He might have been asleep only for a moment,
Troy thought when he roused. The sun patch still lit the pool.
There had been no change in his surroundings, save that the
animals, except for the injured cat, were gone. The cat raised its
head from licking the splinted leg and made an inquiring noise deep
in its throat as Horan sat up, rubbing his arm across his eyes. He
shook his head, still a little bemused, wondering vaguely if he had
slept the clock around.
Then out of the murk of the fungus growth trotted the black cat,
its head held high as it dragged the body of a limp thing across
the coarse earth. Paying no attention to Troy, it brought the weird
underground dweller to its mate.
The dead creature was in its way as hideous as the hur-hur, a
nightmare combination of many legs, stalked eyes, segmented, plated
body. But apparently to both felines it was a very acceptable form
of food and they dined amiably together.
If the Terran animals were able to forage for themselves even in
this hole in the ground, Troy had proof of another of Kyger’s
secrets. They had not needed the special food that had been so
ceremoniously delivered at a suitably high price to the quondam
owners in Tikil.
“Good hunting?” he asked the black casually.
The cat was engaged in a meticulous toilet with tongue and
paw.
“Good hunting,” it agreed.
“The others also have good hunting?” Troy wondered
where in that unwholesome fungoid growth the missing three hunted
and what they pursued.
“They eat,” the cat answered with finality.
Troy stood up, stretched the cramps out of his sore body. He had
no intention of remaining in this cavern, or underground city, or
whatever it might be.
“There is a way out?” he asked the cat, and received
the odd mental equivalent of what might have been a shrug. It was
plain that hunting had been of more importance than exploration for
another passage as far as that independent animal was
concerned.
Troy sat down again to study both cats. The injured one was
still eating, with neatness, but hungrily. He was sure that it was
not unaware of the exchange between its mate and himself.
Horan had no control over the five Terran animals, and he knew
it. By some freak of chance he was able to communicate with them
after a disjointed fashion. But he was very sure that their
communication with Kyger had been much clearer and
fuller—perhaps through the aid of that odd summoning device
he had seen in the dead man’s hands.
They had accompanied him in the flight from Tikil because that
had suited their purpose also, just as they had guided him to this
particular hole. Yet he knew well that if they wished they would
leave him as readily, unless he could establish some closer tie
with them. The position was changed—in Tikil he had been in
command because that was man’s place. Here the animals had
found their own; they no longer needed him.
It was disquieting to face the fact that his somewhat rosy
dreams of cooperation between man and animal might be just
that—dreams. He could fly the fussel to his will and that
bird would know the pleasure of the hunt and still return on call.
But these hunters had wills and minds of their own, and if they
gave companionship, it would be by free will. The age-old balance
of man and animal had tipped. There would be a cool examination
from the other side, no surrender but perhaps an alliance.
And such thoughts could lead Troy now to understand Zul’s
demand that the animals be killed. Few men were going to accept
readily a co-partnership with creatures they had always considered
property. There would lurk a threat to the supremacy man believed
in.
Yet Troy knew that he could not have left any of the animals in
Tikil, nor yielded to Zul’s demands. Why? Why did he feel
that way about them? He was uneasy now, almost unhappy, as he
realized that he was not dealing with pets, that he must put aside
his conception of these five as playthings to be owned and ordered
about. Neither were they humans whose thinking processes and
reactions he could in a manner anticipate.
The black cat ceased its toilet, sat upright, the tip of its
tail folded neatly over its paws, its blue eyes regarding Troy. And
the man stirred uneasily under that unwinking stare.
“You wish a way out?”
“Yes.” Troy answered that simply. With this new
humbleness he was willing to accept what the other would give.
“This place—not man’s—not
ours—”
Troy nodded. “Before man—something like man but
different.”
“There is danger—old danger here.” There was a
new touch of thought like a new voice. The gray-blue cat had
finished its meal and was looking over the good paw, raised to its
mouth for a tonguing, at Troy.
“There was a bad thing happened here to men—some
years ago.”
