The Deep Down DragonThe Deep Down Dragon
 
The girl's one duty was to look — and understand: 
White flatness of the wide wall dissolved into mist as the room dimmed. Then 
whiteness itself broke apart, from all-color to each component. 
Pinpoints of brightness swirled and coalesced into new patterns of color and 
shape. Pinks and yellows here. Silver, blue, black there. Brown, gray, green. 
Rainbow stripes. 
First flat, like a painted scene, then deepening to its own kind of reality, the 
scene glowed in the center of nothingness where the wall had been before. 
The scene had been exactly the same before, she remembered. There was the 
strangely clear-air atmosphere, thin and sharp. The sketched-in effect of the 
background — hills, oddly shaped? a domed structure closer? — was simply a 
matter of her focused attention, not distance haze. Through this transparent air 
detailed vision would be possible at a far distance. And the background hills 
were far; for the moment, however, they were only background. 
What counted was front-center, bright-colored . . . as real as when she had seen 
it the first time, for herself. 
The three footprints. The shoe. The square of cloth. The three bushes. In color, 
focus and meaning they were identical. Her own shoe, with the silly spike heel 
and lacy strap unfastened, was lying where it dropped on the pink-hued sand, 
alongside the alien prints. The first time she had not known why, exactly, the 
prints were "alien." Now she saw it was the shoe that accomplished the effect. 
Plenty of three-toed things left prints in sand, but nothing exactly the length 
of her own foot was tripartite. 
Nothing on Earth. 
It was the same thing with the brown-gray-green thorn bushes ... planted, she 
suddenly realized, by some insane gardener, to landscape that circular 
blockhouse thing in the background! Or maybe not so insane. Nowhere else in 
sight was there a growing or green thing at all. Poor green was better than 
none. Spikes, spines and thorns did grow. They were alive, if still — alien? 
Why? Of course, the same thing. The patterned robe. A square of cloth, from the 
same bolt from which she had made the robe, only last week, hung impaled on the 
farthest bush. 
Farthest? Nearest! Nearest to the door of the house, from which the strange 
footprints curved down and off-scene. 
Half the wall was filled now. Inch by slow fraction of inch the scene widened. 
She sat forward, breathing almost not at all, tensed with knowing the next 
print, or the one beyond it, would contain the print-maker, the — alien. 
Alien? What an odd thought! That was the second — the third? — time she'd 
thought it. She did not remember the thought from the first seeing of the same 
scene. "Strange," maybe. "Unknown." Not "alien." 
Odd . . . odder still, as her eyes went unwillingly from the forming print at 
the far edge of the scene, she saw her own sandal alongside the trail, silly 
spike heel and lacy strap, still fastened as it had been on her foot. 
That wasn't just odd. It was wrong! And the torn strip of fabric ripped from her 
robe by the thornbush — 
"That's not how it was! That's not the way it went," she thought, and the scene 
faded out. 
The light brightened in the room as the wall came back to normality, and she 
realized that she had not just thought it, but spoken aloud. 
"This is his, remember?" Gordon was smiling. "Only the very first frame is 
identical. It starts branching off right away. The colors, for instance?" 
Ruth thought back and of course he was right. Hers had been much yellower. Pink 
sand was absurd. 
She laughed out loud, at the absurdity of thinking anything in the projection 
absurd. Then she explained. "Pink sand. I was thinking how silly that was, and 
then I remembered that mine had little pink clouds floating over my pure yellow 
desert! Why on Earth do you think he'd have pink sand, though?" 
Gordon smiled again as she realized how her own question had answered itself. ". 
. . On Earth . . ." she had said. Of course. Why should it be Earth at all? 
With the questioning thought came concern. Why had hers been on Earth? Did that 
mean . . .? Were they showing her Charles' sequence just to explain, in the 
kindest way, why she failed? 
She wouldn't finish the thoughts, even in her own head. But Gordon was chuckling 
quietly as he watched her. Of course he knew what had been crossing her—face, 
she decided, as well as her mind! Other people had been through this whole thing 
before. Half of them must have gone through the same thoughts. 
Half of them would have been worried ... and how many of them had good cause to 
be? 
