VAGUELY AWARE that the clamor at the other end
of the camp had died away, Dane muted the sound of his drum. Over
its round top he could watch the Khatkan outlaws; their heads
bobbed and swayed in time to the beat of his fingers. He, too,
could feel the pull of Tau’s voice. But what would come in
answer? That shadowy thing which had been loosed to drive them
here? Or the man himself?
To Dane, the ruddy light of the fire dimmed, yet there was no
actual dying of those flames which coiled and thrust around the
wood. And the acrid scent of burning was thick. How much of what
followed was real, how much the product of his tense nerves, Dane
was never afterwards able to tell. In fact, whether all the
witnesses there saw the same sights could be questioned. Did each
man, Khatkan and off-worlder, see only what his particular set of
emotions and memories dictated?
Something swept in from the east, something which was not as
tangible as the creature born of swamp mist. Rather it came as an
unseen menace to the fire, and all that fire signifies to human
kind—security, comradeship, a weapon against the age-old
forces of the dangerous night. Was that threat, too, only in their
minds? Or had Lumbrilo some power to so shape his hatred?
The unseen was cold; it sapped a man’s strength, bit at
his brain, weighted his hands and feet, weakened him. It strove to
soften him into clay another could remold. Nothingness, darkness,
all that was opposed to life and warmth and reality, arose in the
night, gathered together against them.
Yet still Tau fronted that invisible wave, his head high. And between his sturdily planted feet the knife gleamed bright
with a radiance of its own.
“Ahhh—” Tau’s voice curled out, to
pierce that creeping menace. Then he was singing again, the cadence
of his unknown words rising a little above the pattern wrought by
the drum.
Dane forced his heavy hands to continue the beat, his wrists to
rise and fall in defiance of that which crept to eat their strength
and make them less then men.
“Lumbrilo! I, Tau, of another star, another sky, another
world, bid you come forth and range your power against mine!”
Now there was a sharper note in that demand, the snap of an
order.
He was answered by another wave of the black negation—stronger,
rolling up to smash them down, as a wave in the heavy surf of a
wild ocean pounds its force against the beach. This time Dane
thought he could see that dark mass. He tore his eyes away before
it took on substance, concentrating on the movements of his hands
against the drum head, refusing to believe that hammer of power was
rising to flatten them all. He had heard Tau describe such things
in the past. But told in familiar quarters on board the
Queen, such experiences were only stories. Here was danger
unleashed. Yet the medic stood unbowed as the wave broke upon him
in full.
And, advancing under the crest of that lick of destruction, came
its controller. This was no ghost drawn from the materials of the
swamp; this was a man, walking quietly, his hands as empty as
Tau’s, yet grasping weapons none of them could see.
In the firelight, as the wave receded sullenly, men moaned, lay
face down upon the ground, beat their hands feebly against the
earth. But, as Lumbrilo came on from the shadows, one of them got
to his hands and knees, moving with small tortured jerks. He
crawled toward Tau, his head lolling on his shoulders as the head
of the dead rock ape had done. Dane patted the drum with one hand
while, with the other, he groped for his fire ray. He tried to shout in warning and
found that he could not utter a sound.
Tau’s arm moved, raised from his side, made a circling
motion.
The creeping man, his eyes rolled up in his head until only the
whites gleamed blindly in the limited light, followed that gesture.
He drew level with the medic, passed beyond toward Lumbrilo,
whining as a hound prevented from obeying his master might
lament.
“So be it, Lumbrilo,” Tau said. “This is
between you and me. Or do you not dare to risk your power against
mine? Is Lumbrilo so weak a one that he must send another to do his
will?”
Raising both hands again the medic brought them down, curling
inward, until he stooped and touched them to the ground. When he
straightened once again the knife was in his grasp and he tossed it
behind him.
The smoke from the fire swirled out in a long tongue, coiled
about Lumbrilo and was gone. A black and white beast stood where
the man had been, its tufted tail lashing, its muzzle a mask of
snarling hate and blood lust.
But Tau met that transformation with laughter which was like the
lash of a whip.
“We both be men, you and I, Lumbrilo. Meet me as a man and
keep those trickeries for those who have not the clear sight. A
child plays as a child, so—” Tau’s voice came in
a rumble, but Tau was gone. The huge, hairy thing which swayed in
his place turned a gorilla’s beast visage to his enemy. For a
breathless moment Terran ape confronted Khatkan lion. Then the
spaceman was himself again.” The time for games is over, man
of Khatka. You have tried to hunt us to our deaths, have you not?
