SITTING UP, Dane stared wide-eyed into the dark.
A handful of glowing coals, guarded by rocks, was the center of
their camp. He hunched up to that hardly knowing why he moved. His
hands were shaking, his skin damp with sweat no heat produced. Yet,
now that he was conscious of the night, the Terran could not
remember the nightmare from which he had just awakened, though he
was left with a growing apprehension which he could not define.
What prowled out there in that dark? Walked the mountainside?
Listened, spied and waited?
Dane half started to his feet as a form did move into the dim
light of the fire. Tau stood there, regarding him with sober
intensity.
“Bad dream?”
The younger man admitted to that with a nod, partly against his
will.
“Well, you aren’t the only one. Remember any of
it?”
With an effort, Dane looked away from the encircling dark. It
was as if the fear which had shaken him awake, now embodied, lurked
right there.
“No.” He rubbed sleep-smarting eyes.
“Neither did I,” Tau remarked. “But both of
’em must have been jet-powered.”
“I suppose one could expect to have nightmares after
yesterday.” Dane advanced the logical explanation, yet at the
same time something deep inside him denied every word of it. He had
known nightmares before; none of them had left this aftertaste. And
he wanted no return of sleep tonight. Reaching to the pile of wood
he fed the fire as Tau settled down beside him.
“There is something else . . . ” the medic began, and
then fell silent. Dane did not press him. The younger man was too busy fighting a growing desire to whirl and aim the fire ray
into that darkness, to catch in its withering blast that lurking
thing he could feel padded there, biding its time.
Despite his efforts Dane did drowse again before morning, waking
unrefreshed, and, to his secret dismay, with no lessening of his
odd dislike for the country about them.
Asaki did not suggest that they trail the poachers into the
morass of Mygra. Instead the Chief Ranger was eager to press on in
the opposite direction, find a way over the range to the preserve
where he could assemble a punitive force to deal with the outlaws.
So they began an upward climb which took them away from the dank
heat of the lowlands, into the parched blaze of the sunbaked ledges
above.
The sun was bright, far too bright, and there were few shadows
left. Yet Dane, stopping to drink sparingly from his canteen, could
not lose that sense of eyes upon him, of being tracked. Rock apes?
Cunning as those beasts were, it was against their nature to trail
in utter silence, to be able to carry through a long-term project.
Lion, perhaps?
He noted that Nymani and Asaki took turns at rear guard today,
and that each was alert. Yet, oddly enough, none of them mentioned
the uneasiness they must all share.
They had a dry climb, finding no mountain stream to renew their
water supply. All being experienced in wilderness travel, they made
a mouthful of liquid go a long way. When the party halted slightly
before midday, their canteens were still half full.
“Haugh!”
They jerked up, hands on weapons. A rock ape, its hideous body
clearly seen here, capered, coughed, spat. Asaki fired from the hip
and the thing screeched, clawed at its chest where the dark blood
spewed out, and raced for them. Nymani cut the beast down and they
waited tensely for the attack of the thing’s tribe, which
should have followed the abortive lunge on the part of their scout.
But there was nothing—neither sound nor movement.
What did follow froze them all momentarily. That mangled body
began to move again, drew itself together, crawled toward them.
Dane knew that it was impossible that the creature could live with
such wounds. Yet the beast advanced, its head lolling on its
hunched shoulders so that the eyes were turned blindly up to the
full glare of the sun, while it crawled to reach the man it could
not see.
“Demon!” Nymani dropped his needler, shrank back
against the rocks.
As the thing advanced, before their eyes the impossible
happened. Those gaping wounds closed, the head straightened on the
almost invisible neck, the eyes glared once more with life, and
slaver dripped from the swine snout.
Jellico caught up the needler Nymani had dropped. With a
coolness Dane envied, the captain shot. And for the second time the
rock ape collapsed, torn to ribbons.
Nymani screamed, and Dane tried to choke back his own cry of
horrified protest. The dead thing put on life for the second time,
crawled, got somehow to its feet, healed itself, and came on.
