THE CHECKERBOARD spread of the fueling port, different as its architecture had been, was yet not too far removed from their own experience. But this—Travis gazed at the wild display beyond the outer door—this was the most fantastic dream made real.
That flickering red played in tongues along the horizon, filling about a quarter of the sky, ascending in licks up into the heavens. It paled stars and battled the moon which hung there—a moon three times the size of the one which accompanied his home planet.
Rippling out from about the ship was a stretch of cracked, buckled, once-smoothly-surfaced field. There was a faint crackling in the air which did not come from any •wind but apparently from static electricity. And the lurid light with its weaving alternately illuminated and reduced to shadow the whole countryside.
“Air’s all right.” Renfry had cautiously slipped off his helmet. At his report the others freed their own heads. The air was dry, as arid as desert wind.
“Buildings of some sort—in that direction.” They turned heads to follow Ross’s gesture.
Whereas the towers of the fueling field, ruined as they were, had fingered straightly into the sky, these structures, or structure, hugged the earth, the tallest portion not topping the globe. And nowhere in the red light could Travis sight anything suggesting vegetation. The desolation of the fuel port had been apparent, but here the barrenness was disturbing, almost menacing.
None of them was inclined to go exploring under that fiery sky, and nothing moved in turn toward the ship. If this was another break in their journey, intended for the purpose of servicing their transport, the mechanics had broken down. At last the Terrans withdrew into the ship and closed the port, waiting for day.
“Desert. . . .” Travis said that half to himself but Ashe glanced at him inquiringly. “You mean—out there?”
“There’s a feel in the air,” Travis explained. “You learn to recognize it when you’ve lived most of your life with it.”
“Is this the end of the trip?” Ross asked Renfry again. “I don’t know.” They had climbed back to the control cabin. Now the technician was standing in front of the main control panel. He was frowning at it. Then he turned suddenly to Travis.
“You feel desert out there. Well, I feel machines—I’ve lived with them for most of my life. We’ve set down here, there’s no indication that we’re going to take off again. Nothing but a sense that I have—that we’re not finished yet.” He laughed, a little self-consciously. “All right, now tell me that I’m seeing ghosts and I’ll have to agree.”
“On the contrary, I agree with you so thoroughly that I’m not going too far from the ship.” Ashe smiled in return. “Do you suppose this is another fuel stop?” “No robots out,” Ross objected.
“Those could have been immobilized or rusted away long ago,” Renfry replied. He appeared sorry now that he had raised that doubt.
They went at last to their bunks, but if any of them slept, 100 it was in snatches. To Travis, lying on the soft mattress which fitted itself to the comfort of his body, there was no longer any security—the odd security offered by the ship while in flight. Now outside the shell he could rest his hand against was an unknown territory more liable to offer danger than a welcome. Perhaps the display of fiery lights in the night, perhaps the dry air worked on him to produce the conviction that this was not indeed a world of machines left to carry out tasks set them before his kind had evolved. No, there was life here and it waited—outside.
He must have dozed, for it was Ross’s hand on his shoulder which brought him awake. And he trailed after the other to the mess. He ate, still silent, but with every nerve in his gaunt body alert, convinced that danger lay outside.
They went armed, strapping on the belts supporting the aliens’ blasters. And they issued into a merciless sunlight, as threatening with its white brilliance as the flames of the night before.
Ashe shielded his eyes with his hand. “Try wearing the helmets,” he ordered. “They might just cut some of the glare.”
He was right. When they fastened down the bubbles, transparent as the material appeared, it cut that daylight so that their eyes were unaffected.
Travis had been right, too, in his belief that they were in desert country. Sand—dunes of white sand, glittering with small sun-reflecting particles which must be blinding to unshielded eyes—crept over the long, deserted landing space. Here were no other grounded ships as they had seen at the first galactic port, only lonely sweeps of sand, unbroken by the faintest hint of vegetation.
Sand—and the buildings, those low, earth-hugging buildings—perhaps a quarter of a mile away.
The four from the ship hesitated at the foot of the ladder. It was not only Renfry’s hunch that their voyage was not completed that kept them tied to the globe. The barren- ness of the countryside certainly was no invitation to explore. And yet there was always a chance that some discovery might help to solve the abiding riddle of their return.
“We do it this way.” Ashe, the veteran explorer, took over with decisive authority. “You stay here, Renfry—up at the door. Any sign the ship is coming to life again and you fire—on maximum.”
A bolt of the force spewed from the narrow muzzle of the alien weapon would produce a crackle of blue fire which should be visible for miles. They were not sure of the range of the helmet corns, but they could be certain of the effectiveness of a force bolt as a warning.
“Can do!” Renfry was already swinging up the ladder, displaying no disappointment in not being one of the explorers.
Then, with Ashe in the center and the lead, the other two flanking him a little behind and to the right and left, the Terrans headed for the buildings. Travis mechanically studied the sand under foot. What he was searching for he could not have told, nor would that loose sand have held tracks-tracks! He glanced back. The faint depressions which marked his footsteps were already almost undistinguishable. There was certainly nothing to indicate that anyone—or anything— had passed over that portion of the forgotten base for days, months, years, generations.
But the sand was not everywhere. He stepped aside to avoid a broken block of the pavement tilted up to one side and forming a hollow—a concealing hollow. Travis hesitated, gazing down into that hollow.
Last night a wind had swept across this field; he had felt it up at the port of the ship. Today the air was dead, not a breeze troubled the lightest drift of sand. And that hollow was free of sand. He did not know why his instincts told him that this was wrong. But because he was nudged by that subconscious uneasiness, he went down on his knees to study the interior of the pocket with the close scrutiny of a hunter-tracker. So he saw what he might otherwise have missed—that depression marked in the soil where the sand had not drifted. On impulse he rubbed his fingertips hard across that faint mark. There was a greasy feel. He unfastened his helmet long enough to raise those same investigating fingers to his nostrils.
A rank odor—sweat of something alive—something with filthy body habits. He was sure of it! And because that thing must have crouched here for a long time in a well-chosen hiding place from which it could watch the ship undetected, he could also believe it possessed intelligence—of a kind. Snapping down his helmet once more, he reported his find over the com.
“You say it must have been there for some time?” Ashe’s voice floated back.
“Yes. And it can’t have been gone long either.” He was basing all his deductions upon that lingering taint which had been imparted by a warm body to the dusty earth within the small shelter.
“No tracks?”
“They wouldn’t show in this stuff.” Travis scuffed his foot across a small fan of sand- No, no tracks. But there could only be one place from which the hidden watcher had come —the buildings half concealed by the creeping dunes. He stood up, walked forward, his hand swinging very close to the weapon at his belt. The sense of danger ahead was very strong.
Ashe was before the midpoint of the buildings—there was really only one as they could see now. Its two outlying wings were each connected by a low-lying, windowless passage to the main block. Travis was familiar with the effects of wind and blown-sand erosion upon rock outcrops. Here the same factors had been in operation to pit surfaces, round and polish away corners and edges, until the walls were like the dunes rising about them.
There were no windows—no visible doorways. But at the end of the wing before Travis there was a dip in a sand dune, breaking the natural line chiseled by the wind. It was a break unusual enough to catch his alerted attention.
“Over here,” he called softly, forgetting that the helmet com and not the air waves carried his voice. Slowly, with the caution of a stalker after wary game, he moved toward that break in the dune. There were no tracks, yet he was almost certain that the disturbance had been recent and made by the passage of something moving with a purpose-not just the result of a vagary of the night wind.
He rounded the pointing finger of one dune which now arose at his shoulder height against the wall, and knew he was right. The sand had obviously been thrust back—blocked loosely on either side—as if some door had opened outward from the building, pushing the sand drift before it.
“Cover him!” Ashe’s shadow crossed the sun-drenched sand of the dune, met the other one cast by Ross. With the two time agents at his back, the Apache began a detailed inspection of that length of wall.
Although his eyes could detect no difference in that surface, his fingers did when he ran them along about waist level. There was a strip here, extending down to the ground, which was not of the same texture as the substance above and to the sides, But though he pressed, pulled, and applied his weight to move it in every way he could think to try, there was no yielding. He was sure that that portion could open, to cause the marks in the sand.
At last, getting down on his hands and knees, Travis crawled along, trying to force fingertips under at ground’s edge. And so he discovered a harsh tuft of hair protruding. Combined efforts of knife tip and fingers worked the wisp loose. It was coarse stuff, coarser than any animal’s he had ever seen, each separate hair enlarged to the size of half a dozen normal Terran specimens. And it was a gray-white in color, melting into the shade of the sand so it could not be distinguished against the dunes.
Having a greasy feel it clung to Travis’ fingers, and he did not really need the evidence of his nose to tell him that it was rankly odorous. He brought it back to Ashe, his distaste in handling it growing steadily. The latter put the trophy away in one of his belt pockets.
“Any chance of opening that?” Ashe indicated the hidden door in the wall.
“Not that I can see,” Travis returned. “It is probably secured on the inside.”
They studied the building dubiously. Behind its length, as far as they could judge, there was only a waste of sand dunes reaching out and out to the sky rim where the fire had played the night before. If there was any riddle to be solved, its answer lay inside this locked box and not in the desert countryside.
“Ross, you stay here. Travis, move on to the end of the wing. Stay there where you can see Ross—and me, as I go along the back.”
Ashe used the same care as the Apache had done, running his hands along the eroded surface, seeking any indication of another door which might possibly be forced. He went the entire length of the building and came back—with nothing to report.
“There were windows once and a door. But they were all walled up a long time ago, sealed tight now. We might pick out the sealing, given time and the right tools.”
Ross’s voice came through the helmet corns. “Any chance of getting in through the roof, chief?”
“If you’re game to try—up with you!”
Travis stood against the wall which refused to give up its secrets and Ross used him as a ladder, mounting to the roof.
He moved inward and the two left on the ground lost sight of him. But on Ashe’s orders he made a running commentary of what he saw through the com.
“Not much sand—you’d think there would be more. . . . Hulloo!” There was an eagerness in that sudden exclamation. “This w something! Round plates set in circles all over— about the size of quarters. They are solid and you can’t move them.”
“Metal?” Ashe asked.
“Nooo . . .” the reply was hesitant. “Seem more like some kind of glass, only they aren’t transparent.”
“Windows?” suggested Travis.
“Too small,” Ross protested. “But there are a lot of them— all over. Wait!” The urgency in that last cry alerted both the men on the ground. “Red—they’re turning red!”
“Get out of there! Jump!” Ashe’s order barked loudly in all their helmets.
Ross obeyed without question, landing with a paratrooper’s practiced roll on one of the dune crests. The others scrambled to join him, all their attention focused on the roof of the sealed building. Perhaps something in the sun-repelling qualities of their helmets enabled them to see those rays as faint reddish lines cutting up from the roof into the reach of the sky.
The skin on Travis’ bare hands tingled with a pins-and-needles sensation as if the circulation in it had been arrested and was not coming back to duty. Ross scrambled up out of the sand and shook himself vigorously.
“What in the world is going on?” There was an unusual note of awe in his tone.
“I think—some fireworks to discourage you. I believe that we may assume whoever lives in there is definitely not at home to curious callers. Not only that, but the householder has some mighty unpleasant gadgets to back up his desire for privacy. Probably just as well we didn’t find his, her, or its front door unlocked.” Travis could no longer see those thin fiery lines. Either the power had been shut off, or the rays were now past the point of detection by human eyes, even with the aid of the helmet. That coarse hair, the repulsive odor—and now this. Somehow the few facts did not add properly. The hair, of course, could have been left by a watchdog, or the equivalent on this particular planet of a watchdog. That supposition would also fit with the low entrance into the building. But a watchdog that kept to carefully chosen cover, the best in the whole landscape, and stayed to spy, maybe for hours, on the ship—? Those facts did not fit with the general nature of any animal he had ever known. Rather, that action matched with intelligence, and intelligence meant man.
“I believe they are nocturnal,” Ashe said suddenly. “That fits with all we’ve seen so far. This sun glare may be as painful for them as it is for us without helmets. But at night—“
“Going to sit up and watch what happens?” Ross asked.
“Not out in the open. Not until we know more.”
Silently Travis agreed to that. There was a furtiveness about the last night’s spying which made him wary. And to his mind this world was far more frightening and sinister than the fueling port. Its very arid barrenness held a nebulous threat he had never sensed in the desert lands of his own planet.
They walked back to the ship, climbed the ladder, and were glad to close the port upon the dead white glare, to unhelm in the blue glow of the interior.
“What did you see?” Ashe asked Renfry.
“Murdock taking a high dive from the roof and then some red lines, very faint, shooting up from all over its surface. What did you do, push the wrong doorbell?”
“Probably waked somebody up. I don’t think that’s a very healthy place to go visiting. Lord—what a stink!” Ross ended, sniffing. Ashe held on his palm the tuft of hair and the odor rising from it was not only noticeable in the usual scentless atmosphere of the ship, but penetrating in its foulness.
They carried the lock into the small cubbyhole which might once have been the quarters of the commander and where Ashe had assembled his materials for study. In spite of the noisome effluvia of their trophy, they gathered around as he pulled the tuft apart hair by hair and spread it flat.
“Those hairs—so thick! Renfry marveled.
“If they are hairs. What I wouldn’t give for a lab!” Ashe placed a clear sheet of the aliens’ writing materials to imprison the lock.
“That smell—“ Travis, remembering how he had handled the noisome find, rubbed his hand back and forth across his thigh.
“Yes?” Ashe prompted.
“Well—I think that comes from just plain filthiness, sir. Or, part might be because the hairs are from a creature we don’t know.”
“Alien metabolism.” Ashe nodded. “Each Terran race has a distinctive body odor far more apparent to a man of another than to one of his own breed. But what are you getting at, Travis?”
“Well, if that does come from some—some man” he used the term because he had no other— “and not from an animal, then I’d say he was living in a regular sty. And that means either a pretty low type of primitive, or a degenerate.”
“Not necessarily,” Ashe pointed out. “Bathing entails water, and we haven’t seen any store of water here.”
“Sure, there’s no water we can see. But they must have some. And I think—“ Only there were few proofs he could offer to bolster his argument. “Might be. Anyway, tonight we’ll watch and see what does come out of the booby-trapped box over there.”
The napped during the day, Renfry in the control cabin as usual. None of them could see any reason why the ship had earthed on this sand pile, and the very barrenness of the place reinforced Renfry’s belief that this could not be their ultimate goal. It was only logic that the ship must have originally voyaged from some center of civilization—and this was not that.
The glare of the sun was gone and dusk clothed the mounds of creeping sand when they gathered again at the door in the outer skin to watch the building and the stretch of ground lying between them and that enigmatic block.
“How long do you suppose we’ll have to wait?” Ross shifted position.
“No time at all,” Ashe answered softly. “Look!”
From behind the dune which marked the low doorway Travis had discovered, there showed a very faint reddish glow.
HAD THE flaming display of the late evening before been in progress, they could not have spotted that. And now, in the dusk, with the shapes of the dunes distorting vision, it was difficult to see. Ashe was counting slowly under his breath. As he reached “twenty” the glow vanished with a sudden completeness which suggested the slamming of a door.
Travis strained his eyes, watching the end of that masking dune. If the thing which had spied upon them the night before was coming back to the old position, the shortest route to take would cross that point. But he had seen nothing so far.
There was a very thin sound, but that came from the opposite direction, a whispering from the open country. Then a pat of arid air touched his cheek, wind rising with the coming of night. And the whispering must be the moving of sand grains under its first tentative stir.
“We could ambush one scout,” Ross observed wistfully. “Their senses may be more acute than ours. Certainly if they are nocturnal, their night sight will be. And we can believe that they are already suspicious of us. Also, I’d like to know a little more about the nature of something or someone I’m going to lay a trap for.”
Travis only half heard Ashe. Surely he had seen a flicker of movement out there. Yes! His fingers closed on the older man’s arm in swift warning pressure. A blob of shadow had slipped from the end of the dune, skidded quickly into hiding, heading straight for the hollow behind the upended block of masonry. Was the spy now settled in for a long spell of duty in that improvised observation post? Or tonight would he, she or it venture closer to the ship?
The dusk deepened and with the coming of true dark the tongues of fire danced in the sky. Though the light afforded by that display was not steady, it did illuminate the smoother ground immediately about the globe. Any attack on the part of the unknown natives could be sighted by the men on guard above. The Terrans knew, though, that with the ladder up and open port some dozen feet removed from ground level, they had little to fear from any actual attempt to force their stronghold. Unless the creatures out there possessed weapons able to cut down the distance advantage.
“Close the inner-lock door,” Ashe said suddenly. “Well shut off the ship’s light, make it hard for them to spot us here.” With the lock shut and the blue light of the ship blanked out, they lay flat on the floor of the cramped space, trying not to hamper each other, awaiting the next move on the part of the lurker or lurkers below. “Something there,” Ross warned softly. “To the left—right at the end of that last dune.”
