There was something strange about this monster"s perceptions. Every time he had tried to get untied and out of the cage, the monster had shown up again. As though it could see when it wasn"t around to see.
Possibly those little spheres had had something to do with it. The monster held them in its paws like small detachable eyes. One was up there now, glittering, way up in the corner of the cage. Like a little eye. The other one was out there stuck onto a nearby building side.
But the monster had caught him trying to get out before it planted those eyes.
What was this place? There was a constant rumble from somewhere, a muted roar similar to the one the insect had made. The thought of more of those insects chilled him.
There was a big stone basin in the middle of the cage, a few feet deep with steps up one side. Lots of sand was in the bottom of it. A grave? A place to roast meat? No, there were no charred sticks or ashes in it.
So there were monsters. When he stood in front of it, his face was just above the level of its belt buckle. Belt buckle? Yes, a shiny thing that held a belt together. It suddenly dawned on Jonnie that the monster was wearing a covering that wasn"t its own skin. A slippery, shiny purple substance. It wasn"t its own hide. Like clothes you"d cut out of a hide. Pants. A coat. A collar. It wore clothes.
Ornaments on the collar. And a device of some sort on the belt buckle. That device was stamped on his mind"s eye, right now. It was a picture of ground on which stood small square blocks. Vertical shafts were going up from the square blocks. Out of the shafts seemed to be coming clouds of smoke, and smoke in curls lay all over the top of the picture. The idea of clouds of smoke stirred some memory in him, but he was too hungry and too thirsty and too hot to wrestle with it.
The ground under him began to shake in measured tread. He knew what this was.
The monster came to the door. It was carrying something. It came in and loomed over him. It threw down into the dirt some soft, gooey sticks of something. Then it just stood there.
Jonnie looked at the sticks. They weren"t like anything he had ever seen.
The monster made motions, pointing from the sticks to his face. That failing, the monster took up a stick and squashed it against Jonnie"s mouth, saying something in a rumbling roaring voice. A command.
Jonnie got it. This was supposed to be food.
He worked a bit of it around in his mouth and then swallowed it.
Abruptly and immediately he was violently ill. He felt like his whole stomach was going to rush back out of his mouth. Before he could control them, his limbs went into the beginning of a convulsion.
He spat. Too thirsty to have much saliva, he tried to get rid of the stuff, all of it, every bit of it, every tiny piece of the acid taste of it.
The monster just backed up and stood there staring at him.
"Water," pleaded Jonnie, getting control of his shaking limbs and voice. "Please. Water." Anything to wash this horrible stuff out.
He pointed to his mouth. "Water."
The monster just went on standing there. The eyes back of the faceplate were slitted, glowing with an eerie fire.
Jonnie composed himself stoically. It was wrong to look weak and beg. There was such a thing as pride. He drew his face into stillness.
The monster leaned over and checked the collar and the flexirope, turned around and went back out, closed the gate with a firm clang, wired it shut and left.
The evening shadows were growing long.
Jonnie looked at his packs by the gate. They might as well be on the top of Highpeak!
A cloak of misery settled over him. He had to a.s.sume Windsplitter was gravely injured or dead. And he had to a.s.sume that in a few days he himself probably would die of thirst or hunger.
Twilight came.
And then with a shock he realized Chrissie"s promise to find him would wind up in her certain death. He caved in.
The little bright eye, up in the corner of the cage, stared down unwinkingly.
Chapter 3.
The following day, Terl probed around the disused quarters of the old c.h.i.n.kos.
It was unpleasant work. The quarters were outside the pressurized Psychlo domes of the minesite and he had to wear a breathe-mask. The c.h.i.n.kos were air-breathers. And while the quarters had been sealed off, a few hundred years of neglect and weather leaks had left their marks.
There were rows and rows of bookcases. Lines and lines of filing cabinets full of notes. Old scarred desks, rickety and frail to begin with, collapsing into themselves. Piles of junk in lockers. And everything filmed over with white dust. Good thing he didn"t have to breathe it.
What funny beings the c.h.i.n.kos had been. They were the Intergalactic Mining Company"s answer to some protests by more warlike and able worlds that mining was wrecking planetary ecologies. And, the company being plush and profitable at that time, some knothead of a director in Intergalactic"s main office had created the culture and ethnology department, or C and E. Maybe it was originally named the ecological department, but c.h.i.n.kos could paint, and some Intergalactic director"s wear-the-claws wife had begun to make a private fortune selling c.h.i.n.ko work on other planets and got the name changed. There was very little that didn"t show up in the secret files of the security department.
It was the strike the c.h.i.n.kos had invented, not the corruption, that caused the final wipeout. Corruption at director level was very paws-off for security. A strike was not.
But the c.h.i.n.kos here had been gone long before that, and this place looked it. What, after all, was worth culturing on this planet? There weren"t enough indigenous populations left to bother with. And who had cared anyway? But like any bureaucracy, the c.h.i.n.kos had been busy. Look at those hundreds of yards of cabinets and books.
Terl was looking for a manual on the feeding habits of man. Surely these busy c.h.i.n.kos had studied that.
He pawed and pawed. He opened and flipped hundreds of indexes. He got down and poked into lockers. And while he got a very good idea of what there was in these rambling offices and lockers, he couldn"t find one single thing about what man ate. He found what bears ate. He found what mountain goats ate. He even found a treatise, scholarly composed, printed and reeking with wasted expense, on what some beast known as a "whale" ate, a treatise that ended up laughably enough with the fact that the beast was totally extinct.
Terl stood in the middle of the place, disgusted. No wonder the company had phased out C and E on Earth. Imagine roaring around, burning up fuel, keeping a whole book-manufacturing plant steaming like a digger shovel, wearing out eyesight...
