Breyer even as he took the commissioner’s outstretched hand, “I told you exactly what happened. I had full permission from Mr. Graves”—Erskine’s predecessor as commissioner. In fact, Graves had invited him to come deal with the man-eater—“and if something went wrong, it wasn’t my fault.”

“No, it certainly wasn’t,” Erskine said, seating himself again. “You’ve done nothing wrong, Mr. Breyer. These gentlemen just want to talk with you. They’ve come all the way from America to do that.”

“All right,” Breyer said, “but there isn’t much to tell. I came to Naini because Mr. Graves told me there was a man-eater he’d like some help with. He assigned me a two-room forest bungalow near the village but in heavy scrub. I walked around the village and found no tiger markings though there was a large pugmark I couldn’t identify. It had sunk into hard soil deep enough that it had to be something as big as a tiger.”

The eldest of the three strangers leaned forward in his chair. “Mr. Breyer,” he said, “why were you sure that the animal was a tiger?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Breyer said. “The villagers said it was a tiger, though the color was funny. It had pulled down a full-grown buffalo. Nothing but a tiger could have done that, though it had torn the buffalo’s throat open with its jaws, instead of leaping on its back and using its claws. But it was the man-eater I’d been sent to shoot. It had killed a herdsman the week before and before that, a woman cutting grass for fodder.

“I know now it was a hyena, but that never crossed my mind. It was way too big for a hyena and anyway it was tan and covered with spots, not like the hyenas I’d seen in the zoo in Madras.”

“What you saw in Madras were the standard Asian striped hyenas,” the man who was smoking said. “The animal you shot was colored like the spotted hyena of Africa.”

“We’re a thousand miles from Africa here,” Breyer said.

“The distance is a lot farther than that,” the stranger said. “The hide color seems the same as the ordinary spotted hyena, but the museum says the bones are those of the cave hyena, which has been extinct for at least tens of thousands of years.”

Breyer shook his head and went on, “Anyway, I went out to where the buffalo had been killed. A grown buff is too big for even a tiger to eat in one go. So I figured he’d be coming back to the kill site. It was rugged country. The attack had been in the open but the drag line was down into a steep narrow valley. From the precipice above I could see the buff lying just inside a patch of wild plums. Most of the body remained, so there was a good chance the tiger was coming back. There was a good-sized pine tree in the plums only twenty feet from where the buffalo lay, but to reach it without being seen by the tiger, I’d have to approach from the valley below.

“I made the long circuit to reach the lower end of the valley and started up the next morning by foot. I was only carrying my Winchester and my knapsack with a rope ladder, and a thermos of tea and a sandwich for lunch. Even so I was almost all in when I reached the base of the pine. I tossed the ladder over the lowest branch in the late afternoon and climbed with my rifle slung. There was enough breeze that the stock swung against the tree as I climbed.

“I’d judged that the lowest branch of the pine would make an adequate perch. When I got onto it, I found it was in fact a trifle less comfortable than I’d expected because the branch didn’t spread immediately from the trunk, so my position was cramped. I also had trouble getting the rope ladder to lie in as broad a loop as I wanted to support my feet, but I judged it would do. Tigers can climb, but I wasn’t expecting it to.

“I wasn’t expecting it to come from behind me either, but that’s what he did. He must have been deeper in the plums, but made a near circuit to reach the kill. I was looking down from above as the tiger slunk past. The size seemed right, but the color was dun and mottled instead of orange with black stripes. I waited for the beast to settle before I took a shot. Unfortunately, it stepped over the dead buffalo and remained half hidden as it worried out a rib with a large gobbet of meat clinging to it. I got a look at the beast in profile though, and saw it was a hyena rather than a tiger.

“He tossed the buffalo’s head and then lowered it to begin crushing the bone he was holding. During the moment he was concentrating on the bone, he was still. I squeezed off my .405. The shot made a sharp crack, and the bullet hit with a dull sound like a tree limb falling to the pavement.

“The hyena twisted and snapped in the air where a man who had just kicked it would have been standing. I worked the underlever to eject the empty case, but recoil on my awkward position prevented me from laying the sight back on target in time for a follow-up shot. The beast leaped into the plums and was lost to sight.

“Villagers had been watching from the precipice and could probably see the hyena though I could not. I took my time about getting down from my perch. I’d seen the hyena’s jaws snapping. They could bite a man in half. They could bite me in half. I told the villagers to pick up clods of dirt. The ground in this valley had no pebbles to pelt the wounded animal or stir it out of the band of trees when we located it.

“The trees weren’t closely spaced, so by lying flat on the ground the men accompanying me could see quite deep into the forest. They moved out ahead of me while I remained upright in a relatively clear portion where I had clearance for my rifle if the hyena came rushing out.

“In fact the beast sprawled only fifty feet into the trees. It didn’t move under a bombardment of dried clay.

“We strapped it to a litter made from a pair of saplings and dragged it back to Naini. I didn’t bother skinning it, but I cleaned the skull and some of the big bones on an ant hill and shipped them back to Commissioner Graves.”

“They got here fine,” Erskine said. “Graves couldn’t make anything of them so he forwarded them on to London. It seems they were at a loss, too, and I guess they sent it on to”—he nodded to the three strangers—“Mr. Collins here.”

“You’re boffins?” Breyer said doubtfully, looking again at the men.

The eldest of the three said, “Not exactly, but people in our Department of State had us tasked to look into the matter when they got a notion of what was going on.”

“Wish to hell I had a notion,” Breyer said. “Which I do not.”

The eldest stranger exchanged glances with the colleague who’d been smoking. That man shrugged and said to Breyer, “We’ve gotten reports that the Soviets and Chinese Communists have been working together on time travel. The appearance here of a cave hyena suggests that their trials are more advanced than we’d dreamed. The military implications are obvious.”

The other two Americans nodded in agreement, but Beyer shook his head and said, “I don’t see anything obvious about it. Are you worried about the Commies invading America with hyenas? They’re nasty critters, I grant you, but a .405 solves one just fine.”

“Mr. Breyer,” said the eldest American, “this appears to have been a very large hyena. But a principle that could undetectably move and deliver a five-hundred-pound hyena to another time would probably do the same with any similar payload.”

“If the appearance of the ancient hyena was not a hoax,” said the man who’d been smoking, “and you have convinced us that it’s no hoax, Mr. Breyer. It’s a weapon that can potentially penetrate any of our defenses.”

“I see,” said Breyer. “Then are you done with me?”

“We’ll ask you to guide us around the site of the incident,” said Collins. “A year after the event there probably won’t be much to learn, but we can at least hope to get an inkling of how the Russians and Chinese are accomplishing this.”

“Sure, I’ll introduce you to people,” Breyer said. He thought of the big cats, man-eaters, that were his regular quarry. Cunning, stealthy, and able to strike down a man or woman with no warning.

Compared to a tiger or leopard, a bomb twice the size of a man could strike down a whole city. And if it didn’t really exist in the present time until it went off, everyone in the world would have to feel the way Breyer did when he knew that a tiger was stalking him in the darkness. It was a terrible feeling and there was no way out for anyone.

Until the bomb went off.


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