Hosteen recognized the torn coverall. “Widders! Widders!” He wavered forward, to go down again beside the quiet form. Then his eyes fastened on one outflung hand unbelievingly.
Skin over bone, with the bone itself breaking through the tight pull of the skin on the knuckles! Fighting his fear of the dead, the inborn sense of defilement, he took the body by one shoulder, rolled it over on its back—
“No—no!” Logan’s cry was one of raw horror.
This thing had been Widders, Hosteen was sure of that. What it was now, what anyone could swear to, was that it might once have been human. The Terran thrust his hands deep into the harshness of the sand, scrubbed them back and forth, wondering if he would ever be able to forget that he had touched this—this—
“What did—that?” Logan’s demand was a whisper.
“I don’t know.” Hosteen stood up, one hand pressed to his heaving middle. His instinct had been right. Somewhere here lurked a hunter—a hunter whose method of feeding was far removed from the sanity of human life. They must get away—out of here—now!
He grabbed for Logan, shoved him toward the passage Widders must have been trying to reach when he had been pulled down. There was a horror loose in this place that had not died long ago in those pens—if it had ever been confined there.
They ran for the open passage and sped into the dark mouth of the tunnel. And they fled on blindly into that thick dark until there was a band of tight, hard pain about their lower ribs and the panic that had spurred them could no longer push their tired bodies into fresh effort. Then, clinging together, as if the touch of flesh against flesh was a defense against the insanity behind, they sat on the floor, dragging in the dead air in ragged, painful gasps.
CHAPTER TWELVE
T
his—is—an—open—passage.” Logan’s warning came in separated words.
He was right. There was nothing to prevent that which had hunted Widders from prowling into this dark tunnel. Perhaps even now it lurked in the dim reaches ahead.
The arm Hosteen had flung about Logan’s heaving shoulders tightened spasmodically. He must not let panic crowd out reason—that would deliver them both over to death. They had to keep thinking clearly.
“We have the grenades and the torch,” he reassured himself as well as his companion. “Widders did not have his equipment—no light or weapon. It was a miracle he got even this far.”
The shudders that had been shaking Logan were not so continuous.
“Scared as a paca rat caught in a grain bin!” The answer came with a ghost of the old wry humor Logan had always summoned to front disaster. “Never broke and ran like that before, though.”
“That was enough to make both of us bolt,” Hosteen replied. “You didn’t see me holding back any, did you? But now I think we are past the trapped paca rat stage.”
Logan’s hand tightened on Hosteen’s forearm in a grip of rough affection and then fell away. “You’re right, brother. We’ve moved up a few steps in the panic scale—maybe now we’re on the level of a frawn bull. But I want to be a tough yoris before we face somethin’ alive and kickin’.”
“Two yoris it is,” Hosteen agreed. “I’d say keep straight ahead, but at less of a scamper.”
He fingered the atom torch indecisively. If he switched that on, would the beam signal a lurker? But the advantage of light over dark won. With the enemy revealed in the light, they would have a chance to use their grenades.
As the passage continued to bore ahead through the stuff of the mountain, Hosteen marveled at the extent of the under-the-surface work. More than just the first mountain must be occupied by this labyrinth. He was sure they were well beyond the height up which the Norbies had originally driven their captives.
There were no signs that anything had come this way before them, and the first stark shock of Widders’ end lost some of its impact on their minds. Hosteen sighted a gray glimmer ahead and switched off the torch so that they could approach another tunnel mouth warily.
Here projections hung down from overhead and stood up out of the floor of the passage, so they passed between two rows of pointed objects as thick as a man’s leg. And set in a curved space well above their heads were three ovals of a blood-red, transparent substance through which light streamed in gory beams.
What lay beyond the opening was sun heat—the sun heat of the parched outer world, where the Big Dry reigned uncontrolled.
They hunched down between those pointed pillars, shielded their eyes against the punishing glare, and tried to pick out some route across that seared landscape.
In the shimmer of the heat waves there was a thin line of poles running—with a gap here and there—into the distance, just as the poles had marked the sonic barrier before the pens.
Hosteen used the lenses to trace that line, but the glare of that open oven was as deceptive as the foggy murk of the interior cavern.
“We’ll have to lay up and wait for dark.” Logan drew his knees up to his chest and folded his arms about them. “Nothin’ could last for a half hour out there now.”
How far did that guiding line of poles stretch? Could one find shelter at the end of that path before the coming of another day? And was this indeed open country?
“Open country?” Hosteen repeated questioningly.
“You think this might be another controlled cavern, to hold things enjoyin’ bein’ baked?”
“There are those poles—they must have run a sonic through here once.” Hosteen pointed out the obvious.
“And there are a lot of gaps in that now, too.” Logan squinted to study the way ahead. “Do we go back—or do we try it?”
“I’d say try it—at least part way. If night does come here, we can try and turn back if we can’t see an end within safe travel distance.”
“That makes sense,” Logan conceded. “We wait.”