Asaki, his face greenish-pale, stepped out stiffly as if each step
he took was forced by torture. He had dropped his needler. Now he
caught up a rock as large as his own head, raised it high with arms
on which the muscles stood out like ropes. He hurled the stone, and
Dane heard as well as saw the missile go home. The rock ape fell
for the third time.
When one of those taloned paws began to move again, Nymani
broke. He ran, his screams echoing thinly in the air, as the thing
lurched up, the gory mess of its head weaving about. If his feet
would have obeyed him, Dane might have followed the Khatkan. As it
was, he drew his ray and aimed it at that shambling thing. Tau
struck up the barrel.
The medic’s face was livid; there was the same horror in
his eyes. But he moved out to front that monster.
A spot of shadow coalesced on the ground, deepened in hue, took
on substance. Crouched low facing the rock ape, its haunches quivering for a deadly spring, narrowed green eyes
holding on its prey, was a black leopard.
The tiny forward and backward movements of its body steadied,
and it arched through the air, brought down the ape. A pitting,
snarling tangle rolled across the slope—and was gone!
Asaki’s hands shook as he drew them down his sweating
face. Jellico readied a second clip in the needler mechanically.
But Tau was swaying so that Dane leaped to take the shock of the
other’s weight as he collapsed. Only for a moment did the
medic hang so, then he struggled to stand erect.
“Magic?” Jellico’s voice, as controlled as
ever, broke the silence.
“Mass hallucination,” Tau corrected him. “Very
strong.”
“How!” Asaki swallowed and began again. “How
was it done?”
The medic shook his head. “Not by the usual methods, that
is certain. And it worked on us—on me—when we
weren’t conditioned. I don’t understand
that!”
Dane could hardly believe it yet. He watched Jellico stride to
where the tangle of struggling beasts had rolled, saw him examine
bare ground on which no trace of the fight remained. They must
accept Tau’s explanation; it was the only sane one.
Asaki’s features were suddenly convulsed with a rage so
stark that Dane realized how much a veneer was the painfully built
civilization of Khatka.
“Lumbrilo!” The Chief Ranger made of that
name a curse. Then with a visible effort he controlled his emotions
and came to Tau, looming over the slighter medic almost
menacingly.
“How?” he demanded for the second time.
“I don’t know.”
“He will try again?”
“Not the same perhaps—”
But Asaki had already grasped the situation, was looking
ahead.
“We shall not know,” he breathed, “what is
real, what is not.”
“There is also this,” Tau warned. “The unreal
can kill the believer just as quickly as the real!”
“That I know also. It has happened too many times lately.
If we could only find out how! Here are no drums, no singing—none of the tricks to tangle a man’s mind that he
usually uses to summon his demons. So without Lumbrilo, without his
witch tools, how does he make us see what is not?”
“That we must discover and speedily, sir. Or else we shall
be lost among the unreal and the real.”
“You also have the power. You can save us!” Asaki
protested.
Tau drew his arm across his face. Very little of the normal
color had returned to his thin, mobile features. He still leaned
against Dane’s supporting arm.
“A man can do only so much, sir. To battle Lumbrilo on his
own ground is exhausting and I can not fight so very
often.”
“But will he not also be exhausted?”
“I wonder . . . ” Tau gazed beyond the Khatkan to the
barren ground where leopard and rock ape had ceased to be.
“This magic is a tricky thing, sir. It builds and feeds upon
a man’s own imagination and inner fears. Lumbrilo, having
triggered ours, need not strive at all, but let us ourselves raise
that which will attack us.”
“Drugs?” demanded Jellico.
Tau gave a start sufficient to take him out of Dane’s
loose hold. His hand went to the packet of aid supplies which was
his own care, his eyes round with wonder and then shrewdly
alert.
“Captain, we disinfected those thorn punctures of yours.
Thorson, your foot salve . . . But, no, I didn’t use
anything—”
“You forget, Craig, we all had scratches after that fight
with the apes.”