The lurker was impatient. A blob of dark, which might have been a head, moved against the white sand. Wind sang around the ship, gathering up grit. The men snapped down their helmets in protection against that. But those whirls of sand devils did not appear to bother the native.
“I think there are more than one of them,” Travis said. “That last movement came too far away from the first I sighted.”
“Could they be getting ready to rush us?” Ross wondered.
Oddly enough, none of the Terrans had drawn his blasters. The perch was so high above the surface over -which the attackers must advance, and the smooth rounding of the un-climbable globe was so apparent, that both gave them a sense of security.
The dark thing made a dart toward the globe. And it either ran bent almost double—or else on all fours! One of the startling jumps of the sky’s light spotlighted the form, and the watchers exclaimed.
Man or animal? The thing had four long limbs, and two more projections at mid-body. The head was round, down-held as it darted, so that they could not sight any features. But the whole body was matted with hair—dark hair, not light to match the tuft Travis had found. There was no sign of clothing, nor did the creature appear to be carrying weapons.
For a single moment that flitting shadow paused, facing the ship. Then it scurried back into hiding among the dunes once more. There was another flash of movement which the watchers could hardly detect, as this time the body of the runner merged in color with the sand about it.
“That might have been your hair shedder,” remarked Ashe. “It certainly was lighter in color than the first one.”
“They come in different colors—but all about the same size,” Ross added. “And what in the world are they?”
“Nothing in our world.” Ashe was definite about that. “We can believe, though, that they are interested in this ship and that they are trying to find some way of getting to it undetected.”
“The way they move,” Travis said, “as if they feared attack. .. . They must have enemies.”
“Enemies to be associated with such a ship as this?” Ashe jumped to the point with his usual speed of understanding. “Yes, that could be. Only I don’t believe that there has been a ship here for a long, long time.” “Memories passed down—“
“Memories would mean they are men!” Travis was not aware until he voiced those words out of a sense of outrage that he abhorred association with those half-seen creatures in the dunes.
“To themselves they may be men,” Ashe returned, “and we might represent monsters. All relative, son. At any rate, I believe that they do not regard us with kindness.”
“What I wouldn’t give for a flashlight now,” Ross said wistfully. “I’d like to catch one of them in a beam for a really good look.”
They were treated to a wealth of half glimpses of the natives moving through the sand hills as the minutes crawled on, but never did they have a chance really to study one.
“I think they’re working their way around to come in behind the globe—on our blind side,” Travis offered, having traced at least two in that possible direction.
“Won’t do them any good—this is the only opening.” Ross sounded close to smug.
But the thought of the natives coming in behind the globe could not be accepted so easily by Travis. Every buried instinct of hunter and desert warrior argued that such a chance threatened his own security. Reason told him, though, that there was only this one door to the ship, and that it was easily defended. They need only close it and nothing could reach them.
“What was the reason for this port anyway?” Ross pursued the big question a few seconds later. “There must have been some purpose for stopping here. Do we have to find something —or do something—before we can leave again?”
That thought had ridden all their minds, but Ross had brought fear into the open. And what if the solution lay over there, in that building to which there was no entrance—unless one could be forced at night? A nighttime entrance guarded by the flitting hairy things which could see in the dark and whose home hunting-ground it was. . . .
“The building—?” Travis made a question of it. He felt Ashe stir beside him.
“Might just be,” the other assented. “If we are hung up here much longer, we can try burning our way in by day. These blasters pack a pretty hefty charge when set at maximum.”
Travis’ hand shot out, clamped down on Ashe’s shoulder. His helmet was locked against the grit drift in the wind, but his hand had been resting on the edge of the door casing and had caught that thud-thud transmitted by the outer skin of the globe. Below the bulge which kept the Terrans from viewing the ground directly under the curve of the side, something was beating on the metallic outer casing of the vessel— for what purpose and with what result, he could not guess. He groped for Ashe’s hand, drew it out beside his own and pressed the palm flat to get the same message.
“Pounding, I think.” He realized that the messages in helmet corns could not reach the ears of lurkers below. “But why?”
“Trying to hole the ship?” Ross hung over the other two. “They’ve no chance of getting through the hull—or have they?” His concluding flash of anxiety was shared by the rest. What did they know of the resources of the natives?
Coiled beside Travis was the ladder. Dare he push that out, climb over to see what the night creepers were doing below? The thud of the pounding appeared to him to be taking on both speed and intensity. Suppose by some miracle, or the use of some unknown tool, the hairy things could pierce the outer skin of the globe? Then there would be no possible hope of escape from this forgotten desert.
He began to edge the ladder forward. Ashe made a grab which the younger man fended away. “We have to see,” he said, “we have to!” Ross and Ashe moved together and in that narrow space blocked each other long enough for Travis to squeeze through the door, swing over the lip and climb down the length of his own body. Then he felt the ladder catch tight and knew that the other two were preventing its descent to ground level.
Gripping the rungs tightly, holding his body as close as he could to the surface of the ship, Travis looked down. The play of red flashes against the sky furnished a weird light for the activity below, for there was activity. He had been right. The hairy things had crept in unseen from behind the ship, and a group of them were now clustered about the base of the globe. But what they were doing he could not make out in the constant flickering of the light. Then one reared from its usual quadrupedal stance, and raised its forearms over its hump of head. The appendages at its midsection gave a twitch, writhed out in a manner which suggested boneless-ness, and clasped tight to the ship.
The creature gave a bound into the air and then hung, its hind feet now a foot or so off the ground. Apparently it held on by the grip of waist tentacles against the globe, while the fists or paws on its forelimbs pounded vigorously against that surface. There was something about that hitching climb, for it gave another squirm upward as Travis watched, which spelled for him a purposeful malignancy.
Now a second creature had hitched itself by midsection tentacles to the hull and was beginning to ascend. Travis could sight no weapons, nothing but those steadily pounding fists. But neither did he have any wish to battle the slow climbers. He reported to Ashe and was ordered back into the ship. They closed the port, took the precaution of sealing it as if making ready for flight, and then loosened their helmets.
Neither the pounding nor the sound of the climbers could reach them now. But Travis did not believe that the creatures had ceased their efforts to win into the ship, futile as those efforts might seem. The Terrans climbed to the control cabin to watch the outer world on the limited view of the vision plate. Renfry looked puzzled.
“I don’t get it. I still say that I’m sure this isn’t the end of the flight. But I can’t tell you why, or the why of this port, either. If the answer lies in that building, you’ll have to crack it open. But we may have a better cracker than just those hand blasters.”
Ross caught his meaning first. “The ship’s guns!”
“Might be.”
“Can we use them?” Ashe wanted to know.
“Well, they’re less a top secret than the rest of the stuff around here. Remember this?” He pressed a lever. Lights winked, that word from a vanished language spoke out of the thin air. It was all as it had been on their exploration of the ship.
“And you can fire them?”
“The chief—my chief—doped out that this does that”— Renfry fingered another switch he did not depress. “As far as I deduce, one of those king-sized blasters should just about clip across the roof of your strongbox. We can try it on for size any time you’re ready.”
But Ashe was rubbing his jaw in that absent-minded way which meant he had not yet come to a decision. “Too much guessing in all of this. We don’t know that we have to crack that place open in order to lift ship again. In fact, if we did crack it and couldn’t find what we needed—we wouldn’t be any better off. These natives must depend upon that shelter for their lives. Break it open and they’re just as dead as if we mowed them down with blasters. They may not be anything or anybody we’d care to live with, but this is their world and we’re intruders. I’d like to wait a little before I try anything as drastic as blowing up the place.”
None of them was inclined to push him into action. Outside the flames beat into the night sky, and the white of the moon they had noted the night before was marred by a more yellow gleam from a smaller satellite trailing behind the larger. But of the activity of the dune skulkers the screen gave them no clue.
That came not by sight but by a startling shifting of the ship itself. How had the creatures outside achieved that movement? Perhaps, Travis imagined, by the sheer weight of many creeping bodies plastered to the hull. The globe canted from its landing position. And maybe that triggered the flying controls. For the now-familiar warnings of a take-off alerted them all.
“No!” Renfry protested, “we can’t—not yet—not until we know why.”
But the engines the Terrans did not understand, and could not hope to control, had no ears for that feeble defiance. Perhaps only a time limit had governed their visit, a full day and night of planetary time. Or maybe it was the strange attack of the hairy things.
And those creatures—would they free themselves in time, drop to the ground as the ship lifted, warned by the vibration? Or would they cling in stupid concentration upon their attack, to be carried out into the freezing blackness of the eternal space night? The unwilling crew of the ship followed the old routine of strap down and wait for the wrench of blast-off, the break into hyper-space. Again they were being carried into the unknown with perhaps a long voyage ahead.
But it was not to be the same this time. Travis noticed the first departure from the usual routine. The take-off was not so severe—or else he had adjusted to it far better than he ever had before. He did not black out completely, nor did he have to undergo that terrible twisting. And he heard Renfry’s voice exclaim in wonder:
“I don’t think we went into hyper! What happened?”
They were up and about, watching the vision plate of the ship. Renfry’s guess was right. For instead of the complete blankness which closed in upon them when they made a big inter-system jump, they saw now the receding orb of the desert planet, its face a mass of shifting color as they withdrew from it.
“Must be heading for another planet in this same system,” Ashe supplied one answer. And, as the hours wore on, they believed that was the right one. The ship now appeared to be on course for the third planet of that unknown sun.
“Do we visit them all?” inquired Ross with some of his old flippancy. “If so— why? Milk delivery?”
Three days went by, four. They ate the alien food and moved restlessly about the ship, unable to pay attention for any length of time to anything but the screen in the control cabin. Then on the sixth day, came the signals of an approaching landing.
On the vision plate the goal showed a vivid blue-green, patched here and there with orange-red. It was arresting in its splashes of contrasting color. They had drawn lots for the occupancy of the three seats in the control cabin, and the odd man to be relegated to the bunk below. So Travis now lay alone and unseeing in the heart of the throbbing globe, wondering what new future they must confront.
The ship set down this time in the planet’s day. The Apache freed himself from his straps, stumbled in the return clutch of gravity to the ladder and climbed up to share the others’ view of the new world.
“No-1”
The ruined towers standing starkly to portion off the expanse of the fueling port had speared as straightly into the sky—but they had not been like this one. Against a background of cloudless, delicate pink, was an opaline dome, curved in flowing lines which spiraled up in turn to a fragile, frosting lace. It was impossible to believe that this was the result of man’s construction.
Torn lace. As he studied those lifting spans, Travis could mark the breaks which spoiled the perfect pattern. Yet in spite of that damage there was still the fantastic beauty of foam and light and play of rainbow color. It rose out of dark foliage with a tinge of blue which was not a part of the green of his own world’s leaves.
And those leafy branches stirred almost languidly as if light breezes pulled at them, showing here and there a touch of other colors. Fruit? Flowers?
Renfry brought their attention away from the scene which was so ethereal as to seem unreal. “Look!”
He was on his feet before the main control board, his hands grasping the back of the pilot’s seat so tightly that the muscles stood out on his taut arms. For the board had taken on life. They had witnessed the flickers of light which had heralded the readying of the ship’s guns. This was something else—a line of small winks of brilliance flowing unevenly down the rows of levers and buttons. And where each flashed a lever arose, a button sank or snapped above the level of the board. There was a final burst of light from a spot Travis could have covered with his thumb. And there a lid opened, a cavity beneath disgorged a small, coin-shaped bit of red metal which tinkled out, to roll across the floor.
Renfry came to life, dove to catch it up. He held it in his hand as if the disk was something very precious indeed.
“Home port!” He swung about to face them, his eagerness lighting a flame in his eyes. “This is the home port! And I think I am holding the course tape!”
There could be no other explanation for what they had just witnessed. The journey plotted by a dying man had come to its full conclusion. That small button of metal Renfry had closed fist upon, held now not only the secret of their arrival— but of their return. If they were ever to regain their own world, it would be because they had solved the workings of that disk.
Yet Travis’ eyes went from the technician’s clenched hand and what it held, back to the vision plate. The picture there was of a. gentle wind lifting flowering branches about a tower of opal against a sky of palest rose. And the immediate future seemed at that moment more entrancing than the more distant one.
Perhaps Ashe shared that feeling at the moment. For the senior time agent moved toward the inner ladder. He paused at the well and looked back over his shoulder, to say with a strange simplicity:
“Let us go out—now.”
IP THERE had once been a wide landing strip here, the space was long since swallowed by a cover of green. From the mass crushed by the landing of the ship came the scent of growing things, some spicy, some rank.
The Terrans had not worn their helmets, nor did they need to here. A sunlight no stronger than that of early summer in the temperate zone of their own world greeted them. And there was no burden of sand in the soft wind which whirled flower petals and torn leaves from the wreckage under their feet.
Now that they had a wider view than that offered by the vision plate, they noted other breaks in the luxuriance of growing things. The opal tower with its fantastic form was flanked by another building as strange and as far removed from the style of its companion as the desert world was from this green one. For the massive blocks of dull red, geometric in their solidity, could not have sprung from the same creative imagination—or perhaps from even the same race or age.
And beyond that was another, with knife-sharp gables and narrow windows secretive in its gray walls. It had a pointed roof of some rough material, dull under the sun, and gave rootage in places to vines, even a small tree. But again it was not of the same vintage as the fairylike dome or the massive blocks.
“Why—?” Boss’s head turned slowly as he looked from one of those totally dissimilar buildings to the next. All were tall, dwarfing the globe, and all had their lower stories hidden by the vegetation.
Travis thought back to a past which seemed a little blurred by all which had happened lately. There were places on his own world where a Zuni village in miniature stood beside a Sioux lodge or an Apache wickiup.
“A museum?” He ventured the only explanation he could see.
Ashe’s face was pale under his fading tan. He stared raptly from dome to block, block to sharply accented gables. “Or else a capital where each embassy built in their home style.”
“And now it is all dead,” Travis added. For that was true. This was as deserted as the fueling port.
“Capital perhaps—of a galactic empire. What there is to be learned here! A treasure house—“ Ashe was breathing fast. “We may have the treasures of a thousand worlds to uncover here.”
“And who will ever know—or care?” Ross asked. “Not that I’m not ready to go and look for them.”
Travis tensed. There was a stirring in the mass of tangled vegetation where the grounding of the globe had flattened some of the fern trees, bearing with them others tied together by vines. He watched that shaking of bruised and broken branches. Something alive was working its way from a point about a hundred yards away from the ship toward the wall of still-standing plants, its progress marked by that movement. And the fugitive thing must be fairly large by the amount of displacement.
Had that crawling unseen thing been injured in the crash of the tree ferns? Was it now dragging itself off to die? Travis listened, striving to hear more than the rustling of the leaves. But if the thing was hurt, it made no complaint. Animal? Or—something else? Something as alien as the dune lurkers, more than animal, yet different from man as they knew man?
“It’s in cover now,” breathed Ross. “Couldn’t have been too hurt or it wouldn’t have moved so lively.”
“I think we can believe that this world isn’t as empty as it might look to the first glance,” Ashe said a little dryly. “And what about those?”
“Those” came lightly, drifting across the torn clearing caused by the descent of the globe. They flapped gossamer wings once or twice to keep air-borne, but their attention was manifestly centered on the ship.
And what were they? Birds? Insects? Flying mammals? Travis could almost believe the four small creatures were a weird combination of all three species. Their long narrow wings, prismatic and close to transparent, resembled those of an insect. Yet they had bodies equipped with three legs, two smaller ones in front ending in there claw-shaped digits, one larger limb in back with even more pronounced talons. Their heads seemed to be set directly on their shoulders with no visible neck and were round at the top, narrowing to a curved beak, while their eyes—four of them!—protruded on short stalks, two in front and two in back. And their triangles of bodies were clothed in plushy fur of a pale and frosted blue.
Slowly, in a solemn, silent procession, they drifted toward the ship. The second in line broke out of formation, dipped groundward. Its hind claws found anchorage on a stub of broken branch and its wings folded together above its back as might those of a Terran butterfly.
The two last in line flapped back and forth across the open port twice and then wheeled, flew off, mounting into the sky to clear the treetops. But the leader came on, until it hung, beating wings now and then to maintain altitude, directly before the entrance of the ship.
It was impossible to read any expression in those stalked eyes, a brilliant blue. But none of the four Terrans felt any repulsion or alarm as they had upon their encounter with the nocturnal desert people. Whatever the flyer was, they could not believe that it was either aggressive or a possible danger to them.
Renfry expressed their common reaction to the creature first:
“Funny little beggar, isn’t he? Like to see him closer. If they’re all the same as him here, we don’t have to worry.”
Why the technician should refer to the winged thing as “he” was obscure. But the creature was attractive enough to hold their concentrated interest. Ross snapped his fingers and held out his hand in welcome.
“Here, boy,” he coaxed.