Both cats appeared to consider that. Perhaps their minds linked
in a thread of communication he could not reach.
“You are not of those we know.” That was the black
cat. Troy discovered that he could now distinguish one’s
thought touch from another’s. The animals had come to be
definite and separate personalities to him and closer in
companionship because of that very fact. Sometimes he was so
certain of a comrade at hand that it was a shock to realize that
the mind he could touch was outwardly clothed in fur and was borne
by four feet, not two.
“No.”
“Few men know our speech—and those must use the
caller. Yet from the first you could contact us without that. You
are a different kind of man.” That was the gray-blue cat.
“I do not know. You mean that you cannot
‘talk’ to everyone?”
“True. To the big man we talked—because that was set
upon us—just as we had to obey the caller when he used it.
But it was not set upon us to talk to you—yet you heard. And
you are not one-who-is-to-be-obeyed.”
Set upon them—did they mean that they had been conditioned
to obey orders and “talk” with certain humans?
“No,” Troy agreed. “I do not know why I hear
your ‘talk,’ but I do.”
“Now that the big man is gone, we are hunted.”
“That is so.”
“It is as was told us. We should be hunted if we tried to
be free.”
“We are free,” the black cat interrupted. “We
might leave you, man, and you could not find us here unless we
willed it so.”
“That is true.”
Again the pause, those unblinking stares. The black cat moved.
It came to him, its tail erect. Then it sat upon its hind legs.
Horan put out his hand diffidently, felt the quick rasp of a rough
tongue for an instant on his thumb.
“There will be a way out.”
The cat’s head turned toward the fungus town. It stared as
intently in that direction as it had toward Troy a moment earlier.
And the man was not surprised when out of that unwholesome maze
trotted the fox pair, followed by the kinkajou. They came to stand
before Troy, the black cat a little to one side, and the man caught
little flickers of their unheard speech.
“Not one-to-be-obeyed—hunts in our paths—will
let us walk free—”
It was the black cat who continued as spokesman. “We shall
hunt your way for you now, man. But we are free to go.”
“You are free to go. I share my path; I do not order you
to walk upon it also.” He searched for phrases to express his
acceptance of the bargain they offered and his willingness to be
bound by their conditions.
“A way out—” The cat turned to the others. The
foxes lapped at the pool and then loped away. The kinkajou dabbled
its front paws in the water. Troy offered it a pressed-food biscuit
and it ate with noisy crunchings. Then it turned to the cavern wall
at their back and frisked away along its foot.
“We shall go this way.” The cat nodded to the right
of the pool, along that clean strip of ground between the fungoid
growth and the cavern wall.
Troy emptied two of the containers of dry food, rinsed them, and
filled them with water as a reserve supply.
Both cats drank slowly. Then Troy picked up the injured one, who
settled comfortably in the crook of his arm. The black darted
away.
Horan walked at a reasonable pace, studying his surroundings as
he went. To the glance there was no alteration in either the fungus
walls or the rock barrier to his right. But as he drew farther away
from the splotch of sunlight, he switched on his atom torch.
The cat stirred in his hold, its head—with ears sharply
pointed—swung to face the fungus.
“There is something there—alive?” Troy’s
hand went to the stunner in a belt loop.
“Old thing—not alive,” the thought answer came
readily. “Sargon finds—”
“Sargon?”
The wavering picture of the male fox crossed his mind.
“You are named?” he asked eagerly. Somehow names made
them seem less aloof and untouchable, closer to his own kind.
“Man’s names!” There was disdain in that,
hinting that there were other forms of identification more subtle
and intelligent, beyond the reach of a mere human. And Troy,
reading that into the cat’s reply, smiled.
“But I am a man. May I not use man’s
names?”
The logic of that appealed to the dainty lady he carried.
“Sargon and Sheba.” Fleeing fox faces flashed into his
mind. “Shang”—that was the kinkajou.
“Simba, Sahiba,” her mate and herself.
