Beastchild

went to the wall of rubble, where a ceiling had partially caved in. There was a gap between the ruins and the walls that he just might be able to push through to reach the cellars beyond and string his lights.
        He clambered up the stones, sliding back a bit for, every piece of progress he made. Dust rose around him.
        At the top, he stretched on his belly and went through the gap into darkness. He turned up the power of his lamp and illuminated most of the chamber in which he found himself. The place was a library of sorts, full of booktapes. For the humans to have buried it this deep must mean that the tomes here contained were considered by them as most valuable.
        He advanced to a rack of spools and began to read the titles. He did, not recognize most of them. What ones he knew were fiction. This, of course, was quite a surprise. The humans he had met-that his race had met-in the stars some hundred and seventy years ago had not been the type to enjoy fiction. They had been cold, precise men with little time to smile and only a slight imagination.
        Yet here, apparently, was a room full of novels.
        And they had thought highly enough of them to bury them against destruction.
        He was still fumbling through the racks, amazed, when the light, airy voice called to him in pure, unaccented Terran: "Above you! A rat!"
        He whirled, looked up.
        The rat hung almost upside down from a beam. It's red eyes glared with reflected light.
        Foolishly, he had come without a weapon.
        He held the beam of the handlamp on it, paralyzing it, blinding it. He could see it plainly, and he was not happy with what he could see. It weighed a good twenty pounds; it had the wide mouth of a mutant, and the extra long teeth. He could hear them gnashing. Its claws, now hooked around the overhead beam, were more wicked than those of a normal rat It was ironic that one of the naoli's own weapons might kill a naoli. Ironic, not amusing.
        The naoli had introduced mutated rats into the humans' home planet some sixty years ago, one of the preliminary weapons for the five-plus decades of the final assault. They had bred true in the sewers and cellars and had done their damage.
        Bright teeth: gnashing.
        Hulann held the light on the rat, keeping it hypnotized. He looked around for a weapon, something, anything. It was not his time to be particular. To his right was a length of steel pipe that had twisted loose, fallen to the floor. The end had twisted away in some bomb blast and was pointed, deadly. He inched to it, stooped, and picked it up with his free hand.
        The rat hissed at him.
        He advanced on it, clutching the pipe so firmly that the muscles of his six-fingered hand ached.
        Perhaps the growing brightness of the light warned the rat. It stiffened, then scurried along the beam, almost escaping the blinding radiance.
        Hulann shifted the lamp, leaped, jabbed the sharp end of the pipe up at the low beam, caught the mutant on its flank. Blood appeared.
        The rat screeched, scurried further along, confused and angry. Froth tipped its brown lips and flecked its dung-colored fur. When he followed it with the light, it scrambled about on its perch and tried to go back the way it had come.
        He jabbed at it again.
        It fell onto the floor, momentarily escaping his light. When it came to its feet, almost instantly, it saw him and came for him, chittering insanely. It was more than likely rabid; the mutated rats had been built with a low tolerance for diseases which they might catch and later transfer to humans.
        He stepped back. But that was not a good move, and he knew it.
        The rat's feet chattered on the cement floor. Pieces of cement, shards of glass, and other small debris rattled out from under it.
        There was no time to open a link with the Phasersystem and send for help. He would be dead by the time they got there. He had to rely on his own agility. He side-stepped, swung out at the beast with the pipe and connected, locking it end for end.
        The rat's squeal echoed from wall to wall. For a moment, there were a hundred rats in the room. It came up, staggering, and scampered back at him, completely mad now.
        He swung again, missed the rat, and slammed the pipe into a steel support beam. There was an explosion of sound in the room, and the concussion surged back into