Therefore death shall be the portion of the loser now.”
Lion vanished, man stood watching, alertly, as swordsman might
face swordsman with a blood feud lying on their blades. To
Dane’s eyes the Khatkan made no move. Yet the fire leaped
high, as if freshly fed, and flames burst from the wood, flew into the air, red and perilous birds, darting at Tau until
they outlined him from the ground under his boots to an arch over
his head. They united and spun faster until Dane, watching with
dazzled eyes, saw the wheel become a blur of light, hiding Tau
within its fiery core. His own wrists ached with the strain of his
drumming as he lifted one hand and tried to shield his sight from
the glare of that pillar of fire. Lumbrilo was chanting—a
heavy blatt of words. Dane stiffened; his traitorous hands were
falling into the rhythm of that other song! Straightaway he raised
both from the drum head, brought them down in a discordinate series
of thumps which bore no relation to either the song Tau wanted or
that which Lumbrilo was now crooning.
Thump—thump-thump—Dane beat it out
frantically, belaboring the drum head as he wanted to sink his
fists home on the body of the Khatkan witch doctor.
The pillar of fire swayed, fluttered as if a wind drove
it—and was gone. Tau, unmarked, smiled.
“Fire!” He pointed his fingers at Lumbrilo.
“Would you try earth, and water, and air also, wizard? Call
hither your whirlwind, up your flood, summon the land to quake.
None of those shall bring me down!”
Shapes came flooding out of the night, some monstrous, some
human, streaming past Lumbrilo to crowd into the circle of
firelight. Some Dane thought he knew, some were strangers. Men
wearing space uniforms, or the dress of other worlds,
women—they strode, wept, mingled with the monsters to laugh,
curse, threaten.
Dane guessed that Lumbrilo sent now against the Terran the
harvest of the medic’s own memories. He shut his eyes against
this enforced intrusion upon another’s past, but not before
he saw Tau’s face, strained, fined to the well-shaped bones
beneath the thin flesh, holding still a twisted smile as he met
each memory, accepted the pain it held for him, and set it aside
unshaken.
“This, too, has no power any longer, man who walks in the
dark.”
Dane opened his eyes. Those crowding wraiths were fading, losing
substance. Lumbrilo crouched, his lips drawn back from his teeth,
his hatred plain to read.
“I am not clay to be molded by your hands, Lumbrilo. And
now I say that the time has come to call an end—”
Tau raised his hands slowly once again, holding them away from
his body, palms pointing earthward. And beneath them, on either
side of the spaceman, two black shadows gathered on the surface of
the ground.
“You have fettered yourself with your own bounds. As you
have been the hunter, so shall you now be the hunted.”
Those shadows were growing as plants might issue from the packed
soil of the camping ground. When his hands were shoulder high, Tau
held them steady. Now on either side of his tautly held body
crouched one of the black-and-white lions with which Lumbrilo had
identified his own brand of magic throughout the year.
Lumbrilo’s “lion” had been larger than life,
more intelligent, more dangerous, subtly different from the normal
animal it counterfeited. So now were these. And both of them raised
their heads to gaze intently into the medic’s face.
“Hunt well, brothers in fur,” he said slowly, almost
caressingly. “Him whom you hunt shall grant you sport in the
going.”
“Stop it!” A man leaped from the shadows behind the
witch doctor. Firelight made plain his off-world dress, and he
swung up a blaster, aiming at the nearest of the waiting beasts.
That flash struck true, but it neither killed nor even singed the
fine fur of the animal’s pelt.
As the blaster’s aim was swung from beast to man, Dane
fired first. His ray brought a scream from the other, who dropped
his weapon from a badly seared hand to reel back, cursing.
Tau waved his hands gently. The great animal heads turned
obediently, until the red eyes were set on Lumbrilo. Facing them,
the witch doctor straightened, spat out his hate at the medic:
“I do not run to be hunted, devil man!”
“I think you do, Lumbrilo. For you must taste fear now as
you have made other men drink of it, so that it fills your blood
and races through your body, clouds your mind to make of you less
than a man. You have hunted out those who doubted your power, who
stood in your chosen path, whom you wanted removed from the earth
of Khatka. Do you doubt that they wait in the last dark for you
now, ready to greet you, witch doctor? What they have known, you
shall also know. This night you have shown me all that lies in my
past that is weak, that was evil, that I may regret or find sorrow
for. So shall you also remember through the few hours left you.