Those brilliant bits of blue winked as the eye stalks moved, the wings beat, and the flyer approached the port. But not close enough for the Terrans to touch. It hung there, suspended in mid-air for a long moment. Then with a flurry of beating wings, sparking rainbows, it mounted skyward, its partner taking off from the brush below at the same moment to join it. A few seconds later they vanished as if they had never been.
“Do you suppose it is intelligent?” Ross watched after the vanished flyer, his disappointment mirrored on his usually impassive face.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ashe replied. “Renfry,” he spoke to the technician, “you have your journey tape now. Can you reset it?”
“I don’t know. Wish I had a manual—at least some type of guide. Do you suppose you can find such a thing here?”
“Why are you in such a big hurry to leave, chief? We only got here and it looks like a pretty good vacation spot to me.” Ross raised his head a little to eye the dome where opal lights played under the sun’s rays.
“That is just why,” Ashe replied quietly. “There are too many temptations here.”
Travis understood. To Ashe the appeal of those waiting buildings, of the knowledge which they might contain, must be almost overpowering. They could postpone work on the ship, delay and delay, fascinated by this world and its secrets. He knew the same pull, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Before it trapped them all, they must struggle against that enveloping desire to plunge into the green jungle, slash a path to the opal dome and see for themselves what wonders it housed.
Ashe was sorely tempted. And because he was the man he was, he must be fighting that temptation now, believing that if he once plunged wholeheartedly into exploration, he might not be able to stop. Also Renfry was offering them an excuse to do just that by wishing for some aid in the problem of the tape.
An hour later the three of them did leave the ship, Renfry remaining in charge there. Using the lowest beam of the blasters, they cut a path into the woods. Travis picked up a flower head. Five wide petals, fluted, crinkled a little at the tips, were a deep cream in color, shading orange at the heart. Resting on his palm, those petals began to move visibly, closing until he held a bud instead of a flower. He could not toss away the blossom. Its color was too arresting, its spicy scent appealing. He worked the short stem into one of the latches of a belt pouch, where, the heat of his hand removed, the flower opened once again. Nor did it fade or droop in spite of the shortness of its stem.
Now, out of the direct rays of the sun, the Terrans found the air cool, moist, heavy with the odor of too luxuriant vegetation. Not that those odors were unpleasant—in fact, they were overpoweringly good. Spicy scents warred with perfumes and the sharper smell of earth as their feet scuffed through the mass of dead leaves.
“Whew!” Ross waved his hand back and forth in front of his face as if to set up a reviving current of air. “Perfume factory—or what have you! I feel as if I were burrowing through about a ton of roses!”
Ashe appeared to have lost some of his somberness since they had left the ship. “With another of carnations thrown in,” he agreed. “I think I can detect”—he sniffed and then sneezed— “some cloves and maybe a few nutmegs into the bargain.”
Travis breathed shallowly. He had welcomed the mixture of perfumes minutes earlier. Now he found himself wishing instead to face a wind with a burden of sage and pinion in place of these cloying scents in their thick abundance.
The jungle grew clear up to the base of the opaline building. And the structure itself doomed far higher from ground level than had appeared true from the port of the ship. They worked their way along, hunting the entrance which must exist somewhere, unless the inhabitants had all worn wings. Oddly enough—though there were windows in plenty of stories above, many opening on small airy balconies—the first story showed no openings at all. Here were panels set in carved frames alternating with solid blocks of the opal material. And each panel was patterned in a gleaming mosaic, not forming any recognized design but merely wedding color to color in blending shades.
The Terrans cut their way through underbrush and reached the end of the wall. This was a large building occupying the space of a normal Terran city block. But around the comer they found the door, at the head of a curling ramp. The portal extended almost the full height of the first story and it was open, a carved archway. The frame was like frozen lace, with here a curve and there a point cracked and gone.
They hesitated. Save for the sighing of the wind, the sound of leaf against moving leaf, and some small twitters and squeaks from the unseen inhabitants of the green world which lay about the foot of the ramp, there was quiet—the quiet of the forgotten.
Ashe stepped onto the ramp, his soft-shod feet making not the slightest whisper. He climbed the gentle slope almost reluctantly, as if he did not really want to know what waited within.
Travis and Ross came behind. There were pockets of dead leaves caught in the curves of the ramp, and more drifted inside the open portal. They shuffled through them, to come into a hall which was breath-taking in its height. For it went up and up, until they were dizzied when they tried to follow its inner spiral with their eyes. And covering this expanse was the great opaline dome. The sunlight shone through it, painting rainbows on walls and on the ramp which climbed in a coil along the walls, serving other archways of fetter-lace on every floor level.
Here there was none of the brilliance of the outside mosaics.
The spread of color was sharply reduced to soft, faded shades, a dusky violet, a pallid green, a dusty rose, a cream. . . .
“... forty-eight—forty-nine—fifty! Fifty doors up and down that ramp at least.” Ross kept his voice to a murmur and yet that echo of a whisper carried eerily back to them. “Where do we start?” Now his tone was definitely higher, in challenge to that echo and the stillness which deadened it. Ashe left them, crossed the expanse of hall, both of his hands going out to a niche. When they hurried after him they discovered he was holding a small statuette carved of a dusky violet stone. Like the blue flyers, the subject bore baffling resemblances to living things they knew, and yet was in its totality alien.
“Man?” Ross wondered. “Animal?”
“Totem? God?” Travis added out of his own knowledge and background.
“All or any,” conceded Ashe. “But it is a work of art.” That they could all recognize, even if the subject still puzzled them. The figure was posed erect on two slender hind limbs, both of which terminated in feet of long, narrow, widely separated, clawed digits. The body, also slender but with a well-defined waist and broad shoulders, was closer to the human in general appearance, and there were two arms held aloft, as if the creature was about to leap outward into space. But it would have a better chance of survival in such a leap than those now passing the statuette from hand to hand. From the arms supported skin wing-flaps, extended on ribs not unlike those possessed by the Terran bats.
The head was the least human, almost grotesque in its ugliness to the time agents’ eyes. There were sharply pointed ears, overshadowing in their size and extension the rest of the features which were crowded together in the forepart of the face. Eyes were set deep within cavities under heavy skull ridges, the nose was simply a vertical slit above a mouth from which thin vestiges of lips curled back to display a usable and frightening set of fangs. And yet its ugliness was not repulsive, not horrifying. There was no clothing to suggest that it represented an intelligent being. Yet all of them were certain, the longer they examined the figure, that it had not been meant to portray an animal.
“To the touch the violet stone was smooth and cool, and when Travis held it out into a patch of light from the dome, the statuette sparkled as might a gem. The careful detail of the figure was in contrast to the abstraction of the murals on the outer walls, more akin to the carvings on the dome and about the doorways.
Ross drew his finger along the interior of the niche where Ashe had found the image. Dust piled there was pushed out to the floor. How long had the winged one stood there undisturbed?
Ashe carried it in the crook of his arm as they went on— not up the spiral of the ramp but into the first of the open doorways on ground level. But the room beyond was empty, lighted through slits high on the wall. They wandered on. More empty rooms, no trace of those who had once lived here—if this had been a dwelling place and not a building of public use. It was as if the inhabitants when they had at last withdrawn, had stripped it bare, forgetting only the little statue in the hall.
As they came from the last bare chamber, Ross sighed and leaned against the wall.
“I don’t know how you feel about it,” he announced. “But I’ve swallowed more than my share of dust this past hour or so. Also breakfast was a long time back. A coffee break right about now—providing we had the coffee—might be heartening.”
They didn’t have coffee, but they had come provided with the foam drink from the ship. So, sitting in a row across the ramp, they sucked in turn from containers of that and ate some of the “corn” cakes they carried for trail rations.
“Be good to have some fresh food,” Travis said wistfully. The rather monotonous diet from the ship’s stores satisfied hunger but did not appeal to his taste. He allowed himself the luxury of visualizing a sizzling steak and all that would accompany it back at the ranch.
“Maybe some on the hoof—out there.” Ross, his hands full, pointed with his chain toward the riot of greenery they could sight from their present perch. “We could go hunting. . . .”
“How about that?” Travis roused and turned to Ashe eagerly. “Dare we try?”
But the older agent did not warm to the suggestion. “I wouldn’t kill—until I knew what I was killing.”
For a moment Travis did not understand, and then the meaning of the rather ambiguous statement sank in. How could they be sure that the prey was not—man! Or man’s equivalent here? But he still wanted that steak, with a longing which gnawed at him.
“Do we climb?” Ross stood up. “This’ll be an all-day job right here, if we stick to it. I’d say the cupboard’s bare, though.”
“Maybe.” Ashe cradled his bat-thing in his arm. “We can take a quick look through the ground floor of that big red block to the north.”
They fought their way through the thick wall of brush, grass, tree and vine to the red building of the monolithic architecture. Here again they faced an open door, this one narrow as the window slits, as if grudging any entrance at all.
“I’d say the guys who built this one didn’t like their neighbors too well,” Ross commented. “This could make a pretty good fort if you had to have one. That domed place is wide open.”
“Different peoples. . . .” Travis had been a little in advance, lingering for a moment before he took the step which would bring him over the threshold. Once inside he froze.
“Trouble!” His blaster was out, ready to fire.
There was a wide hall before him, as there had been in the dome building. But where that had been clean and bare, this one was different.
A series of partitions some five or six feet high cut back and forth, chopping the floor space into a crazy quilt of oddly shaped and sized spaces, with little chance to see from one to the next. But that did not bother Travis so much as the message recorded by his nose.
The odor of the night creatures had been something like this. It was the taint of a lair—a lair long in use. It smelled of decay, alien body reek, dried and rotted vegetation and animal matter. Something denned here, used this place freely for some time.
It was the eagerness of that strange hunter which betrayed it. A low, throaty murmur, such as a cat might utter when intent upon unsuspecting prey, carried across the shadows.
Travis spun around. He saw the hunched shape balancing on top of a partition, knew it was about to launch straight for him. And he pressed the firing button of the blaster as he brought it up.
The attacker was caught in mid-air. A terrible yowl of rage, and pain, echoed and re-echoed about the massive walls. A flailing limb, well provided with claws, raked across Travis’ body from the waist down, sending him reeling from the door into the greater gloom. Just then Ross and Ashe burst in, to center the full beams of their weapons on the rolling, caterwauling thing making a second attempt at Travis.
Whatever it was, the creature possessed abnormal vitality. It was not until those blast rays met and crossed in its body that it lay still. Travis scrambled to his feet, shaken. He knew that if he had not had that split second of warning, he would be dead—or so badly mauled he would have longed for death.
He limped back toward the door, his thigh and leg feeling numb from the force of that smashing stroke. But under his questing hand the fabric of the suit was untorn, and there seemed to be no open wound.
“Did it get you?” Ashe came to meet him, pushing aside his hands to look at his body. Travis, still shaken, winced under the exploring probe of the other’s fingers.
“Just bruised. What was it?”
Ross arose from a gingerly inspection of the remains. “After the blasting we gave it, your guess is as good as mine. But it is sure sudden death on six legs—and that’s no overstatement.”
The blasters had not left too much to identify, that was true. But the thing had been six-legged, furred, and carnivorous—and it was about eight feet long with fangs and claws in proportion to the size.
“Sabertooth, local variety,” Ross remarked.
Ashe nodded to the outer world. “I suggest we make a strategic withdrawal. These may be nocturnal, too, but I’d rather not tangle with another in the jungle.”
“DID YOU think we’d find no nasty surprises?” Ross drummed on the mess table with his scarred hand, his eyes showing amusement, even if his lips did not curve into a smile. “Let me share with you a small drop of good common sense, fella. It’s just when things look the smoothest that there’s a big trap waiting ahead on the trail.”
Travis rubbed his bruised thigh. The other’s humor grated. And since he had had time to consider the late battle, he began to suspect that he had been a little too sure of himself when he had entered the red-walled building. That didn’t make him any more receptive to Ross’s implied criticism, though—or what he chose to believe was criticism.
“You know”—Renfry came in from the corridor talking to Ashe—“those blue flying things came back twice while you were gone. They flew almost up to the port, but not inside.”
Travis, recalling the claws with which those were equipped, grunted. “Might be just as well,” he commented.
“Then,” Renfry said, paying no attention to his interruption, “just before you came back I found this—inside the outer lock.”
“This” was clearly no natural curiosity such as might have been deposited on their doorstep by some freak of the wind. Three green leaves possessing yellow ribs and veins had been pinned together with two-inch thorns into a cornucopia holder, a holder filled with oval, pale-green objects about the size of a thumbnail.
They could be fruit, seeds, a form of grain. Oddly enough, Travis was sure they were food of a sort. And plainly, too, they were an offering—a gesture of friendship—an overture on the part of the blue flyers. Why? For what purpose?
“You didn’t see a flyer leave it?” questioned Ashe.
“No. I went to the port—and there it was.”
One of the seed things had dropped out of the packet, rolled across the table. Travis put a fingertip to it and the globe promptly burst as does an over-ripe grape when pressed. Without thinking, he raised his sticky finger to his mouth. The taste was tart, yet sweet, with the fresh cleanness of mint or some Like herb.
“Now you’ve done it,” observed Ross. “Well, we can watch while you break out in purple spots, or turn all green and shrivel up.” His words were delivered in his usual amused tone, but there was a heat beneath that Travis did not understand. Unless once more Ross believed the Apache had taken too much on himself in that unthinking experiment.
“Good flavor,” he returned with stolid defiance. And deliberately he chose another, transferring it to his mouth and breaking the skin with his teeth. The berry, or seed, or whatever it was, did not satisfy his desire for fresh meat, but it was not a concentrate or something out of one of the aliens’ cans and the taste was good.
“That is enough!” Ashe swept up the leaf bag and its contents. “We’ll have no more unnecessary chances taken.”
But when Travis experienced no ill effects from his sampling, they shared out the rest of the gift at the evening meal, relishing the flavor after their weeks of the ship’s supplies.
“Maybe we can trade for some more of these,” Ross had begun almost idly. Then he gave a start and sat straighter in the uncomfortable mess seat.
Ashe laughed. “I wondered just when that possibility was going to dawn on you.”
Ross grinned. “You may well ask. You’d think nothing stuck long between my ears, wouldn’t you? All right—so we set up as traders again. I never did get a good chance to try out my techniques when we were on the Beaker run—too many interruptions.”
Travis waited patiently for them to explain. This was another of those times when their shared experiences from the past shut him out, to remind him that only chance had brought him into this adventure, after all.
“There ought to be some things among all that stuff we routed out to study which should attract attention.” Ross wriggled around Ashe to leave the mess cabin. “I’ll see.”
“Trade, eh?” Renfry nodded. “Heard how you boys on the time runs play that angle.”
“Its’ a good cover, one of the best there is. A trader moves around without question in a primitive world. Any little strangeness in his speech, his customs, his dress, can be legitimately accounted for by his profession. He is supposed to come from a distance, his contacts don’t expect him to be like their fellow tribesmen. And a trader picks up news quickly. Yes, trade was a cover the project used from the first.” “You were a trader, back in time?” Travis asked.
Ashe appeared willing enough to talk of his previous ventures. “D’you ever hear of the Beaker Folk? There were traders for you—had their stations from Greece to Scotland during the early Bronze Age. That was my cover, in early Britain, and again in the Baltic. You can really be fascinated by such a business. My first partner might have retired a millionaire—or that period’s equivalent to one.” Ashe paused, his face closing up again, but Travis asked another question.
“Why didn’t he?”
“The Reds located our station in that era. Blew it up. And themselves into the bargain because they gave us our fix on their own post when they did that.” He might have been discussing some dry fact in a report—until you saw his eyes.
Travis knew that Ross was dangerous. He thought now that Ashe probably could surpass his young subordinate in ruthless action, was there any need to do so. Ross came back, his hands full. He set out his selections for their appraisal.
There was a length of material—perhaps intended for a scarf—which they had found in one of the crew lockers. A small thread of a vivid purple barred the green length, both colors bright enough to rivet attention. Then there were four pieces of carved wood, a coral-shaded wood with flecks of gold. They were stylized representations of fern fronds or feathers, as far as the Terrans could tell, and Ashe believed they might be men in some game, though playing board and other pieces had not been located. Lastly was the plaque which could so mysteriously reproduce a picture of home for the one holding it. That Ashe pushed aside with a shake of head.
“That’s too important. We needn’t be too generous the first time, anyway. After all, we’ve only a small offering to top. Try the scarf and two of these.”
“Put them in the port?” Ross asked.
“I’d say no. No use encouraging visitors. Use your judgment in picking out some place below.”
Ashe might have told Ross to take the initiative in that venture, but he followed him out. Travis, his leg having given him a sudden severe twinge, retired to his bunk, to try out the healing properties that resting pad had to offer in the circumstances. He stripped off his suit, stretched out with a grimace or two, and relaxed.
He must have gone to sleep under the narcotic influence of the healing jelly which seeped out and over him, triggered by his need. When he roused, it was to find Ross pulling at him.
“What’s the matter?”
