The Record of Currupira Page 4

mountain he liftedit to his lips.

  A high sweet note cut like a knife through the roll of nightmaredrums. With terrible concentration Dalton shifted his fingers and blewand blew....

  Piercing and lingering, the tones of the pipes flowed into his veins,tingling, warring with the numbing poison of the _currupira's_ song.

  Dalton was no musician but it seemed to him then that an ancestralinstinct was with him, guiding his breath and his fingers. The powersof the monster were darkness and cold and weariness of living, thedeath-urge recoiling from life into nothingness.

  But the powers of the pipes were life and light and warmth, lifereturning when the winter is gone, greenness and laughter and love.Life was in them, life of men dead these thousand generations, lifeeven of the craftsmen on an alien planet who had preserved their formand their meaning for this moment.

  Dalton advanced of his own will until he stood beside Thwaite--but theother remained unstirring and Dalton did not dare pause for a moment,while the monster yet bellowed in the blackness before them. The lightof the flare was reddening, dying....

  After a seeming eternity he saw motion, saw the rifle muzzle swing up.The shot was deafening in his ear, but it was an immeasurable relief.As it echoed the _currupira's_ voice was abruptly silent. In thebushes ahead there was a rending of branches, a frantic slitheringmovement of a huge body.

  They followed the noises in a sort of frenzy, plunging toward themheedless of thorns and whipping branches. The flashlight stabbed andrevealed nothing. Out of the shadows a bass croaking came again, andThwaite fired twice at the sound and there was silence save for arenewed flurry of cracking twigs.

  Along the water's edge, obscured by the trees between, moved somethingblack and huge, that shone wetly. Thwaite dropped to one knee andbegan firing at it, emptying the magazine.

  They pressed forward to the margin of the slough, feet squishing inthe deep muck. Dalton played his flashlight on the water's surface andthe still-moving ripples seemed to reflect redly.

  Thwaite was first to break the silence. He said grimly, "Damned luckyfor me you got here when you did. It--_had_ me."

  Dalton nodded without speaking.

  "But how did you know what to do?" Thwaite asked.

  "It wasn't my discovery," said the linguist soberly. "Our remoteancestors met this threat and invented a weapon against it. Otherwiseman might not have survived. I learned the details from the Martianrecords when I succeeded in translating them. Fortunately the Martiansalso preserved a specimen of the weapon our ancestors invented."

  He held up the little reed flute and the archeologist's eyes widenedwith recognition.

  Dalton looked out across the dark swamp-water, where the ripples werefading out. "In the beginning there was the voice of evil--but therewas also the music of good, created to combat it. Thank God that inmankind's makeup there's more than one fundamental note!"