Aye, you shall run, Lumbrilo!”
As he spoke, Tau approached the other, the two black-and-white
hunters pacing beside him. Now he stooped and caught up a pinch of
soil and spat upon it three times. Then he threw the tiny clod of
earth at the witch doctor. It struck Lumbrilo just above the heart
and the man reeled under what might have been a murderous blow.
The Khatkan broke then, completely. With a wailing cry he
whirled and ran, crashing into the brush as one who runs blindly
and without hope. Behind him the two beasts leaped noiselessly
together and all three were gone.
Tau swayed, put his hand to his head. Dane kicked away the drum,
arose from his cramped position stiffly to go to him. But the medic
was not yet done. He returned to stand over the prostrate native
hunters and he clapped his hands sharply.
“You are men, and you shall act as men henceforth. That
which was, is no longer. Stand free, for the dark power follows him
who misused it, and fear no longer eats from your basins, drinks
from your cups, or lies beside you on the sleep mats.”
“Tau!” Jellico’s shout reached them over the
cries of the rousing Khatkans. But Dane was there first, catching
the medic before he slumped to the ground; but he was dragged with that dead weight until he sat with the medic’s head
on his shoulder, the other’s body resting heavily against
him. For one horror-filled moment Dane feared that he did indeed
hold a dead man, that one of the outlaw Hunters must have struck a
last blow for his discredited leader. Then Tau sighed and began to
breathe deeply. Dane glanced up, amazed, at the captain.
“He’s asleep!”
Jellico knelt and his hand went to test heart beat, then to
touch the medic’s worn and dirty face. “Best thing for
him,” he said briskly. “He’s had it.”
It took some time to get the facts of their triumph sorted out.
Two of the off-worlder poachers were dead. The other and the
spaceman were prisoners, while Nymani rounded up in addition the
man Dane had burned to save Tau. When the younger spaceman returned
from making the medic comfortable in the shelter, he found Asaki
and Jellico holding an impromptu court of inquiry.
The dazed native Hunters had been expertly looped together by
Nymani and, a little apart from them, the off-worlders were under
examination.
“An I-C man, eh?” Jellico, smoothing a mud-spattered
chin with a grimed hand, regarded the latest arrival measuringly.
“Trying to run in and break a Combine charter, were you?
You’d better spill the facts; your own head office will
disown you, you ought to know that. They never back any failures in
these undercover deals.”
“I want medical attention,” snapped the other,
cradling his seared hand to his chest. “Or do you plan to
turn me over to these savages?”
“Seeing as how you tried to blast our medic,”
replied the captain with a grin which was close to shark-like,
“he may not feel much like patching up those fingers of
yours. Stick ’em in where they have no business, and
they’re apt to get burned. At any rate he’s not going
to look at ’em until he’s had a chance to rest.
I’ll give you first aid. And while I’m working we’ll talk. I-C going into the poaching trade now?
That news is going to please Combine; they have no use for you boys
anyway.”
His answer was lurid and uninformative. But the uniform tunic
the other wore could not be so easily explained away. Dane, worn
out, stretched his aching length on a pile of mats and lost all
interest in the argument.
Two days later they stood once more on the same terrace where
Lumbrilo had wrought his magic and met his first defeat. This time
no lightning played along the mountain ridges and the blaze of the
sun was so bright and clear that one could hardly believe in the
fantastic happenings of that swamp clearing where men had fought
with weapons not made by hands. The three from the Queen
moved away from the parapet to meet the Chief Ranger as he came
down the stairs.
“A messenger has just arrived. The hunter was hunted
indeed, and his going was witnessed by many—though they did
not see those which hunted him. Lumbrilo is dead; he came to his
end by the Great River.”
Jellico started. “But that is almost fifty miles from the
swamp, on this side of the mountain!”
“He was hunted and he fled—as you promised,”
Asaki said to Tau. “You made strong magic, off-world
man.”
The medic shook his head slowly. “I but turned his own
methods against him. Because he believed in his power, that same
power, reflected back, broke him. Had I been facing one who did not
believe . . . ” He shrugged. “Our first meeting set the
pattern. From that moment he feared a little that I could match
him, and his uncertainty pierced a hole in his armor.”
