Against Infinity Read Online Free PDF

its belly, not on legs,” a voice drawled from the bunks far back. “I seen it drag itself up a sheer cliff using grapplers, just five years back.”
    The Colonel stood up and waved the voice into silence. “There are many forms. You forget that the cameras showed different results from time to time.”
    “Each time I see it,” Petrovich grumbled, “is the same.”
    Major Sánchez said slyly, “Perhaps the good machine is simply trying to make things simple for you, my friend.”
    Petrovich grunted in dismissal and rolled onto his bunk. Low talk continued among the bare pipe frames of the bunks, muted now, desultory, amid the stale, sour fumes left from supper. Old Matt had come into this part of the rambling shack to get closer to the burbling heaters, and he sat down beside Manuel. “They argue over nothing.”
    “Seems to me it’s important to know what to look for,” Manuel said.
    “It changes. Not to confuse us. For itself.”
    “Should be some vulnerable spot, you’d think.”
    Old Matt shrugged, his face wrinkling into a fine-threaded map as he chewed on a hemp slug. “There are holes sometimes. A mouth or an ass or nothing we have a name for. It doesn’t matter.”
    “There’s got to be something we can do. Those scientists—”
    “They are hunters of a different kind. They never knew.”
    “With e-beams and all those traps—I looked at some of them when I was in Loki Patera—they sure gave it a try.”
    “They never hemmed it in enough. Tomorrow, if it comes up on us sudden and we box it in—well, sometimes in the past it’s not taken the time to burrow down through the ice and get away. Don’t know why. So it might go right through us, fast as a bat out of hell. That’s when you got to watch.”
    “What… You mean me in particular?”
    “Right.”
    “It would pick me out?”
    “Might.”
    “You mean, I never been here before, an’ it knows me anyway?”
    “I don’t know. But there’ve been times before, people who were new, and it… Look, maybe it remembers everything, never forgets a man or a crawler or an animal or anything. So somebody new comes along, it gets interested.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s been here a long time. Millions of years, they say from dating the stuff on the outer moons. Maybe it’s bored.”
    It seemed to the boy that boredom or any other simple pathetic human emotion was not the way to think about the huge shape, and that its indifference to them meant it shared none of their values or illusions. Old Matt would say no more about it. He just shook his head and told Manuel to get into his bunk early; to rest; and the next day would be soon enough to see.
     
4
    T HE LAND WAS vast and empty beneath the storm that had moved in from the south again, bringing a slow drizzle of methane-cloaked and ammonia-steeped droplets, all swirling in the still-thin mongrel chemlab gas that was the new air. Hovering just above the ice point, the sluggish vapor rolled in—ruddy banks of fog that clung to the sheets of ice as if the wispy stuff longed to return to the original and stable existence it had known for billions of years, to sink down and freeze and rest, and not be tortured by the harsh warmth that men had brought to boil the elements into a blanket of gas, to cloak the old dead world now resurrected. There were thirty-nine men and women on the hunt that day, three having already gone back to Sidon to help with some hydro processing. (Or so they said. Petrovich and some others muttered over the steaming plates of breakfast that the three had been jumpy when they heard about the Aleph, and had discovered the rush job to be done at Sidon awful fast when they’d called home the night before. The Colonel told them to shut up talking about men behind their backs, and sent the two loudest out to flame the night’s ice off the crawler treads, a job nobody liked.)
    The thirty-nine included some olders, though none who dated as far back as Old Matt, and some men out for