"Relax, Ruth," he said warmly. "You haven't failed or passed yet. There's a lot 
more to it than the sequence. But I can tell you that it makes no difference 
where you make the setting, or when. At least —" he frowned faintly, and she 
knew it was impatience with his own imprecision in a vital communication. "At 
least, it makes no more difference — and no less —than your choice of colors or 
textures. A good bit less difference than clothing, for instance." 
She looked at him gratefully. 
"All right," she said. "I'll try to forget my own sequence." 
"The best way is just to let yourself go, as completely as you can. There's no 
harm in being aware of the difference, just so you aren't contrasting. It won't 
rationalize. But you don't have to stop being you to be him for a while, you 
know." He smiled again. 
She nodded and grinned. Some things did not have to be verbalized. 
She shivered and settled back, ready to watch — to feel, to know, be, exist — in 
his mind and body. 
Gordon didn't say any more. The room dimmed again, and once more the misting 
wall focused the scene. 
When it had covered the wall, Ruth had forgotten that there was a wall there at 
all. Or that she was herself. 
More completely than ever before, or again (unless and until they fused to a new 
person, their child) she was one with the man who had made her his own. 
The trail of prints led tantalizingly out of sight, curving away behind a low 
ridge of dunes. Unless the creature, whatever it was, moved much more swiftly 
than the prints promised, it had been more than a few minutes since it happened. 

He looked again at her slipper dropped on its side in the sand. The first 
glimpse had been more incongruous than anything else. The alienness of the 
prints contrasted ridiculously with the spiced femininity of Ruth's shoe on the 
orange-pink sand. Now it seemed to him that the slipper was not dropped but 
thrown. Or kicked. 
Kicked off her foot? For the first time, fear grabbed him, a clawed fist of ice 
in his belly that turned him to look again at the bright rainbow of stuff draped 
and torn on the edge of the bush near the door. It was part of the skirt of the 
new robe, the one she made herself last week, after he noticed the new fabric in 
the shop window. He had liked it; so she had bought it and fashioned it into a 
garment to please him. Now it hung cruelly torn by spiked thorns. And she 
He tore himself loose from the immobility of anxiety, and ran for the house. 
Somewhere in back of his mind the question was registered: What shop? Where? The 
nearest shop was forty million miles away. The question was registered, filed, 
and ticketed for later thought. 
Right now he could not even stop to wonder why he had not noticed the door 
before. He had to have seen it, when he saw the bush. How do you not notice that 
the thick door of a pressure hut has been torn loose from its hinges? What kind 
of wild man speculates about his wife's robe when his home, in which he left her 
safe and protected, no more than five hours ago, has been violated? 
That was a dangerous word. He unthought it, and the red haze cleared away. He 
could see again. 
"Ruth!" he shouted. "Ruth!" 
No answer. He had known there could not be one. "Ruth!" he kept shouting to 
thin-aired emptiness inside the dome that had been — five short hours ago — rich 
with Earth air and scents, sounds and solidity: Ruth. 
His gun hung by the door. It had been a joke, he remembered. Pioneers ought to 
keep a gun by the front door. Damn right they should! He grabbed it as he ran, 
stride unbroken. He tore off down the trail of the monstrous prints, past the 
bushes and the sandal, fifty feet more. His lungs were on fire inside him. He 
would have cursed in his futility, but there was no strength or breath for 
self-anger; not even, just now, for anger better placed. It was not even 
possible now to run back to the copter. He had wasted too much strength. He had 
to drag himself full length along the sand, catching and holding the thin 
concentration of lichen's oxygen at the sand surface. 
Inside the copter, lungs full again, he was coasting along fifteen feet above 
the prints of horned three-toed feet. He had time enough, and more than he 
wanted, to think and to question his idiocies. As if he had forgotten where he 
was. At the first hint of danger they faced he went into shock. As if he were 
back on Earth, wrapped in her warm air, strong-armed gravity. 
Ancestral memories reacting for him in moment of panic? He sneered back at 
himself for that kind of excuse. The only part that applied was the single word, 
"panic." 