Tau sat down on the ground. With feverish haste he unsealed his
medical supplies, laid out some containers. Then delicately he opened each, examined its contents closely by eye,
by smell, and two by taste. When he was done he shook his head.
“If these have been in any way meddled with, I would need
laboratory analysis to detect it. And I don’t believe that
Lumbrilo could hide traces of his work so cleverly. Or has he been
off-planet? Had much to do with off-worlders?” he asked the
Chief Ranger.
“By the nature of his position he is forbidden to space
voyage, to have any close relationship with any off-worlder. I do
not think, medic, he would choose your healing substances for his
mischief. There would only be chance to aid him then in producing
the effects he wants. Though there is often call for first aid in
travel, he could not be certain you would use any of your
drugs on this trip to the preserve.”
“And Lumbrilo was certain. He threatened
something such as this,” Jellico reminded them.
“So it would be something which we would all use, which we
had to depend upon . . . ”
“The water!” Dane had been holding his own canteen
ready to drink. But as that possible explanation dawned in his
mind, he smelled instead of tasted the liquid sloshing inside.
There was no odor he could detect. But he remembered Tau commenting
on the powdered purifier pills at their first camp.
“That’s it!” Tau dug further into his kit,
brought out the vial of white powder with its grainy lumps. Pouring
a little into the palm of his hand he smelled it, touched it with
the tip of his tongue. “Purifier and something else,”
he reported. “It could be one of half a dozen drugs, or some
native stuff from here which we’ve never
classified.”
“True. There are drugs we have found here.” Asaki
scowled down at the green mat of jungle. “So our water is
poisoned?”
“Do you always purify it?” Tau asked the Chief
Ranger. “Surely during the centuries since your ancestors
landed on Khatka you must have adapted to native water. You
couldn’t have lived otherwise. We must use the purifier, but must
you?”
“There is water and water.” Asaki shook his own
canteen, his scowl growing fiercer as the gurgle from its depths
was heard. “From springs on the other side of the mountains
we drink—yes. But over here, this close to the Mygra swamps,
we have not done so. We may have to chance it.”
“Do you think we are literally poisoned?” Jellico
bored directly to the heart of their private fears.
“None of us have been drinking too heavily,” Tau
observed thoughtfully. “And I don’t believe Lumbrilo
had outright killing in mind. How long the effect will last I have
no way of telling.”
“If we saw one rock ape,” Dane wondered, “why
didn’t we see others? And why here and now?”
“That!” Tau pointed ahead on the trail Asaki had
picked for their ascent. For a long moment Dane could see nothing
of any interest there and then he located it—a finger of
rock. It did not point directly skyward this time, in fact it
slanted so that its tip indicated their back trail. Yet in outline
the spire was very similar to that outcrop from which the real rock
ape had charged them the day before.
Asaki exclaimed in his own tongue and slapped his hand hard
against the stock of the needler.
“We saw that and so again we saw an ape also! Had earlier
we been charged by graz or jumped by a lion in such a place, then
again we would have been faced by graz or lion here!”
Captain Jellico gave a bark of laughter colored only by the most
sardonic humor. “Clever enough. He merely leaves it to us to
select our own ghost and then repeat the performance in the next
proper setting. I wonder how many rocks shaped like that one there
are in these mountains? And how long will a rock ape continue to
pop out from behind each one we do find?”
“Who knows? But as long as we drink this water we’re
going to continue to have trouble; I feel safe in promising that,” Tau replied. He put the vial of doctored purifier
into a separate pocket of his medical kit. “It may be a
problem of how long we can go without water.”
“Perhaps,” Asaki said softly. “Only not all
the water on Khatka comes running in streams.”
“Fruit?” Tau asked.
“No, trees. Lumbrilo is not a hunter, nor could he be
certain when and where his magic would go to work. Unless the
flitter was deliberately sabotaged, he was planning for us to use
our canteens in the preserve. That is lion country and there are
long distances between springs. This is jungle below us and there
is a source there I think we can safely tap. But first I must find
Nymani and prove to him that this is truly deviltry of a sort, but
not demon inspired.”
