TAU’S FINGERS CLICKED the call key of the far-range caster
when that sound was drowned out by a wail, both weirdly familiar
and strangely menacing. Here on the edge of the burnt-off land
there was no soughing of the wind, nothing to break the eternal
silence of the blasted country. But this tearing over head brought
both of the Terrans to their feet. Tau, out of his greater
experience, identified it first.
“A ship!”
Dane was no hundred flight man, but something in that shrieking
crescendo splitting the sky above them argued that if a ship were
coming in, all was not well with it. He caught at Tau’s
arm.
“What’s the matter?”
The Medic’s face paled beneath the dark space tan. He bit
hard on his lower lip. And the eyes still fastened on the arch of
sky were haunted. When he answered he had to scream to be heard
over the rumble.
“She’s coming in too fast—not on a braking
orbit!”
And now they could see as well as hear—a dark shape in the
morning sky, a shape which tore across that same sky to be gone in
an instant to a landing somewhere among those jagged peaks which
were the mountains of Limbo’s northern continent.
The sound was gone. It was broodingly quiet. Tau shook his head
slowly.
“She must have crashed. She couldn’t have come out
of that one in time.”
“What was she?” puzzled Dane. The passage of that
shadow had been so quick that he had not been conscious of any
identifying outline.
”Too small for a liner, thank the Lord of Far Space. Or at
least—I hope it was no liner—”
For a passenger ship to crash would be utter horror. Dane could
understand that.
“A freighter maybe,” Tau sat down and his hand went
out to the click keys. “She must have been out of control
when she entered atmosphere.” He began to relay this last
information on to the Queen.
They did not have to wait long for an answer. They were to
remain where they were until the second flitter joined them
carrying Tau’s full medical kit. This flyer would then head
out into the mountains in an attempt to locate the scene of the
crash, so if there were any survivors the men from the Queen could
render aid. While a smaller party would stay and try to trace
Kamil.
It was only a matter of minutes before the other flitter did
appear. Kosti and Mura dropped from it almost before it hit dirt
and Tau hurried across to change places. The flyer whirled up into
the sun of mid-morning and cut a straight course towards the rock
teeth of the range, following the line of flight Dane and Tau had
seen that shadow travel.
“Did you see her from the Queen?” Dane demanded of
the other two.
Mura shook his head. “See her, no, hear her, yes. She was
out of control!”
Kosti’s broad face wrinkled in concern. “She must
have hit hard. A bad smash—no one living, perhaps. I once saw
a smack landing like that on Juno—very bad—all dead.
That ship—she must have been out of control before they
started down. She was not even fighting the fall—she came in
like a thing already dead.”
Mura whistled softly. “Plague ship,
maybe—”
Dane shivered. Plague ships were the terrifying ghosts of the
space lanes. Wandering derelicts, free roving tombs holding the
bodies of the crews who on some uncharted world had contracted some
new and virulent disease, dying alone in the reaches of the
heavens—perhaps by stern choice—before they could bring
their infection to inhabited worlds. The solar system guards
had the unenviable task of rounding up such drifting threats of
death and sending them into cleansing suns or giving them some
other final end. But here, beyond the frontiers of civilization, a
derelict could drift for years, even centuries, before some freak
of chance brought it into the gravitational pull of a planet and so
crash it on an unwary world.
But the men from the Queen knew the score, there would be no
rash exploration of the ship if they did locate it. And its
smash-up might have been a thousand miles away, well out of the
range of the flitter. Tau was there—and of all men a Medic
was the last to take any chances with a plague.
“Ali—he has disappeared?” Kosti brought them
back to the business at hand.
Dane, not overlooking his own carelessness, reported in detail
what had happened in the valley. To his relief neither of the
newcomers made any comment on his part in the affair but centred
their attention on the task at hand. Mura was the first to suggest
a plan of action.
“Let Kosti take up the flitter and cruise above us. Then
you and I shall search the ground. There may be some trace left
which you could not easily sight from the air.”
So it was arranged. The flitter, cut to its lowest cruising
speed, circled slowly around, never venturing too far ahead. While
Dane and Mura on foot, having to swing bush knives in places
against the thick mat of vegetation, made their way into the
sinister valley. They found the place where the track of the
crawler came from the rock of the burnt-off land to bite into the
soft soil of the healthy area.
Mura turned there and stared back, over the plain. They could
not sight from this point the blotch of brightly coloured ruins.
