Chapter 8

AC came through for me and managed to come up with both of the old programs that we had swiped from the Hollywood files. Yeah, I know that it was theft, but sometimes you have to bend the rules to get past the unimportant details. If this worked, we would find a way to pay the original owners for the programs. On the other hand, there was no point in stirring up an interstellar incident over something that did not work.

We started out with the Combat program because it was my favorite show from my youth. This was one of the early shows in black and white, so our first job was to have the computer convert it into color. That required a lot of input from me because the computer didn’t have a lot of information to work with. When we finished, I thought that we had done an excellent job of maintaining the spirit of the show without shocking too many preconceived notions of the proper color of grass and sky.

The second step was translating the dialog into the local spoken communication. There was no way to synchronize the mouth movements with the music put out by the translation, so we did not even try. Lola was going to read an introduction explaining that and just what the fight was all about. Of course, her introduction leaned hard on the Americans being the good guys and the Germans, Nazis, being the bad guys. We used a few newsreel shots of concentration camps and executions to emphasize our point.

By the time we finished, we had another powerful morality play ready for exhibition. The executives who saw this show were really stirred by the presentation and cheered every time a German was shot and groaned every time an American was shot. Okay, that was the reaction we were looking for, so we were ready to test the public reaction.

Our friendly neighborhood TV network picked up the show at practically no cost with the understanding that it was an experimental one and might not be duplicated. We did get a prime time slot because it was a DADP offering on the strength of our BGFG showing, though we did not get the big promotion that our first show had received.

Nevertheless, we did have a big audience, about 77% of the available sets were tuned to Combat, and it ran for 90 minutes. Lola’s closing remarks concentrated on the fact that this was an aberration in human behavior and not common to all humans. After seeing the remarks from the critics, I was not so sure that we had the winner that I originally anticipated.

Most critics agreed that it was a powerful morality play and well presented, but a number of them wondered if this was not typical of what they could expect from humans, so it would be a good idea to avoid them. Okay, that killed the idea of showing war movies, and we decided that we would drop the whole idea of transforming Earth shows for galaxy-wide distribution. Fortunately, BGFG was making enough profit that we could afford to eat the loss from this show. The Hopalong Cassidy movie was shelved before we wasted any more money on it. We were up against a culture thing that we could not beat.

So, back to work on the BGFG series. I picked the next monster as one from a planet I called Arctic. It was in the midst of an ice age, and the dominant carnivore was a beast that closely resembled a polar bear from Earth. Naturally, I named it Polar.

The Polars roamed as single hunters, so it was very rare to find two of them together, except in the very short mating season, and then they had only one thing in mind. The Polars’ main prey was a semi-amphibian that acted much like an Earth walrus, but certainly did not look like one. Therefore, a Polar was most likely to be found along the edge of the ice floating on the ocean. They very rarely went very far inland, so that did make things easier for us.

The Polar was another of those very aggressive carnivores that attacked anything that showed up in its territory. We did not expect to have any trouble getting one to try to attack us. I figured that this would be another good training exercise, and I arbitrarily picked Charlie as the hunter.

Yes, I was going along, but only as a backup gun in case Charlie ran into trouble that she couldn’t handle. We were both armed with the modified combat shotgun using hog-loads as ammunition. I had become very partial to that particular round, and it was what I recommended to all of the hunters unless something else was obviously more appropriate.

We had drones flying up and down the edge of the ice looking for a Polar to hunt. It wasn’t that Polars were hard to find, but we wanted to find a very large one that would show off the hunter’s prowess. Okay, that was marketing hype, but I was getting more and more indoctrinated.

One was spotted late in the morning that fit our specifications, and Charlie and I dropped down to the ice to pick our fight. The Polar was intently watching for his prospective prey, so it didn’t notice us when we landed. We waited 2 or 3 minutes without any reaction from the Polar, so I ran out of patience. I shouted, “HEY, POLAR, LOOK OVER HERE, YOU STUPID ASSHOLE!”

Charlie broke up at my remark, so it was just as well that the Polar was slow to react to us. We were directly behind the Polar, and it took a few seconds for it to look in our direction. When it finally did look at us, it simply stared for about a minute as if it were having a serious problem trying to process the information that its eyes were supplying.

Well, it eventually made up its mind that we were a threat, so it charged at us. Now that was something that the Polar was a master at. I was amazed at how quickly it was able to reach what looked to me like its full speed. I had to hand it to Charlie—she did not panic, but remained calm as the creature charged at us.

She held her fire until the Polar was about 70 yards away, but then she put a slug into its chest just below its neck. It looked like a perfect shot to me, but the Polar never slowed down. It just kept coming, and it was moving so fast that there was no time for any kind of finesse. She switched to full automatic and started pouring shots into the beast’s chest. Still, the Polar kept coming, and I was about to start shooting when Charlie switched her aim to the Polar’s legs.

She was still firing on full automatic, so she had trouble with precise aiming, but I think it was her third shot that hit the Polar in the left leg between its shoulder and its knee. The beast immediately dropped to the ice and began sliding toward her. She had no choice but to scramble to one side as the Polar slid past. On its way, It reached out with its uninjured right leg and tore a series of slashes in her leg just above her right knee. Just a fraction of an inch to the side, and the Polar would have gutted the woman.

She was knocked about 10 feet by that swing of the Polar’s right leg, and that was probably what saved her life. I did not hesitate, but almost shouted into my radio’s microphone, “Transport Charlie directly to sick bay! She has been badly injured!”

There was no hesitation on the part of the observers in the spaceship. They grabbed Charlie in the transporting field right away, and she disappeared. That was all I needed to know.

Meanwhile, the Polar had struggled to its feet and was trying to set up to run after me on only three legs. I managed to dodge around faster than the Polar could turn on three legs, so it could never get aimed at me. I managed to work my way far enough around to get a shot at the Polar’s side, and started pumping in round after round. I was looking for its heart, but I would take any vital organ that I could reach.

It could well have been my 12^th shot that finally brought the beast down. It gave all of the indications of being dead, but I was not about to approach it until I was certain that it would not revive. I figured that 15 minutes was enough, and carefully approached the carcass. One of the things that amazed me immediately was how little blood was to be seen. That was just one of the mysteries of the Polar that demanded to be solved.

Once I knew that the Polar really was dead, I ordered the transporter crew to transfer the carcass to the spare medical room. I wanted an autopsy as soon as possible. It looked like I had made innumerable false assumptions about this animal simply because I made extrapolations from what I thought was the Earth equivalent. That obviously was not true, and I had to know what I had done wrong. The next time, we might not be so lucky!