He was gone, running lightly down-slope in the direction his
hunter had taken, and Dane spoke to Captain Jellico.
“What’s this about water in trees, sir?”
“There is a species of tree here, not too common, with a
thickened trunk. It stores water during the rainy season to live on
in the hot months. Since we are in the transition period between
rains, we could tap it—if we locate one of the trees. How
about that, Tau? Dare we drink that without a purifier?”
“Probably a choice of two evils, sir. But we have had our
preventive shots. Personally, I’d rather battle disease than
take a chance on a mind-twisting drug. You can go without water
just so long . . . ”
“I’d like to have a little talk with
Lumbrilo,” remarked Jellico, the mildness in his voice very
deceptive.
“I’m going to have a little talk with
Lumbrilo, if and when we see him again!” promised Tau.
“What are our chances, sir?” Dane asked. He screwed
the cap back on his canteen, his mouth feeling twice as dry since
he knew he dared not drink.
“Well, we’ve faced gambles before.” Tau sealed
the medical kit. “I’d like to see one of those trees
before sundown. And I don’t want to face another pointed rock
today!”
“Why the leopard?” asked Jellico reflectively.
“Another case of using flame to fight fire? But Lumbrilo
wasn’t among those present to be impressed.”
Tau rubbed his hand across his forehead. “I don’t
really know, sir. Maybe I could have made the ape vanish without a
counter projection, but I don’t think so. With these
hallucinations it is better to battle one vision against another
for the benefit of those involved. And I can’t even tell you
why I selected a leopard—it just flashed into mind as about
the fastest and most deadly animal fighter I could recall at that
moment.”
“You’d better work out a good list of such
fighters.” Jellico’s grim humor showed again. “I
can supply a few if you need them. Not that I don’t share
your hope we won’t see any more trigger rocks. Here comes
Asaki with his wandering boy.”
The Chief Ranger was half-leading, half-supporting his hunter,
and Nymani seemed only half-conscious. Tau got to his feet and
hurried to meet them. It would appear that their search for the
water tree would be delayed.
SITTING UP, Dane stared wide-eyed into the dark.
A handful of glowing coals, guarded by rocks, was the center of
their camp. He hunched up to that hardly knowing why he moved. His
hands were shaking, his skin damp with sweat no heat produced. Yet,
now that he was conscious of the night, the Terran could not
remember the nightmare from which he had just awakened, though he
was left with a growing apprehension which he could not define.
What prowled out there in that dark? Walked the mountainside?
Listened, spied and waited?
Dane half started to his feet as a form did move into the dim
light of the fire. Tau stood there, regarding him with sober
intensity.
“Bad dream?”
The younger man admitted to that with a nod, partly against his
will.
“Well, you aren’t the only one. Remember any of
it?”
With an effort, Dane looked away from the encircling dark. It
was as if the fear which had shaken him awake, now embodied, lurked
right there.
“No.” He rubbed sleep-smarting eyes.
“Neither did I,” Tau remarked. “But both of
’em must have been jet-powered.”
“I suppose one could expect to have nightmares after
yesterday.” Dane advanced the logical explanation, yet at the
same time something deep inside him denied every word of it. He had
known nightmares before; none of them had left this aftertaste. And
he wanted no return of sleep tonight. Reaching to the pile of wood
he fed the fire as Tau settled down beside him.
“There is something else . . . ” the medic began, and
then fell silent. Dane did not press him. The younger man was too busy fighting a growing desire to whirl and aim the fire ray
into that darkness, to catch in its withering blast that lurking
thing he could feel padded there, biding its time.
Despite his efforts Dane did drowse again before morning, waking
unrefreshed, and, to his secret dismay, with no lessening of his
odd dislike for the country about them.
Asaki did not suggest that they trail the poachers into the
morass of Mygra. Instead the Chief Ranger was eager to press on in
the opposite direction, find a way over the range to the preserve
where he could assemble a punitive force to deal with the outlaws.
So they began an upward climb which took them away from the dank
heat of the lowlands, into the parched blaze of the sunbaked ledges
above.