“Why on earth did you want ‘Terra
Bound?’” burst out Dane, still seeking an explanation
for that one small mystery among the others.
Tau chuckled. “In the first place, that blasted tune has
haunted us all for so long that I knew its rhythm was probably the
one you could keep to without hardly knowing that you were beating
it out. And, in the second place, its alien pattern was a part of
our particular background, to counteract Lumbrilo’s native
Khatkan music, which was certainly a big factor in his
stage setting. He must have believed that we would not find out
about the drugged water and so would be prepared for any fantasy he
cared to produce. When they saw us coming out over the swamp they
counted us easy takings. His practice had always been with
Khatkans, and he judged us by their reactions to stimuli he knew
well how to use. So he failed . . . ”
Asaki smiled. “Which was good for Khatka but ill for
Lumbrilo and those using him to make mischief here. The poacher and
the outlaw Hunters will meet with our justice, which I do not
believe they will relish. But the other two, the spaceman and the
company agent, are to be sent to Xecho to face Combine authorities.
It is my thought that those will not accept kindly the meddling of
another company in their territory.”
Jellico grunted. “Kindness and Combine are widely
separated in such matters. But we can now take passage on the same
ship as your prisoners—”
“But, my friend, you have not yet seen the preserve. I
assure you that this time there shall be no trouble. We
have several days yet before you must return to your
ship—”
The captain of the Queen held up his hand.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to inspect the
Zoboru preserve, sir—next year. As it is, my holiday is over
and the Queen is waiting for us on Xecho. Also, permit me
to send you some tapes dealing with the newest types of
flitters—guaranteed against flight failures.”
“Yes, guaranteed,” Tau added guilelessly, “not
to break down, lose course, or otherwise disrupt a pleasant
excursion.”
The Chief Ranger threw back his head and his
deep-chested laughter was echoed from the heights above them.
“Very well, Captain. Your mail run will bring you back to
Xecho at intervals. Meanwhile I shall study your sales tapes concerning the non-expendable flitters. But you shall
visit Zoboru—and pleasantly, very pleasantly, I assure you,
Medic Tau!”
“I wonder,” Tau muttered and Dane heard. “Just
now the quiet of deep space is a far, far more entrancing
proposition!”
VAGUELY AWARE that the clamor at the other end
of the camp had died away, Dane muted the sound of his drum. Over
its round top he could watch the Khatkan outlaws; their heads
bobbed and swayed in time to the beat of his fingers. He, too,
could feel the pull of Tau’s voice. But what would come in
answer? That shadowy thing which had been loosed to drive them
here? Or the man himself?
To Dane, the ruddy light of the fire dimmed, yet there was no
actual dying of those flames which coiled and thrust around the
wood. And the acrid scent of burning was thick. How much of what
followed was real, how much the product of his tense nerves, Dane
was never afterwards able to tell. In fact, whether all the
witnesses there saw the same sights could be questioned. Did each
man, Khatkan and off-worlder, see only what his particular set of
emotions and memories dictated?
Something swept in from the east, something which was not as
tangible as the creature born of swamp mist. Rather it came as an
unseen menace to the fire, and all that fire signifies to human
kind—security, comradeship, a weapon against the age-old
forces of the dangerous night. Was that threat, too, only in their
minds? Or had Lumbrilo some power to so shape his hatred?
The unseen was cold; it sapped a man’s strength, bit at
his brain, weighted his hands and feet, weakened him. It strove to
soften him into clay another could remold. Nothingness, darkness,
all that was opposed to life and warmth and reality, arose in the
night, gathered together against them.
Yet still Tau fronted that invisible wave, his head high. And between his sturdily planted feet the knife gleamed bright
with a radiance of its own.
“Ahhh—” Tau’s voice curled out, to
pierce that creeping menace. Then he was singing again, the cadence
of his unknown words rising a little above the pattern wrought by
the drum.
Dane forced his heavy hands to continue the beat, his wrists to
rise and fall in defiance of that which crept to eat their strength
and make them less then men.
“Lumbrilo! I, Tau, of another star, another sky, another
world, bid you come forth and range your power against mine!”
Now there was a sharper note in that demand, the snap of an
order.