But they were certain that the crawler had come out of the blasted
area, to be driven with intelligent purpose towards the
mountains—until it vanished into the solid rock of a cliff
wall!
“Dr Rich’s party—?” Dane aired his
suspicions.
“Perhaps—perhaps not,” was Mura’s
ambiguous reply. “Did you not say that Ali thought this
machine was not of the usual type?”
”But—” Dane gaped, “you can’t mean
that the Forerunners survived—here!”
Mura laughed. “They say that all things are possible in
space, do they not? But no, I do not think that those ancient
rulers of the lanes have here left their sons to greet us. Only
they may have left other things—which are now being put to
use. I would like to know more about those ruins—a great deal
more.”
Perhaps that guess Rip had made days earlier—that on some
planet might lie, waiting to be discovered, possessions of the
legendary Forerunners—was close to the truth. Had such a
cache been discovered by parties unknown here on Limbo? But with
that marched the grim warning voiced by Ali that Forerunner
material in Terran hands might be a threat to all of them.
Slowly they combed the mouth of the valley, reassured by the
flitter cruising above. Dane broke open his field rations, chewing
as he went, on a cube of rubbery, tasteless stuff which was
supposed to provide his lank young body with all it needed in the
way of balanced nourishment—and yet which was so savourless
and far removed from real food.
He hacked at a mass of prickly shrubs and stumbled through the
clutch of longer branches to come into a pocket-sized clearing
entirely ranged with thorn-studded greenery. Underfoot was a thick
mat of decaying leaves through which not even the spears of grass
could grow.
Dane stopped short. The brown muck of the mat had been
disturbed. He was conscious of an unwholesome reek of decay which
came from scuffed patches where a green slime had been recently
uncovered.
He went down on his hands and knees, circling that ploughed up
patch. He was no tracker, but even to his inexperienced eyes this
had been the site of a scuffle. And since the slime was still
uncrusted, that event had taken place not too long ago. Dane
surveyed the brush which walled in the tiny area. It was just the
place for an ambush. If Kamil had come through—over
there—
Taking care not to disturb the churned muck, Dane made his way
to the opposite side of the clearing. He was right! The cut of a
bush knife showed where a branch had been lopped away.
Someone, armed with regulation Terran field equipment, had come
through here.
Come through here—to find some one, or something, waiting
for him!
The globe creatures? Or those who had used the strange crawler
and burnt the globes in the valley?
But Dane was certain that he had discovered where Ali had been
surprised—not only surprised but overpowered by a superior
force. Overpowered—to be taken where? He subjected the
walling shrubs to a careful scrutiny. But in no other place did he
see any suggestion of disturbance or break. It was almost as if the
hunter, having made certain of his prey, had vanished into thin
air, transporting the prisoner with him.
Dane was startled by a crashing in the brush. His sleep ray-rod
was out as he spun around. But it was Mura’s pleasant brown
face which was framed in a circle of torn leaves. At Dane’s
wave he came into the clearing. It was not necessary to point out
the signs of battle—he had already noted them.
“They jumped him here,” Dane was convinced.
“But who or what are ‘they’?” was
Mura’s counter. And seconds later he added the unanswerable
question, “And how did they leave?”
“The tracks of the crawler went right through the wall of
the cliff—”
Mura edged out on the carpet of muck. “No indications of
any trap door here,” he observed, gravely, as if he
had expected to find something of the sort. “There
remains—” he jerked a thumb into the air where the purr
of the flitter grew louder as Kosti circled back towards them.
“But we would have heard—have seen—”
protested Dane, all the time wondering if they would have. He had
been at the other end of the valley when Tau had caught that
interrupted cry for help. And from this point the place where the
Medic had been at that moment was hidden by at least two miles of
broken ground.
“Something smaller than one of our flitters,” Mura
was thinking aloud. “It could be done. One thing we may be
sure of—they have collected Kamil and we must find out who they are and
where they are before we can get him back!”
He ploughed away through the brush and Dane followed him out on
a bare strip of ground from which they could signal to the
flitter.
“Found him?” Kosti called as he brought the machine
down.
“Found where some one scooped him up.” Mura went to
the keyboard of the caster.
Dane turned for a last look up that sinister valley. But all at
once his attention was drawn from the valley and its cliffs to a
new phenomenon in evidence on a higher level. He had not noticed
that the sun had disappeared while they had been making their
search of the brush. But now clouds were gathering—and not
only clouds.
