VII: FIVEDAY NIGHT
After dinner, Rasmussen led me to his "den." I had expected a cave, but it was another wooden room. The advance winds of the gathering storm stirred the cloth around an open window and ruffled papers on a carved desk. I turned left, jumped convulsively, and clawed for imaginary weapons.
A pair of tiny red eyes peered from beneath flopping ears. From either side of a truncated snout, two yellow tusks jutted upward. Grayish-brown, creased, tuberculated skin sprinkled with stiff hairs covered a monstrous head at least a meter and a half wide and two meters long.
I recovered enough to see that the horror was mounted on a plaque above a stone arch. Rasmussen eased his enormous body into a strong chair. He gestured at the head and explained, "A sow. The Hog is larger. Snout is almost solid bone. Skin two inches thick, filled with horny plates harder than many metals. Almost impervious to our hissers."
I said, "I've seen strange animals, but this thing—Maybe it's the width of the jaw, and the close-set eyes, and the way the snout tilts up. It looks like something horribly human." Suddenly, I realized that it resembled Rasmussen.
The old hunter closed the window against the first cool breeze I had breathed on the planet. Rain splashed the transparent panes. Rasmussen said, "Maggiese hogs are not true swine. No one has examined them much. Who cares? Could be marsupials or unique. Similar appearance is an evolutionary coincidence, quite often seen in the Explored Galaxy."
He pointed to an antique weapon in a rack with other arms. "Only rocket rifle on the planet. Found it in the museum. Two hundred years old. Some of the rockets fired. Others were duds. Used it to kill five sows and twenty pigs. Now the rockets are all gone. Type is no longer made. In any event, laws forbid importing. Trapped, poisoned, shocked, and shot the other four sows and twenty-one pigs. Betty Toal—do not understand her—Betty Toal killed four pigs."
I said, "She mentioned that she was a hunter." I considered Toal for a moment and asked, "How may I contact her?"
"If insist, shall show you her house tomorrow."
Since the old man evidently disapproved of the topic, I abandoned it and examined the rocket rifle, a clumsy device that seemed ready to fall apart if anyone dared to fire it. I said, "I'd think you'd import all sorts of weapons when the hogs have killed 237 people."
"Two hundred thirty-eight. Killed a Farmer this afternoon. We follow the Joe Nordo Plan. Nothing may draw us from it. Build comfortable houses not used elsewhere for a thousand years. Our food has not been known out there for five dark centuries. Speech is simple, not slurred and wordy." Rasmussen removed a long weapon with a graceful wooden stock from the rack and said, "Had some success with firearms."
"Firearms?"
Rasmussen displayed a metal tube with an attached point. "Nitrocellulose in this shell explodes. Drives the bullet through the barrel."
"Noisy," I supposed. "Don't you have some big ones mounted on carriages?"
Rasmussen juggled the firearm but avoided dropping it. Deep wrinkles creased his brow. Thunder rumbled and shook the window. The hunter said, "Is the largest yet made."
I said, "Tuesday—no, Fourday morning, when the shuttle was grounding, I saw some men pushing something with a long tube, and wheels, and trailing pieces. I was too spacesick to care about it, but it could have been one of these firearms, a big one."
"Where?"
"They were putting it in a building in a corner of the wall. Near the gate facing the spacefield, I think."
Rasmussen sat looking at me and chewing his lips. He shook his fat head and purred, "Must be tired. Must rest until morning. Then we find the Hog."
I protested that I had questions about the habits of the Hog, but he took my arm and escorted me into the hall. He pointed and said, "Your room and luggage." The floor boards groaned under his weight, as he passed through a doorway.
The room contained only a cabinet, chair, and bed. A smaller adjoining room was furnished with what seemed to be cleansing facilities. I finally found Emilio, or his twin brother, and had him explain the Maggiese system, which involved lathering and soaking in a small tank of water.
Refreshed, I reviewed the sketchy research I had done on Henderson's Globe, Spica System. With no time to indulge in ponderous interstellar communication before leaving for Maggie, I had gathered but few facts, and they might not apply, since Rasmussen said the Hog was not actually a hog.
I projected a booklet with the mighty title, Initial Experiments in Earthian Swine (Sus scrofa) Production on Freesphere. If hogs were as delicate as this booklet pretended, I wondered how a similar animal could become an indestructible man-eater. On Freesphere, hogs wallowed only in clean plastic tanks and lived under healthful domes. Their food was carefully compounded and measured. They were constantly inoculated and treated for diseases, some of which were, even today, virtually incurable. They were protected from temperature extremes and from sunburn and sunstroke. The booklet warned that over-exertion or over-exposure to sunlight might cause a hog to have convulsions. It sadly concluded that Freesphere was unsuited to hogs, except under the most expensive conditions.
I read further in my one-volume edition of Witos' classic Natural History of Ninety Planets, but even that old-time genius was uncertain about the Maggiese hog. He suggested that, unlike omnivorous swine, it was totally carnivorous, rooting up small burrowing animals or catching larger forms, and speculated that, under standard gravity, it might weigh twelve metric tons. Galactic Government zoologists listed the hog as a probable beast.
Whatever the Hog's nature, I felt that I could kill him by the most effective method of destroying nearly any life form, perforation. The Maggiese had failed by using crude weapons.