‘Troy Horan,” he answered gravely aloud, to complete
the round of introduction. Then he came back to her report.
“This old thing—it was made—or did it once
live?”
“It once lived.” Sahiba relayed the fox’s
report promptly. “It was not man—not
we—different.”
Troy’s curiosity was aroused, not enough, however, to draw
him into the paths threading the forbidding fungoid town. But as
they passed that point he wondered if the remains of one of the
original inhabitants of Ruhkarv could lie there.
“An opening—” Sahiba relayed a new
message. “Shang has discovered an opening—up—”
She pointed with her good paw to the cavern wall.
Troy altered course, came up a slight slope, and found the
kinkajou chattering excitedly and clinging head down to a knob that
overhung a crevice in the wall. Troy flashed the torch into that
dark pocket. There was no rear barrier; it was a narrow passage.
Yet it did not have any facing of worked stone as had the other
corridor entrances, and it might not lead far.
The foxes and Simba came from different directions and stood
sniffing the air in the rocky slit. Troy was conscious of that
too—a faint, fresh current, stirring the fetid breath of the
fungus, hinting of another and cleaner place. This must be a way
out.
Yet the waiting animals did not seem in any hurry to take that
path.
“Danger?” asked Troy, willing to accept their
hesitation as a warning.
Simba advanced to the overhang of the opening, his head held
high, his whiskers quivering a little, as he investigated by
scent.
“Something waiting—for a long time
waiting—”
“Man? Animal?”
But Simba appeared baffled. “A long time waiting,”
he repeated. “Maybe no longer alive—but still
waiting.”
Troy tried to sift some coherent meaning out of that. The
kinkajou made him start as it leaped from the rock perch to his
shoulder.
“It is quiet.” Shang broke in over Simba’s
caution. “We go outside—this way
outside—”
But Troy asked Simba for the final verdict. “Do we
go?”
The cat glanced up at him, and there was a flash of something
warm upon the meeting of their eyes, as if Troy in his deference to
the other’s judgment had advanced another step on the narrow
road of understanding between them.
“We go—taking care. This thing I do not
understand.”
The foxes were apparently content to follow Simba’s lead.
And the three trotted into the crevice, while Troy came behind, the
atom torch showing that this way was indeed a slit in the rock wall
and no worked passage.
Though the break was higher than his head by several feet, it
was none too wide, and Troy hoped that it would not narrow past his
using. Now that he was well inside and away from the cavern, the
freshness of the air current blowing softly against his face was
all the more noticeable. He was sure that in that breeze was the
scent of natural growing things and not just the mustiness of the
Ruhkarv paths.
They had not gone far before the pathway began to slope upward,
confirming his belief that it connected somehow with the outside
world. At first, that slope was easy, and then it became steeper,
until at last Troy was forced to transfer Sahiba to the ration bag
on his back and use both hands to climb some sections. His less
sensitive nose registered more than just fresh air now. There was
an unusual fragrance, which was certainly not normal in this slit
of rock, more appropriate to a garden under a sun hot enough to
draw perfume from aromatic plants and flowers. Yet beneath that
almost cloying scent lay a hint of another odor, a far less
pleasant one—the flowers of his imagining might be rooted in
a slime of decay.
The torch showed him another climb. Luckily the surface was
rough and furnished handholds. Shang and Simba went up it fluidly,
the foxes in a more scrambling fashion. Then Troy reached the top
and was greeted by a glow of daylight. He snapped off the torch and
advanced eagerly.
“No!” That warning came emphatically from more than
one of the animals. Troy stiffened, studied the path ahead, saw now
that between him and the open was a grating or mesh of netting.
He stood still. The cat and the foxes were outlined clearly
against that mesh.
“Gone—”
A flicker of thought, which was permission for him to come on.
There was a meshwork over the way into the open. And through it he
could see vegetation and a brightness that could only be daylight.
The mesh itself was of a sickly white color and was formed in
concentric rings with a thick blob like a knob in the center.