Ross allowed him no time for protest. “Ashe’s gone!” His face might be schooled and impassive, but little cold devils looked out of his eyes.
“Gone?” The drowsiness induced by the healing of the bunk did not make quick thinking easy. “Gone where?” “That’s what we have to find out. Get moving!” Travis, his bruises and aches gone, dressed, buckled the arms belt Ross pushed into his hands. “Let’s have the story.”
Ross was already in the corridor, every line of his taut body expressing his impatience.
“We were out there—fixed up a trading stone. There were a couple of flyers watching us and we waited to see if they would come down. When they didn’t, Ashe said we had better take cover, as if we were going on to the buildings. Ashe detoured around a fallen tree—I saw him go. I tell you— I saw him! Then he wasn’t there—or anywhere!” Ross was clearly shaken well out of his cultivated imperviousness.
“A ground trap?” Travis gave the first answer probable as he followed Ross to the air lock. Renfry was there making fast two lengths of silky cord barely coarser then knitting yarn but which, as they had discovered earlier, possessed a surprising strength. So hitched to the ship, they could prowl the vicinity and yet leave a guide to their whereabouts.
“I crawled over that ground inch by inch,” Ross said between set teeth. “Not so much as a worm or ant hole showing. He was there one minute—the next he wasn’t!”
Making fast their lines and leaving Renfry as lookout, they descended into the trampled and blasted area about the globe where the green was now withering under a sun not far from setting. Darkness would complicate their search. They had better move swiftly, find some clue before they were so baffled.
Ross took the lead, balancing along a fallen tree trunk to its crown of dropping fern fronds, now crushed and broken. “He was right here.” ,
Travis swung down into the crushed foliage. The sharp smell of sticky sap, as well as the heavy scents of flowers and leaves, was cloying. But Ross was right. The vegetation on the ground had been pulled away in a wide sweep, and there was no sign that the dank earth beneath had been disturbed. He sighted a round-toed track, but it was twin to the ones he was leaving in the mold and could have been pressed there by either Ashe or Ross. But, because it was the only possible trace, he turned in the direction it pointed.
A moment or two later, at the very edge of the clearing Ross had made during his search, Travis saw something else. There was another tree trunk lying there, the remains of a true forest giant. And it had not been brought down by the landing of the ship, but had lain there long enough for soil and fallen leaves to build up about it, to grow a skin or red-capped moss or fungi.
Across that moss there were now two dark marks, ragged scars, suggesting that someone or something had clawed for a desperate hold against irresistible force. Ashe? But how had he been captured without Ross’s seeing or hearing his struggles?
Travis vaulted the tree trunk. There was his confirmation— another footprint deep in the mold. But beyond it-nothing—absolutely nothing! And no living creature could have continued along that stretch of soft earth without leaving a trace. From this point it did appear that Ashe had vanished into thin air.
Air! Not on the ground but above it was where they would have to search. Travis called to Ross. There were tall trees about them now, trees with twenty feet or more of smooth bole before their first fern branches broke from the trunks. The wind rustled there, but they could sight no movement that was not normal, hear no sounds aloft.
Then one of the blue flyers came along, hovering over Travis, watching him with all four of its stalked eyes. The flyers—had they taken Ashe? He couldn’t believe that. A man of Ashe’s weight and strength, undoubtedly struggling hard into the bargain—at least the scrapping on the moss suggested that—could not have been airborne unless by a large flock of the blue creatures working together. But the Apache believed as completely as if he had witnessed k, that Ashe had been taken away either through the air or along a road of treetops.
“How did they get him up?” Ross puzzled. He appeared willing to accept Travis’ idea, but the Apache, in turn, was forced to agree such a maneuver would be difficult. “And getting up,” the time agent continued, “where in the world did they take him?”
“This lies in the opposite direction from the three nearest buildings,” Travis pointed out. “To transport a prisoner might force them to travel in a direct line to their own quarters-speed would matter more than concealment.”
“Which means a direct strike out into the jungle.” Ross eyed the wilderness of trees, vines and brush with disfavor. “Well, there’s one little trick—let me have your belt. This was something they showed us in basic training—good old basic.” He took Travis’ belt, made it fast to his own, increasing its expansion to the last hole before he measured it about the tree. But the girth of the bole was too great. Ross untied his cord connection with the ship, slashed off a length to incorporate in the circle of belts. This time it served, uniting him to the bole. With the belt to support him, he hitched up the trunk which overhung the signs of struggle.
The fronds shook as he forced his way between them. “Here’s your clue,” he called down. “There’s been a rope strung about this limb—worn a groove in the bark. And— Well, well, well—they’re not so bright, after all—or they don’t think we are. Here’s a way to travel, all right—and by the upper reaches. Come up and see!”
A line made of cord and belts slapped down the trunk and Travis caught at it, making the climb with less agility than Ross had shown, to join the other at his perch among the fronds. He found the agent folding up between his hands another rope, but a supple green one which aped the vines native to this aeriel place.
“You do a Tarzan act.” Ross flipped the rope end for emphasis. “Swing over to that tree, probably find another rope end there—and so on. I still don’t see how they boosted Ashe along. Though”—his eyes narrowed—“maybe they waited to go until I went back to the ship for you.”
Travis eyed the rope. “Leaving that here means one thing—“
“That they intend to return?” Ross nodded. “They may have some bright plans about scooping us up one by one. But who are ‘they’? Not those blue flyers. . . .”
“Those might act as their hounds.” Travis tried not to glance at the ground, for his present perch inspired little confidence in him.
“And that fruit present was bait for a trap,” Ross agreed. “It fits. The fruit to get us out of the ship, the flyers to report when we came. Then—pounce!—one of us is snaffled! Only Ashe isn’t going to stay a prisoner.”
“This could be a trap, too,” Travis reminded him as he gave the rope a jerk and discovered Ross had been right, the line was very firmly attached to its tree anchorage.
“True enough. But well find some way.”
“At night?” The sun was close to setting. Travis wanted to be on the trail just as much as Ross, but common sense would pay off better than a reckless dash to the rescue.
“Night—“ Ross squinted at the patches of sunlight. “These things move around in the daytime. And they’re used to • heights.”
“Which suggests there may be good reasons for not traveling on the ground or in the dark.” Travis was growing a little tired of talking. “Our friend in the red house may be one of those reasons. What is your solution?”
“We go back to the domed place—up to the top. There is a balcony around the dome itself, and we can take our bearings from there.”
Travis could agree with that. But they had to argue down the protests of Renfry. The technician’s demands to accompany them Ross was able to overcome by pointing out crisply that alone of their party Renfry possessed the knowledge, or fraction of knowledge, which might mean their , eventual control of the ship, and so of their future. And the j need for a scouting party before dark urged the necessity for speed in their try to locate landmarks which might guide them on a hunt for Ashe.
They threaded the path they had cut that morning.
Travis glanced now and then at the sky when they crossed small glades. He had half expected to find the blue flyers on ‘ the lookout. But none appeared. I
Ross took the inner ramp under the dome at a rapid trot, j
His pace, however, slowed as they wound their way up past five levels, then six, seven, eight, nine and finally ten. There was no sound in the building, nothing to break the echoing emptiness of the fantastically beautiful shell.
They reached the balcony, a narrow walk curving completely around the bulk of the dome, protected by a breast-high parapet of the carved lace. The wind, now rising in intensity, pulled at their hair, sang weirdly through the openwork. Ross took the lead. He hurried to the vantage point from which they could obtain an unrestricted view in the direction they thought Ashe’s captors had headed.
There were other buildings, or the remains of buildings, rising out of the jungle. Some of them were smaller than the dome, three or four—at a greater distance—taller. And the taller ones had a certain similarity of outline which suggested that they must have had a common architectural origin.
It was one of those which Ross indicated now. “If they were headed for the nearest building across the treetops—that must be it.” He sighted along his pointed finger as he might have along a rifle barrel.
Travis was listing all possible landmarks—though from ground level perhaps three-quarters of them would not be of much use. “To the right of that funnel-shaped capping, and the left of the pile of blocks. It may be several miles from here.”
To cut a trail along the ground was possible—using their blasters. But such action would certainly advertise their coming. If they wanted to locate the enemy—always providing, of course, that the enemy was roosting in the structure Ross had just chosen—the process must entail a longer and more complicated bit of trail craft. And such a scout could not be made at night.
“There’s one way of checking,” Ross said, as if he were thinking aloud. “If we stay here until dark, we’d know.” “How?”
“Lights. If we see any lights out there—they would be proof.”
“Slim chance. They’d be fools to use lights.”
“Could be trap-setting again,” Ross demurred. “More bait to pull us in.”
“That’s just guessing. How can we tell what makes their minds tick? We don’t even know what they are. You didn’t like the type who first wore this uniform.” Travis plucked at the blue fabric crossing his chest. “If this was their home planet, wouldn’t they be able to play games with us the way they did with you—by mental control?”
“Look out there!” Ross’s sweep of hand included half the landscape, the sea of untroubled jungle, the buildings rising in isolated islands out of it. “Whatever they had— it’s dead now—long dead. And maybe they’re dead, too—or back at the primitive stage. If they’re primitives, Ashe can handle them to a point; he’s been taught to do just that. I’ve seen him in action. Give me an hour up here past sundown. Then if we see no lights—I’ll go. . . .”
Travis drew his blaster. Dark, or even heavy dusk, here might unleash things to lurk in the shadows along their trail. But he could understand Ross’s point, and they had a well-marked path to the ship. “All right.”
They walked slowly around the dome waiting for the murk of evening to gather. And so they counted at least fifty more buildings, fantastic, unlike, some even appearing to defy the laws of gravity. Beyond them were those others, tall, thin, of a common mold. Were those the native structures and these others embassies, examples of trans-galactic architecture as Ashe had suggested? If not all of them were stripped, what a wealth of knowledge lay—
Travis was jerked out of speculation by a cry from Ross. There was still a reflection of sunlight in the sky at their backs. But—Murdock’s hunch had paid off. A wink of light flashed across the green from the first of the distant tall towers. Flashed on—off—on.
Was it meant to be an enticing signal?
THEY HELD a council of war in the ship, the outer hatch closed against the night, that simple precaution taught them by the desert world.
“It’ll be difficult to go straight through the tangle in that direction,” Renfry observed. “They’d be waiting for you to try it.”
“Sometimes the fastest way is around, not straight,” Ross agreed. He had a map drawn .on a sheet of material from the aliens’ stores, the crosses and squares on it marking the various buildings they had sighted. “See here—they bunch, those tall towers. But here, and here, and here, are other buildings. Suppose we head for this one -which looks like an outsized oil can, then beyond that there’s the pile of blocks. The one we want is between them. So—move to the funnel top, then start beyond to the block pile—and cut back. If we can make them believe we’re just searching everything in that direction, it’ll buy us time. Reach a point about here”—his forefinger dug into the surface of the improvised map— “and then do a right-about-face and go at top speed.” He looked up challengingly. “Anybody got a better idea?”
Renfry shrugged. “This is your party, you’ve had the training for this type of thing. But I’ll go along.”
“And let some joker take the ship behind our backs?” Ross wanted to know. “They’ve a line on us—they must have or they wouldn’t have scooped up the chief so neatly. He’s no recruit at this type of fun and games, remember. I’ve seen him in action.”
“Through the treetops,” Travis mused. “If that’s their f regular mode of travel, then maybe we have another point in our favor. Once we’re really into the jungle, there’s a lot of cover which will give us protection. They can’t watch us from above all the time.”
“You’re both set on this then?” Renfry still studied the map. Ross stood up. “I don’t propose to let them nobble the chief and get away with it. And the quicker we are on the move—the better!”
But even Ross had to admit that they must wait until dawn to put their plan to the test. They rummaged the ship for supplies and assembled a small pack apiece. Each wore a belt supporting alien blasters. In addition a coil of the supple cord-rope was wound from shoulder to hip about their bodies, and they had retained the flint knives from their hunter disguise. Brittle though the flint might be, the finely chipped blades could still serve a deadly purpose in close combat. They slung packsacks with food and the froth containers.
Renfry disputed his staying with the ship. But he was forced to admit that there was not way to lock the port be hind them and so a guard must remain. However, he insisted upon triggering the armament of the spacer. So when they descended the ladder to the ground in the first dull rose of the early morning, the black mouths of those sinister tubes were thrust from the shell of the globe. ‘
They took turns cutting a path. And, where they could, they pushed through the underbrush, saving the power of , the blasters. It was Travis who led when they thrust completely through a fern wall into a green tunnel.
The ground here had been worn into a shallow trough and ! beaten hard. Travis needed only one look to know that slot for what it was—a game trail, leading either to water or to j some favorite grazing ground. It had been well traveled, and for some length of time.
There were tracks here, pads with the pinprick indentations of claws well beyond them, a clover hoof with so deep a cleavage that the hoof must be almost split in two, and some smaller tracings too alien to be identified.
“This goes in the right direction. Do we follow it?” Travis was in two minds about such an action himself. On one hand they could greatly increase their speed and speed might be important. But a well-used game trail not only provided a road for animals—it was as well a lure for those creatures that preyed upon such travelers.
Ross moved out on the narrow path. It had twists and turns, but the way did run in the direction of the funnel top which was their first goal.
“We do,” he decided.
Travis dropped into a loose trot which fitted his feet into the slot of the track. He caught small sounds in the vegetation about them—twitters, squeaks, sometimes a harsh, croaking call. But he saw nothing of the creatures that voiced them.
The trail took a dip into a shallow ravine. At the bottom a stream trickled lazily over brown-green gravel and above them the sky was open. There they disturbed a fisher.
Travis’ hand went to the grip of his blaster, dropped away again. Like the blue flyers, this strange inhabitant of the unknown world gave no impression of hostility. The beast was about the size of a wild cat, and somewhat similar to a cat in appearance. At least, it possessed a round head with eyes set slightly aslant. But the ears very very long and sharply pointed with heavy tufts of—feathers at their tips. Feathers! The blue flyer had been furred, provided with insect wings. The fisher, plainly a ground dweller, was fluffily clothed in soft feathers of the same blue-green shade as the foliage about. Had it not been crouched on the rock in the open, it would have passed unseen.
Its haunches and hind legs were heavy and it squatted back upon them. Two pairs of far more slender and longer front limbs held a limp, scaled thing which it had been methodically denuding of a series of fringe legs by the aid of teeth and claws. Interrupted, the animal watched Travis with round-eyed interest, displaying neither alarm nor anger at his sudden appearance.
As the Terran edged forward, the creature freed one front leg, still clasping its prey in the other three, and flicked a fringe leg or two from its feather-clad paunch in absent-minded tidiness. Then folding its breakfast to its middle with the intermediary pair of arms or forepaws, it leaped spectacularly from a sitting position, to be hidden in the brush. “Rabbit—cat—owl—whatsis,” Ross commented. “Wasn’t afraid though.”
“Means that it either hasn’t any enemies—or none resembling us.” Travis studied the curtain into which the fisher had plunged. “Yes, it’s still watching—from over there,” he added in a half whisper.
But the presence of the feather-clad feaster was in a way a promise of security along this road. Travis found the opening of the trail on the other side of the stream. And he was now better pleased to follow it, Even though once more the tree ferns closed in overhead and he and Ross were swallowed in what was a tight tunnel of green.
The indications of a busy, hidden life about them continued to come in sounds. Twice they stumbled on evidence of some hunter or hunters working the trail. Once they found a fluff of plush-like gray fur still bedaubed with light pinkish | blood, then a clot of cream-yellow feathers and draggled skin. ; There was an open apron about the funnel building. A fan j of stone, dappled with red moss but not yet claimed in entirety by the jungle and the game trail, skirted this, running on past the building. If they were to continue to follow ; Ross’ plan, they must strike back now into the jungle again and bull their way through its resilient mass. But first, for the benefit of any watchers, they crossed that moss-spattered apron to the building as if about to search its interior. Only there was no easy entrance here. A grill, of the same imperishable material as that which formed the fan area before the door, forbade their entry. Through its bars they could see parts of the inside. Plainly this particular structure had been left furnished after a fashion, for objects, muffled in disintegrating coverings, crowded the floor.
Ross, his face pressed close to the bars, whistled. “I’d say they were getting ready for movers, only the vans never arrived. The chief’ll want to break in here, might be some of his kind of pickings about.”
“Better collect him first.” Travis stood at the top of those four wide steps leading to the barred door. He could sight the tower which was their ultimate goal, though the fern trees shielded it for about three stories up. To his survey there were no signs of life about it, nothing moved at any of the window holes. Yet there had been that light at yesterday’s dusk.
“All right—we’ll get to it!” Ross came away from the grill. He swung his arm wide in an extravagant gesture to mark not the goal of their choice but the block building beyond it.
They had to cut their way now, using blasters and their hands to pull and break a path between the small, isolated glades where the fall of some giant tree in the past had cleared a passable strip for them. Panting and floundering, they came to the fifth such clearing.
