ROUGH BEAST by Roger D. Aycock

Good evening and welcome to Night's Gallery. Thank you, Rod, and I want to welcome everyone to Midnight Viewing, where once a month we talk all about your follow up to the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling's Night Gallery. They say it's Rod through Ling's Night Gallery, and it isn't really Rod through Las Night Gallery. It's somebody else's. Oh we know, we talk about it a lot.

Your curators at Midnight Viewing are the projection booths. Mike White. What can happen to human beings when trust is wiped out by suspicion and culture casts? Chris Stashue, small boy incased in the Crystal Ball, and I'm Father Malone, the kind of thing that usually infest nightmares, joined us monthly at Midnight Viewing. The Night Gallery podcast at weird Ingwaymedia dot com doesn't remotely belong to me.

I have no proprietary interest in that at all. Weird weirding Way Media presents a sounding of the public public which Father below? Which Father below? Rough Beast by Roger D. I.

Coock. The field of the experimental Telethink station in the Florida Keys caught the fleeing more its attention, just as it stolen Federation lifeboat plunged into the outer reaches of night side atmosphere. The more it reacted with the instant decision of a harried wolf stumbling upon a cave that offers not only sanctuary but a lost lamb for supper as well, with the pursuing Federation ship hot on its talent heels, the more it zeroed on the Telethink signals, fuzzy and incomprehensibly alien to its viciously direct mentality, but indicating life and therefore food, and aimed straight for their source. The lifeboat crashed headlong in the Mangroves stringing Dutchman's Key, perhaps ten miles west of the Oversea Highway, in less than two from the Telethink station.

The more it emerged in snarling haste, anticipating the power plant's explosion by a matter of seconds, and vanished like a magentaferred juggernaut into the moonlit ride of vegetation that crowded back from the Mangrove strip of beach, the more it considered it a success. The lifeboat went up in a cataclysmic roar and flare of bluish light that brought van the Telethink operator on duty out of his goldberg helmet. With a prickly conviction of runaway range missiles. It all but blinded and deafened. Ellis, his partner, who was cruising with a portable telethink in the station, launched through a low lying maze of islands a quarter of a mile from Dutchman's Key.

Their joint consternation was lost on the Morrid because both, at the moment were outside of its avid reach. The teeming welter of life on Dutchman's Key was not the more it headed inland, sensing abundant quarry to satisfy the raving hunger that drove it, and that craving satisfied to offer ample scope to its joy of killing. The Morid's escape left Shack's Tall Federation ship's commander in a dilemma bordering upon the insoluble. It would have been bad enough to lose so rare a specimen, even on a barren world, but to have one so voracious at large upon one so teeming as the primitive telethink signals demonstrated with previously unsuspected intelligence was unthinkable. This, at the outset was Shakstall's problem, forbidden by strictest galactic injunction.

He could not make planet fall in interfere with a previously unscouted primitive culture. Contraverywise, neither could civilized ethic condone his abandoning such an unsuspecting culture to the bloody mercies of a Moorrid without every effort to correct his plunder. Hanging in stationary orbit in order to keep a fixed relation to the Morids landing site, the Federation commander debated earnestly with his staff until a sudden quickening of the barbarous telethink net action imperative. Two of the autocathons were isolated on a small island, with the Morrid unwarned. They were doomed, so he grouped his staff about him, sitting crouching, coiling, or hovering as individual necessity demanded, and as one entity, put the whole into rapport with the all but meaningless signals that funneled up from the Telethink station in the Florida Keys, and in doing so roused a consternation as great as his own, and infinitely more immediate.

The flash brought Van away from the telethink console and out of the Quanset station to stare shakenly across the tangle of mangrove islands to the west. Wayman came out a moment later on the run when the teeth jarring blast of the explosion woke him. They stood together on the moon bright sand, and Van relayed in forwards the total of his information. It fell over there, Van said. A pale, pinkish cloud of smoke and steam rose and drifted phosphorescently toward a non committal moon second key out.

Wayman said that would be Dutch, where the hermit lives. Van nodded, drawing minimal reassurance from the fact that there had been no mushroom. It shouldn't be atomic. The gulf breeze was steady out of the west, created with its perpetual salt and mangrove smell. The geigers will teach us soon enough.

Wayman said, not that it'll help us. With Ellis out on the launch. They looked at each other in sudden shock of joint realization the launch. Van said, Ellis is out there with the portable telethink rig. We were working out field strength ratios for personal equipment.

They died for the quantit together. Van smaller and more agile than the deliberate Wayman reached the telethink first, nothing but the regular standby carrier from Washington. Van said. Ellis may have been directly under the thing when it struck. He was working toward Dutchman's key, hoping for a glimpse of the hermit.