He was answered by another wave of the black negation—stronger,
rolling up to smash them down, as a wave in the heavy surf of a
wild ocean pounds its force against the beach. This time Dane
thought he could see that dark mass. He tore his eyes away before
it took on substance, concentrating on the movements of his hands
against the drum head, refusing to believe that hammer of power was
rising to flatten them all. He had heard Tau describe such things
in the past. But told in familiar quarters on board the
Queen, such experiences were only stories. Here was danger
unleashed. Yet the medic stood unbowed as the wave broke upon him
in full.
And, advancing under the crest of that lick of destruction, came
its controller. This was no ghost drawn from the materials of the
swamp; this was a man, walking quietly, his hands as empty as
Tau’s, yet grasping weapons none of them could see.
In the firelight, as the wave receded sullenly, men moaned, lay
face down upon the ground, beat their hands feebly against the
earth. But, as Lumbrilo came on from the shadows, one of them got
to his hands and knees, moving with small tortured jerks. He
crawled toward Tau, his head lolling on his shoulders as the head
of the dead rock ape had done. Dane patted the drum with one hand
while, with the other, he groped for his fire ray. He tried to shout in warning and
found that he could not utter a sound.
Tau’s arm moved, raised from his side, made a circling
motion.
The creeping man, his eyes rolled up in his head until only the
whites gleamed blindly in the limited light, followed that gesture.
He drew level with the medic, passed beyond toward Lumbrilo,
whining as a hound prevented from obeying his master might
lament.
“So be it, Lumbrilo,” Tau said. “This is
between you and me. Or do you not dare to risk your power against
mine? Is Lumbrilo so weak a one that he must send another to do his
will?”
Raising both hands again the medic brought them down, curling
inward, until he stooped and touched them to the ground. When he
straightened once again the knife was in his grasp and he tossed it
behind him.
The smoke from the fire swirled out in a long tongue, coiled
about Lumbrilo and was gone. A black and white beast stood where
the man had been, its tufted tail lashing, its muzzle a mask of
snarling hate and blood lust.
But Tau met that transformation with laughter which was like the
lash of a whip.
“We both be men, you and I, Lumbrilo. Meet me as a man and
keep those trickeries for those who have not the clear sight. A
child plays as a child, so—” Tau’s voice came in
a rumble, but Tau was gone. The huge, hairy thing which swayed in
his place turned a gorilla’s beast visage to his enemy. For a
breathless moment Terran ape confronted Khatkan lion. Then the
spaceman was himself again.” The time for games is over, man
of Khatka. You have tried to hunt us to our deaths, have you not?
Therefore death shall be the portion of the loser now.”
Lion vanished, man stood watching, alertly, as swordsman might
face swordsman with a blood feud lying on their blades. To
Dane’s eyes the Khatkan made no move. Yet the fire leaped
high, as if freshly fed, and flames burst from the wood, flew into the air, red and perilous birds, darting at Tau until
they outlined him from the ground under his boots to an arch over
his head. They united and spun faster until Dane, watching with
dazzled eyes, saw the wheel become a blur of light, hiding Tau
within its fiery core. His own wrists ached with the strain of his
drumming as he lifted one hand and tried to shield his sight from
the glare of that pillar of fire. Lumbrilo was chanting—a
heavy blatt of words. Dane stiffened; his traitorous hands were
falling into the rhythm of that other song! Straightaway he raised
both from the drum head, brought them down in a discordinate series
of thumps which bore no relation to either the song Tau wanted or
that which Lumbrilo was now crooning.
Thump—thump-thump—Dane beat it out
frantically, belaboring the drum head as he wanted to sink his
fists home on the body of the Khatkan witch doctor.
The pillar of fire swayed, fluttered as if a wind drove
it—and was gone. Tau, unmarked, smiled.
“Fire!” He pointed his fingers at Lumbrilo.
“Would you try earth, and water, and air also, wizard? Call
hither your whirlwind, up your flood, summon the land to quake.
None of those shall bring me down!”
Shapes came flooding out of the night, some monstrous, some
human, streaming past Lumbrilo to crowd into the circle of
firelight. Some Dane thought he knew, some were strangers. Men
wearing space uniforms, or the dress of other worlds,
women—they strode, wept, mingled with the monsters to laugh,
curse, threaten.
Dane guessed that Lumbrilo sent now against the Terran the
harvest of the medic’s own memories. He shut his eyes against
this enforced intrusion upon another’s past, but not before
he saw Tau’s face, strained, fined to the well-shaped bones
beneath the thin flesh, holding still a twisted smile as he met
each memory, accepted the pain it held for him, and set it aside
unshaken.