The sun was bright, far too bright, and there were few shadows
left. Yet Dane, stopping to drink sparingly from his canteen, could
not lose that sense of eyes upon him, of being tracked. Rock apes?
Cunning as those beasts were, it was against their nature to trail
in utter silence, to be able to carry through a long-term project.
Lion, perhaps?
He noted that Nymani and Asaki took turns at rear guard today,
and that each was alert. Yet, oddly enough, none of them mentioned
the uneasiness they must all share.
They had a dry climb, finding no mountain stream to renew their
water supply. All being experienced in wilderness travel, they made
a mouthful of liquid go a long way. When the party halted slightly
before midday, their canteens were still half full.
“Haugh!”
They jerked up, hands on weapons. A rock ape, its hideous body
clearly seen here, capered, coughed, spat. Asaki fired from the hip
and the thing screeched, clawed at its chest where the dark blood
spewed out, and raced for them. Nymani cut the beast down and they
waited tensely for the attack of the thing’s tribe, which
should have followed the abortive lunge on the part of their scout.
But there was nothing—neither sound nor movement.
What did follow froze them all momentarily. That mangled body
began to move again, drew itself together, crawled toward them.
Dane knew that it was impossible that the creature could live with
such wounds. Yet the beast advanced, its head lolling on its
hunched shoulders so that the eyes were turned blindly up to the
full glare of the sun, while it crawled to reach the man it could
not see.
“Demon!” Nymani dropped his needler, shrank back
against the rocks.
As the thing advanced, before their eyes the impossible
happened. Those gaping wounds closed, the head straightened on the
almost invisible neck, the eyes glared once more with life, and
slaver dripped from the swine snout.
Jellico caught up the needler Nymani had dropped. With a
coolness Dane envied, the captain shot. And for the second time the
rock ape collapsed, torn to ribbons.
Nymani screamed, and Dane tried to choke back his own cry of
horrified protest. The dead thing put on life for the second time,
crawled, got somehow to its feet, healed itself, and came on.
Asaki, his face greenish-pale, stepped out stiffly as if each step
he took was forced by torture. He had dropped his needler. Now he
caught up a rock as large as his own head, raised it high with arms
on which the muscles stood out like ropes. He hurled the stone, and
Dane heard as well as saw the missile go home. The rock ape fell
for the third time.
When one of those taloned paws began to move again, Nymani
broke. He ran, his screams echoing thinly in the air, as the thing
lurched up, the gory mess of its head weaving about. If his feet
would have obeyed him, Dane might have followed the Khatkan. As it
was, he drew his ray and aimed it at that shambling thing. Tau
struck up the barrel.
The medic’s face was livid; there was the same horror in
his eyes. But he moved out to front that monster.
A spot of shadow coalesced on the ground, deepened in hue, took
on substance. Crouched low facing the rock ape, its haunches quivering for a deadly spring, narrowed green eyes
holding on its prey, was a black leopard.
The tiny forward and backward movements of its body steadied,
and it arched through the air, brought down the ape. A pitting,
snarling tangle rolled across the slope—and was gone!
Asaki’s hands shook as he drew them down his sweating
face. Jellico readied a second clip in the needler mechanically.
But Tau was swaying so that Dane leaped to take the shock of the
other’s weight as he collapsed. Only for a moment did the
medic hang so, then he struggled to stand erect.
“Magic?” Jellico’s voice, as controlled as
ever, broke the silence.
“Mass hallucination,” Tau corrected him. “Very
strong.”
“How!” Asaki swallowed and began again. “How
was it done?”
The medic shook his head. “Not by the usual methods, that
is certain. And it worked on us—on me—when we
weren’t conditioned. I don’t understand
that!”
Dane could hardly believe it yet. He watched Jellico stride to
where the tangle of struggling beasts had rolled, saw him examine
bare ground on which no trace of the fight remained. They must
accept Tau’s explanation; it was the only sane one.
Asaki’s features were suddenly convulsed with a rage so
stark that Dane realized how much a veneer was the painfully built
civilization of Khatka.