Troy approached it gingerly, noting that the cat and the foxes
did not get within touching distance. Now he noticed something
else—that along the rings of the netting were the remains of
numerous insects, ragged tatters of wings, scraps of carcasses, all
clinging to the surface of those thick cords. He drew the knife
from his belt and sliced down with a quick slash, only to have the
cord give very slightly beneath his blow. Then the blade rebounded
as if he had struck at some indestructible elastic substance.
The cord stuck to the blade so that it was carried upward on the
rebound, and he had to give a hard jerk to free it. A second such
experiment nearly pulled the knife out of his grasp. Not only was
the stuff elastic and incredibly tough, but it was coated with
something like glue, and he did not think it was any product of
man—or of man’s remote star-born cousins.
There was clearly no cutting through it. But there was another
weapon he could use. Troy set down the bag in which Sahiba rode and
investigated the loot he had brought with him from the wrecked
flitter. There was a small tube, meant originally for a distress
flare, but with another possible use.
Troy examined the webbing as well as he could without touching
it. The strands were coated with thick beads of dust. It had been
in place there for a long time. Unscrewing the head of the flare
and holding the other end of the tube, he aimed it at the center of
the web.
Violent red flame thrust like a spear at the net. There was an
answering flower of fire running from the point of impact along the
cords to their fastening points on the rock about the opening, a
stench that set Troy to coughing. Then—there was nothing at
all fronting them but the open path and some trails of smoke
wreathing from the stone.
They waited for those to clear before Simba took a running leap
to cross the fire-blackened space, the foxes following him eagerly.
Troy, again carrying Sahiba and Shang, brought up the rear.
He was well away from the cliff before he realized that they
might have made their escape from the cavern of the fungus town,
but they were not yet on the open surface of Korwar. There was
vegetation here, growing rankly in an approximation of sunlight, a
light that filtered down from a vast expanse of roof crossed and
crisscrossed with bars or beams set in zigzag patterns like those
formed by the light sparks in the water tunnel. Between that
patching of bars was a cream-white surface, which, seen from ground
level, could have been sand held up by some invisible means.
As Troy studied that, he saw a puff of golden vapor exhaled from
a section of crosshatched bars. The tiny cloud floated softly down
until it was midway between the roof and earth, and then it
discharged its bulk in a small shower, spattering big drops of
liquid on the leaves of the plants immediately below.
And now Troy could see radical differences between those plants
and the ordinary vegetation of the surface. Not far away a huge
four-petaled flower—the petals a vivid cream, its heart a
striking orange-red—hung without any stem Troy could detect,
in a rounded opening among shaggy bushes.
The heavy, almost oppressive fragrance he had first noted in the
passage came from that. Simba, nose extended, stalked toward the
blossom. Then the cat arched its back and spat, its ears flattened
to its skull. Troy, coming in answer to the wave of disgust and
warning from the animal, found his boots crunching the husks of
small bodies, charnel house debris. His sickened reaction made him
slice at the horrible flower—to discover it was not a flower
but a cunning weave of sticky threads. And, as his knife blade tore
through them, the orange-red heart came to life, leaping from the
trap, darting straight at him.
Troy had a confused impression of many-legged thing with a
gaping mouth, a thorned tail ready to sting. But Simba struck with a
heavy clawed paw, throwing the creature up into the air. As it
smashed to the ground, Sargon pounded it into the earth in a
flattened smear. The fox sniffed and then drew back, his head down,
his paws rubbing frantically at his nose.
Simba, tail moving in angry sweeps from side to side, sat half
crouched as if awaiting a second attack.
“This is a bad place,” Sahiba stated flatly. And
Troy was ready to agree with her.
Oddly enough it was Shang, the kinkajou, who took the lead. He
leaped from Troy’s shoulder to the top of the nearest tall
bush, and in a moment was only to be marked by a thrasing of
branches as he headed into the miniature wilds. Troy dodged another
made-to-order rain cloud and sat down to share out supplies with
his oddly assorted company. They would need food and water before
they tried to solve this latest riddle.