“This is it,” Ross said. “We’ll turn back from here.”
Luckily the summit of the tower showed now and then as a guide. They were approaching it from the back, and by some freakish whim of nature there was less underbrush here. So they had to choose cover, watching the heights for any indication that some scout or spy might lurk aloft. Not that they could be certain of spotting any army under the circumstances, Travis decided gloomily, moving with the wariness of one expecting an ambush at any moment.
They had covered perhaps half of the distance which would bring them to the base of the tower when both of them were startled into immobility by a squall. The battle cry of the thing which had laired in the red hall! And the sound was so distorted by the jungle about them that Travis could not tell whether its source lay before or behind.
That first wail of battle was only the starting signal of a racket, a din to split Terran eardrums. A bird thing boomed out of the brush, flew in blind panic straight for the two, blundered past them in safety. A graceful, slender creature with a dappled coat and a single curving horn flashed away before Travis was truly sure he had seen it.
But those howls of rage and blood hunger chorused on. There must be more than one of the beasts—perhaps a pack of them! And from the noise, they were engaged in combat. Travis could only think of Ashe cornered in the tower to face such as enemy. He began to run. Ross drew level with him before they plunged together into a hedge of brush, fighting their way in the straightest line to the base of the tower.
Travis tripped, staggered forward, fighting to regain his balance, and plowed on his hands and knees into the open. He was facing the entrance to the tower, a long, narrow slit of opening. From within came the sounds. Ross, blaster in , hand, leaped past him, a blue streak of concentrated action. The Apache scrambled up, was only a step or two behind the time agent as they entered, finding themselves directly on the foot of an upward-leading ramp. One of those squalling roars, sounding above, ended in a cough. A mass of dull red > fur, flailing legs, a flat, narrow, weasel’s head showing snapping jaws, rolled down, struggling in convulsive death agony. Ross leaped aside.
“Blaster got that one!” he shouted. “Chief! Ashe! You up there?”
If there was any answer to that hail, the words were ‘ drowned in the screech of the animals. The light was dusky here, but there was enough for the Terrans to spot the barrier across the ramp. It was a barrier which had been there some time but was now showing a gap, choked by two of the red beasts struggling against each other in their eagerness to force that doorway. Behind them snarled a third.
Travis steadied the barrel of the blaster across his forearm and nicked a darting weasel-head with a sniper’s expert aim. The thing did not even cry out, but reared, somersaulted backward down the ramp as the men jumped apart to give it room.
One of the creatures at the gap caught sight of the two below and pulled back, allowing its fellow through the barrier while it whirled to spring at Ross. His blaster beam raked across its shoulders and it screamed hideously, collapsed, scratching frantically with its hind feet to gain footing. Ross fired again and the animal was still. But the rage of the fight beyond the barrier continued.
“Ashe!” Ross shouted. And Travis, catching his breath, echoed that call. To go through the gap in the barrier before them and perhaps be met by a blaster beam from a friend was certainly not to be desired.
“Hullloooo!” The cry was weirdly echoed, dehumanized, and it appeared to come from some distance ahead or above. But both of them had heard it and now they pushed past the barrier into a wide hallway.
There was light here, coming in white flames from smoking brands which lay on the floor at the far end as if tossed from a higher level. One of the red beasts lay dead and they hurdled the body. Another, dragging useless hindquarters, crept with deadly purpose toward them and Travis picked it off. But the beam in his blaster died before he lifted finger from firing button. Another try proved his fears correct—the charge in the weapon was exhausted.
There was a scrambling on the second ramp at the far end of the hall. Ross stood at the foot, his blaster up. Travis stooped to scoop up one of the torches. He whirled the brand in the air, bringing the smoldering end into a burst of life.
Ross aimed at a charging weasel-head, missed, flung himself to the side of the ramp and over to the floor to escape the rush. But the beast plunged insanely after him. Travis whirled the torch a second time, -bringing its flaming end down in a swing against the snaky, darting head of the attacker. One of those powerful forepaws aimed a vicious swipe, tore the torch from the Apache’s hold. But Ross was up to his knees again, blaster ready. And the red animal died. Travis retreated, a little unsteadily, to pick up a second torch.
“Hullloooo!” Again that shout from overhead. Ross answered it.
“Ashe! Down here. . . .”
There were no more squalls from the ramp. But Travis wondered if more of the beasts lay in wait. With a useless blaster he had no desire to climb into the unknown. A flint knife was nothing against the weasel-heads.
They waited, listening, at the foot of the ramp. But when there came no other attack, Ross pattered ahead and Travis followed, nursing his new torch. His hand shot out, closed on Ross’s arm, as he caught up with the other. Something was waiting for them up there.
Travis thrust the torch into that pocket of gloom at the head of the ramp, saw Ross’s blaster at ready— ,
“Come on in!” The words were ordinary enough, but Ashe’s , voice sounded a little breathless and in higher pitch than usual. But it was Ashe, unharmed and seeming his usual self, who stepped into the pool of light and waited for them to join him. Only he was not alone. Half-seen shadows moved behind him. Ross did not holster his blaster and Travis’ hand , rested on his knife hilt.
“You all right, chief?”
Ashe laughed in answer to Ross’s demand. “Now that the space patrol has landed, yes. You boys introduced the right play at the proper moment. Come on and meet the gang.”
The torch sputtered as those shadows moved in closer to Ashe. Then a new light blazed up well above floor level and Travis blinked at the company that fire revealed.
Ashe was six feet tall, giving Travis himself an inch or so. But in this company he towered, for the tallest of his companions came only a little above his shoulder.
“They have wings!”
Yes, with a sudden twitch a flap of wing—not feathered, but ribbed skin—had unfurled, pointing up above its owner’s shoulder. Where had he seen a wing such as that? On the statue from the domed building!
However, the faces now all turned toward the Terrans were not as grotesque as the one of the image. The ears were not so large, the features were more humanoid, though the noses remained vertical slits. Either the statue had been a caricature, or it represented a far more primitive type.
The natives hung back, and from their narrow, pointed jaws came a low murmur, rising and falling, which Travis could not separate into distinct sounds or words.
“Local inhabitants?” Ross still held his blaster. “They the ones who kidnapped you, chief?”
“In a manner of speaking. I take it you accounted for the wild life below?”
“All we saw,” Travis returned, still •watching the winged people, for they were people, of that he was sure.
“Then we can get out of here.” Ashe turned to the waiting shadows and bolstered his own weapon with an emphatic slam. Two of the winged men beckoned and the rest stood back, allowing Ashe, Ross and Travis to pass them, to climb a third ramp. At the top the Terrans saw the open yellow of sunlight, and came out into a wide hall with archways, not doors, down its length.
Travis’ nostrils expanded as he caught a mixture of scents, f some pleasant, some otherwise. There was activity here; there were indications that this was a permanent settlement. The archways were hung with nets of green into which were tucked flowers here and there, many like the one he had found on his first day of exploration. Logs, hollowed out and so made into troughs, stood about the walls. From them grew a mixture of plants, all reaching toward the sun which came through windows, running a curtain of green from floor level to ceiling.
The people were no longer just shadows. And in this brighter light their humanoid resemblance was marked. The furled wings covered their backs as might folded cloaks, and they wore no clothing save ornaments of belt, collar or armlets. The weapons, which all within sight carried, were small spears —little enough protection against the red killers which had assailed them from below.
They watched the Terrans closely, keeping up their murmur of speech, but making no threatening gestures. And since it was impossible for the Terrans to read any expression on their faces, Travis did not know whether the three from the ship were considered prisoners, allies, or merely strange , objects of general interest.
“Here. . . .” Ashe stopped before one of the curtained archways and pursed his lips to give a gentle hoot.
The curtain parted and he went in, signaling the other two to follow him.
Under their feet was thick matting plaited from vines and ‘ leaves. And there were low partitions of latticework over which living plants climbed to form dividing walls, cutting one large room into a series of smaller cubicles around a central space fronting the archway.
“Pay attention to nothing around the wall,” Ashe said quickly. “Keep your eyes on the one at the table.”
Squatting by a table raised some two feet from the j carpeted floor was one of the winged men. Those they had seen in the outer hallway had had skins which were a dusky lavender color, close in shade to the very stone from which the image had been carved. But this one was darked, almost a deep purple. And there was something in his constrained movements which suggested the stiffness of age.
But when the native looked up to meet Ashe’s gaze in welcome, Travis knew that this was not only a man, but a great man among his kind. It was there in his eyes, in the pride of his carriage, and in the slow deliberation of the searching study with which he regarded the three Terrans.
“WHAT A junkyard!” Ross stared about him in sheer stupefaction.
“Treasure house!” his chief corrected him almost sharply.
Travis simply stood between them and gazed. Perhaps both descriptions could apply in part.
“They kidnapped you to sort this out for them?” Ross demanded, as if he couldn’t believe a word of that conclusion.
“That’s the general idea,” Ashe admitted. “Question is— where do we start, what do we have, and how can we get across to them the meaning of anything we do find—if we can make it out ourselves?”
“How long have they been collecting all this?” Travis wondered. There were paths through those piles of moldering materials, so one could investigate the contents of the heaps. But the general confusion of the mass was almost intimidating.
Ashe shrugged. “When your total method of communication consists of gestures, a lot of ragged guessing, and pointing, how is anyone to know anything?”
I “But why you? I mean—how are you supposed to know what makes all this tick, or thump, or otherwise run?” Ross asked again.
“We came in the ship. They may have some hazy tradition-legends—that the ship people knew everything.” “The Fair Gods,” Travis threw in.
“Only we are not Cortez and his men,” Ashe returned with a snap.
“They aren’t the baldies, or that furry-faced operator I saw on the vision plate of the ship the Reds had. So where do they fit in?”
“Judging by that statue, their ancestors were known to the builders of the dome,” Ashe replied. “But I think they are primitive, not decadent.”
Travis’ imagination made a sudden, swift leap. “Pets?”
Both of the others looked at him. Ashe drew a deep breath.
“You might just be right!” The way he spaced his words gave them an impressive emphasis. “Give our world ten thousand years and the right combination of conditions and see what could happen to our dogs or our cats.”
“Are we prisoners?” Ross came back to a main point. “Not now. Our handling of the weasels took care of that. A common enemy is an excellent argument for mutual peace. And we have a common purpose here, too. If we’re going to find out anything which will help Renfry, it will be in just such a collection as this.”
“It’d take a year just to shuffle through the top layer in this mess,” Ross gave a gloomy opinion.
“We know what we are looking for—we have examples on the ship. Anything we can uncover in the process which might help our winged friends, we turn over to them. And who knows what we may find?”
Ashe was right about the attitude of the winged people. ‘• The chief or leader, who had first received them in the t 152 vine-walled room and brought them in turn into the huge chamber containing the loot gathered by his tribe, showed no unwillingness to let them return to the ship. But their path back, followed on ground and not by the aeriel ways of the natives, was supervised by two of the blue flyers that had some link with the winged people—perhaps a relationship not unlike man and hound.
During his period of captivity Ashe had learned that the red weasels were the principal local menace and that the winged fold had tried to wall off the lower sections of their dwelling towers to baffle the hunters. These creatures had worked with sly cunning—which suggested a measure of intelligence on their part also—on the ramp barrier. But only a determined raid made by a whole pack had finally broken through that laboriously constructed wall to get at tie living quarters of the flying people. Ashe’s readiness to use his blaster on the behalf of his captors and the surprise attack by Ross and Travis had completely destroyed the marauding pack. These two things had also made a favorable impression upon the intended victims. As Ashe had commented, a common enemy was a firm base on which to build an alliance.
“But they can fly,” Ross protested. “Why didn’t they just take off—out the windows, and let .those six-legged weasels have the place?”
“For a reason their chief was finally able to make plain. This is apparently the season during which their young are born. The males could have escaped, but the females and young could not.”
They found Renfry awaiting their arrival at the ship in a fingernail-gnawing state of impatience. Relieved to see them whole and together, he greeted them with the news that he had managed to trace the routing of the trip tape through the control board. Whether he could reset another tape, or reverse the present one, he did not yet know.
“I don’t know about rewinding this one.” He tapped the coin-sized disk they had seen ejected from the board on the morning of their arrival. “If the wire breaks—“ He shrugged and did not need to elaborate.
“So you’d like to have another to practice on.” Ashe nodded. “All right, we all know what to look for when we start our digging into the treasure trove tomorrow.”
“If any still exist.” Renfry sounded dubious.
“Deduction number one.” Ashe took a long pull from the froth-drink can. “I believe most of the stuff the winged folk have gathered came from towers such as the one they use to house their village. And there are a number of those here. The other buildings of radically different design are not duplicated. Which leads you to surmise that the tower structures are native to this planet, the other types imported for some purpose.
“When that pilot set the control tape to bring the ship here, he was setting course either for his home—or his service headquarters. Therefore, it is not too improbable to suppose that we can hope to come across something in that miscellaneous mixture of loot they’ve gathered which is allied to record tapes we have found on this ship. And I will not rule out journey wires among the litter.”
“There are a lot of ifs, ands, and maybes in that,” Renfry said.
Ashe laughed. “Man, I have been dealing with ifs and maybes for most of my adult life. Being a snooper into the past takes a lot of guessing—then the hard grind of working to prove your guesses are right. There are certain basic patterns which become familiar—which you can use as the framework for your guess.”
“Human patterns,” Travis reminded. “Here we do not deal with humans.”
“No, we don’t. Unless you widen the definition of human to include any entity with intelligence and the power to use it. Which I believe we shall have to do, now that we are no longer planet—or system—bound. Anyway, to hunt through the remains of the tower civilization is the first concrete job we have now.”
The next morning found them all, Renfry included, back at the tower. And, in those patches of sunlight which entered the packed room, the job Ashe and the chief of the winged people had set them looked even more formidable.
That is—it did until the cubs, or chicks, or children of the natives turned up to offer busy hands and quick bright eyes to assist. Travis found himself the center of a small gathering of winged midgets, all watching him with eager attention as he tried to disentangle a pile of disintegrating objects. A pair of small hands swooped to catch a rolling container, another helper brought out a box. A third straightened a coil of flexible stuff which was snarled about the top layer of the pile. The Apache laughed and nodded, hoping that both gestures would be translated as thanks and encouragement. Apparently they were, for the youngsters dived in with a will, their small hands wriggling into places he could not reach. Twice, though, he had hurriedly to jerk some too-ambitious delver back from a threatened avalanche of heavy goods.
So much of what they uncovered, examined, and put to one side was either too badly damaged by time to be of any use, or else had no meaning for the Terrans. Travis struggled with the covers of crumbling containers and boxes. Sometimes he would see them go to dust with their contents under his prying hands; other times he would find their interiors filled only with powder which might once have been fabric.
Lengths of an alloy, fashioned into sections of pipe, he laid to one side. These seemed still intact and might be of use to the winged people, either as material for weapons more effective than their spears, or for tools. Once he came upon an oval box which flaked to bits in his hands, But it left mingled with the powder on his palm a glittering stone set in a scroll of metal, as untarnished and perfect as the day the jewel had been stored. His volunteer assistants hummed with wonder and he gave it to the nearest, to see it passed from hand to hand and at last gravely returned to his keeping.
By noon none of the four Terrans, working in opposite corners of the big room, had found anything useful to their own purposes. They met under a window to share food supplies free of the dust of the rubbish heap.
“I knew it was a year’s job,” Ross complained. “And what have we found so far? Some metal which hasn’t rusted completely away, a few jewels—“
“And this.” Ashe held out a round spool. “If I’m not mistaken, this is a record tape. And it may be intact. Looks something like those we found aboard the ship.”
“Here comes the big boss,” Ross said, glancing up. “Are you going to ask him for that?”
The chief who had brought them to this storeroom entered the far doorway with his escort. He moved slowly about the perimeter of the room to inspect the piles where the explorers had made such a small beginning. When he reached the Terrans they stood up, towering over both chief and escort. Though they did not share language and their communication was by gesture, Ashe went to work to suggest a few uses for the morning’s salvage. The gems were understandable enough. And the metal tubes were examined politely without much interest.
Ashe spoke to Renfry across the chiefs shoulder. “Any chance of working these into spears?”
“Given time—and tools—maybe.” But the technician did not sound too certain.
Last of all Ashe displayed the spool, and for the first time the chief became animated. He took it into his own hands and hummed to one of the guards who went off at a trot. He tapped one finger on the red tape and then spread out all the digits several times, ending with a wide inclusive sweep of one arm.
“What’s he trying to tell us, Ashe?” Renfry had been watching the performance closely.
“I think he means that this is only one of many. We may have made a real discovery.”
The guard came back followed by a smaller, younger edition of himself. Taller than the children, the newcomer was probably an adolescent. He saluted the chief with a clap of his wings and stood waiting until his leader held out the spool. Then, reaching out, the chief caught at Ashe’s hand and put the youngster’s in it—waving them off together.
“You going?” Ross wanted to know.