The naked snow touched peaks of the range, which had been so
sharp set against the pallid sky of Limbo when the ship out of
space had swept over them, were gone! It was as if that milky,
faded sky had fallen as a curtain to blot them out. Where the peaks
had been swirled fog—fog so thick that it erased half the
horizon as a painter might draw a blotting brush across an
unsuccessful landscape. Dane had never seen anything like it. And
it was moving so fast, visibly cutting off miles of territory in
the few moments he had watched it. To be lost in
that—!
“Look!” he ran to the flitter and jogged
Mura’s arm, pointing to the fast disappearing mountains.
“Look at that!”
Kosti spit out an oath in the slurred speech of Venus. Mura
simply obeyed orders and looked. Another huge section to the north
was swallowed up as he did so. And now they noted another thing.
From the tops of the valley cliffs curls of greyish, yellow vapour
were rising, to cling and render misty the outlines of the rocks.
Whether this was all part of the same phenomenon they did not know, but the
three Terrans insensibly drew closer together, chilled as much by
what they saw as the cold apparent with the going of the sun.
They were shaken out of their absorption by the click of the
caster summoning them back to the ship. The change in the mountains
had been noted on the Queen and both the flitter searching for the wreck and their own were ordered to report in
at once.
There was further change in the atmosphere, a speeding up of the
mists. The swirls above the valley walls combined, formed banks and
began to drop, cutting visibility.
Kosti watched them anxiously. “We’ll have to swing
out—away from the valleys. That stuff is moving too fast. We
can ride the beam in, but I’d rather not unless I
have to—”
But, by the time they were airborne, the mist was down to the
level of the valley floor and was puffing out in threatening
tendrils on to the rough terrain of the burnt-off land. The
mountains had vanished and the foothills were being fast swallowed
up. It was uncanny, terrifying in a way, this wiping away of solid
earth, the substitution of a dirty, rolling mist which swirled and
spun within its mass until one suspicioned movement there, alien,
menacing movement.
Kosti set the controls to full speed, but they had covered
little more than a mile of the return journey before he was forced
to throttle down. For the mist was not only spilling out of the
valleys, it was also curling up from the land under them, each
thread of haze spinning to join and thicken with others.
It was true that they were in no danger of being lost. The thin
reed of sound humming in their ears provided a guide to bring the
flitter back to the parent ship. But they were none the easier
knowing that as they coasted above a curdling sea of mist.
The stuff rose about them forming viscid bubbles on the
windbreak. Only the constant hum of the radar beam linked them with
reality.
“Hope our boys made it down from the mountains before the
worst of this hit,” Kosti broke the strained silence.
“If they didn’t,” Mura replied, “they
will have to land until it clears.”
Kosti throttled down once more as the radar hum sharpened.
“No use crashing into the old lady—”
Within the blanket of mist all sense of direction, of distance
was lost. They might have been up ten thousand feet, or skimming
but one above the broken surface of the rock plain. Kosti hunched over the controls, his usually good-humoured face
pinched, his eyes moving from the mist to the dials before him and
back again.
They sighted the ship—a dark shadow looming through the
veil. With masterly precision Kosti brought the flitter down until
it jarred against the ground. But he was in no hurry to climb out.
Instead he wiped his face with the back of his hand. Mura leaned
forward and patted the big man’s shoulder.
“That was a good job!”
Kosti grinned. “It had to be!”
They crawled out of the flitter and, on impulse, linked hands as
they started for the dim pillar which was the Queen. The contact of
palm against palm was not only insurance and reassurance, but it
was also security of a type Dane felt he needed—and guessed
that his companions wanted also. The menacing, alien mist pressed
in upon them. Its damp congealed greasily on their helmets, dripped
from them as they moved.
But ten paces took them to the welcome arch of the ramp and they
went up, to stand a moment later in the pleasant light and warmth
of the entrance hatch. Jasper Weeks teetered back and forth there,
his pallid little face expressing worry.
“Oh—you—” was his unflattering
greeting.
Kosti laughed. “Who did you expect, little man—a
Sensor dragon breathing fire? Sure, it’s us, and we’re
glad to be back—”
“Something wrong?” Mura interrupted.
Weeks stepped to the outer opening of the hatch once more.