He might have been asleep only for a moment,
Troy thought when he roused. The sun patch still lit the pool.
There had been no change in his surroundings, save that the
animals, except for the injured cat, were gone. The cat raised its
head from licking the splinted leg and made an inquiring noise deep
in its throat as Horan sat up, rubbing his arm across his eyes. He
shook his head, still a little bemused, wondering vaguely if he had
slept the clock around.
Then out of the murk of the fungus growth trotted the black cat,
its head held high as it dragged the body of a limp thing across
the coarse earth. Paying no attention to Troy, it brought the weird
underground dweller to its mate.
The dead creature was in its way as hideous as the hur-hur, a
nightmare combination of many legs, stalked eyes, segmented, plated
body. But apparently to both felines it was a very acceptable form
of food and they dined amiably together.
If the Terran animals were able to forage for themselves even in
this hole in the ground, Troy had proof of another of Kyger’s
secrets. They had not needed the special food that had been so
ceremoniously delivered at a suitably high price to the quondam
owners in Tikil.
“Good hunting?” he asked the black casually.
The cat was engaged in a meticulous toilet with tongue and
paw.
“Good hunting,” it agreed.
“The others also have good hunting?” Troy wondered
where in that unwholesome fungoid growth the missing three hunted
and what they pursued.
“They eat,” the cat answered with finality.
Troy stood up, stretched the cramps out of his sore body. He had
no intention of remaining in this cavern, or underground city, or
whatever it might be.
“There is a way out?” he asked the cat, and received
the odd mental equivalent of what might have been a shrug. It was
plain that hunting had been of more importance than exploration for
another passage as far as that independent animal was
concerned.
Troy sat down again to study both cats. The injured one was
still eating, with neatness, but hungrily. He was sure that it was
not unaware of the exchange between its mate and himself.
Horan had no control over the five Terran animals, and he knew
it. By some freak of chance he was able to communicate with them
after a disjointed fashion. But he was very sure that their
communication with Kyger had been much clearer and
fuller—perhaps through the aid of that odd summoning device
he had seen in the dead man’s hands.
They had accompanied him in the flight from Tikil because that
had suited their purpose also, just as they had guided him to this
particular hole. Yet he knew well that if they wished they would
leave him as readily, unless he could establish some closer tie
with them. The position was changed—in Tikil he had been in
command because that was man’s place. Here the animals had
found their own; they no longer needed him.
It was disquieting to face the fact that his somewhat rosy
dreams of cooperation between man and animal might be just
that—dreams. He could fly the fussel to his will and that
bird would know the pleasure of the hunt and still return on call.
But these hunters had wills and minds of their own, and if they
gave companionship, it would be by free will. The age-old balance
of man and animal had tipped. There would be a cool examination
from the other side, no surrender but perhaps an alliance.
And such thoughts could lead Troy now to understand Zul’s
demand that the animals be killed. Few men were going to accept
readily a co-partnership with creatures they had always considered
property. There would lurk a threat to the supremacy man believed
in.
Yet Troy knew that he could not have left any of the animals in
Tikil, nor yielded to Zul’s demands. Why? Why did he feel
that way about them? He was uneasy now, almost unhappy, as he
realized that he was not dealing with pets, that he must put aside
his conception of these five as playthings to be owned and ordered
about. Neither were they humans whose thinking processes and
reactions he could in a manner anticipate.
The black cat ceased its toilet, sat upright, the tip of its
tail folded neatly over its paws, its blue eyes regarding Troy. And
the man stirred uneasily under that unwinking stare.
“You wish a way out?”
“Yes.” Troy answered that simply. With this new
humbleness he was willing to accept what the other would give.
“This place—not man’s—not
ours—”
Troy nodded. “Before man—something like man but
different.”
“There is danger—old danger here.” There was a
new touch of thought like a new voice. The gray-blue cat had
finished its meal and was looking over the good paw, raised to its
mouth for a tonguing, at Troy.
“There was a bad thing happened here to men—some
years ago.”