“I will. I think they want to show us where this came from. Renfry, you had better come too. You might be able to recognize a technical record better than I could.”
When they were gone, the chief and his retinue after them, Ross looked about him with dissatisfaction written plain on his face.
“There’s nothing worth grubbing for here.”
Travis had picked up a length of the tubing, to examine it in the full light of the window. The section was four feet or so long and showed no signs of erosion or time damage. An alloy, it was light and smooth, and what its original use had been he did not know. But as he ran it back and forth through his hands an idea was born.
The winged men needed better -weapons than the spears. Arid to make such weapons from the odds and ends of metals they had found in this litter required forging methods perhaps none of the Terrans, not even Renfry, had the skill to teach. But there was one arm which could be made—and perhaps even the ammunition for it might also exist in the unclassified masses on the floor. It was not a weapon his own people had used, but to the south those of his race had developed it into a deadly and accurate arm.
“What’s so special about that tube?” Ross asked.
“It might be special—for these people.” Travis held it up, put one end experimentally to his lips. Yes, it was light enough to be used as he planned.
“In what way?”
“Didn’t you ever hear of blowguns?”
“What?”
“The main part is a tube such as this—they’re used mostly by South American Indians. A small splinter arrow is blown through and they are supposed to be accurate and deadly. Sometimes poisoned arrows are used. But the ordinary land would do if you hit a vital point, say one of those weasel’s eyes —or its throat.”
“You begin to make sense, fella.” Ross hunted for a section of pipe to match Travis’. “You plan to give these purple people a better way to kill red weasels. Can you make one to really work?”
“We can always try.” Travis turned to the clustering children and gestured, getting across the idea that such sections of pipe were now of importance. The junior assistants scattered with excited hums as if he had loosed a swarm of busy bees in the room.
As Travis had hoped, he was also able to discover the necessary material for arrows there. Again their original use was unknown, but at the end of a half hour’s search he had a handful of needle-slim slivers of the same light alloy as the pipes themselves. Since he had never built or used a blowgun and knew the principles of the weapon only through reading, he looked forward to a period of trial and error. But at last they gleaned from the room a wealth of raw materials with which to experiment. And they had not yet done when the youngster who had guided Ashe came back, to gut at Ross’s sleeve and beckon the Terrans to follow.
They wound from one ramp to another, passing the point where the weasels had breached. But they did not leave the tower. Instead their guide went to the back of the entrance hall, putting both hands to a seemingly blank wall and pushing. Travis and Ross, watching his effort, joined their strength to his and a panel slipped back into the wall.
Before them was not a room, but a more sharply inclined ramp descending into a well of shadow which increased in darkness until its foot could not be sighted from their present stand. The winged boy took the downward path at a run. His wings expanded until they balanced his body and he skimmed at a speed neither of the Terrans was reckless enough to try to match.
Once they reached the foot of the descent, they saw in the distance the smoky gleam of one of the native torches. And, guided by that, they ran along a narrow corridor where dust rose in puffs under their pounding feet.
The room of plunder in the tower above had housed un-sorted heaps of bits and pieces. The place they now entered, where Ashe awaited them, was a monument to the precision and efficiency of the same race—or a kindred people—of those who flew the ship.
Here were machines, banks of controls, dim, dark vision plates. And as the Terrans advanced slowly the torch displayed racks and racks of containers, not only of record tapes, but of journey disks. Hundreds, thousands of those burton spools which had brought them across space, were racked in cylinders with transparent tops and unknown symbols of the other people on their labels.
“Port control center—we think.” Ashe may have temporized by adding those last two words, but there was a certainty in his tone which suggested he was sure. Renfry was filling the front of his suit with samples taken from both record containers and tape racks.
“Library. . . .” Travis added an identification of his own.
Ashe nodded. “If we only knew what to take! Lord, maybe everything we want, we need—not only for now but for the whole future—is right here I” Ross went to the nearest rack, began to follow Renfry’s example. “We can try to run these on the reader in the ship. And if we take enough of them, the odds are at least one or two should be helpful.”
His logical approach to the problem was the sensible one. They went about the selection as methodically as they could, lifting samples from each rack of holders.
“A whole galaxy of knowledge must be stored here,” Ashe marveled, as his fingers flicked one coil after another free.
They left at last, the fronts of their flexible suits bulging, their hands full. But before they left the tower, Travis also gathered up the lengths of pipe and the needle slivers. And when they were back in the ship, the reader set up, their plundered record rolls ready to feed, the Apache went to work on fashioning the weapon he hoped to offer to the winged people in return for their sharing of the stored wisdom.
Renfry, an array of small tools from the crew lockers aligned before him, was operating on one of the route disks. He was prying off its cover and carefully unwinding the wire spiral curled within. Twice he was doomed to disappointment, that fragile thread upon which a ship could cruise to the stars snapping brittlely under his most careful handling. The second time that happened he looked up, his face drawn, his eyes red with strain.
“I don’t think it can be done.”
“There’s this.” Ashe reached for one of the waiting disk tapes. “Those you are working with are old. The one in the ship is new.”
There it was again, the jog in time which might return them to their own world—or might not. But that reminder’ appeared to encourage Renfry. He checked the outside of his disks, pushing aside any which showed the pitting of years. His next choice did not look too different from the one which held their future locked into its spiral. For the third time he pried delicately to force off the case.
But it was not to be that night that they learned anything which was of value to them. The record tapes in the reader gave only a series of pictures, fascinating in themselves, but of no value now. And in addition there were others which merely flashed symbols—perhaps formulae, perhaps written accounts. At last Ashe snapped off the machine.
“We can’t expect to be lucky all the time.”
“There’re thousands of those things stored in that place,” Ross pointed out. “If we do find anything useful—it will have to be by luck!”
“Well, luck is what we have to count on in our game.” Ashe’s voice was tired, drained. He moved slowly, rubbing his hands across his eyes. “When you give up a belief in luck, you’re licked!”
TRAVIS SET the mouthpiece of a blowgun to his lips and puffed. A thin, shining silver, tipped with a fleecy tuft, sped— to center on his improvised target of a red-veined leaf and pin it more securely to the trunk of a fern tree some ten feet away. He was absurdly pleased with the success of his trial shot. He moved back another four feet and prepared for a second test. All the while the low humming of his enthralled native audience buzzed bee-fashion across the clearing.
When he was able to place a second dart almost beside the first, his satisfaction was close to complete. With a crooked finger Travis beckoned to the winged youth who had helped to carry the newly manufactured weapons to the testing ground. He handed over the tube he had just used, picking up a second, slightly longer, from the selection on the ground.
The young warrior laid his spear on the leaf mold, hooking his clawed toes over its shaft while he fumbled with the blowgun. Raising the weapon to his mouth, he gave a vigorous puff. Not as centered as Travis’ shot had been, the sliver hit the tree slightly above the leaf. Two other natives, their wings unfolding slightly as they ran, hurried to inspect the target, and Travis, smiling and nodding, brought his hands together in a sharp clap of approval.
They needed no more urging to try this new weapon. Tubes were snatched, passed from hand to hand, with some squabbling on the outer fringes of the gathering. Then each took his turn to try shooting, with varying degrees of success. They halted from time to time to pick the target clean of ammunition, or put up another leaf over the tattered remnants of the last.
Several of Travis’ pupils had sharpshooters’ eyes, and the Apache believed that with practice they could far surpass his own efforts. When the midday sun bit down on the range, he left the blowguns with the enthusiastic marksmen and went to hunt up his crew mates.
Renfry was still buried in his study of journey tapes and the ship’s circuits. But when Travis climbed to the control cabin he found Ashe there also. The reader was set up on the floor, and both of them were squatting before it, alternately watching some recording and making attacks on the main panel of the pilot’s unit. The case of that had been removed, exposing an intricate wiring pattern. And from time to time Renfry traced one of those threads up or down and either beamed or frowned at the results of his investigation.
“What’s going on?”
Ashe answered Travis. “We may have had our break! This record is a manual of sorts. It provides some wiring blueprints Renfry has been able to identify with that cat’s cradle of cords up there.”
“Some wiring.” Renfry’s enthusiasm did not match Ashe’s at that moment. “About one line in ten! This is like trying to put together a Nike head when all your working instructions are written in Chinese code! Yeah—the red cord hits the plate there—but does it say anything about these white loop-de-loops to the left?”
Ashe squinted at the loops in question and consulted the record reader again. “Yes!” Renfry was down on his knees in an instant to see for himself the diagram on the picture screen.
“Anybody home?” Ross’s voice floated up the well of the interior ladder, and Travis could feel the vibration of his footfalls on the rungs as he climbed.
His head and shoulders emerged from the stairwell. His face was streaked with dust which testified to his occupation of the morning as the investigator on duty in the crazy treasure house at the winged people’s tower.
“Any luck?” Travis asked with some sympathy. Ross shrugged.
“A handful of stuff they may be able to use. I’m no big brain to string together some wire, nails and a couple of pieces of tin and produce an A-jet all set to fly. Saw your William Tells busy with those spitters of theirs. One of them had already bagged an addition to the dinner pot—not that the dear departed looked too edible. I don’t care for things with about four dozen legs all clawing at once. But I could relish some more civilized food right now.”
Travis glanced at Ashe and the dedicated Renfry. “If we have any today, looks as if you and I are elected to get it ready. They’ve discovered a record which shows the inside of the control board.”
“Well-that’s more like it!” Ross climbed the rest of the way into the cabin and stooped to look over Ashe’s shoulder at the miniature screen. “I’d say it’s closer to the plans for a demon-inspired, four-lane thru-way,” he commented judiciously. “And I’ll settle for a can of stew.”
Renfry and Ashe were pried away and they ate in the absent-minded fashion of men whose complete interest was centered elsewhere. When they had gone, Ross stretched and gazed at Travis.
“Care for a little look-see of our own?” he asked with a casualness which aroused Travis’ suspicion.
“In what direction?”
“That funnel place. Remember—the front hall is packed as if the boys living there had been in a hurry to move out, but had to leave their baggage behind? I’d like to have a good look at the baggage.”
“If I remember rightly, there is also a good stout grill over the doorway,” Travis reminded him.
“And I have a way to get around that. Come on.”
Ross’s way of passing the secured door was simple enough. One of the natives flew to a second-story window equipped with a coil of climbing cord from the ship. He was fronted by a shutter across the window. But prying with his spear point forced the latch on that, and a few moments later the rope dangled down the side of the building in open invitation to climb.
The gallery into which they so forced a way gave many indications it had been hurriedly stripped. Some ragged tatters of flimsy web, which fell to powder at the touch of an investigating finger, still hung on the walls. And there were pieces of oddly shaped furniture shrouded in dust. But the dust on the floor was marked in places by tracks and, seeing those, their native companion fingered his spear. Then, his eyes on the Terrans holding their attention, he drove it point down into the pattern of that trail with the vigor or one making a determined attack upon an enemy.
Another lair of the weasel things? Travis, studying those tracks in the half gloom beyond the light from the opened window, believed not. In fact, the marks were disturbingly like a human footprint. And the teasing picture provided by his imagination of some one of the old lords of this place lingering on to haunt its solitude, grew disturbingly in the back of his mind.
Here for the first time they found a stairway, though its treads were so narrow and steep as to make the Terrans believe that it had been made to accommodate bodies unlike their own. Ross, taking the lead, went down, his explorer’s zeal well tempered with caution, in search of the crowded hall they had seen from without.
Travis sniffed. There was a faint fetid odor, not just the accumulation of the dust of centuries, the decay of leaves borne in by the wind, the taint of some small animal lair. This was not only strong enough to be of recent origin, but also the stench was vaguely familiar.
Warning of a weasel den? He did not think so. This was not quite so rank and compelling as that which had burdened the air in the red-walled structure those beasts had taken for their own. And it was not the alien but inoffensive odor which clung to the winged people’s quarters.
He noted that the nose flap of their native companion expanded, and the deep-set eyes in that lavender face shone as they turned alertly from side to side. Not for the first time the Apache regretted the absence of a quick common form of communication. It had proved impossible for the Terrans to approximate the humming sounds which made up the natives’ speech. And none of them in return appeared able to utter any recognizable word, in spite of all the coaxing and patient repetition of common nouns or action verbs.
The interior of the building was a grayish gloom, though the hall into which they had descended had a greater measure of light from the door. Ross stepped out, skirting a pile of boxes. He laid his hand on the top one, his other hovering over the grip of his blaster.
Travis remained where he was. That smell—it tugged at his memory. They stood still, the winged youth freezing with them. Then a sudden gust of wind puffing in the latticed doorway brought with it a warm, fresh reek and Travis knew— “The sand people!” His words were a hiss of whisper but they carried the authority of a shout. What were the nocturnal creatures of the shrouded desert world doing here?
“You are sure?” To his surprise Ross questioned his identification no further than that.
“You don’t forget a stink like that in a hurry.” Travis’ eyes were busy, surveying the pools of shadow about the crates and boxes piled in the hallway. Had anything moved out there? Were they being watched now by eyes which could see farther than their own in this dusk?
The hand of the native touched his arm, an appeal for attention. Travis’ head swung slowly as he saw the other ready a spear. He fitted a dart in his blowgun.
“There is something—to the left.” Ross’s whisper was the thinnest trickle of sound. His blaster was pointed at that shadowy corner.
Then the hall came alive, a boiling up of forms from every likely and concealing cover. The things which beat toward them in attack shambled swiftly on four limbs like animals. Their silent advance carried with it an added horror in the fact that those slavering beasts had once been—or their remote ancestors had been—men!
The last of blaster fire crackled, brought down three of the clumsy runners. A tentacle licked out and then a fourth attacker went down, a dart dancing in its hairy throat. Behind Travis the native ran back a few steps up stairs, launched out into the air with a beat of his wings. Wheeling over the enemy, he stabbed down at the boneless middle limbs raised to drag him down with a concentration which hinted at a long enmity between the two species.
Ross cried out. A tentacle flicked from the shadows, coiled about his ankle and pulled, as he fought to keep his balance. He turned the blaster beam on that rope of living flesh. He was answered by a roar as the loop fell away. Then Travis’ dart caught the thing which arose to its hind legs clawing for Ross’s shoulders. The Apache shot as fast as he could insert darts into the pipe. He had backed to the stairs and now he flailed out with his weapon as a club, clearing a space to drag Ross with him.
The native’s spear had been jerked from his hold by a tentacle. He perched on one of the piles of boxes, and now he rocked back and forth on his refuge, beating his wings to hasten the tumble of the stack. He rose into the air just as the bulky containers crashed down across the foot of the stairway to provide the beginnings of a barrier.
“Blaster charge—exhausted,” Ross panted. He gripped the barrel of the weapon now useless as a gun, smashed the butt down on the round skull of a creature scrambling over the wreckage.
They retreated up the stairway. Travis kicked out, catching another coarsely haired head under the chin, slamming its owner back and down to tangle with another eager attacker. The native sent a second pile of boxes crashing. Now he was flying back and forth over the ruck of the enemy main body, bombing them with smaller packages he snatched up from the heaps.
For a moment the Terrans were free. They took advantage of that lull to win back to the gallery where they had entered what might have proved a trap. The native shot up, over their heads. He stood on the sill of the open window to beckon them on. uttering excited hums which rose in the scale until their volume approached squeaks.
Travis shouldered Ross behind him toward the exit. “I’ve only two more darts—get out quick!”
For a moment the other resisted, then his common sense took command and he ran for the window. Travis aimed a dart at a hunched shoulder and head just appearing above the stairs. But that missile only nicked a furred upper arm, and fangs showed in a gap which was no longer a man’s mouth. Eyes, small, red with fury, and yet alight—horribly so—with a spark of intelligence, were on him.
He backed to the window. A lavender-skinned arm reached over his shoulder, a hand fastened on the blowgun, twisted at it, trying to pull the tube from his grasp. The native still kept his post on the sill; now he wanted the weapon.
And Travis, knowing that the other had a means of escape he himself did not possess, surrendered the blowgun, then boosted his body over and out on the rope. He watched the lavender back of their rear guard. Wings projected outside the frame of the window and they were raised, ready. . . .
Then the native threw himself backward and out in a wild display of aerial gymnastics. His wings flapped wide, broke his fall and he roared again, spiraling upward as the first shaggy head protruded from the window. Hairy fists pawed at eyes which were apparently blinded by the sun. Ross had reached the ground, Travis was not far behind him. The rope swung vigorously, scraping him along the building, and he realized that those above were trying to draw him up.
The Apache let go, falling as relaxed as he could, and the lightened rope flapped wildly as it was jerked up into the window. But they were safely out in the day and he did not believe that the nocturnal creatures would pursue them into the light. However, as they crossed the strip of jungle to reach the ship, both of them applied their scoutcraft to discovering whether or not they were being trailed.
Ashe listened to their report frowningly. “It might be worse—if we were staying here.” Ross threw aside the useless blaster. “D’you mean we’re getting out? When?”