“The other flitter—we haven’t heard from them for
an hour. Captain ordered them back as soon as he saw the fog
closing in. Survey tape says these fogs sometimes last a couple of
days—but they aren’t usual this time of
year.”
Kosti whistled and Mura leaned back against the wall, unbuckling
his helmet.
“Several days.” Dane thought of that. To be lost out
in that soup for days! You’d just have to stay grounded and
hope for the best. But an emergency landing in the mountains under
such conditions—! Now he could understand why Weeks fidgeted
at the hatch. Their own journey over the unobstructed plain
was, under the circumstances, a stroll in a Terran park, compared to
the difficulties those on the other flitter might be forced to
face.
They went up to make their report to the Captain. But all
through it he sat with at least half his attention given to the com
where Tang Ya sat before the master visa-screen, his hand ready for
the key of the caster or to tend the rider beam which might guide
the missing flyer in. Somewhere out in the mystery which was now
Limbo was not only Ali, but Rip, Tau and Steen Wilcox—a good
section of their crew.
“There it is again!” Tang’s forehead creased,
his hands pulled the phones from close contact with his ears. As he
did so the rest heard the clamour which had jolted him. Not unlike
the drone of the rider beam—it scaled up to a screech which
was real pain.
It continued steadily for a space and as Dane listened to it he
became conscious of something else—a muffled rhythm deep
within that drone—a rhythm he had known before—when he
laid his hands upon the wall of the sinister valley. This
disturbance was akin to the vibration in the distant rock!
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the sound was gone. Tang put
on his earphones once more and listened for a signal—either
from the missing flitter or from Ali’s personal com-unit.
“What is that?” Mura asked.
Captain Jellico shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours.
It may be a signal of some sort—been cutting in at regular
intervals all day.”
“So we must admit—” that was Van Rycke looming
in the door of the control cabin, “that we are not alone on
Limbo. In fact there is much more to Limbo than meets the casual
eye.”
Dane voiced his own suspicion. “Those
archaeologists—” he began, but the Captain favoured him
with a sharp pointed stare that stopped him almost in mid-word.
“We have no idea what is at the root of this,”
Jellico said coldly. “You men get some food and
rest—”
Dane, smarting from his abrupt dismissal, trailed Mura and Kosti
down to the mess cabin. As they passed the Captain’s private
quarters they could hear the wild shrieks of the Hoobat.
That thing sounded, Dane thought, just the way he felt. And even
warm food, bearing no resemblance to the iron rations he had eaten
earlier, did little to raise the general curtain of gloom.
But the meal had an excellent effect on Kosti’s spirits.
“That Rip,” he announced to the table at large,
“he’s got a lot of sense. And Mr. Wilcox, he knows what
he’s doing. They’re all snug somewhere and’ll
stay holed up until this stuff clears. Nobody’ll come out in
this—”
Was Kosti right there, Dane wondered. Suppose there were those
on Limbo who knew the tricks of the climate, who were familiar
enough with such fogs to be able to navigate through them—use
them as a cover—? That signal they had heard blatting out of
the com—could it be a beam to guide some expedition creeping
through the mist? An expedition heading towards the unsuspecting
Queen?
TAU’S FINGERS CLICKED the call key of the far-range caster
when that sound was drowned out by a wail, both weirdly familiar
and strangely menacing. Here on the edge of the burnt-off land
there was no soughing of the wind, nothing to break the eternal
silence of the blasted country. But this tearing over head brought
both of the Terrans to their feet. Tau, out of his greater
experience, identified it first.
“A ship!”
Dane was no hundred flight man, but something in that shrieking
crescendo splitting the sky above them argued that if a ship were
coming in, all was not well with it. He caught at Tau’s
arm.
“What’s the matter?”
The Medic’s face paled beneath the dark space tan. He bit
hard on his lower lip. And the eyes still fastened on the arch of
sky were haunted. When he answered he had to scream to be heard
over the rumble.
“She’s coming in too fast—not on a braking
orbit!”
And now they could see as well as hear—a dark shape in the
morning sky, a shape which tore across that same sky to be gone in
an instant to a landing somewhere among those jagged peaks which
were the mountains of Limbo’s northern continent.
The sound was gone. It was broodingly quiet. Tau shook his head
slowly.
“She must have crashed. She couldn’t have come out
of that one in time.”