“This, too, has no power any longer, man who walks in the
dark.”
Dane opened his eyes. Those crowding wraiths were fading, losing
substance. Lumbrilo crouched, his lips drawn back from his teeth,
his hatred plain to read.
“I am not clay to be molded by your hands, Lumbrilo. And
now I say that the time has come to call an end—”
Tau raised his hands slowly once again, holding them away from
his body, palms pointing earthward. And beneath them, on either
side of the spaceman, two black shadows gathered on the surface of
the ground.
“You have fettered yourself with your own bounds. As you
have been the hunter, so shall you now be the hunted.”
Those shadows were growing as plants might issue from the packed
soil of the camping ground. When his hands were shoulder high, Tau
held them steady. Now on either side of his tautly held body
crouched one of the black-and-white lions with which Lumbrilo had
identified his own brand of magic throughout the year.
Lumbrilo’s “lion” had been larger than life,
more intelligent, more dangerous, subtly different from the normal
animal it counterfeited. So now were these. And both of them raised
their heads to gaze intently into the medic’s face.
“Hunt well, brothers in fur,” he said slowly, almost
caressingly. “Him whom you hunt shall grant you sport in the
going.”
“Stop it!” A man leaped from the shadows behind the
witch doctor. Firelight made plain his off-world dress, and he
swung up a blaster, aiming at the nearest of the waiting beasts.
That flash struck true, but it neither killed nor even singed the
fine fur of the animal’s pelt.
As the blaster’s aim was swung from beast to man, Dane
fired first. His ray brought a scream from the other, who dropped
his weapon from a badly seared hand to reel back, cursing.
Tau waved his hands gently. The great animal heads turned
obediently, until the red eyes were set on Lumbrilo. Facing them,
the witch doctor straightened, spat out his hate at the medic:
“I do not run to be hunted, devil man!”
“I think you do, Lumbrilo. For you must taste fear now as
you have made other men drink of it, so that it fills your blood
and races through your body, clouds your mind to make of you less
than a man. You have hunted out those who doubted your power, who
stood in your chosen path, whom you wanted removed from the earth
of Khatka. Do you doubt that they wait in the last dark for you
now, ready to greet you, witch doctor? What they have known, you
shall also know. This night you have shown me all that lies in my
past that is weak, that was evil, that I may regret or find sorrow
for. So shall you also remember through the few hours left you.
Aye, you shall run, Lumbrilo!”
As he spoke, Tau approached the other, the two black-and-white
hunters pacing beside him. Now he stooped and caught up a pinch of
soil and spat upon it three times. Then he threw the tiny clod of
earth at the witch doctor. It struck Lumbrilo just above the heart
and the man reeled under what might have been a murderous blow.
The Khatkan broke then, completely. With a wailing cry he
whirled and ran, crashing into the brush as one who runs blindly
and without hope. Behind him the two beasts leaped noiselessly
together and all three were gone.
Tau swayed, put his hand to his head. Dane kicked away the drum,
arose from his cramped position stiffly to go to him. But the medic
was not yet done. He returned to stand over the prostrate native
hunters and he clapped his hands sharply.
“You are men, and you shall act as men henceforth. That
which was, is no longer. Stand free, for the dark power follows him
who misused it, and fear no longer eats from your basins, drinks
from your cups, or lies beside you on the sleep mats.”
“Tau!” Jellico’s shout reached them over the
cries of the rousing Khatkans. But Dane was there first, catching
the medic before he slumped to the ground; but he was dragged with that dead weight until he sat with the medic’s head
on his shoulder, the other’s body resting heavily against
him. For one horror-filled moment Dane feared that he did indeed
hold a dead man, that one of the outlaw Hunters must have struck a
last blow for his discredited leader. Then Tau sighed and began to
breathe deeply. Dane glanced up, amazed, at the captain.
“He’s asleep!”
Jellico knelt and his hand went to test heart beat, then to
touch the medic’s worn and dirty face. “Best thing for
him,” he said briskly. “He’s had it.”
It took some time to get the facts of their triumph sorted out.
Two of the off-worlder poachers were dead. The other and the
spaceman were prisoners, while Nymani rounded up in addition the
man Dane had burned to save Tau. When the younger spaceman returned
from making the medic comfortable in the shelter, he found Asaki
and Jellico holding an impromptu court of inquiry.