Maybe he wasn't wearing the telethink when the blast came. Wayman said, then, with characteristic practicality, better image Washington about this. While we're waiting for Ellis to report in, can't use the net radio. We'd start a panic. Van settled himself at the console.

I'll try that is, if I can get anything beyond the sort of suburb and a rot we've been trading lately. He signaled for contact and felt the Washington operator's answering surge of subconscious resentment at being disturbed with the closing of the net. The now familiar giddiness of partial rapport came on him, together with the oppressive sense of bodily sharing. There was a sudden trickle of saliva in his mouth, and he resisted the desire to spit. Washington has having a midnight snack, Van said, rotted sudins and limburger.

I think he made correction when the Washington operator radiated indignation, goose liver and dill pickles then, but you wouldn't guess it. Salt tastes like brass filings, Wayman said shortly, get on with it. You can clown. Later, Van visualized the flare of explosion and winced at the panicky hammer and sickled surmise that came back to him. How would I know, he said aloud, We have a man out.

He recalled the inherent limitation of fanetics then and fell back upon imagery, picturing Ellis's launch headed toward an island luridly lighted by the blast. For effect, he added on the keys minuscule beach a totally imaginary shack of driftwood pleat with bearded hermit. He knew immediately when authority arrived at the other end of the net. There was a mental backwash of conversation that told him his orders even before the Washington operator set himself for the relay. They wanted any witness account from Ellis, he told Wyman.

As if Ellis broke into the net at the moment, radiating a hazy image, he was still partially blinded from the glare of the blast. Of a lowering key, overhung by a dwindling pall of pinkish smoke. In the foreground of Lagoon and mangroves stood a stilted shack, not unlike the one Van had pictured, but without the hermit. Instead, the rickety elevation of thatched porch was a blot of sabled darkness, relieved only by a pair of slanted yellow eyes gleaming close to the floor. Climactically, Shakstall entered the net, then, with an impact of total information that was more than the human psyche, conditioned to serialize thinking by years of phonetic communication, could bear.

The Washington operator screamed and tore off his helmet, requiring restraint until he could compose himself off enough to relay his message. Alice, in his launch, faded dead away and ran the boat headlong aground on the beach of Dutchman's Key. Van reelded his chair, teetering between the shock and lunacy, until Wayman caught him and slid the telething from his head. It was minutes before Van could speak. When he did, it was with a macab flippancy that Wayman found more convincing than any dramatics.

It's come. Van said, there's an interstellar ship out there with a thousand odd crew that would give Dolly himself nightmares. Wayman had to shake him forcibly before he could continue. They're sorry they can't put down and help us, Van said, Galactic regulations, it seems, but they feel they should warn us that they've let some sort of bloodthirsty jungle monster a specimen they were freighting to an interplanetary zoo escape in a lifeboat. It's loose down here, Dutchman's key.

Wayman breathed, what kind of brute could live through a blast like that? It left the lifeboat before the power plant blew. Van said, they're tracking its aura now. It's intelligent to a degree about on par with ourselves, I gather, and it's big. It's the largest and most vicious life for him.

They've met in kilo years of star trading. He frowned over a concept unsuited to words longer than thousands. Their culture goes back so far that the term doesn't register Ellis. Wayman said, tell him to sheer off, tell him to keep away from that island. Van clapped on the telelink helmet and felt real panic when he found the net vacant except for a near hysterical Washington operator.

Aliens are off the air, he said, but I can't feel Ellis. Maybe he isn't wearing his telelink. I'll try his launch radio. He had the microphone in his hand when Van said, they got the message in Washington and they're petrified. I asked for a copter to pick up Ellis in the Hermit if they can reach them before the thing does.

But they're thinking along different lines. They're sending a squadred of gent bombers with non atomic hydrogen to make sure the beast doesn't escape to the mainland to devastate the countryside. Wayman said, incredulously, they'll blow the key to bits. What about Ellis and the Hermit. Ellis is to evacuate him if possible.

They're given us twenty minutes before the jets come. After that, he didn't have to finish. At midnight, Old Charlie Trask was waiting knee deep in the east side grass flats of his private lagoon, methodically knitting shrimp that darted to the ooze clouded area, stirred up by his ragged wading shoes. An empty gunny sack hung across one shoulder, ready for the coon oysters he would pick from the mangrove roots on his way back to his shack. In his dour and antisocial way, Charlie was content.

He had nearly enough shrimp for boiling and for bait, with the prospect of koon oyster stew in the offing. He had tobacco for his pipe, and cartridges for a single shot twenty two rifle, and a batch of potent homebrew ready for the bottling. What more could a man want. The blast and glare of lamour it's landing on the western fringe of his key jarred Charlie from his mellow mood like a clear sky thunderbolt. The concussion rattled what teeth remained to him and brought a distant squall from his cat.