“Lumbrilo!” The Chief Ranger made of that
name a curse. Then with a visible effort he controlled his emotions
and came to Tau, looming over the slighter medic almost
menacingly.
“How?” he demanded for the second time.
“I don’t know.”
“He will try again?”
“Not the same perhaps—”
But Asaki had already grasped the situation, was looking
ahead.
“We shall not know,” he breathed, “what is
real, what is not.”
“There is also this,” Tau warned. “The unreal
can kill the believer just as quickly as the real!”
“That I know also. It has happened too many times lately.
If we could only find out how! Here are no drums, no singing—none of the tricks to tangle a man’s mind that he
usually uses to summon his demons. So without Lumbrilo, without his
witch tools, how does he make us see what is not?”
“That we must discover and speedily, sir. Or else we shall
be lost among the unreal and the real.”
“You also have the power. You can save us!” Asaki
protested.
Tau drew his arm across his face. Very little of the normal
color had returned to his thin, mobile features. He still leaned
against Dane’s supporting arm.
“A man can do only so much, sir. To battle Lumbrilo on his
own ground is exhausting and I can not fight so very
often.”
“But will he not also be exhausted?”
“I wonder . . . ” Tau gazed beyond the Khatkan to the
barren ground where leopard and rock ape had ceased to be.
“This magic is a tricky thing, sir. It builds and feeds upon
a man’s own imagination and inner fears. Lumbrilo, having
triggered ours, need not strive at all, but let us ourselves raise
that which will attack us.”
“Drugs?” demanded Jellico.
Tau gave a start sufficient to take him out of Dane’s
loose hold. His hand went to the packet of aid supplies which was
his own care, his eyes round with wonder and then shrewdly
alert.
“Captain, we disinfected those thorn punctures of yours.
Thorson, your foot salve . . . But, no, I didn’t use
anything—”
“You forget, Craig, we all had scratches after that fight
with the apes.”
Tau sat down on the ground. With feverish haste he unsealed his
medical supplies, laid out some containers. Then delicately he opened each, examined its contents closely by eye,
by smell, and two by taste. When he was done he shook his head.
“If these have been in any way meddled with, I would need
laboratory analysis to detect it. And I don’t believe that
Lumbrilo could hide traces of his work so cleverly. Or has he been
off-planet? Had much to do with off-worlders?” he asked the
Chief Ranger.
“By the nature of his position he is forbidden to space
voyage, to have any close relationship with any off-worlder. I do
not think, medic, he would choose your healing substances for his
mischief. There would only be chance to aid him then in producing
the effects he wants. Though there is often call for first aid in
travel, he could not be certain you would use any of your
drugs on this trip to the preserve.”
“And Lumbrilo was certain. He threatened
something such as this,” Jellico reminded them.
“So it would be something which we would all use, which we
had to depend upon . . . ”
“The water!” Dane had been holding his own canteen
ready to drink. But as that possible explanation dawned in his
mind, he smelled instead of tasted the liquid sloshing inside.
There was no odor he could detect. But he remembered Tau commenting
on the powdered purifier pills at their first camp.
“That’s it!” Tau dug further into his kit,
brought out the vial of white powder with its grainy lumps. Pouring
a little into the palm of his hand he smelled it, touched it with
the tip of his tongue. “Purifier and something else,”
he reported. “It could be one of half a dozen drugs, or some
native stuff from here which we’ve never
classified.”
“True. There are drugs we have found here.” Asaki
scowled down at the green mat of jungle. “So our water is
poisoned?”
“Do you always purify it?” Tau asked the Chief
Ranger. “Surely during the centuries since your ancestors
landed on Khatka you must have adapted to native water. You
couldn’t have lived otherwise. We must use the purifier, but must
you?”
“There is water and water.” Asaki shook his own
canteen, his scowl growing fiercer as the gurgle from its depths
was heard. “From springs on the other side of the mountains
we drink—yes. But over here, this close to the Mygra swamps,
we have not done so. We may have to chance it.”
