Clifford D. Simak Over the River & Other Stories.

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as steel bars!
A keeper, armed with a rifle, rushed up to Riggs.
'All hell's broken loose,' he shouted.
The polar bears had staged a bloody battle, with two of them dead, two dying and the rest so badly mauled that there
was little hope they would live. Two buck deer, with locked horns, were fighting to the death. Monkey Island was in an
uproar, with half of the little creatures mysteriously dead - dead, the keepers said, of too much excitement. A nervous
condition.
'It ain't natural,' protested Pop, when they were inside. 'Animals don't fight like that.'
Riggs was yelling into a telephone.
Outside a rifle roared.
Pop flinched.
'Maybe that's Nero.' he groaned. 'Nero, that I raised from a cub. Bottle-fed him, I did.'
There were traces of tears in the old man's eyes.
It was Nero. But Nero, before he died, had reached out for the man who held the rifle and had killed him with a single
vicious blow that crushed his skull.
Later that day, in his office, Doctor Gilmer smote the newspaper that lay open on his desk.
'You see that?' he asked Jack Woods.
The reporter nodded grimly. 'I see it. I wrote it. I worked on it all afternoon. Wild animals turned loose in the city.
Ravening animals. Mad with the lust to kill. Hospitals full of dying people. Morgues with ripped humanity. I saw an
elephant trample a man into the earth before the police shot the beast. The whole zoo gone mad. Like a jungle
nightmare.'
He wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.
'I can stand most anything,' he said, 'but this was the acme of something or other. It was pretty horrible, Doc. I felt
sorry for the animals, too,' he said. 'Poor devils. They weren't themselves. It was a pity to have to kill so many of them.'
Doc leaned across the table. 'Why did you come here?' he asked.
Woods nodded toward the glass cage that held the Martian animal. 'I got to thinking,' he said. 'The shambles down
there today reminded me of something else -'
He paused and looked squarely at Gilmer.
'It reminded me of what we found in the _Hello Mars IV_.'
'Why?' snapped Gilmer.
'The men on board the ship were insane,' declared Woods. 'Only insane men would do the things they did. And
Cooper died a maniac. How he held onto his reason long enough to bring the ship to a landing is more than I know.'
Gilmer took the mangled cigar out of his mouth and concentrated on picking off the worst of the frayed edge. He
tucked it carefully back into the corner of his jaw.
'You figured those animals were insane today?'
Woods nodded.
'And for no reason,' he added.
'So you up and suspicioned the Martian animal,' said Gilmer. 'Just how in blue hell do you think that defenseless little
Fur-Ball over there could make men and animals go insane?'
'Listen,' said Woods, 'don't act that way, Doc. You're on the trail of something. You broke a poker date tonight to
stay here at the laboratory. You had two tanks of carbon monoxide sent up. You were shut in here all afternoon. You
borrowed some stuff from Appleman down in the sound laboratory. It all adds up to something. Better tell me.'
'Damn you,' said Gilmer, 'you'd find out anyway even if I kept mum.'
He sat down and put his feet on the desk. He threw the wrecked and battered cigar into the waste-paper basket, took
a fresh one out of a box, gave it a few preliminary chews and lit it.
'Tonight,' said Gilmer, 'I am going to stage an execution. I feel badly about it, but probably it is an act of mercy.'
'You mean,' gasped Jack, 'that you are going to kill Fur-Ball over there?'
Gilmer nodded. 'That's what the carbon monoxide is for. Introduce it into the cage. He'll never know what happened.
Get drowsy, go to sleep, never wake up. Humane way to kill the thing.'
'But why?'
'Listen to me,' said Gilmer. 'You've heard of ultrasonics, haven't you?'
'Sounds pitched too high for the human ear to hear,' said Woods. 'We use them for lots of things. For underwater
signaling and surveying. To keep check on high-speed machines, warn of incipient breakdowns,'
'Man has gone a long way with ultrasonics,' said Gilmer. 'Makes sound do all sorts of tricks. Creates ultrasonics up to
as high as 20 million vibrations per second. One million cycle stuff kills germs. Some insects talk to one another with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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