He'd panicked. Okay. Don't forget it, boy. But don't let it slow you down, 
either. File for future reference. Take it out and examine it — later. Meantime, 
what counts is down there. Right now, you're just a pair of eyes. Later you may 
get to be arms and legs, a back, if you're lucky a gun. Right now — just eyes. 
And a computer. 
He studied the prints. Two-footed or four? He couldn't decide — and then he saw 
the pattern, and it was not two or four, but three. Three? Distribute N pounds 
of weight — divided at any time on two of three feet, in prints that each dug in 
deeper than his own foot would, with his full weight on it. The damn thing was 
big. N pounds was too many. 
That didn't make sense. What kind of Thing made prints like that on Mars? On a 
planet whose largest life-form was adapted to breathing air no more than two 
feet above ground? And even those didn't cross desert dryness. They lived in the 
still thinly moist and green valley of old sea bottoms. 
The error was obvious. What kind of creature could make a print like a man's, on 
Mars? Largest native life-form, he had meant. So this Thing, with three-toed, 
three-legged stride, hard-bottomed foot digging too deep in dry sand, had a 
stride barely more than a man's, one meter maybe from print to print along the 
trail. It was not long enough to be that heavy. Not man, not Martian. Something 
else. 
Alien. 
He tried to think more, but either there were no more clues or the block was too 
great. Alien, from where? No way to know. What for? Where to? Why? When? 
For the moment, the "when" was what counted the most. Whatever and whyever, It 
had Ruth with It. Was she still alive? Did she have an oxytank? 
He tried to remember, aside from the door, what signs of violence, struggle or 
damage he'd seen in the house. He remembered none. The door, the robe and the 
slipper. That was all. 
Ten minutes after the copter lifted, he came to the first rock outcroppings. For 
a while after that he could still follow the trail without too much trouble. The 
creature tended to stay on the sand-drifted crevices between hills. There were 
still plenty of prints clear enough to be seen from the height he had to 
maintain to stay clear of the jagged-edged, sand-scoured shapes of bare 
hilltops. But as the ground level rose, there was less and less sand between 
rocks to catch imprints, and it was more difficult to peer down and navigate at 
the same time. 
Hard to say if he would be better off on the ground. He could spend hours trying 
wrong passages, backing and trying again, to search out the scattered prints 
that made the only trail now. Circling above, he could save time — maybe. 
Certainly, if he could stay in the air, he kept an advantage he'd never have 
face to face. (Face to chest? belly? thigh? No way at all to judge relative 
height.) Not to mention armament, general equipment. Inside the copter, he had 
the distilled and neatly packaged essence of Earth technology to fight for him. 
On foot in the hills, with whatever he could carry on his own back —? 
It was obvious he had no choice. He had just noticed the time. Twilight would 
fall fast and dark across him in a half hour or less. Moonless, or as good as 
moonless, dark would follow short minutes after. The kind of cross-eyed 
trail-following and peak-hopping he could barely manage in sun light would then 
be impossible. Find a place where he could land, then. Now, quickly, while he 
still could. 
The copter dropped, and he found a ledge just firm and wide enough. Charles went 
methodically through lockers, picking and choosing, till at last he had a pile 
he thought he could manage, with all the essentials, in one form or other. 
Searchlight, rope, hand pickaxe, knife. Pistol-grip torch, which he thought of 
as a flame thrower. Plain old pistol. Extra airtank. Extra mask. Light warm 
blanket. Bullets, and gas for the torch. Food concentrates. Two water flasks. He 
climbed into his heat suit, discarded the blanket, and took her suit instead. He 
had thought to make a knapsack of the blanket, carrying the rest of the stuff on 
his back, but that was silly. He had to be able to get at whatever he needed, 
but fast. He got out a package of clip-back hooks and studded his suit with 
them, hanging himself like a grim Christmas tree inside-out: bright flame-red 
suit underneath; dull gray, brown and black tanks, handles, tools and weapons 
dangling all around. 
He practiced bending over, sitting, squatting, reaching. He could climb. Okay. 
The weight was going to be hard to handle, but not impossible. 
He added one more airtank, and one more flask. If it all got too heavy, he could 
leave a trail of his own behind him. At least the stuff would be nearer than 
here in the copter. He was half out of the hatch when he remembered it: The 
first aid kit. 