“What was she?” puzzled Dane. The passage of that
shadow had been so quick that he had not been conscious of any
identifying outline.
”Too small for a liner, thank the Lord of Far Space. Or at
least—I hope it was no liner—”
For a passenger ship to crash would be utter horror. Dane could
understand that.
“A freighter maybe,” Tau sat down and his hand went
out to the click keys. “She must have been out of control
when she entered atmosphere.” He began to relay this last
information on to the Queen.
They did not have to wait long for an answer. They were to
remain where they were until the second flitter joined them
carrying Tau’s full medical kit. This flyer would then head
out into the mountains in an attempt to locate the scene of the
crash, so if there were any survivors the men from the Queen could
render aid. While a smaller party would stay and try to trace
Kamil.
It was only a matter of minutes before the other flitter did
appear. Kosti and Mura dropped from it almost before it hit dirt
and Tau hurried across to change places. The flyer whirled up into
the sun of mid-morning and cut a straight course towards the rock
teeth of the range, following the line of flight Dane and Tau had
seen that shadow travel.
“Did you see her from the Queen?” Dane demanded of
the other two.
Mura shook his head. “See her, no, hear her, yes. She was
out of control!”
Kosti’s broad face wrinkled in concern. “She must
have hit hard. A bad smash—no one living, perhaps. I once saw
a smack landing like that on Juno—very bad—all dead.
That ship—she must have been out of control before they
started down. She was not even fighting the fall—she came in
like a thing already dead.”
Mura whistled softly. “Plague ship,
maybe—”
Dane shivered. Plague ships were the terrifying ghosts of the
space lanes. Wandering derelicts, free roving tombs holding the
bodies of the crews who on some uncharted world had contracted some
new and virulent disease, dying alone in the reaches of the
heavens—perhaps by stern choice—before they could bring
their infection to inhabited worlds. The solar system guards
had the unenviable task of rounding up such drifting threats of
death and sending them into cleansing suns or giving them some
other final end. But here, beyond the frontiers of civilization, a
derelict could drift for years, even centuries, before some freak
of chance brought it into the gravitational pull of a planet and so
crash it on an unwary world.
But the men from the Queen knew the score, there would be no
rash exploration of the ship if they did locate it. And its
smash-up might have been a thousand miles away, well out of the
range of the flitter. Tau was there—and of all men a Medic
was the last to take any chances with a plague.
“Ali—he has disappeared?” Kosti brought them
back to the business at hand.
Dane, not overlooking his own carelessness, reported in detail
what had happened in the valley. To his relief neither of the
newcomers made any comment on his part in the affair but centred
their attention on the task at hand. Mura was the first to suggest
a plan of action.
“Let Kosti take up the flitter and cruise above us. Then
you and I shall search the ground. There may be some trace left
which you could not easily sight from the air.”
So it was arranged. The flitter, cut to its lowest cruising
speed, circled slowly around, never venturing too far ahead. While
Dane and Mura on foot, having to swing bush knives in places
against the thick mat of vegetation, made their way into the
sinister valley. They found the place where the track of the
crawler came from the rock of the burnt-off land to bite into the
soft soil of the healthy area.
Mura turned there and stared back, over the plain. They could
not sight from this point the blotch of brightly coloured ruins.
But they were certain that the crawler had come out of the blasted
area, to be driven with intelligent purpose towards the
mountains—until it vanished into the solid rock of a cliff
wall!
“Dr Rich’s party—?” Dane aired his
suspicions.
“Perhaps—perhaps not,” was Mura’s
ambiguous reply. “Did you not say that Ali thought this
machine was not of the usual type?”
”But—” Dane gaped, “you can’t mean
that the Forerunners survived—here!”
Mura laughed. “They say that all things are possible in
space, do they not? But no, I do not think that those ancient
rulers of the lanes have here left their sons to greet us. Only
they may have left other things—which are now being put to
use. I would like to know more about those ruins—a great deal
more.”
Perhaps that guess Rip had made days earlier—that on some
planet might lie, waiting to be discovered, possessions of the
legendary Forerunners—was close to the truth. Had such a
cache been discovered by parties unknown here on Limbo? But with
that marched the grim warning voiced by Ali that Forerunner
material in Terran hands might be a threat to all of them.
Slowly they combed the mouth of the valley, reassured by the
flitter cruising above. Dane broke open his field rations, chewing
as he went, on a cube of rubbery, tasteless stuff which was
supposed to provide his lank young body with all it needed in the
way of balanced nourishment—and yet which was so savourless
and far removed from real food.