The dazed native Hunters had been expertly looped together by
Nymani and, a little apart from them, the off-worlders were under
examination.
“An I-C man, eh?” Jellico, smoothing a mud-spattered
chin with a grimed hand, regarded the latest arrival measuringly.
“Trying to run in and break a Combine charter, were you?
You’d better spill the facts; your own head office will
disown you, you ought to know that. They never back any failures in
these undercover deals.”
“I want medical attention,” snapped the other,
cradling his seared hand to his chest. “Or do you plan to
turn me over to these savages?”
“Seeing as how you tried to blast our medic,”
replied the captain with a grin which was close to shark-like,
“he may not feel much like patching up those fingers of
yours. Stick ’em in where they have no business, and
they’re apt to get burned. At any rate he’s not going
to look at ’em until he’s had a chance to rest.
I’ll give you first aid. And while I’m working we’ll talk. I-C going into the poaching trade now?
That news is going to please Combine; they have no use for you boys
anyway.”
His answer was lurid and uninformative. But the uniform tunic
the other wore could not be so easily explained away. Dane, worn
out, stretched his aching length on a pile of mats and lost all
interest in the argument.
Two days later they stood once more on the same terrace where
Lumbrilo had wrought his magic and met his first defeat. This time
no lightning played along the mountain ridges and the blaze of the
sun was so bright and clear that one could hardly believe in the
fantastic happenings of that swamp clearing where men had fought
with weapons not made by hands. The three from the Queen
moved away from the parapet to meet the Chief Ranger as he came
down the stairs.
“A messenger has just arrived. The hunter was hunted
indeed, and his going was witnessed by many—though they did
not see those which hunted him. Lumbrilo is dead; he came to his
end by the Great River.”
Jellico started. “But that is almost fifty miles from the
swamp, on this side of the mountain!”
“He was hunted and he fled—as you promised,”
Asaki said to Tau. “You made strong magic, off-world
man.”
The medic shook his head slowly. “I but turned his own
methods against him. Because he believed in his power, that same
power, reflected back, broke him. Had I been facing one who did not
believe . . . ” He shrugged. “Our first meeting set the
pattern. From that moment he feared a little that I could match
him, and his uncertainty pierced a hole in his armor.”
“Why on earth did you want ‘Terra
Bound?’” burst out Dane, still seeking an explanation
for that one small mystery among the others.
Tau chuckled. “In the first place, that blasted tune has
haunted us all for so long that I knew its rhythm was probably the
one you could keep to without hardly knowing that you were beating
it out. And, in the second place, its alien pattern was a part of
our particular background, to counteract Lumbrilo’s native
Khatkan music, which was certainly a big factor in his
stage setting. He must have believed that we would not find out
about the drugged water and so would be prepared for any fantasy he
cared to produce. When they saw us coming out over the swamp they
counted us easy takings. His practice had always been with
Khatkans, and he judged us by their reactions to stimuli he knew
well how to use. So he failed . . . ”
Asaki smiled. “Which was good for Khatka but ill for
Lumbrilo and those using him to make mischief here. The poacher and
the outlaw Hunters will meet with our justice, which I do not
believe they will relish. But the other two, the spaceman and the
company agent, are to be sent to Xecho to face Combine authorities.
It is my thought that those will not accept kindly the meddling of
another company in their territory.”
Jellico grunted. “Kindness and Combine are widely
separated in such matters. But we can now take passage on the same
ship as your prisoners—”
“But, my friend, you have not yet seen the preserve. I
assure you that this time there shall be no trouble. We
have several days yet before you must return to your
ship—”
The captain of the Queen held up his hand.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to inspect the
Zoboru preserve, sir—next year. As it is, my holiday is over
and the Queen is waiting for us on Xecho. Also, permit me
to send you some tapes dealing with the newest types of
flitters—guaranteed against flight failures.”
“Yes, guaranteed,” Tau added guilelessly, “not
to break down, lose course, or otherwise disrupt a pleasant
excursion.”
The Chief Ranger threw back his head and his
deep-chested laughter was echoed from the heights above them.
“Very well, Captain. Your mail run will bring you back to
Xecho at intervals. Meanwhile I shall study your sales tapes concerning the non-expendable flitters. But you shall
visit Zoboru—and pleasantly, very pleasantly, I assure you,
Medic Tau!”
“I wonder,” Tau muttered and Dane heard. “Just
now the quiet of deep space is a far, far more entrancing
proposition!”