He started into the hills with his searchlight flooding the pass at his feet 
just as darkness collapsed from the sky. He wondered as he stumbled forward and 
up — following an edge of toe here, of heel there — what else he had not thought 
to take. 
Then the glare of light glinted off redness on rockside. A smear, that's all. 
Red blood. Not alien. Ruth's! 
His gloved hand reached out, and the red smudged. Still wet? Impossible. In this 
atmosphere, the seconds they'd need to get out of sight would have dried blood. 
He looked closely at his gauntlet and moved forward more swiftly, with an 
exultation of knowledge and purpose he had not dared let himself hold until 
then. It was not blood. It was spilled red powder. Rouge! She was alive, able to 
think, to act! She knew he would have to come after, and she was helping by 
leaving a trail. 
He no longer followed footprints. He followed the crimson trail blazes. And 
wondered how far back they'd started, how much time he might have gained had he 
abandoned the copter sooner. 
No use wondering. No use thinking back. Now it was only the next moment and the 
next. Was he gaining or losing? This he had to know. He was traveling at his 
best speed. He went faster. If he lost ground now, he had no chance. The 
creature was making a path as straight as the hard rockside hills would permit; 
It knew where It was headed. The Thing could not climb, that was clear, so It 
would not have gone through the hills without cause. But wherever It was headed, 
presumably that spot offered It some protection. He had to find It and head It 
off first. 
He found he could go faster still. And then, suddenly, he knew he'd better slow 
down. It was nothing he'd seen — surely nothing he'd heard. Inside the suit 
hood, even such sounds as carried through the thin air were stilled. Well, then. 

He opened the mask, and he did hear. Maybe it was some vibration of the Thing's 
tread through the rock that had warned him first. Well, he would not give 
himself away by the same carelessness. He knew he was very close to It now. 
He moved so carefully after that, it seemed agonizingly as if he were once more 
crawling belly-flat. But he knew he was gaining on them. The Thing was really 
slow! 
He was close. Fool! he thought angrily, as he switched his light off. Creep up 
on the Thing with a searchlight to flood the scene in advance! The suit had an 
infrascope in the visor. He'd have had to close it soon anyhow. Five minutes was 
about maximum breathing without a tank; unless you cared to drag yourself flat 
as he'd done earlier. 
The black-light scope came on. Charles paused with a new certainty under an 
overhang of rock at the next bend. And saw the Thing. And his wife. 
He noticed, in a detached and extremely calm way, that what happened next all 
happened in seconds. Maybe a minute at most. No more, because with the sharp 
self-awareness exploding inside him, he could count his breaths while he did all 
the rest. 
He inhaled exactly three times — deeply, evenly — while it occurred. 
Before the first breath, there was again the ice-fingered grip of fear twisting 
his gut, squeezing the strength and air out of him. 
He inhaled then. And let the retinal image go to his brain, instead of his 
belly. 
It was twice the height of a man, weirdly elongated, the tripod base all ropy 
tendon, thin and hard. The trunk —thorax? — chest? — well, whatever, shelled or 
spacesuited or something, but shiny-hard — bulked enormous, four feet around 
surely at the center. At least four. And the Thing's head was turned just far 
enough to the side so that Charles could see clearly that his wife's face was in 
the gaping, reptilian maw of the Thing. 
It held her under one arm. Her feet kicked at It's side. It seemed not to 
notice. Her arm, with the bright metal cosmetic case clutched in her hand, swung 
wide, reaching to hit the canyon wall whenever it could. Her head was half into 
the creature's mouth, firmly held, chin and forehead, by It's enormous stretched 
lips. 
While he drew in the first breath, he saw all this clearly and knew he dared not 
act in such a way as to make It bite down — from fear or anger, made no 
difference. Charles could not see inside the great maw. What kind of teeth, what 
harm had been done, what could be done, he did not know . . . and knew he could 
not risk. He thought through and rejected five separate plans, while his hands 
found the items he'd need. He drew a new breath, and his legs moved beneath him. 

He could not shoot first. And he could not simply follow and learn more about 
the Thing. Because another image came through from somewhere — the same eyes 
that watched every move of the Thing? Unlikely, but it had to be — of the 
gleaming column of metal too close ahead. A Thing-ship. So: no time. 