A scar and cynical old tom named Max at the shack. Damn rockets was Charlie's instant, thought full around it. They blow us all to hell. The rosy phosphorescence drifting up from the mangroves a quarter of a mile away colored his resentment with alarm. A blast like that could start a fire burn across the key and cut his shack.

Grumbling at the interruption of his midnight for ray, Charlie crimped the lid tight on his shrimp bucket and stalked back along the lagoon toward his shack. The coon oysters would have to wait. Five minutes later, he reached his personal castle, perched on precarious pilings in a gap hewn from the mangroves. The moon made it to Charlie a thing of black and silver beauty, with Max's yellow eyes gleaming from the porch floor like wicked welcoming beacons. Still muttering, Charlie waded out of the shallow water ooze and stumped in squishing shoes up the ladder to his shack.

The shrimp bucket he hung on a wall peg out of Max's calculating reach. He found his pipe in the kitchen and loaded and lighted it deliberately, because the capacity for haste was not in him. His homebrew croc bubbled seductively, and he took time out to raise the grimy toweling that covered it and sniff appreciatively. RADI to cap by the time I get back and get the shrimp graded. He changed his dripping brogans for a pair of snakeproof boots and took down his twenty two rifle from its pegs, not because he really imagined that anyone might have lived through such a blast, but because strangers them radio fell as two keys east, for instance, might take it into their heads to comprying around.

He was half way across the key when the drone of Ellis's launch entering his lagoon justified his suspicions. Charlie's investigation was soon over. A dying plume of steam rising from a circle of mattered mangroves told him that no danger of fire impended, and he turned back in relief. It did not occur to him that the pilot of his hypothetical rocket might be lying desperately injured in the shallow water at the mercy of sharks and crocodiles. If it had, he would not have moved to help.

Any fool who got himself into such a spot, in Charlie's rude philosophy, could get himself out. The drone of the launch's engine was loud when he reached his shack, The boat handled by a pilot grotesque in what Charlie took at first for a diverse moment was heading directly for his landing at an unsafe speed, serving right of the shoals on a noister bed, and rips his bog, Charlie said, as if on kip. The boat swerved sharply. Its pilot came half erect, arms flung wide in a convulsive gesture. The engine roared wildly.

The boat healed, slamming its occupant against the right gunwhale, and blasted straight for Charlie's shack. Miraculously, it missed the shack's piling and lunged half its length up on the sand. The engine roarer died instantly. The pilot was thrown headlong overside Goldberg, helmet flying off in mid arc to lie stunned at the foot of Charlie's ladder. Callously, Charlie stepped over to Ellis's twitching form and stumped up the ladder to his shack.

Mags, who had taken to the porch raptors at the crash of the launch, came ung gingerly down to meet him. It's all right, Charlie told him, just some fool that don't know how to handle a boat. He leaned his rifle against the wall and brought a split bamboo chair from the kitchen. He was not too late. The bucket when he took it from its peg still slithered satisfactorily with live shrimp.

The squawking of the launch radio roused Ellis. He groaned and sat up, dazed and disoriented by the combined shock of Shacktall's telepathic bombshell and his own rude landing, just as Wayman gave up his attempt at radio contact. In the silence that fell, Ellis would have fainted again except for the chilling knowledge that he was unarmed and a foot on the same key with a man eating alien monster that might make its appearance at any moment. He collected his wits and breath to stave off the black pall of shock that still threatened. Come down from there and help me.

Pushed this launch off. He called up to Charlie. Trask, We've got to get off this key fast. Charlie separated a menu sized shrimp from his bucket. You grounded her, he said, sourly.

Puse you're off yourself, listen. Ellis said desperately that blast was a ship from space, from another star. A wild animal escaped from it. Something worse than you've ever dreamed of. We've got to get out of here before it finds us.

Charlie grunted and chose another shrimp. The more it, as Shakstall had pictured, it rose vividly in Ellis's memory, fanged and shaggy and insatiably voracious. I'm magenta furred ursine embodiment of blood lust, made the worst by its mere human intelligence. He described it in dogged haste, his eyes frozen to the tangle of inland underbrush behind the shack. No such vomit in these keys, old Charlie said.

The launch radio blared again, in Wayman's voice, speaking urgently of gent bombers and deadlines. A glance at his watch brought Ellis up from the sand in galvanic resolution. In twelve minutes, he said, grimly, a squadron of planes will pinpoint this key and blast it out of the water. I'm not going to be eaten, alive or blown to bits, arguing with you. If I can't push the launch off alone, I'll swim.

He scooped up his fallen Telethink helmet and ran for the launch. At the fourth step, his foot caught in the iron hard stump of mangrove root that had been chopped off inches above the sand, and he fell heavily. Pain blinded him. His right ankle lanced with fire and went numb. He fought to rise and fell again when the ankle collapsed under him.

