The Dark Symphony

plaster of the corridor ceiling. It must have had a great deal of satisfaction when it was not caught, but it did not trust to luck and did not let itself waste time with self-congratulations. In that respect, it would have made a great soldier if it had been a man. It went on to another staple and took that one out too.
    One corner of the net drooped. Only one, but that was enough.
    The rats swarmed up the net on a flesh ladder, pulling over one another in a mad scramble to be the first, and poured through the opening. As the main body of the wave concentrated in reaching the gap at the top, their weight began ripping the other staples out…
    "Master rat!" a cyclops with a bald head shouted.
    Then it was plural. "Master rats, master rats!" The call echoed through the confusion,
    Guil had no difficulty seeing what they were talking about. Rats as large as small dogs, perhaps fifteen or twenty pounds apiece, foamed around the bend in the corridor and followed the smaller slave rats who had died to bring down the nets. Their cluttering was less screechy, more guttural. This appearance of a plan seemed to indicate intelligence of some degree in the larger rats, but Guil did not think he wanted to dwell on that sort of thought.
    It also seemed as if the guttural rumbling of the Masters had a pattern, a detectable raising and lowering, a varying of sound lengths that could be a sign of verbal communication above the level of mere animal-instinct grunting. But that was a nasty thought too. He kept firing, grabbing clip upon clip from the basket of a three-armed dwarf who was acting as ammunition bearer. The dwarf kept shouting, "Shoot! Shoot! Kill!" at Guil every time he brought him dart clips.
    But Guil did not have to be told.
    The master rats knew what they wanted. It was not the flesh of their slave rats or of each other. Guil could not see a single case of rat cannibalism now that the Masters were leading the charge. With red-eyed fury, they hustled on, dying in frightening numbers, clawing over their fellows as they fell—gaining, gaining…
    A scaly Popular with orange eyes like chips of some sweet frozen confection went down under the enemy when he tripped and could not regain his feet in time. A number of rats converged on him, but the main force continued its drive.
    "Fall back!" Strong shouted.
    They moved backwards to the end of the corridor, firing continuously, aware that even a momentary lull in their barrage would afford the mutant rats the opportunity they desired to sweep forward and overwhelm them. Guil risked a glance at Tisha, saw her biting her lower lip, the gun extended to the end of her stiffened arm as she fired again and again with a fury born of panic. She was accounting well for herself, and she made Guil even more proud of her.
    Then, for a brief but terribly lucid moment, he perceived her as a corpse covered with rats, her flesh sheared away from her face by sharp, yellow teeth. She was almost dead, in this vision, but not quite—just alive enough to know what was happening and to be driven stark raving mad by it. Also, in the dream, one rat stood in the hole of her gaping mouth and worried her nose…
    He gagged, dispelling the dream, and was burdened down with the realization that he, as her man, should make certain that nothing of this sort befell her. Abruptly, he remembered the sound pistol in his jacket which he had brought with him in the event the Populars proved unfriendly.
    "Strong!" he shouted, waving the gun. "Move the men back. I can handle them alone."
    "You're insane!"
    "I know that, but I have a sound pistol."
    "I can't allow it," his father said.
    "You haven't any choice!"
    Reluctantly, Strong made the order. The other mutants fell away from Guil, most happy to retreat. He turned to the gray horde now surging unchecked down the passageway, chilled by the increase in their maniacal chattering now that they felt confident of their victory. He raised the gun and fired.
    Rats hummed, vibrated flesh against bone, were flung apart in fiery flourishes that ashed glowing and were gone. Blood showered through the air but became a flaming fall of ashes and then evaporated into nothingness, the molecules whining away from one another, the patterns of the atomic constructions negated by the sound weapon. There seemed to be thousands of them now, pouring as if from the mouth of a cornucopia. The wave stood still almost as if it were a single organism, though the rats still struggled