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of the canyon.
    Phil Lynch was not subject to hallucinations. He had never had
one, auditory or visual, either drug-induced or otherwise. He questioned at
that moment whether or not he had just had one. He replayed the entire incident
and carefully viewed the details. No holes existed. Nothing had been lost in
some mental fog since the craft drifted away. There was the creature in his
mental play-back, shiny, insectoid—the machinery woven into it—the sound organ
booming its unearthly throat-singer’s harmonic at a jillion decibels.
    There it
was, he thought. I saw it. I heard it. It
was not from Earth. It was alive. It flew because somehow all that grown-over
hardware allowed it to do so, and it made noise. It was all of these things — and it was real.
    He pursed his lips in thought but felt the smile starting
somewhere deep in his facial apparatus. He held it down at first, but let the smile
out, finally, and felt its stiffness, its ambivalence, like smiling at a cop
who was writing him a ticket. It was far too important to smile about, this
event, but smiling was the only possible response. He had just seen a thing
that had changed his perception forever about Heaven and Earth.
    It was one thing to imagine a biological impossibility, to draw
it, say, or model it. Nothing in Phil’s history supported even the remotest
possibility of the honest-to-god, there-it-is reality of the bizarre animal he
had just seen. So he smiled.
    “I’ll be godamned,” he said.
    There was something else, too. The creature had left a sense of
alien danger in the air like a residue. He held the light under his arm, took
the pistol out of his pocket, racked the slide and chambered a round. Just to
be fully prepared, he took off the safety and wrapped his forefinger around the
trigger guard.
    He stood there for a minute, gun in one hand, light in the other
shaking his head in disbelief. He shined the light over the immediate area and
the cabin, looking for any artifact the craft might have left that could add
real matter to the memory of it.
    He was checking out the rocks a hundred feet to the east when he
heard the running sound some distance behind him down the hill. He spun and saw
just a glimpse of the animal as it scrabbled up behind a juniper thicket down
the hillside about fifty yards distant. He wasn’t sure what it was, but the
Marine in Phil didn’t like the motion it made one bit. The movement sent a
series of very telling messages to the part of Phil’s psyche that was trained
to react in the gravest extreme to open threats to his person. In the Corps
they taught you not to die for a cause, but to make the enemy die for his. Like
the skull tattooed on his shoulder, that idea had faded somewhat with age, but
it was still there, etched on his soul, still legible. It was his righteous
duty to preserve his life and expend that of his enemy, if necessary, in the
process. Period. In light of recent events, rational thinking was giving
ground to a much older, highly reactive set of responses.
    He began to form a clearer idea about the sounds he’d heard coming
from the campsite below. That wasn’t raucous play he’d heard; they’d been
attacked.
    As he watched, the animal left cover and scrabbled up to another
thicket some fifty feet closer. He got a clear enough look at it this time to
see that it was definitely not local fauna. It was big, about two hundred pounds, fast, and
moving with what looked very much like hostile intent.
    He wasn’t quite convinced it was an assault, but the thing wasn’t
extending an invitation to tea, either. Phil knew by that unmistakable
maneuvering cover to cover that he was the object, if not the target of its
approach. He did a quick tally of his assets: light, hill, truck, porch, pistol
with ten rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. He had the advantage. He
narrowed the light’s beam and put it directly on the thicket. As he watched,
another one just like the first scrambled up to the