He leaped, knife in hand. Pricked the creature, and jumped back. 
It worked, as he'd prayed; no; as he had known, not just hoped or prayed, that 
it must. The Thing jumped, turned to look — and released his wife's head. 
He did not waste effort in looking, but saw anyhow that her face was unharmed. 
He jumped again, drawing the third breath, and pricked at the arm that held her. 
She squirmed and pushed, exactly on time, like a part of himself — which she was 
— and her body was clear of his as he emptied the pistol at It's head. 
He reached for the torch. 
By that time he could not stop himself. He would have avoided the torch if he 
could. As it was he thundered at Ruth, above the explosion: Down! Keep down, 
babe!" And the blue flame of released oxygen missed her head by a foot …
He carried her back to the copter with strength he had not believed he could 
find. Nobody pursued. 
She sat up, dazed, as the lights brightened slowly, and the white wall turned 
serenely opaque. She looked across at Gordon, and her face glowed with pleasure. 

"No sillier than mine was," she said, laughing. "Was it?" "Not at all," Gordon 
said. 
She sat politely, waiting. 
Gordon stood up, grinned down at her, and offered his hand. "I think they must 
be done in there," he told her, nodding in the direction of the screenwall. "I 
imagine you'd like . . ." He let it trail off. 
"You're a smart old thing, aren't you?" She took the hand and came to her feet. 
Then, on impulse, astonished at herself, she stood on tiptoe and placed a quick 
kiss on his cheek. 
"What's more, you're a doll." She turned and ran, glad but embarrassed. 
The door closed behind her. A mirrored door on the opposite wall opened, and a 
young man entered. Gordon greeted him warmly. "Well — what did you think?" His 
own enthusiasm was unmistakable. 
"Outside of it being a great racket? Do they all react that way?" 
"Well, not all. Matter of fact, this pair is practically classical. You don't 
often get a mesh like this one — you saw hers, didn't you?" 
"I don't think so," the other said. "Unless it was one of the bunch you ran for 
us last night?" 
"Could be. She worked out a sort of a junior-size Tyrannosaur. Out of Professor 
Challenger maybe? Future-past uncertainty, here on Earth. Had it threaten the 
children, and just when she was about to sacrifice herself to save them, old 
Charlie showed up in the nick of time to do the slaying." 
The other nodded. "It's a fascinating technique," he said. "Damn glad to have 
this chance to see it work. One thing I don't follow — why do you show them each 
other's? That's pretty much against basic theory on joint therapy, isn't it?" 
Gordon was smiling again. "Well," he said slowly. "This pair didn't really take 
the runs for therapy." He had a surprise to spring, and he was enjoying it. 
"You've heard about the new screening technique for colonists? You know the last 
expedition had only one broken couple and two psychotic collapses, out of 
fifty-six?" 
The younger man whistled. Then he understood. "This is how you're doing it? Let 
them fantasy their own reactions? Well, hell. Sure! What's surprising is, nobody 
thought of using it before!" 
"Of course not. It was right under our noses," Gordon said. 
They both laughed. 
"In this case," he added, "we've got everything. His sequence stressed 
readiness, thoughtful preparation, careful action. You saw that. Hers was 
strongest on instinct, physical wisdom, that whole set. He was moved to do 
things he couldn't possibly do — and knows he can't, by the way — in real life, 
because she was in danger. Her stimulus was a threat to home and children. And 
even then, she made sure he did the actual dragon-slaying job." He flicked a 
switch. Through the wall, now, they saw Ruth and Charles, standing, holding 
hands, smiling and squeezing a little. That was all. 
The two doctors smiled as the paleskinned, ninety-five-pound, five-foot product 
of slum-crowded Earth threw a proud arm around his wife's narrow shoulder, and 
led her out. 
"Doesn't look like much of a dragon-slayer," the younger one said. 
"No. But as long as he is . . . " He paused, looked the visitor over with care, 
and said. "You asked about showing them to each other? Ever think how much more 
therapy there might be for him in knowing she knows he can handle a dragon? Or 
for her, knowing that he really can?"