file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20d...paar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Good%20Night,%20Mr.%20James.txt
only a puudly, but certain other alien beasties even less lethal than a puudly. There was good reason for
such a law, reason which no one, much less himself, would ever think to question.
And now the puudly was loose and somewhere in the city.
James grew cold at the thought of it, his brain forming images of the things that might come to pass if
he did not hunt down the alien beast and put an end to it.
Although beast was not quite the word to use. The puudly was more than a beast... just how much
more than a beast he once had hoped to learn. He had not learned a lot, he now admitted to himself, not
nearly all there was to learn, but he had learned enough. More than enough to frighten him.
For one thing, he had learned what hate could be and how shallow an emotion human hate turned out
when measured against the depth and intensity and the ravening horror of the puudly's hate. Not
unreasoning hate, for unreasoning hate defeats itself, but a rational, calculating, driving hate that
motivated a clever and deadly killing machine which directed its rapacity and its cunning against every
living thing that was not a puudly.
For the beast had a mind and a personality that operated upon the basic law of self-preservation
against all corners, whoever they might be, extending that law to the interpretation that safety lay in one
direction only... the death of every other living being. No other reason was needed for a puudly's killing.
The fact that anything else lived and moved and was thus posing a threat, no matter how remote, against
a puudly, was sufficient reason in itself.
It was psychotic, of course, some murderous instinct planted far back in time and deep in the
creature's racial consciousness, but no more psychotic, perhaps, than many human instincts.
The puudly had been, and still was for that matter, a unique opportunity for a study in alien
behaviorism. Given a permit, one could have studied them on their native planet. Refused a permit, one
sometimes did a foolish thing, as James had.
And foolish acts backfire, as this one did.
James put down a hand and patted the gun at his side, as if by doing so he might derive some
assurance that he was equal to the task. There was no question in his mind as to the thing that must be
done. He must find the puudty and kill it and he must do that before the break of dawn.
Anything less than that would be abject and horrifying failure.
For the puudly would bud. It was long past its time for the reproductive act and there were bare hours
left to find it before it had loosed upon the Earth dozens of baby puudlies. They would not remain babies
for long. A few hours after budding they would strike out on their own. To find one puudly, lost in the
vastness of a sleeping city, seemed bad enough; to track down some dozens of them would be
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Good%20Night,%20Mr.%20James.txt (4 of 18)20-2-2006 23:20:55