Hope was thin. Much depended now on whether this was another cavern under weather control—the wrong kind of control for them—or the open. For human eyes, there was no looking up into the inferno that marked the possible sky. Hosteen had thought that the heat and glare when they first reached the end of the passage had been that of early afternoon. So they would wait for a night that might never fall or start the long trail back to that distant cave into which the Norbies had sealed them.
Uneasily they slept in turn, keeping watch as the time crept leadenly by. Suddenly, Hosteen was aroused from a doze by Logan’s shaking.
“Look!”
Where the light had been—a yellow-white their eyes could meet only with actual pain—there was now a reddish glow. The Terran had seen its like too many times to be mistaken. Yes, there was a night out there, and it was now on its way. They need only wait for true dusk and then follow the road marked by the pole line.
They ate, drank sparingly of their water, and waited impatiently for the red to deepen to purple, the purple that meant freedom. But as they waited, Hosteen walked forward between the projections, his senses alert—to what? There was no sound out of the desert ahead, nothing moving there.
With the lenses he could follow the pole line well ahead—bare rock, the poles, with gaps in their marching line. No vegetation, no place for any living thing he had seen yet on Arzor. Yet, inside him, there was a growing fear of that sere landscape, a tension far higher in pitch than any he had known before in any of the tunnels and caverns they had traversed.
“What is it?”
Startled, Hosteen looked back over his shoulder. Logan had been testing the fastening of the canteens. But now he, too, was staring with narrowed eyes into the open.
“I don’t know,” the other answered slowly. “This—is—strange—”
They had run in open horror and fear from the place where Widders lay. Now, as the Terran weighed one emotion against the other, he was sure that the sensation he was experiencing was not the same as they had known earlier. Where that, in part, had been physical fear, this was a more subtle thing, twitching at mind
and not at body.
“We’ll go—” Logan did not make a question of that, rather a promise that was half challenge to what lay ahead. His jaw was set, and the stubbornness that had made him go his own way so often in the past was in the ascendant now, setting him to face what he shrank from.
“We’ll go,” Hosteen assented. Every fiber of his body fought against his will in this. What had begun as an uneasiness was now a shivering, quivering revolt of one deeply rooted part of him against the iron form of his determination. Yet, he knew that he could not refuse to go out there and face whatever waited, for if he did, he would be broken in some strange, inexplicable way that would leave him as crippled as if he had been shorn of a leg or an arm.
Dusk—they moved forward, shoulder to shoulder, coming out of the tunnel mouth. Logan caught at Hosteen and dragged him half around.
For a wild second or two the Terran thought he was facing the source of his subtle fears. Then he guessed the truth. The tunnel mouth had been carved into a weird and horrible image. They had emerged from a fanged mouth, the open gullet of a three-eyed monster fashioned after the skull they had discovered on the shore of the underground lake. The eyes glinted—those were the oval red patches they had sighted from within. The wrinkled snout—Hosteen did not doubt for a moment that the artist who had designed that portal knew well a living model.
“Could that be the full size of three eyes?” Logan found his voice and attempted some of his old lightness of tone.
“Who knows—at least we came out instead of going in.”
“And we may regret that yet!”
They trotted on, away from the mask doorway. Underfoot, the space bordered by the pole line was smooth, though Hosteen’s torch did not show any trace of paving. Anyway, it provided good footing for the pace they must set, until midnight told them whether they could advance or must retreat into three eyes’ waiting jaws.
Not a sound, not a stir of breeze. But—Hosteen stopped and swung the pencil beam of the torch off the path before him to a pool of shadow under a pinnacle of rock to the left. Light on rocks—just that, bare rocks. Yet, the moment before the ray had touched that surface, he had been certain something lurked there, slinking around that pile, sniffing its way toward the pole path. He could have sworn he heard the pattern of its gusty breathing, the faint scrape of talon on rock, the sound of a stone disturbed!
“Nothin’ there!”
Logan, also? Had he heard, sensed, believed something had been out there?
“To the left!” Logan’s hand was on his wrist now, bringing the torch beam about, to shine it directly into a crevice in the ground. Of course! The thing must be crouching there, just waiting for them to draw opposite and then—!
Bare rock—empty crevice, nothing!
“There—there has to be somethin’.” Logan’s words were marked with the determination to hold his emotions in check. “They had a sonic barrier for protection, didn’t they?”
“Once they had it,” replied Hosteen.
Ghosts—spirits? The ghosts of the builders of this road, the artist who had carved that dragon mask—or of the weird life that had lived on this sun-rusted plain from which the builders protected themselves in their journeyings?
He started on, Logan matching him step by step. They started slowly and then their speed built, as the need to get past all those rock outcrops, all those sinister crevices and dips, ate at their self-control.
Croaking—or was it husky breathing? There—! Hosteen was sure this time he had spotted the danger point, not too far ahead in a shadow pool by a hillock. He gripped a grenade in one hand, ready, brought the torch up with the quick flick of a stunner draw, aiming the light as he might the stupefying ray.
Rock—only rock.
“Steady!” Hosteen was not even aware he had given himself that command aloud.
