To Conquer Chaos by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

thundered from a speaker high on the wall. “We’re waiting for you to tell us where it is—we can’t move until you do!”
    “Sorry,” Nestamay mumbled. “I was just—uh—making a double check. This is a big one, Grandfather, probably too big to kill. Mass about two hundred kilos. It hatched in Sector 2-A and started moving immediately. It’s somewhere in Sector 4 by now, but there’s a dial broken—just a moment, a signal’s coming up!”
    She leaned forward and rubbed dust from the glass over a dial.
    “Yes, it’s in 4-C now and still moving. You may be able to hear it!”
    A voice in the background behind Grandfather said something affirmative, and, straining her ears, Nestamay caught a faint crash that reached her almost simultaneously via the speaker and directly from the heart of the Station around her.
    “Right!” Grandfather snapped, and went on to his companions. “Margin for error in a two-hundred-kilo body is too great—we might not hit a vital organ. Try and flush it into Channel Nine and drive it clear of the Station. Light first, noise next, and only then anything which might enrage it without doing serious harm. Quickly, now!”
    There was a pause. Nestamay saw from the dials that the thing had stopped moving; more crashes from the direction of Sector 4-C suggested the creature had found something to interest it for a while.
    “Nestamay!”
    It was Grandfather again. She called an answer.
    “Nestamay, it’s a bad one—wild! It charged the handlights and someone’s been hurt. No time for half-measures! I want power fed to the Channel Nine electrofence, and the storage cells for the heatbeams topped up.”
    Nestamay’s heart lurched. On this watch of all watches, when a dangerous killer came through, Jasper had to delay her on her way to the office! She was going to give Jasper a piece of her mind when she next saw him—a going-over with a heatbeam would be even better, but hard to organise …
    “Full power!” she reported, having tripped the necessary switches.
    “Full power!” Grandfather told his companions. “Move!”
    Nestamay jumped from her chair and ran to the window overlooking that side of the Station known as Sector 4. She stared into the gloom under the cracked and sagging roof.
    At first she saw nothing. Then glimmering handlights appeared, masked by vegetation and rubble. Caught in their beam for a second, something glistening reared up. A howl at a teeth-rasping frequency split the air, followed by a vast crash and a completely human scream. Nestamay found she was biting her fingertips in agony.
    Then the heatbeams came on. Like dull red pokers, they stabbed through the murk, striking swirls of smoke from anything they touched. Behind Nestamay, there were clicks as the power-level readings dropped with frightening rapidity.
    The thing howled again and made a couple of stupid rushes at its tormentors, but the heat increased inversely with the square root of the intervening distance, and provided the beams remained steady it was impossible for the thing to come closer than some fifteen feet. It realised this at last, turned—howling more than ever—and blundered into Channel Nine, which would lead it to the bare ground beyond the Station.
    “Electrofence!” Grandfather ordered. Nestamay dived for the power-switch.
    The electrofence wasn’t precisely a fence, but a tubular mesh of wire completely enclosing each channel. Its original function might have been connected with the transportation of goods; currently, it served as their best weapon against the things. It induced microwave frequencies in sufficient quantity to half-cook anything inside it.
    With a howl far louder than any preceding, the thing felt the first effects, and panic took over. Nestamay hadn’t seen whether it had legs or not, but it must have done; nothing else but good, muscular legs could have carried its substantial mass out of the channel so fast. Off into the surrounding desert it fled,