“Do you think we are literally poisoned?” Jellico
bored directly to the heart of their private fears.
“None of us have been drinking too heavily,” Tau
observed thoughtfully. “And I don’t believe Lumbrilo
had outright killing in mind. How long the effect will last I have
no way of telling.”
“If we saw one rock ape,” Dane wondered, “why
didn’t we see others? And why here and now?”
“That!” Tau pointed ahead on the trail Asaki had
picked for their ascent. For a long moment Dane could see nothing
of any interest there and then he located it—a finger of
rock. It did not point directly skyward this time, in fact it
slanted so that its tip indicated their back trail. Yet in outline
the spire was very similar to that outcrop from which the real rock
ape had charged them the day before.
Asaki exclaimed in his own tongue and slapped his hand hard
against the stock of the needler.
“We saw that and so again we saw an ape also! Had earlier
we been charged by graz or jumped by a lion in such a place, then
again we would have been faced by graz or lion here!”
Captain Jellico gave a bark of laughter colored only by the most
sardonic humor. “Clever enough. He merely leaves it to us to
select our own ghost and then repeat the performance in the next
proper setting. I wonder how many rocks shaped like that one there
are in these mountains? And how long will a rock ape continue to
pop out from behind each one we do find?”
“Who knows? But as long as we drink this water we’re
going to continue to have trouble; I feel safe in promising that,” Tau replied. He put the vial of doctored purifier
into a separate pocket of his medical kit. “It may be a
problem of how long we can go without water.”
“Perhaps,” Asaki said softly. “Only not all
the water on Khatka comes running in streams.”
“Fruit?” Tau asked.
“No, trees. Lumbrilo is not a hunter, nor could he be
certain when and where his magic would go to work. Unless the
flitter was deliberately sabotaged, he was planning for us to use
our canteens in the preserve. That is lion country and there are
long distances between springs. This is jungle below us and there
is a source there I think we can safely tap. But first I must find
Nymani and prove to him that this is truly deviltry of a sort, but
not demon inspired.”
He was gone, running lightly down-slope in the direction his
hunter had taken, and Dane spoke to Captain Jellico.
“What’s this about water in trees, sir?”
“There is a species of tree here, not too common, with a
thickened trunk. It stores water during the rainy season to live on
in the hot months. Since we are in the transition period between
rains, we could tap it—if we locate one of the trees. How
about that, Tau? Dare we drink that without a purifier?”
“Probably a choice of two evils, sir. But we have had our
preventive shots. Personally, I’d rather battle disease than
take a chance on a mind-twisting drug. You can go without water
just so long . . . ”
“I’d like to have a little talk with
Lumbrilo,” remarked Jellico, the mildness in his voice very
deceptive.
“I’m going to have a little talk with
Lumbrilo, if and when we see him again!” promised Tau.
“What are our chances, sir?” Dane asked. He screwed
the cap back on his canteen, his mouth feeling twice as dry since
he knew he dared not drink.
“Well, we’ve faced gambles before.” Tau sealed
the medical kit. “I’d like to see one of those trees
before sundown. And I don’t want to face another pointed rock
today!”
“Why the leopard?” asked Jellico reflectively.
“Another case of using flame to fight fire? But Lumbrilo
wasn’t among those present to be impressed.”
Tau rubbed his hand across his forehead. “I don’t
really know, sir. Maybe I could have made the ape vanish without a
counter projection, but I don’t think so. With these
hallucinations it is better to battle one vision against another
for the benefit of those involved. And I can’t even tell you
why I selected a leopard—it just flashed into mind as about
the fastest and most deadly animal fighter I could recall at that
moment.”
“You’d better work out a good list of such
fighters.” Jellico’s grim humor showed again. “I
can supply a few if you need them. Not that I don’t share
your hope we won’t see any more trigger rocks. Here comes
Asaki with his wandering boy.”
The Chief Ranger was half-leading, half-supporting his hunter,
and Nymani seemed only half-conscious. Tau got to his feet and
hurried to meet them. It would appear that their search for the
water tree would be delayed.