Both cats appeared to consider that. Perhaps their minds linked
in a thread of communication he could not reach.
“You are not of those we know.” That was the black
cat. Troy discovered that he could now distinguish one’s
thought touch from another’s. The animals had come to be
definite and separate personalities to him and closer in
companionship because of that very fact. Sometimes he was so
certain of a comrade at hand that it was a shock to realize that
the mind he could touch was outwardly clothed in fur and was borne
by four feet, not two.
“No.”
“Few men know our speech—and those must use the
caller. Yet from the first you could contact us without that. You
are a different kind of man.” That was the gray-blue cat.
“I do not know. You mean that you cannot
‘talk’ to everyone?”
“True. To the big man we talked—because that was set
upon us—just as we had to obey the caller when he used it.
But it was not set upon us to talk to you—yet you heard. And
you are not one-who-is-to-be-obeyed.”
Set upon them—did they mean that they had been conditioned
to obey orders and “talk” with certain humans?
“No,” Troy agreed. “I do not know why I hear
your ‘talk,’ but I do.”
“Now that the big man is gone, we are hunted.”
“That is so.”
“It is as was told us. We should be hunted if we tried to
be free.”
“We are free,” the black cat interrupted. “We
might leave you, man, and you could not find us here unless we
willed it so.”
“That is true.”
Again the pause, those unblinking stares. The black cat moved.
It came to him, its tail erect. Then it sat upon its hind legs.
Horan put out his hand diffidently, felt the quick rasp of a rough
tongue for an instant on his thumb.
“There will be a way out.”
The cat’s head turned toward the fungus town. It stared as
intently in that direction as it had toward Troy a moment earlier.
And the man was not surprised when out of that unwholesome maze
trotted the fox pair, followed by the kinkajou. They came to stand
before Troy, the black cat a little to one side, and the man caught
little flickers of their unheard speech.
“Not one-to-be-obeyed—hunts in our paths—will
let us walk free—”
It was the black cat who continued as spokesman. “We shall
hunt your way for you now, man. But we are free to go.”
“You are free to go. I share my path; I do not order you
to walk upon it also.” He searched for phrases to express his
acceptance of the bargain they offered and his willingness to be
bound by their conditions.
“A way out—” The cat turned to the others. The
foxes lapped at the pool and then loped away. The kinkajou dabbled
its front paws in the water. Troy offered it a pressed-food biscuit
and it ate with noisy crunchings. Then it turned to the cavern wall
at their back and frisked away along its foot.
“We shall go this way.” The cat nodded to the right
of the pool, along that clean strip of ground between the fungoid
growth and the cavern wall.
Troy emptied two of the containers of dry food, rinsed them, and
filled them with water as a reserve supply.
Both cats drank slowly. Then Troy picked up the injured one, who
settled comfortably in the crook of his arm. The black darted
away.
Horan walked at a reasonable pace, studying his surroundings as
he went. To the glance there was no alteration in either the fungus
walls or the rock barrier to his right. But as he drew farther away
from the splotch of sunlight, he switched on his atom torch.
The cat stirred in his hold, its head—with ears sharply
pointed—swung to face the fungus.
“There is something there—alive?” Troy’s
hand went to the stunner in a belt loop.
“Old thing—not alive,” the thought answer came
readily. “Sargon finds—”
“Sargon?”
The wavering picture of the male fox crossed his mind.
“You are named?” he asked eagerly. Somehow names made
them seem less aloof and untouchable, closer to his own kind.
“Man’s names!” There was disdain in that,
hinting that there were other forms of identification more subtle
and intelligent, beyond the reach of a mere human. And Troy,
reading that into the cat’s reply, smiled.
“But I am a man. May I not use man’s
names?”
The logic of that appealed to the dainty lady he carried.
“Sargon and Sheba.” Fleeing fox faces flashed into his
mind. “Shang”—that was the kinkajou.
“Simba, Sahiba,” her mate and herself.
