Phantoms

on. She was dangling in the pit, head down. The concrete tumbled into the hole and landed with a crash. The pavement under Tal’s feet shook, started to give way, and he almost lost his grip on Jenny. Then he moved back, hauling her with him, away from the crumbling brink. When she was on solid ground once more, he helped her stand.
    Even though she knew it wasn’t biologically possible for her heart to rise into her throat, she swallowed it anyway.
    “My God,” she said breathlessly, “thank you! Tal, if you hadn’t—”
    “All in a day’s work,” he said, although he had nearly followed her into the spider’s trap.
    Just a cakewalk , Jenny thought, remembering the story about Tal that she had heard from Bryce.
    She saw that Timothy Flyte, on the far side of the pit, wasn’t going to be as fortunate as she had been. Bryce wasn’t going to reach him in time.
    The pavement beneath Flyte gave way. An eight-foot-long, four-foot-wide slab descended into the pit, carrying the archaeologist with it. It didn’t crash to the bottom as the concrete had done on Jenny’s side. Over there, the pit had a sloped wall, and the slab scooted down, slid thirty feet to the base, and came to rest against other rubble.
    Flyte was still alive. He was screaming in pain.
    “We’ve got to get him out of there fast,” Jenny said.
    “No use even trying,” Tal said.
    “But—”
    “Look!”
    It came for Flyte. It exploded out of one of the tunnels that pecked the floor of the pit and apparently led down into deep caverns. A massive pseudopod of amorphous protoplasm rose ten feet into the air, quivered, dropped to the ground, broke free of the mother-body hiding below, and formed itself into an obscenely fat black spider the size of a pony. It was only ten or twelve feet from Timothy Flyte, and it clambered through the shattered blocks of pavement, heading toward him with murderous intent.
     
    Sprawled helplessly on the concrete sled that had brought him into the pit, Timothy saw the spider coming. His pain was washed away by a wave of terror.
    The black spindly legs found easy purchase in the angled ruins, and the thing progressed far more swiftly than a man would have done. There were thousands of bristling, wirelike black hairs on those brittle legs. The bulbous belly was smooth, glossy, pale.
    Ten feet away. Eight feet.
    It was making a blood-freezing sound, half-squeal, half-hiss.
    Six feet. Four.
    It stood in front of Timothy. He found himself looking up into a pair of huge mandibles, sharp-edged chitinous jaws.
    The door between madness and sanity began to open in his mind.
    Suddenly, a milky rain fell across Timothy. For an instant he thought the spider was squirting venom at him. Then he realized it was Biosan-4. They were standing above, on the rim of the pit, pointing their sprayers down.
    The fluid spattered over the spider, too. White spots began to speckle its black body.
     
    Bryce’s sprayer had been damaged by a chunk of debris. He couldn’t get a drop of fluid from it.
    Cursing, he unbuckled the harness and shrugged out of it, dropping the tank on the street. While Tal and Jenny shot Biosan down from the other side of the pit, Bryce hurried to the gutter and collected the two spare cannisters of bacteria-rich solution. They had rolled across the pavement, away from the erupting concrete, and had come to rest against the curb. Each cannister had a handle, and Bryce clutched both of them. They were heavy. He rushed back to the brink of the pit, hesitated, then plunged over the side, down the slope, all the way to the bottom. Somehow, he managed to stay on his feet, and he kept a firm grip on both cannisters.
    He didn’t go to Flyte. Jenny and Tal were doing all that could be done to destroy the spider. Instead, Bryce wound through and clambered over the rubble, heading toward the hole out of which the shape-changer had dispatched this latest phantom.
     
    Timothy Flyte watched in horror as the spider, looming over him, metamorphosed into an enormous hound. It wasn’t merely a dog; it was a Hellhound with a face that was partly canine and partly human. Its coat (where it wasn’t spattered with Biosan) was far blacker than the spider, and its big paws had barbed claws, and its teeth were as large as Timothy’s fingers. Its breath stank of sulphur and of something worse.
    Lesions began to appear on the hound as the bacteria ate into the amorphous flesh, and hope sparked in Timothy.
    Looking down at him,