Hell's Gate(61)

“But what is this fish doing inside him?”

“Candiru get excited at the scent of urine,” MacCready said. “Probably because it’s full of the same nitrogen compounds their prey excrete from their gills. Fish don’t urinate.”

As Wolff turned back toward his men, MacCready glanced over at the guides. “Walks with Empty Bladder” was now casually scanning the sky, as if searching for rain clouds or maybe butterflies. MacCready had to suppress a chuckle. “Your man must have relieved himself while he was wading across the stream,” he announced. “His new pal evidently took a wrong turn at Willy’s willy.”

“And how do we get this . . . parasite out of him?” Wolff asked.

Mac shook his head. “From what I hear, there’s only one way to remove a candiru.”

“And what is that?”

The American responded by making a scissoring motion with his index and middle fingers.

Now it was one of the guides who turned away, feigning disgust but in reality hiding a grin.


Less than five minutes later, the expedition resumed its trek toward the plateau—minus the traumatized soldier. Private Schoeppe had been sent back to Nostromo Base, limping, whimpering, and desperately clutching one end of a string that had been fastened around the base of the candiru’s tail fin. He had also been given instructions for the “necessary surgery.”

“Now, that guy’s going to have a serious story to tell if he ever gets home from the war,” MacCready said to no one in particular.

Just up ahead, Corporal Kessler turned back for a moment, “You are right, MacCready, but I think it will be a short story.”

The American smiled, suppressing the urge to keep the exchange going for fear of getting coldcocked again by his outsize SS buddy.


The Indian guides also watched as the sad-looking warazu stumbled past them. They had neglected to tell the strangers that there was indeed another remedy for a candiru attack. This one involved inserting a potion made from the unripe fruit of the jagua plant into the stricken orifice. The extract killed the candiru and dissolved its body, allowing the remains to be urinated out within a day or two.

“Such a common plant,” one of the men said, shaking his head and grinning.

“I have seen many of them this day,” said the other. Then he turned and slashed at something growing across the trail.


Six hours earlier, in his lab, Maurice Voorhees had his second encounter with the blut kinder—then decided not to tell anyone about it. Finding Kessler gone, and with no one giving him even the vaguest reason why Wolff had taken the soldier away into the forest, it seemed to Voorhees that the better part of valor would be to keep his mouth shut. Speaking about what he knew of future propulsion systems had already gotten him into trouble. Talking about known unknowns might be even worse. What he did know was that Kessler’s unknown phantoms were not only efficient killers but skilled infiltrators as well.

Independently Wolff had come to suspect the same thing. Before he left, he issued a command that the perimeter patrols were to be pulled inward to the vital nerve centers of Nostromo Base. The most efficient use of manpower, logic dictated, was to reduce the overall surface area of the defensive lines, primarily to the three buildings where the final stages of chemical manufacture, sled and rocket testing, and—soon—payload development were racing toward completion.

As an extra precaution against intrusions by the phantoms, there were now four armed observers on the roof of each shed, keeping watch by aid of the latest copies of MI-5’s infrared binoculars. If these creatures were warm-blooded, as Kimura seemed to be convinced, any possibility of them scrabbling unseen, onto or into the buildings, could be eliminated or at least greatly diminished. The premise seemed to be that the apparent cunning and stealth of the night visitors could be counterbalanced by excessive vigilance. Wolff was evidently betting on the superiority of the human mind.

This should have been a good bet. But on the same morning Schr?dinger woke the American prisoner for a trek to the night stalkers’ lair, Voorhees missed the first breakfast call, having worked through the night and even through his shift break. Then, while his machinists were released for breakfast, and as the predawn fog crept in toward high tide, something else came into the warazu compound—undetected.

For several days, virtually all of Voorhees’s thoughts had been concentrated on increasing the range of the Silverbirds. S?nger’s original designs fell short of the efficiencies necessary to overfly their targets, and the new “bottle rocket” boosters, for all their power, were not quite enough to make up the difference. Now Voorhees had the machinists stripping and scraping away every sacrificeable gram of mass from the two space-planes. By doing so he hoped to further extend their range, thus giving their pilots at least some small chance of not having to eject from their ships or letting them crash unguided into mountains, enemy territory, or even the sea.

Reducing mass meant that the pilots would carry neither food nor water; no life rafts, no survival kits—nothing weightier than whatever could be fit into the cushion at the pilot’s back and neck (which would serve double duty as a life vest). Even the backup parachutes had been eliminated, all in the hope of extending flight range, all in the hope that a skid-crash on a friendly runway, with empty fuel tanks, might save the ships. “The Leonidas Maneuver,” he would call it. Reitsch would love that one. Voorhees removed metric tons by stripping out the landing gear, along with its associated bracing and hydraulics. Still . . . each rocket would have fallen short of its safe haven by at least a thousand kilometers. Adding to the difficulties, they were now completely out of materials with which they could manufacture another batch of solid, aluminum-based propellants. Voorhees, however, discovered that he could make up for the shortfall with a newer and very carefully mixed set of chemicals, set into a cowl of tanks, or pods, paired near the tail of each bird. These hypergolic propellant pods were fueled by two substances that so hated the presence of each other that, when combined, their simultaneous combustion provided almost as much thrust as the bottle rocket boosters.