‘Troy Horan,” he answered gravely aloud, to complete
the round of introduction. Then he came back to her report.
“This old thing—it was made—or did it once
live?”
“It once lived.” Sahiba relayed the fox’s
report promptly. “It was not man—not
we—different.”
Troy’s curiosity was aroused, not enough, however, to draw
him into the paths threading the forbidding fungoid town. But as
they passed that point he wondered if the remains of one of the
original inhabitants of Ruhkarv could lie there.
“An opening—” Sahiba relayed a new
message. “Shang has discovered an opening—up—”
She pointed with her good paw to the cavern wall.
Troy altered course, came up a slight slope, and found the
kinkajou chattering excitedly and clinging head down to a knob that
overhung a crevice in the wall. Troy flashed the torch into that
dark pocket. There was no rear barrier; it was a narrow passage.
Yet it did not have any facing of worked stone as had the other
corridor entrances, and it might not lead far.
The foxes and Simba came from different directions and stood
sniffing the air in the rocky slit. Troy was conscious of that
too—a faint, fresh current, stirring the fetid breath of the
fungus, hinting of another and cleaner place. This must be a way
out.
Yet the waiting animals did not seem in any hurry to take that
path.
“Danger?” asked Troy, willing to accept their
hesitation as a warning.
Simba advanced to the overhang of the opening, his head held
high, his whiskers quivering a little, as he investigated by
scent.
“Something waiting—for a long time
waiting—”
“Man? Animal?”
But Simba appeared baffled. “A long time waiting,”
he repeated. “Maybe no longer alive—but still
waiting.”
Troy tried to sift some coherent meaning out of that. The
kinkajou made him start as it leaped from the rock perch to his
shoulder.
“It is quiet.” Shang broke in over Simba’s
caution. “We go outside—this way
outside—”
But Troy asked Simba for the final verdict. “Do we
go?”
The cat glanced up at him, and there was a flash of something
warm upon the meeting of their eyes, as if Troy in his deference to
the other’s judgment had advanced another step on the narrow
road of understanding between them.
“We go—taking care. This thing I do not
understand.”
The foxes were apparently content to follow Simba’s lead.
And the three trotted into the crevice, while Troy came behind, the
atom torch showing that this way was indeed a slit in the rock wall
and no worked passage.
Though the break was higher than his head by several feet, it
was none too wide, and Troy hoped that it would not narrow past his
using. Now that he was well inside and away from the cavern, the
freshness of the air current blowing softly against his face was
all the more noticeable. He was sure that in that breeze was the
scent of natural growing things and not just the mustiness of the
Ruhkarv paths.
They had not gone far before the pathway began to slope upward,
confirming his belief that it connected somehow with the outside
world. At first, that slope was easy, and then it became steeper,
until at last Troy was forced to transfer Sahiba to the ration bag
on his back and use both hands to climb some sections. His less
sensitive nose registered more than just fresh air now. There was
an unusual fragrance, which was certainly not normal in this slit
of rock, more appropriate to a garden under a sun hot enough to
draw perfume from aromatic plants and flowers. Yet beneath that
almost cloying scent lay a hint of another odor, a far less
pleasant one—the flowers of his imagining might be rooted in
a slime of decay.
The torch showed him another climb. Luckily the surface was
rough and furnished handholds. Shang and Simba went up it fluidly,
the foxes in a more scrambling fashion. Then Troy reached the top
and was greeted by a glow of daylight. He snapped off the torch and
advanced eagerly.
“No!” That warning came emphatically from more than
one of the animals. Troy stiffened, studied the path ahead, saw now
that between him and the open was a grating or mesh of netting.
He stood still. The cat and the foxes were outlined clearly
against that mesh.
“Gone—”
A flicker of thought, which was permission for him to come on.
There was a meshwork over the way into the open. And through it he
could see vegetation and a brightness that could only be daylight.
The mesh itself was of a sickly white color and was formed in
concentric rings with a thick blob like a knob in the center.