If his imagination was at work, perhaps he could bend it to his own purposes. Suppose there was some living thing out there playing games, able to project an impression of its presence where it was not in order to confuse enemies? Hosteen’s training of the team had made him open-minded in matters dealing with mental relationships between men and animals—and, who knows, perhaps some of the same techniques could work between man and alien?
That faculty, which had tied him to Surra, Hing, and Baku, in part to the stallion Rain and other non-mutant-bred living creatures, could he use it to detect what was behind this nerve-breaking attack? Something assured him that this was an attack, far more subtle and devastating than any physical thrust out of the night.
Just as a blindfolded man might feel his way cautiously through unknown territory, so did Hosteen reach out to try to contact what lay waiting out there. Intelligence—was he dealing with intelligence, alien but still to be reckoned so by human standards? Or did he front some protective device set up to warn off intruders, just as the sonic barrier had been erected to protect the rulers of the pen cavern?
A touch of what—awareness? The Terran was sure he had met that, so sure that he paused and slowly pivoted toward the dark space from which that twinge of contact had seemed to come. Was it his imagination that supplied the rest? He could never have offered any proof, but from that instant Hosteen believed that he had had a momentary mental meeting with someone or something that had once lived in communication with the builders of this mountain maze, as he lived in concert with the team.
And he believed it so firmly that he strove to hold to that thread, to impress upon that unknown creature his desire for a meeting, as he could in part impose his will on the team. Only, the frail and fleeting contact was snapped almost as quickly as it was made.
What flooded in to follow was the anger of an aroused guardian or an embattled survivor—an attack through mental and emotional gates so intense that, had it persisted, perhaps both men would have broken under it.
Shadows boiled, twisted, crawled, slunk in upon them. The light beam stabbed each menace into nothingness, only to have another take its place. Logan called out hoarsely, snatched up stones clawed loose handfuls of soil to hurl them at that invisible menace now ringing them in. And it built up and up!
There was rage in this—as if behind some unclimbable barrier the three-eyed monster of the caverns raced back and forth, eager to get at them. And it was when that impression grew on Hosteen that he gasped out an order:
“Stand still!”
Logan froze, his arm half up to throw a rock.
“We go on—”
Hosteen obeyed his own order, his legs moving stiffly, his active mind arguing against such folly. There—there was something crawling across the path just ahead—waiting—ready—To the left—two—converging on the strip through which the men must pass within moments. They were surrounded.
Logan shuffled along. Sweep, sweep—the torch opened the secrets of shadows. But the pressure against the intruders was reaching the point past which Hosteen was afraid he could not hold.
With a snarl Logan faced left, his hand went to his belt, and he lobbed one of the grenades into the dark. The resulting burst of light left them blinded for a second or two.
Then—nothing! As there had been the explosion, so now there was an answering burst of energy in their minds. Then, only empty land under the night sky—a landscape now without any life in it.
Shaken, they stood breathing hard with rib-stretching gasps and then began to run. Again their road approached the foot of a mountain, and they could reach that before the sun rose.
Underfoot, the trail was rising slowly but steadily above the surface of the ground. When Hosteen turned the light on that road, they saw that now it was fashioned of the black substance used elsewhere to coat tunnel walls.
They were well above the general level of the valley when the road ended in a wide wedge of black, the narrow end of which touched against a solid cliff wall in which there was no discernible break. To all their inspection with hand and torch, there was no door there, no way ahead. This was the end of t
he trail they had been following for so long.
“A landin’ mat for ’copters, d’ you suppose?” Logan asked after they had made a second circling exploration of the wedge. He was sitting cross-legged on the smooth black surface, his hands resting on his knees. “What now—do we start back?”
Privately the Terran doubted if they could now make that return trip before the day broke. Though they had not come so far in actual distance, their struggle with the shadows had been exhausting. He knew that fatigue of both mind and body rode him, made him flinch at the thought of back-tracking. Yet if they wanted to live, they must do that before sunrise.
He had hunkered down on the pavement and was flashing his torch back forth across its surface for no conscious reason. Then his eyes sighted the pattern there, and his dull mind became alert. There was a circular strip of glassy, glossy black, which began at the point where the road met the wedge and then spiraled around and around until it ended in a circle just large enough for a man to stand upon.
Why he went into action then he could never afterwards explain. It was all a part of the weird influence of this place. He only knew that this he must do at once.
Crossing to the beginning of that spiral, he began to walk along the route it marked, around and around, approaching the center point and concentrating upon keeping his boots firmly planted on the slick surface, in no way touching the duller borders.
Dimly he was aware of Logan asking questions, demanding answers. But that sound, the words, meant nothing now. The most important thing in the world was to walk that path without deviation or error. The circle in the center could not be rightly entered in any other way, and it was a door.
Door? demanded another part of his brain. How? Why?
Hosteen fought down all questions. To walk the spiral slowly, cautiously, with all his powers of concentration, with no careless boot-toe touch beyond its border, he had to fit one foot almost directly before the other, balance like a man walking the narrowest of mountain ledges. This way only was it safe. Safe? He dismissed that query also.