It wasn"t all in vain, though. He had learned from the aged and yellowed map he now gripped in his hand that there were a few other groups of men left on this planet. At least there had been a few hundred years ago.
Some were in a place the c.h.i.n.kos called "Alps." Several dozen, in fact. There had been about fifteen up in the ice belt the c.h.i.n.kos called "North Pole" and "Canada." There had been an unestimated number at a place called "Scotland" and there had been some in "Scandinavia." And also in a place called "Colorado."
This was the first time he had seen the c.h.i.n.ko name for this central minesite area. "Colorado." He looked at the map with some amus.e.m.e.nt. "Rocky Mountains." "Pike"s Peak." Funny c.h.i.n.ko names. The c.h.i.n.kos always did their work in painfully severe Psychlo, faithful to their ore. But they had had funny imaginations.
This was getting him no place, however, although it was good to know, for the sake of his planning, that there had been a few more men around.
He would have to rely on what he should have relied on in the first place- security. The techniques of security. He would put them to work.
He walked out and closed the door behind him and stared around at this non-Psychlo alien world. The old c.h.i.n.ko offices, barracks, and zoo were up on the high hill back of the minesite. Close by but higher. The arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. One could see all around from this place. One could see the ore transshipment platform as well as the freighter a.s.sembly field; the place didn"t look very busy down there. Intergalactic would be sending some sizzlers down the line unless quotas were met. He hoped he wouldn"t have too many investigations ordered by the home office.
Blue sky. Yellow sun. Green trees. And the wind that tugged at him full of air.
How he hated this place.
The thought of staying made him grit his fangs.
Well, what do you expect in an alien world?
He"d finish that investigation ordered about a lost tractor and then put his tried-and-true security technology to work on that man-thing.
That was the only way out of this h.e.l.lhole.
Chapter 4.
Jonnie watched the monster.
Thirsty, hungry, and with no hope, he felt adrift in a sea of unknowns.
The thing had come into the cage, its footsteps shaking the earth, and had stood there for some time just looking at him, small glints of light in its amber eyes. Then it had begun to putter around.
Right now it was testing the bars, shaking them, apparently verifying that they were firm. Satisfied, it rumbled all around the perimeter inspecting the dirt.
It stood for a while looking at the sticks it had tried to make Jonnie eat. Jonnie had pushed them as far away as possible since they had a bad, pungent smell. The monster counted them. Aha! It could count.
It spent some time examining the collar and rope. And then it did a very strange thing. It unhooked the rope"s far end from the bar top. Jonnie held his breath. Maybe he could get to his packs.
But the monster now hooked the rope on a nearby bar. He dropped a loop over the bar indifferently and then moved off to the door.
It spent some time at the door, rewinding the wires that kept it closed, and did not seem to notice that when it turned its back on the door, one of the wires sprang free.
The monster rumbled off toward the compound and disappeared.
Lightheaded with thirst and hunger, Jonnie felt he was having delusions. He was afraid to hope. But there it was: the rope could be removed, and the gate fastening might be loose enough to open.
He made very sure the monster was really gone.
Then he acted.
With a flip of the rope he got the far end off the bar.
Hastily he wrapped the length around his body to get it out of his way and tucked the end into his belt.
He dove for his packs.
With shaking hands he ripped them open. Some of his hope died. The water bladder had burst, probably from the earlier impact, and there was only dampness there. The pork, wrapped in hide that retained the sun"s heat, was very spoiled, and he knew better than to eat it.
He looked at the door. He would try.
Grabbing a kill-club and rope from the pack and checking his belt pouch for flints, Jonnie crept to the door.
No sign of the monster.
The wires of the fastening were awfully big. But age had weakened them. Even so they tore and bruised his hands as he feverishly sought to open them.
Then they were open!
He pushed against the door.
In seconds he was sprinting through the shrubs and gullies to the northwest.
Keeping low, taking advantage of every bit of cover so as to remain hidden from the compound, he nevertheless went fast.
He had to find water. His tongue was swollen, his lips cracked.
He had to find food. He felt the lightheaded unreality that came with the beginnings of starvation.
Then he had to get back to the mountains. He had to stop Chrissie.
Jonnie went a mile. He examined his backtrail. Nothing. He listened. No sound of the insect, no feel of monster feet shaking the earth.
He ran two miles. He stopped and listened again. Still nothing. Hope flared within him.
Ahead he could see greenery, a patch jutting out of a gully, a sign of water.
His breath hoa.r.s.e and rattling in his chest, he made the edge of the gully.
No scene could be more heartwarming. A speck of blue and white. The cheerful burble of a small brook running through the trees.
Jonnie lunged forward and a moment later plunged his head into the incalculably precious water.
He knew better than to drink too much. He just kept rinsing his mouth. For minutes he plunged his head and chest in and out of the stream, letting the water soak in.
Gone was the taste of that terrible gooey stick. The freshness and cleanness of the brook were almost as joyful as its wetness.
He drank a few cautious swallows and then sank back, catching his breath. The day looked brighter.
The backtrail was still quiet. The monster might not discover he was gone for hours. Hope surged again.
Far off to the northwest, just a little bit above the curve of the plain, were the mountains. Home.
Jonnie looked around him. There was an old rickety shack on the other side of the stream bed, the roof sunk down to its foundation.
Food was his concern now.
He took more swallows of water and stood up. He hefted his kill-club and walked through the stream toward the ancient shack.
While running, he had seen no game.
Perhaps it was cleared out in the vicinity of the compound. But he didn"t need big game. A rabbit would do. He had better take care of this fast and keep going.
Something moved in the shack. He crept forward, silent.