He stood on the balcony and greedily inhaled the morning air. The motel he had been staying at had ignored the terms of his reservation and put him in a smoker's room. This one was something special, apparently inhabited by generations of heavy smokers. The walls were yellowish and sticky and felt vaguely carcinogenic, and the shower had only left him feeling more intimately contaminated. He sighed, and then descended for the promised "continental breakfast."

    It was as he had feared. "Continental," in this application, usually meant that there croissants or something, but in this case it apparently referred to war-torn France, with the Nazi occupation relentlessly tightening its grip. A couple of empty warming trays with blobs and shreds that might have been scrambled eggs and spam, a browning fruit salad reeking of sulfites, dregs of coffee, and a couple of bagels. A quick squeeze showed that these were noble, ancestral bagels, brought over in steerage from the Old Country and handed down through dynasties of motel owners, well advanced in the process of converting themselves into stoneware. He briefly visualized a bagel bomb, a stack of antique bagels with a core of high explosive, filling the lobby with razor-edged shards of unleavened death. Oh well, There was bound to be something on the road.

    The day's driving took him well into the night, and into the bleak terrain of the Panhandle, where the road began a long up and down undulation. He found this unpleasant. He wasn't a twitchy person in general, but one abiding dislike was now appearing through the windshield. On the upslope, the headlights illuminated the road and surrounding shrubbery enough to wash out any other vision, and it appeared that he was driving headlong into utter blackness, as if there were nothing at all on the other side of this road hump. Not a half-comical precipice at the edge of the world, and Here There Be Monsters - just nothing.

    He came upon a small town, or former town, which bore the curious name of "Xebico" on a sign with the usual bullet holes. Apparently someone had taken special care to shoot out the population number which, from the spacing, was only two digits. The one remaining highlight of greater downtown Xebico, aside from several empty spaces, was a leaning building of sun-scalded wood that seemed held together only by rust-scabbed Nehi and Coke signs, barely able to stand the light pressure of the stars and gibbous moon falling upon it. But still it stood, and it must have had some sort of roof, because the gaping windows and doorway were absolutely black. What had stopped him was in the rough grass and weeds pushing up through the stony beaten earth of the yard, where it looked like handfuls of pinpoint rubies had been scattered. He began to suspect what they were even before approaching with a flashlight. Hundreds of wolf spiders, big and ugly but essentialy harmless, all watching him. What had cuaused them to congregate here - a quick flick of the flashlight, left and right, showed that they were all in a patch about thirty feet broad - was one of those things he supposed he'd never know. He cast the beam into the gaping doorway, getting only a vague impression of some sort of counter running the width of the building, and toyed with the idea of checking out the interior; but for some unclear reason, it didn't seem prudent. He turned and left, the rubies shifting slightly here and there, watching him.

    It reminded him, though, of a time when he had driven through what seemed a mass migration of tarantulas. Suddenly, a horde of scuttling black bodies appeared in his headlights and he was among them before he could stop, after which the thought of sitting still did not appeal. He clenched his teeth and drove on, expecting to hear a crunch and pop beneath his wheels, but there was nothing. Within half a mile he was through, and he supposed he would never know why the sere wasteland on one side of the road was any more attractive than that on the other. He briefly imagined a tarantula waving an admonitory pedipalp, saying "It's a tarantula thing, man. You wouldn't understand." No doubt.

    The road curved away to the left, then the right. Far ahead, there appeared a couple of greenish glows about the height of a deer's eyes, which blinked and disappeared, as they usually did. It reminded him of an occurence one night, several years ago, when he frequently rode a Greyhound bus beween Houston and Bastrop. In a mostly empty bus he was sitting in the right front seat, enjoying the drowsy feel of road hypnosis rather than fighting it. He had come to associate the mingled smells of diesel fumes and the chemicals in the holding tank of the tiny toilet in the back with the pleasant anticipation of journey's end. He was jolted to full awareness when a doe stepped out in front of the bus, almost mincing, somehow not noticing the noisy road leviathan bearing down. What could have been a dangerous accident in a small car was here a nearly inaudible thump, a barely perceptible tremor. The driver slowed down, apparently considering what to do, but what indeed was there to be done? The ruined body of the doe, punted into the roadside bushes, already seemed remote in the darkness. Shrugging, the driver picked up speed again. Now thouroughly awake, the rider considered that there was something odd about deer. He had known many dogs, with attitudes ranging from murderous psychosis, through a reserved but not unfriendly mien, to a joyfully indiscriminate "Hail fellow, well met!" There was no point in saying that dogs didn't have emotions. Just this morning, he had paused a few minutes to listen to a mockingbird running through its grand salute, even attempting the cawing of a crow at one point, although it really didn't have the lung power for that raucous noise. It seemed a display of literally superhuman virtuosity for its own wondrous sake. He know that there were subtlties in it, ultrasonic modulations that he couldn't hear at all. As far as he could tell it was just for the fun of it.

    He could perceive, or thought he could, a certain intelligence in some parrots. He remembered a mynah bird in a pet shop, which occasionally made loud remarks that somehow sounded like clear English and yet were totally unintelligible. Rather creepy, in a way. It would only do this when nobody was watching, but when watched, it would only respond with a yellow-eyed stare. There was a definite feeling of some strange kind of intelligence there. Some of the cephalods had surprising abilities. It was nothing like human, but it was alive and alert. With, he supposed, greater degrees of projection he imagined that he could perceive the raptorial watchfulness of the mantis, and even the sober resolve of beetles. All quite absurd, of course, but there it was. For deer, though, or anything cervine - nothing. Their rare, strange whistling cries conveyed nothing, and evoked not even curiosity. They were less interesting than the trees around them, which had slow but surprisingly complex lives of their own.

    The car topped one more hump, and the two red tail-lights disappeared.

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