Troy approached it gingerly, noting that the cat and the foxes
did not get within touching distance. Now he noticed something
else—that along the rings of the netting were the remains of
numerous insects, ragged tatters of wings, scraps of carcasses, all
clinging to the surface of those thick cords. He drew the knife
from his belt and sliced down with a quick slash, only to have the
cord give very slightly beneath his blow. Then the blade rebounded
as if he had struck at some indestructible elastic substance.
The cord stuck to the blade so that it was carried upward on the
rebound, and he had to give a hard jerk to free it. A second such
experiment nearly pulled the knife out of his grasp. Not only was
the stuff elastic and incredibly tough, but it was coated with
something like glue, and he did not think it was any product of
man—or of man’s remote star-born cousins.
There was clearly no cutting through it. But there was another
weapon he could use. Troy set down the bag in which Sahiba rode and
investigated the loot he had brought with him from the wrecked
flitter. There was a small tube, meant originally for a distress
flare, but with another possible use.
Troy examined the webbing as well as he could without touching
it. The strands were coated with thick beads of dust. It had been
in place there for a long time. Unscrewing the head of the flare
and holding the other end of the tube, he aimed it at the center of
the web.
Violent red flame thrust like a spear at the net. There was an
answering flower of fire running from the point of impact along the
cords to their fastening points on the rock about the opening, a
stench that set Troy to coughing. Then—there was nothing at
all fronting them but the open path and some trails of smoke
wreathing from the stone.
They waited for those to clear before Simba took a running leap
to cross the fire-blackened space, the foxes following him eagerly.
Troy, again carrying Sahiba and Shang, brought up the rear.
He was well away from the cliff before he realized that they
might have made their escape from the cavern of the fungus town,
but they were not yet on the open surface of Korwar. There was
vegetation here, growing rankly in an approximation of sunlight, a
light that filtered down from a vast expanse of roof crossed and
crisscrossed with bars or beams set in zigzag patterns like those
formed by the light sparks in the water tunnel. Between that
patching of bars was a cream-white surface, which, seen from ground
level, could have been sand held up by some invisible means.
As Troy studied that, he saw a puff of golden vapor exhaled from
a section of crosshatched bars. The tiny cloud floated softly down
until it was midway between the roof and earth, and then it
discharged its bulk in a small shower, spattering big drops of
liquid on the leaves of the plants immediately below.
And now Troy could see radical differences between those plants
and the ordinary vegetation of the surface. Not far away a huge
four-petaled flower—the petals a vivid cream, its heart a
striking orange-red—hung without any stem Troy could detect,
in a rounded opening among shaggy bushes.
The heavy, almost oppressive fragrance he had first noted in the
passage came from that. Simba, nose extended, stalked toward the
blossom. Then the cat arched its back and spat, its ears flattened
to its skull. Troy, coming in answer to the wave of disgust and
warning from the animal, found his boots crunching the husks of
small bodies, charnel house debris. His sickened reaction made him
slice at the horrible flower—to discover it was not a flower
but a cunning weave of sticky threads. And, as his knife blade tore
through them, the orange-red heart came to life, leaping from the
trap, darting straight at him.
Troy had a confused impression of many-legged thing with a
gaping mouth, a thorned tail ready to sting. But Simba struck with a
heavy clawed paw, throwing the creature up into the air. As it
smashed to the ground, Sargon pounded it into the earth in a
flattened smear. The fox sniffed and then drew back, his head down,
his paws rubbing frantically at his nose.
Simba, tail moving in angry sweeps from side to side, sat half
crouched as if awaiting a second attack.
“This is a bad place,” Sahiba stated flatly. And
Troy was ready to agree with her.
Oddly enough it was Shang, the kinkajou, who took the lead. He
leaped from Troy’s shoulder to the top of the nearest tall
bush, and in a moment was only to be marked by a thrasing of
branches as he headed into the miniature wilds. Troy dodged another
made-to-order rain cloud and sat down to share out supplies with
his oddly assorted company. They would need food and water before
they tried to solve this latest riddle.