“Another day—maybe two. Renfry is ready to try rewinding the tape.”
For the first time Travis made himself face how much would depend upon the proper handling of that slender length of wire, how one small break would defeat their purpose and leave them exiled here forever. Or how a weakness which they could not see might develop in space, snapping their invisible tie with their home world, to set the ship drifting between solar systems an eternal derelict. Could Renfry rewind the spool? And if it were rewound—would it work in reverse? There could be no test flight. Once they raised ship from this spot, they were gambling with their lives on a very slender thread composed mainly of hope and an illogical belief in luck.
“You understand now?” Ashe asked. “Remember this—we can stay here.”
They would be exiles for the rest of their lives, but they would be alive. There were enemies here, but they could set up an alliance with the winged natives, join them. Suddenly Travis got to his feet. He went to that compartment in the cabin where they had put the square of picture block which could tune in on a man’s memory and make home visible to him. He had to know—whether the past had pull enough to push him into this greatest gamble of his life.
He held the slab between his hands, looked into its curdled depths. Soon he saw—red cliffs rising from the fringe of smoky green marking pinion—a blue sky—the hills of home. He could almost taste the bite of alkali dust in a rising wind, feel the swell of a horse’s barrel between his legs. And he knew that he must take the chance. . . .
In the end they all made the same choice. Ross summed up their feelings:
“Time travel—that is different. We’re still on our own world. If something goes wrong and we’re marooned back before history began—well, it’ll give a guy a bad jolt, sure. Who wants to play around with mammoths when he’s more used to A-jets? But still, he’d know pretty well what he was up against and that the people he’d meet would be his own species. But to stay here— No, not even if we get the job of playing gods for the winged people! They aren’t our kind— we’re visitors, not immigrants. And I don’t want to be a lifetime visitor anywhere!”
They made a last trip to the record library, transporting back to the ship and stowing away in every available storage place all the record tapes which appeared to be intact. The chief of the natives, delighted with the blowguns, allowed them to choose other objects from the tribe’s treasure room. He only asked that they return in time, bringing with them new knowledge to share. They saw no more of the nocturnal creatures from the funnel-spired building—though they again took the precaution of sealing the ship at night.
“Will we be back?” Ross asked when Ashe came from his last meeting with the chief.
“Let us get home safely with this haul,” Ashe returned dryly, “and someone will be back, all right. You can depend on that. Well, Renfry?’
The technician looked like a ghost of his usual self. Lines of tension, probably never to be erased, bracketed his mouth, marked the corners of his tired eyes. His hands shook a little and he could not lift his drinking container to his mouth without hooking all ten fingers about it.
“The tape’s rewound,” he said flatly. “And the wire didn’t break. Tomorrow I’ll thread it ready to run. For the rest—we pray the trip out. That’s all I can tell you.”
Travis lay on his bunk that night—his bunk, their ship. . . . The globe and its contents had grown progressively less alien when compared to what lay without. Around his wrist was a heavy band of red metal set with small, full, sea-green stones in a pattern which suggested breaking waves, a gift presented to him by the winged chief at their formal farewell. He was sure that the lavender-skinned flying man had not fashioned that bracelet. How old was the ornament? And from what world, from the art of what forgotten and long-vanished race had it come?
They had not even scratched the surface of what was to be found in this ancient port. Had the jungle-cloaked city been the capital of some galaxy-wide empire, as Ashe suspected? They had had no time to explore very far. Yes, there would be a return—sometime. And men from his world would search and speculate, and learn, and guess—perhaps wrongly. Then, after a while there again would be a new city rising somewhere—maybe on his own world—which would serve as a storehouse of knowledge gained from star to star. Time would pass, and that city, too, would die. Until some representative of a race as yet unborn would come to search and speculate—and guess—Travis slept.
He awoke swiftly, with a quick sense of urgency. Over his head he heard the sigh of the speaker from the control cabin.
“All ready,” came Renfry’s voice, thin, drained. Why, the technician must have worked through the night, eager to prove his handiwork.
“All ready.”
They still had time to say “no” to this crazy venture, to choose known perils against the unknown. Travis felt a surge of panic. His hands levered against the bunk, pushing his body up. He had to stop Renfry—they must not blast into space.
Then he lay down once more, made his hands clasp the bunk straps across his body, his lips pressed tightly together. Let Renfry push the proper button—soon! It was the waiting which always wore on a man. He felt the familiar vibration, singing through the walls, through his body. There was no going back now. Travis closed his eyes and tried not to stiffen Ms whole body in protest against that waiting.
“WE’RE OUT—safely.”
“So far—so good.” Another voice made answer to that over the com system.
Travis opened his eyes and wondered if anyone ever became thoroughly inured to the discomfort of a planetary take-off. He had forgotten during the past days when they had been comfortably earth-bound what it meant to be wrenched into the heights beyond atmosphere and gravity. But at least the tape had worked to the extent that they had lifted safely off world.
And their flight continued, until at length they all breathed easier and began to hold more confident feelings than just hope concerning their future.
“If we simply repeat the pattern,” Ashe observed thoughtfully on the evening of the fifth day, “we set down again on the desert world sometime tomorrow.”
“Be better if we could eliminate that stop,” Travis remarked. There was something in the desolate waste and the night things which repulsed him as nothing else had during this fantastic voyage.
“I’ve been thinking. . . .” Ross glanced across the swinging seat to the pilot’s perch where Renfry spent most of his waking hours. “We refueled on the trip out—at the first port. Suppose—just suppose that we exhausted the supply there.”
Renfry grinned, a death’s-head stretch of skin across bones. His thumb jerked downward in the immemorial gesture of sardonic defeat. “Then we’ve had it, fella. Let’s hope that we can stretch out luck past that particular point along with all the rest of the elastic tricks.”
This time they downed on the desert port in the early morning, when the lavish display of flames along the horizon was paling into nothingness. They saw the blaze of the rising sun reflected too brightly from the endless drifts of sand.
“Two days here, roughly—if we do duplicate the pattern exactly.”
Waiting two days, cooped up in the ship, not sure that they would take off again. At the thought of it, Travis shifted restlessly in his seat. And the specter Ross had evoked shared the narrow confines of the cabin with them all.
“Any walk-about?” Ross must be feeling it too—that goading desire to be busy, to drown in action ever-present fears.
“Not much reason for that,” Ashe replied calmly enough. “We’ll take a look outside—in daytime. Not that I believe there is much to see.”
The sun-repelling helmets on, they opened the outer .hatch. They surveyed the expanse where the winds might have whittled new patterns among the dunes, but where they could see no change since their last visit. The enigmatic sealed buildings still squatted beyond, with no sign of life about.
“What did they do here?” Ross’s hands moved restlessly along the frame of the exit port. “There was some reason for this stop—there had to be. And why were those same things-people, animals, whatever they are—or were—on the other world, in the funnel-topped building?”
“Which are the exiles?” Ashe asked. “Is this their home world, while those others exist across the void and have for generations because they were not recalled in time? Or are these the exiles and the others are at home? We may never know the reason or answer to any questions about them.” He studied the squat building among the creeping dunes. “They must live underground, with that building covering the entrance. Perhaps they live underground on the other planet also. Once they must have been here to service ships—to maintain some necessary outpost.”
“And then,” Travis said slowly, “the ships didn’t come any more.”
“Yes. There were no more ships. Perhaps a whole generation waited—hoping for ships—for recall. Then they either sank into apathy and stagnation, to slide down the hill of evolution, or they more consciously adapted to their surroundings.”
“In the end, the result was the same,” Ross observed. “I don’t think those here are any different from the ones in the funnel building. And there they had a better world to adapt to.”
“Wait!” Travis had been studying that sand-enclosed block with interest. Now he thought that his memory of the place as it had been weeks earlier did not match what he saw now. “Was that elevation on the left there before?”
Ross and Ashe leaned forward, their attention settling on the end of the structure he indicated.
“You’re right, that’s new!” Ross’s affirmation came first. “And I don’t think that projection is made of stone like the rest, either.”
The block which had so oddly appeared on the corner of that distant roof did not give out a metallic answer to the sun’s rays. But neither was it dull-coated. There was a sleek sheen to it, such as might be displayed by opaque glass or obsidian. The hump had no openings that they could see, and what its purpose might be remained as much of a mystery as the rest of this age-old puzzle.
It remained so for a very few moments. Then there was action of a sort the watchers in the ship did not expect. They had seen the rays which protected the roof of the building against assault or investigation. Now they witnessed the use of what must have been one of the aggressive weapons of the men who had first erected that block.
What was it which lashed out, cracked a whip’s thong about the skin of the ship? A beam of fire? A bolt of energy? A force which the Terrans could neither imagine nor name?
Travis only knew that the energy wash of that blow crushed him back into the globe, hurled him into the inner door of the lock with Ross and Ashe thrust tight against him. Their bodies were flattened on the metal wall of the ship until the breath was forced from their lungs and the world went black about them.
Travis was on the floor, fighting for the air his body had to have, pain in bands about his chest. And before his blurred eyes was the open door of the port. In that moment all that mattered was that oblong of empty space—that, and beneath the torture of his body, the sense that that space must be shut out—that what lay beyond it meant final extinction.
He clawed at the body across his knees, turned over somehow and inched painfully from under its weight, moving in a worm’s progress toward the outer port. There was a singing in his ears, filling his head, adding to his daze. Then he was staring out into the glare of sun and sand.
At first he thought he was lightheaded—that what he was seeing could not be true. For there was no wind, yet from the hidden floor of the landing space sand was rising in thin, unwavering sheets, walling in the globe. And those curtains of grit arose vertically, unmoved by any breeze! It was incredible—it could not happen—yet before his eyes it did.
He lunged to his knees, thrust against the door, shut out the curtains of sand, the harsh light of the sun, the thing which could not be true. And as his hands fumbled to shoot home the alien bolts, the pain lessened. He could breathe again without the constriction which had held his lungs imprisoned. He turned to the other two.
The congested blueness of their faces startled him into quick action. He jerked both men up into a sitting position against the wall. Ashe’s blue eyes opened.
“What—?” He only got out that one faint word as Travis turned his attention to Ross.
There was a thin thread of blood trickling from the corner of the younger scout’s slack mouth. He moaned as Travis shook him gently. Ashe moved and winced, his hands going to his chest.
“What happened?” He was able to get out the whole demand this time.
“The space—marines—landed.” Ross’s lips shaped the words one at a time. There was a shadow of a grin about them, |
“—On me, I think.” I
“Hullloooo down there!” The call was disembodied over the ship’s com, but it was imperative. “What’s going on?”
Although the hull could cut out sun, sound, the world without, they could now feel movement through its layers of protection. It was as if the ship were being buffeted by some force. Those walls of sand? Travis hauled himself to the ladder wall and began to climb, seeking the vision plate by the controls which was now their only link with outside.
He discovered Renfry standing before that link, his disbelieving eyes on thick curdles of sand, sand rising from the ground, drawing in with steady purpose to engulf the ship. They were on the point of being buried in a sea of grit, and there was no reason to believe that that was not directed, consciously, by very active animosity and intelligence.
“Can we get out?” Travis dragged himself to the nearest seat. “Any way to up ship?”
If the tape governed their departure according to the earlier schedule, they were stuck here for another night, another day. By that time the globe could be so deeply buried that there would be no hope of blasting free from the tons of sand. They would be sealed into a living tomb. Renfry’s hands went out to the keyboard of the controls, hesitated there. His lips tightened.
“It’s a big risk but I could try.”
“It’ll probably be a bigger risk to stay.” Travis remembered the two he had left at the lock. They must be brought out of danger before the shock of blast-off. “Give me five minutes,” he said. “Then blow—if you can!”
He found Ashe on his feet, dragging Ross out into the corridor. Travis hurried to help.
“Renfry is going to try to blast off,” he reported. “We’re being buried in sand.”
They got Ross to a bunk. Ashe flopped into the adjoining one, and Travis barely made it to the next cabin and the waiting cushion there, when the warning shrilled through the com. There was the vibration of laboring engines. But it went on far longer than before. Travis lay tense, willing the wrench of blast-free to come, counting off seconds. . . .
The vibration was building up—higher than he had ever known it to go before. And the ship rocked on its base, movement and sound becoming one, a sickening mixture which churned the stomach, deadened thought but not fear.
The break came in an instant of prolonged red agony. Afterward came blackness—nothing at all.. . .
Vibration was gone, sound was gone—but sensation remained. And the clean, aromatic scent of the healing jelly which filled the bunks on occasion of need. Travis opened his eyes. Had they pulled free from the desert planet?
He sat up, brushing the jelly from him. It slid easily from his skin, from the suit, leaving the usual well-being of mind and body. The confidence which had been jolted out of him had already flooded back. He got to his feet, went to peer into the neighboring cabin.
Ross and Ashe still lay inert under the quivering mounds of that substance on which the aliens had based their first aid. He climbed to the control cabin.
Renfry was strapped into the pilot’s chair, but his head lolled limply on his shoulders, his white face alarming Travis. A heart beat slowly under his questing fingers. He unfastened the technician, somehow managed, with the aid of no-weight, to get him to his bunk below. The vision plate presented only that swirl of dead black which was the sign of hyper-space. They had not only broken loose from the sand trap, they were also embarked on the next leg of the long journey which might or might not take them home.
How long had that portion of the journey lasted before? Nine days by Renfry’s watch—nine days between the sand and the fueling port. Nine days until they could be sure that Renfry’s blast-off had not thrown the tape off course.
As they recovered from that shock Ashe took command, using the loot they had gathered from the storehouse of records to focus their interest outside themselves. On the plea of hunting another ship’s operation manual, he set them to work in shifts at the record reader, processing every tape which could still be run through that machine. More than one promising coil broke, whipped into a tangle they did not dare try to unravel. But even those must be kept for the experts at home to study. For Ashe never admitted after their break from the desert world that they were not going to get home. He pointed out that the odds they had already licked totaled a formidable sum and that there was no reason to believe that their luck would not continue to hold.
But even Ashe, Travis thought to himself, must have doubts, be as nervous as the rest—though he did not show it—when Renfry’s watch marked the ninth day’s flight and they had no warning of arrival at the fueling port. They made only a pretense of a midday meal. Travis had calculated rations just that morning. By going on very sum supplies, they would have enough of the food they dared use to see them home—if the voyage was not prolonged. He reported that fact to Ashe and received only an absent-minded grunt in reply. Then—as if to prove all their worst forebodings untrue— the warning came. Travis strapped down, sharing quarters with Ross this time. The other grinned at him.
“The chief’s called it right again! Here we go for a shot of gas from the service station—then home!”
Even the discomfort of landing could be forgotten when they did see about them the ruined towers marking off landing spaces, the metallic turquoise sky of their first galactic port. Why, they were almost home!
They clattered down to the space lock and opened it eagerly —to watch for the creeping snake of the fuel line and its attendant robot. But long moments went by and there was no movement in the shadow of the nearest tower. Travis studied the immediate terrain. Had they set down in the same square they had visited before? Might a change in so slight a matter provide the reason for the silence about them?
“Could be due to the time element.” As Ashe’s voice-sounded in his helmet com, the old man might have been reading his thoughts. “We left the second stop well ahead of our former schedule.”
They clung to that hope as an hour, and then two, passed and there was no movement from the tower. Pooling their recollections of the place, they were fairly certain that they had landed in the same square. And they avoided putting into words the other dire possibility—that the mechanism of the ancient port had at last been exhausted, perhaps by the very effort put upon it weeks before when the globe had been serviced there.
Renfry spoke at last. “I don’t know how much fuel we have on board. I can’t even tell you the nature of that fuel. And whether we can take off without more is also an open question. But if we can, I don’t believe we’ll be able to finish the trip. We may be working against time—but we’ll have to discover if we can push those machines into one more job.
And we’ll have to do it quick!”
They swung out of the globe, and Renfry crawled under its arching side, to discover a new catastrophe. If there had been any fuel left in the ship’s sealed storage compartments, it was gone now. There was ah ominous damp patch spreading from an opening at ground level.
Renfry’s voice came hollowly. “That’s done it, fellas. She’s empty. Unless you can get that pipe line on the jog again, we’re grounded for keeps.”
“What made that open up?” Ross wondered with the bafflement of one to whom machines are still mysterious save for their most obvious functions.
“Might be some mechanism triggered by this.” Ashe stamped on the pavement. “Well, let’s go and look for the robot and that animated pipe line.”
They walked toward the tower. From ground level the structure was even more pointed and needle-like. There was an opening at the foot, the doorway from which the robot had come. Ashe reached that, stood for a moment peering within.
The chunky robot which had clanked into duty at their first visit was still there, just within the doorway. And beyond, plain to be seen in a rusty, yellowish light, were a corporal’s guard of its fellows. All alike, they were backed against the far wall as if awaiting some long-past official inspection.