Hell, he said, just before blackness claimed him for the second time, I've broken my leg. His twelve minutes had dwindled the seven. When Ellis roused, he tried to stand. His twisted ankle momentarily forgotten, and gave it up. When the mangrove spun dizzily before his eyes.

He couldn't afford to pass out again. He made one last ditch bid for help. My leg's broken, he yelled up at old Charlie Trask. Get down here and lend a hand. Charlie glowered and said nothing.

Max bounded down the ladder, tail stiffly, erect and scarred. Ears cocked at the underbrush in baleful curiosity. The thing is coming this way, Ellis, called your cat sense, it will you let us all be killed? Charlie Trask grated another shrimp, swearing bitterly, Ellis caught up his telething helmet and slid it over his head. He found the net.

In a welter of confusion, Washington demanded further information. Van at the station was calling him frantically. His own scramble for help images only added to the mental babble on the Federation ship. Confusion was nearly as rampant. Shakstall's dilemma still held.

He could not make planetfall. Time was too short for aid now in any case, but neither could he with clear galactic conscience, desert the harried primitives below, while hope remained. Ellis's predicament forced Shakstall to decision he could only follow the Morridzaura and relay its progress. It could not be helped that the relayed image was blurred of definition and weirdly askew. The Morud's visual and auditory range differed so sharply from either human or galactic that even over the ship's wonderfully selective telecommunicator, little of the Morud's immediate surroundings came through clearly.

Its aura arrived with a burning intensity that turned Shakstall and his group faint with empathetic horror, but the fact that the more it had just made its first kill obliterated all detail for the moment beyond a shocking welter of blood and torn flesh. Ellis fared a little better under the second telepathic blast than he had the first. He managed to snatch off his telethink helmet just in time. The thing just killed something out there. He yelled at Charlie.

Trask, it's comin this way he could sit. Charlie grated his last edible shrimp, took up his bucket and went inside. The leisurely clinking of home. Rue bottles drifted after him, clear and musical on the still hot air. Ellis looked at his watch and considered prayer.

He had three minutes left. When the more it came, Ellis was sitting dumbly on the sand, nursing his broken ankle and considering, with a shock detached part of his mind a fragmentary line of some long forgotten school day's poem, What rough beast is this? The rest eluded him. The underbrush beyond the shack rustled, and the mord's raveting image sprang to Ellis's mind with a clarity that shook his three net part scipiants to the corps. One of them passed Endurance Van in the station, said dear God, and braced himself for the end.

In Washington, the operator fainted and had to be dragged from his console aboard the Federation ship Shakstall radiated a shaken enough and tentacled the stud that sent his craft flashing on its way through subspace. At Charlie Trask's shack. Max bounded across the clearing and into the brush. There followed a riot of squalling and screaming that brought Charlie out of his shack. On the run, Ellis sat numbly beyond shock, waiting for the worst.

Unaccountably, the worst was delayed. Charlie came back, clutching a protesting Max by the scruff of the neck, and threw down something at Ellis's feet, something small and limp and magenta fred smeared with greenish blood and very very dead. There's enviroment, said Charlie, with one minute remaining before the promised bombers roared over Ellis with a frozen clarity he had not dreamed he possessed, radiated a final message before he fainted again. Call off the jets, he said, in effect, it's over. The beast is dead.

The Hermit's cat killed it an hour later at the station, his ankle bandaged and his third cup of coffee in hand, Ellis could review it all with some coherence. We didn't consider the business of relative size, he said. Neither did our galactic friends. Apparently they're small, and so are all the species they've met before. Maybe we're something unique in the universe after all, and maybe it's a good thing they didn't land and learn how unique it figures, said Waymond.

Washington let it out on the air that DF Stations made a fix on the spaceship before it jumped off. It measured only twenty two feet, Van said, wonderingly, and there were hundreds of them aboard. Gentlemen, we are Brobdignaggians in a universe of Lilliputians. I've been trying, Ellis said, irrelevantly to recall a poem I read once in school. I've forgotten the author and all the first but one line it goes, what rough beast is this?

Van quoted. You were thinking out it hard enough when the demacle and the brush took place. The image you radiated was rough enough. It chunk the pants off us and off the galactics. Wayman said.

The shoe is on the other foot. Now, I think he went to the quantit door and looked out and up listening jets the Washington Brass on its way to cross examine us the other foot, Van said, don't be cryptic. Man whose foot there's Ellis said, don't you see one of these days we'll be going out to make our own place in the galaxy. With our size and disposition, how do you think we'll seem to those gentle little people? Van whistled and belated understanding rough he said.

This episode performed and produced by Fathom Alone, music by hp To