Beastchild

machine-like being. Not like you or I, of course, but clever enough to out-think us."
        "It doesn't sound good," Leo said.
        "It isn't."
        "You aren't giving up, are you?"
        "No."
        Leo grabbed Hulann's heavy biceps and squeezed, grinned at the scaly naoli. Hulann grinned back, though he did not much feel in the mood for such a pleasantry.
        The spy-bee ceased to hover and snapped against the windscreen, shattering into dozens of little bits and leaving a chip on the plastiglass.
        "It broke! "Leo said.
        "The Isolator ordered it to destruction," Hulann corrected hint "But why?"
        "Don't get your hopes up," the alien said, pulling his lips back from his teeth, baring the gleaming points, his four nostrils flared and his eyes wide and cautious. "If the Isolator has destroyed the bee, that can only mean that it is already sending a weapon for us and does not need the little mechanical monitor any longer."
        "Oh," Leo said. He crouched a little deeper into his chair, watching the sky which had begun to cloud over with low, gray blankets of mist like a burnished steel bowl laid over the world. He searched the flat stretches of sand in all directions, peering intently through wavering fingers of hot air that sought to delude him. "I don't see anything," he said at last.
        "You won't," Hulann said. "It will come too quickly for that."
        "What can we do?"
        "Wait"
        "There must be something more!"
        "We can drive," Hulann said. "We can make this shut-tlecraft move as swiftly as it can. The Isolator only covers an area of a hundred or two hundred miles square, depending on the model. If we drive fast and long enough, we should escape its territory-though I have never heard of anyone escaping an Isolator."
        "That's pessimism," Leo said.
        "That's right," the alien agreed.
        There was dark sky.
        And sand.
        And something else on its way, something they could not define or imagine until it was upon them…
        Within the vat, the independent cells of the Isolator worked together according to the dictates of their group consciousness. It was true, as Hulann had told the boy, that each individual cell was perfectly capable of sustaining life on its own. But the intelligence of the beast was a conglomerate one. And all the cells had been programmed, by the naoli engineers, to respect the need for group action above the natural urge and ability of each particle to separate itself and exist in isolation.
        The mother mass burbled contentedly, like a fat baby chuckling deeply in its throat, lying there in the bottom of the vat, contemplating its catalogue of destructive devices and employing its limited but genuine imagination to modify the catalogue items to make them even more deadly than they had been intended. It was an amber jelly now, shot through with streaks of green as bright as newly mown grass and blotted with patches of gray as the cells combined to function in various specialized fashions at least through this moment of crisis when every resource had to be called upon and used.
        If anyone had been within the vat, he would have been repelled by the odor: the smell of death and decay, even though things were being born-not dying. It emanated from the flesh of the Isolator and clung to the warm, metal walls like a film of grease. It was generated by the heat which was, in turn, generated by the intricate and exhausting processes of creation which the mother mass was employing to develop its weaponry.
        Deep in the mechanical works of the complex, around the vat itself, the food constructors and dispensers increased the supply of liquid protein that was fed into the bottom of the vat where the mother mass absorbed and digested it almost instantly, each cell taking what it required and passing the rest on in a form of high-speed osmosis unmatched by any earthly plant. The machines, to obtain the higher demand for food on the part of the creature they were created to serve, opened the surface receptors of the ingestion plant and collected more sand, rock, weed, and cactus for conversion into liquid protein, at the same time obtaining water from underground pools which other systems siphoned upwards into the humming works of the station.
        The smooth surface of the amoeboid mass churned like pudding stirred from beneath by a beater. The thin tension