From a well in the center of the floor, to be glimpsed around the bulk of the robot in the doorway, was a massive piece of metal which Travis recognized as the “head” of the snake pipe line. Ashe reached out almost reluctantly to push the robot. To their surprise the machine, which had appeared so massive and immobile, answered to that handling. It did not react as might an alarm clock shaken into running once again—instead it toppled disappointingly forward with an odd flaccidity. One of the arms clattered loose and spun across the pavement to strike on the snake’s head.
“It’s moving! Look—it’s moving!”
Ross was right. In a jerky, sullen manner the heavy end of the mobile pipe line raised, inched forward about a foot while the Terrans held their breaths in hope—until it fell supinely once more.
“Hit it again,” advised Ross.
Ashe edged around the prostrate robot to inspect more closely what they could now see of the pipe. This small portion displayed no signs of deterioration. He stooped, took a good grip on the “head” and tugged. The he hurriedly jumped back while Ross and Travis kicked the robot out of the path of the creeping snake. Two feet—three—out in the open it went—and headed for the ship. Renfry saw them coming and waved, crawling back under the bulge of the globe to make ready for the pipe’s arrival.
But they had exulted too soon. Some four feet away from the tower the head sank to earth once more. Ashe tried his former method of revival, without result. They took turns shaking it, together and separately. It was much heavier than the robot and they could not urge it into any further effort.
Renfry came to join in a consultation. He went back to inspect the well from which the pipe emerged, only to return as baffled as he had gone.
“Can we pull it by hand?” Travis wanted to know.
“That’s what we’ll have to try now.” Renfry was grim.
They brought out the light, tough rope from the ship, made fast lines about the “head,” and set to work. At Ashe’s word of command they gave a concentrated jerk. The stubborn pipe gave, started forward, but not under its own power. They gained another four, five feet, but the effort required to move that dead weight was exhausting. Now their gains were shorter, and the strain they must exert to produce them grew greater and greater.
Ross tripped, went down, levered himself up, his face in the bowl of the helmet showing a set snarl. He seized the rope again as if it were a man he could tangle with—and jerked in concert with the other three. This time there was no yielding at all, and their feet slipped on the cracked and age-old stone.
TRAVIS SAT back on his heels in the immemorial position of the dismounted range rider. The others sprawled beside the tow rope, their faces a congested red from their efforts. Renfry squirmed, braced himself on his hands and began to fumble with the latching of his helmet. He threw the bubble back and breathed hard with the immediacy of a drowning man.
“Put on your helmet, you fool!” Ashe raised his head from his arms; his voice in the com was broken by the laboring of his lungs.
But Renfry shook his head, his lips moving in words sealed away by the protection he no longer shared. Travis’ fingers went to the fastenings of his own helmet.
“I don’t think we need these.” He pulled off the bubble and lifted his head to meet the touch of a small, playful breeze. The air was crisp, like that of a Terran autumn. And it filled his lungs in an invigorating way. He reached for the rope, ready to try again.
There’s no use in pulling ourselves blind.” Ashe’s voice was no longer rendered metallic by the alien com. “The trouble may lie back in the tower.”
Renfry began to crawl on his hands and knees back the length of the pipe, inspecting its surface as he went. At last he staggered to his feet and lurched through the door, the others after him. They found the technician down by the mouth of the well from which the pipe extended. He was examining the covering there, trying to wriggle the flexible tube back and forth.
“The thing must be caught—below this!” He hammered his fist against the capping.
“Can we get that lid off and see?” Ross wanted to know.
“We can try.”
But such an operation required tools of a sort—levers, wedges. . . . There was the line of waiting robots—could parts of their bodies be put to more practical purposes? Ross had picked up a loose “arm,” shed by the one which had disintegrated, testing the rod’s strength with all the force of his own arm and shoulder.
Travis studied the well capping. There was no opening, no vestige of crack into which a wedging tool might be inserted. And now Renfry ran his hands about the ring through which the pipe issued, striving to find by touch what none of them could see. He tapped with the rod, first lightly and then with increasing force, leaving some dents and scratches, but making no other impression on the fitting.
“Does that unscrew?” Ross suggested.
Renfry scowled, spat out a couple of short and forceful words. He transferred his efforts from the immediate vicinity of the pipe to the outer rim of the cover. And it was there that he did make a promising discovery. They worked fast, one at each, to pick the accumulated dust of centuries out of four depressions in which were sunk knobs which might just be the heads of bolts.
Then they turned to the broken robot, dismantled its remains, until they were equipped with pieces of metal to force those heads. It was slow, disheartening work. Once Travis went back to the ship to gather up the containers of the jelly which had poisoned him during the testing of the supplies.
They smeared the stuff in and around the stubborn knobs, hoping it would lubricate and loosen, while they pounded and prodded. But their efforts were encouraged when the first bolt yielded, and Renfry used blistered fingers to work it entirely free. And that small success gave a spurt to their labors.
It was nightfall and they were working mainly by touch when Ashe’s bolt came free—the second one.
“This is it for now,” he told them. “We can’t rig any sort of light in here and there’s no use in trying to free the rest in the dark. I’ve hit my fingers more than this blasted thing for the past half hour.”
“Time may be running out on the journey tape,” Ross answered tightly. He was putting into words one of the two fears which grinned over their shoulders during all those hours of punishing labor.
“Well, we aren’t going to lift without fuel.” With a sharp exclamation and a hand to his back, Ashe stood up. “And we can’t work on in the dark without rest or food. Those things we know—the rest we’re just guessing at.”
So they stumbled back to the ship, realizing only when they stopped the battle with the stubborn casing how completely tired they were. Travis knew that Ashe was right. They could not hope to lick the problem by driving their bodies past the point of human endurance.
They ate, more than the proper rations for the meal, wavered to their bunks, collapsing, drunk with fatigue. And Travis was still stiff in the morning when he awakened to Ross’s shaking—blinking foggily up at the other’s thin face.
“Back to the salt mines, brother!” Ross put the blackened and torn nail of an abused finger to his mouth. “I could do with a blowtorch now. Climb out of your downy bed, but fast, and join the slave gang.”
It was midmorning before they worked the fourth and last bolt out of its bed. And for a long moment after Renfry threw it from him with emphatic force, they just sat about the rim of the well, their torn and blistered hands hanging limply between their knees.
“All right.” Ashe roused. “Now let’s see if shell come up!”
To get levers to raise the cover they had to dismantle two more of the robots. And they carried out that destruction with a kind of savage satisfaction. Somehow, attacking the unresisting semi-manlike forms gave them release from some of the frustration and lurking fear. They achieved stout bars and went back to attack the well cover.
They never knew afterward how long it took them to pry that plug out of its bed. But a last frantic heave on the part of all, together, suddenly snapped it apart in two halves, displaying the dark hole from which the pipe arose.
Though it was day outside, as brilliantly clear a day as the one before had been, the interior of the tower was not too well Lighted and they had no torch to explore those depths. Renfry lay down, to thrust both arms into the well, running his hands along the surface of the pipe as far as he could reach.
“Find anything?” Ashe crouched beside him, peering over one shoulder.
“No. . . .” And then he changed that to a quick and excited, “Yes!”
“I can barely touch it—feels as if the scaled coating on the pipe is caught.” He wriggled and Travis caught hold of his legs to anchor him.
In the end Renfry did the rest of the tedious job painfully, with frequent halts for rest. He hung head down in that pit, kept from wedging his head and shoulders in too tightly by the others’ hold on him. He had to work mainly by sense of touch, since his own body blocked out three-fourths of the already subdued light, and with improvised tools hurriedly culled from the litter about them.
The fourth time they pulled him out for a breather, he rolled over on his back and lay gasping. “I’ve pried the thing loose as far down as I can reach.” His words came one by one as if he could barely summon up the strength to push them out. “And it’s still fast farther down.”
“Maybe we can work it loose, pulling from up here.” Ashe’s hands curved about the scaled surface of the pipe where it projected over the side of the well.
“You can try.” Renfry rubbed his fists across his forehead as Travis, with a heave he tried to make gentle, moved the technician’s dead weight away from the side of the opening, to put his own hands overlapping Ashe’s.
Together they strained to move the column of the pipe inside the tube of the well. But it appeared glued to the side where Renfry had fought to free it. Beads of sweat gathered along the line of black hair above Travis’ forehead, trickled down to sting across his lips. And in the half-light he saw Ashe’s jaw line set—sharp under the thin brown skin—while the cords and muscles of his arms and shoulders stood out to be modeled under the fabric of the blue suit.
Then Ross added his weight to the effort. “You pull,” he told Ashe. “Let us push in your direction. If it is ever going to give, that ought to do it.”
For a long, long moment it seemed that the pipe was not going to give, that too much damage existed below. Then Ashe flew back, the hose striking him a forceful blow in the chest, as, out of their sight, the obstruction gave away and Ross and Travis sprawled halfway across the opening.
They scrambled up and Ross hurried to pull Ashe free of the hose. With Renfry trailing, they went back to the outer air of the port. They took up the towrope once again and began the labor of dragging the hose to meet the ship. The’ scaled pipe moved sluggishly, but they were winning, foot by painful foot.
Then Travis, during one of their all-too-frequent halts, glanced back and cried out. They were three-fourths of the way to their goal, but from under the belly of the hose snake was spreading a stain of moisture which gleamed in the afternoon light. That last rip to free the tube must have weakened its fabric and the burden of the unknown fuel was being lost.
Renfry stumbled back, knelt to explore, and jerked one hand away with a cry of pain. “It’s corrosive—like acid.” lie warned. “Don’t touch it.”
“Now what?” Ross kicked dirt over the stain, watched the soil crumble into slime in the dark smear of fluid.
“We can get the pipe on to the ship—and hope that enough of the fuel comes through,” Ashe answered in a colorless voice. “I don’t think we can hope to mend the hose.”
And because they could see no other way out, they went back to hauling at the towrope, trying not to glance back or think of the fuel seeping out of the pipe line. Renfry nursed his burnt hand against his chest until they at last pushed the end of the hose under the curve of the globe. He got down and crawled under, grunting with pain as he fastened the head of the snake against the opening in the ship.
“Is it feeding through?” Ross asked the all-important question.
Renfry, almost as if he dreaded the answer, put his good hand palm-down on the scaled side of the pipe, holding it there for a long moment while they waited to know the future.
“Yes.”
They had no idea how much fuel the ship required—or whether the necessary amount was still available. The moist seepage along the hose continued to spread. But Renfry lay with his hand on the pipe, nodding to them from time to time that the feed of fluid was still in progress.
There came a pop like a small explosion. The head of the pipe cropped from the opening in the ship, the hose now flaccid. Renfry tapped and hammered at the cap which had slid into place, pulling down over it a second protective lock. When that clicked under his efforts he rolled out.
“That’s that. We’ve all we’re going to get.”
“Is it enough?” Travis wanted to ask—to demand. But he knew that the others were as ignorant as he of the proper answer.
They straggled back to the port ladder, somehow pulled themselves up, and made their way in a blind haze of fatigue to the cabin bunks. What they could do they had done—now their success was back again in the hands of blind fortune.
Travis roused out of a dose. The vibration in the walls— They were bound off-planet again! But were they heading home? Or would that unknown fuel only take them into space, abandon them there to drift forever?
He dreamed—of red cliffs and sage, pinion pine, and the songs of small birds in a canyon. He dreamed of the feel of a desert wind against one’s body and the surge of horse muscles between one’s legs—of a world which was, before mankind aspired to space. And it was a good dream, so good a one that even when it drifted from him after the way of dreams, Travis lay very still, his eyes closed, trying to will it back again.
But the sterile smell of the ship was in his nostrils, the feel of the ship was under his hands, closing around his body. And his old claustrophobic dislike of the globe was reborn with an intensity he had almost forgotten. He opened his eyes with a forced effort.
“We’re still on the beam.” Ross sat on the bunk opposite, his face hollow with strain under the blue light. He held up ‘ his hands. Both normal and scarred fingers were crossed, and he laughed as he so displayed them. “Soup’s on,” he added.
They counted the ration tins again that day. The contents of those few containers must be stretched to the limit now. Ashe measured out the portions which must serve for nourishment each waking period. “We will just have enough if the time element remains the same. Stay in your bunks as much as possible—the less energy you burn the better.”
But a man could sleep just so much. And however earnestly they pursued that escape, there came a time when sleep fled and one could only lie, staring up, or with closed eyes, while lone minutes of waiting stretched into hours, always darkened by fears.
“I was thinking,” Ross spoke suddenly into the silence of the cabin he shared with Travis, “when we come in we should show up on the radar screens before we land. It’ll be just like some bright boy to loose off a missile, just for practice. We can’t possibly signal that we’re only space travelers coming home.”
“We’re armed.” But Travis wondered what defenses the globe did have. Missiles were top secret. Their government-other governments—could have any number of unpleasant surprises waiting to greet air-borne craft which could not adequately identify themselves.
“Dream on.” Ross sounded scornful. “I don’t see us knocking down Nike Four and all her cousins and aunts with those cannon. We don’t even know how to aim the things!”
They broke out of hyper-space, that period of discomfort heightened by their weakened condition. But in spite of that weakness, they dragged themselves to the control cabin to watch that green-patched ball grow on the vision screen. Travis discovered he was shaking, feeling almost as ill as he had during the food-testing session. Was that green ball-home? Dared they believe so—or was it a mirage they were all sharing now because they wanted it so badly? Just as the picture plate of the aliens could reproduce any man’s home site to lighten his loneliness?
But now the familiar lines of the continents sharpened. Ross’s head went down, his face hidden in his hands. And Ashe spoke slowly certain measured words Travis knew, though they were no part of his own heritage. Renfry’s hands ran back and forth along the edge of the control board, caressingly.
“She did it! She’s brought us home!”
“We aren’t down yet!” Ross didn’t lift his head and his words were sharp, as if perhaps he could insure their eventual safe landing by his very doubt of it.
“She brought us this far,” Renfry crooned. “She’ll take us the rest of the way. Won’t you, old girl?”
They met the jolt of the break into Terran atmosphere, accepted it, half numbed, still unbelieving. Ross released his hold on the chair, made for the well of the ladder.
“I’m going down.” He averted his eyes from the vision plate as if unable to watch any longer.
And suddenly Travis shared the other’s distrust of that window on space. He followed Ross, swinging down the ladder to their cabin, throwing himself prone in the bunk to await their landing—if there would be a safe landing.
The thin vibration of a take-off motor was nothing to the pressure of air against the globe skin now. It raised a hum which sang in their ears, through every atom of their tense bodies. All the waiting they had managed to put behind them was nothing compared to this last stretch they could not measure by any clock. The feeling that something might-would happen—to negate all their hard-won safety gnawed deep.
Travis heard Ross mutter on the other side of the cabin but could distinguish no words. What were they doing now? Racing night or day around the surface of their world, trying to home on the spot from which the alien journey tape had lifted them weeks ago?
Seconds crawled—minutes—hours. . . . One could measure this only by uneven breaths drawn with difficulty as the weight of gravity pulled once more. Were they now registering on radar screens, hostile and friendly alike, summoning a net of missiles to fence them off from the firmness of solid earth? Travis could almost picture the rise of such a bullet, trailing a spear tail of fire—coming in—
He cringed as he lay in the bunk, the soft padding rising about his gaunt body.
“Coming down.”
Had those words sounded through the ship’s com? Or were they only an echo of his own imagination?
He felt the pressure against the padding, the squeeze of chest and lungs, harder to bear because of his weakness. But he did not black out.
There was a jar, the ship rolled, settled slightly aslant. Travis’ hands moved to the straps about him. There was complete silence. He was loathe to break it, hardly daring to move—somehow unable even now to believe that they were down, that under them must rest the brown soil of his own earth.
Ross sat up jerkily. Freeing himself from the protective harness of the bunk, he made for the door. He walked like a sick man, driven by some overwhelming force outside himself.
His voice came as a whisper. “Got—to—see. .. .”
And then Travis knew that he must see also. He could not accept any evidence except that of his eyes. He followed Ross along the corridor—to the inner lock. And when the other fumbled at the closing, he added his own strength to open it.
They went through the air lock, laid hold almost together on the outer port. Ross was shaking, his head hunched between his shoulders, his face gray and wet.
It was Travis who opened the door. They were facing east and the time must be early dawn, for there was a belt of shadow beneath the curve of the ship while on the horizon light banners spread pale gold. He dropped down, his eyes on that band.
“Company coming.” Ross swept out an arm. There was a soaring rumble of sound. A quartet of planes in formation cut across the light patch of sky.
There were lights flashing on about the ship—flooding away the shadows. Now Travis could pick out a buckled framework, signs of a disaster. And among the wreckage men were moving, drawing in to the star ship. But beyond them the sun was rising. His sun—rising to light his world! They had made it against all the stacked odds. Travis’ hand smoothed the skin of the globe beyond the frame of the open port, as he might have smoothed the arched neck of the pinto that had brought him through a grueling day’s ride on the range.
The sun was yellow on the distant hills. And those were made of the good brown earth of home!