He hacked at a mass of prickly shrubs and stumbled through the
clutch of longer branches to come into a pocket-sized clearing
entirely ranged with thorn-studded greenery. Underfoot was a thick
mat of decaying leaves through which not even the spears of grass
could grow.
Dane stopped short. The brown muck of the mat had been
disturbed. He was conscious of an unwholesome reek of decay which
came from scuffed patches where a green slime had been recently
uncovered.
He went down on his hands and knees, circling that ploughed up
patch. He was no tracker, but even to his inexperienced eyes this
had been the site of a scuffle. And since the slime was still
uncrusted, that event had taken place not too long ago. Dane
surveyed the brush which walled in the tiny area. It was just the
place for an ambush. If Kamil had come through—over
there—
Taking care not to disturb the churned muck, Dane made his way
to the opposite side of the clearing. He was right! The cut of a
bush knife showed where a branch had been lopped away.
Someone, armed with regulation Terran field equipment, had come
through here.
Come through here—to find some one, or something, waiting
for him!
The globe creatures? Or those who had used the strange crawler
and burnt the globes in the valley?
But Dane was certain that he had discovered where Ali had been
surprised—not only surprised but overpowered by a superior
force. Overpowered—to be taken where? He subjected the
walling shrubs to a careful scrutiny. But in no other place did he
see any suggestion of disturbance or break. It was almost as if the
hunter, having made certain of his prey, had vanished into thin
air, transporting the prisoner with him.
Dane was startled by a crashing in the brush. His sleep ray-rod
was out as he spun around. But it was Mura’s pleasant brown
face which was framed in a circle of torn leaves. At Dane’s
wave he came into the clearing. It was not necessary to point out
the signs of battle—he had already noted them.
“They jumped him here,” Dane was convinced.
“But who or what are ‘they’?” was
Mura’s counter. And seconds later he added the unanswerable
question, “And how did they leave?”
“The tracks of the crawler went right through the wall of
the cliff—”
Mura edged out on the carpet of muck. “No indications of
any trap door here,” he observed, gravely, as if he
had expected to find something of the sort. “There
remains—” he jerked a thumb into the air where the purr
of the flitter grew louder as Kosti circled back towards them.
“But we would have heard—have seen—”
protested Dane, all the time wondering if they would have. He had
been at the other end of the valley when Tau had caught that
interrupted cry for help. And from this point the place where the
Medic had been at that moment was hidden by at least two miles of
broken ground.
“Something smaller than one of our flitters,” Mura
was thinking aloud. “It could be done. One thing we may be
sure of—they have collected Kamil and we must find out who they are and
where they are before we can get him back!”
He ploughed away through the brush and Dane followed him out on
a bare strip of ground from which they could signal to the
flitter.
“Found him?” Kosti called as he brought the machine
down.
“Found where some one scooped him up.” Mura went to
the keyboard of the caster.
Dane turned for a last look up that sinister valley. But all at
once his attention was drawn from the valley and its cliffs to a
new phenomenon in evidence on a higher level. He had not noticed
that the sun had disappeared while they had been making their
search of the brush. But now clouds were gathering—and not
only clouds.
The naked snow touched peaks of the range, which had been so
sharp set against the pallid sky of Limbo when the ship out of
space had swept over them, were gone! It was as if that milky,
faded sky had fallen as a curtain to blot them out. Where the peaks
had been swirled fog—fog so thick that it erased half the
horizon as a painter might draw a blotting brush across an
unsuccessful landscape. Dane had never seen anything like it. And
it was moving so fast, visibly cutting off miles of territory in
the few moments he had watched it. To be lost in
that—!
“Look!” he ran to the flitter and jogged
Mura’s arm, pointing to the fast disappearing mountains.
“Look at that!”
Kosti spit out an oath in the slurred speech of Venus. Mura
simply obeyed orders and looked. Another huge section to the north
was swallowed up as he did so. And now they noted another thing.
From the tops of the valley cliffs curls of greyish, yellow vapour
were rising, to cling and render misty the outlines of the rocks.
Whether this was all part of the same phenomenon they did not know, but the
three Terrans insensibly drew closer together, chilled as much by
what they saw as the cold apparent with the going of the sun.
They were shaken out of their absorption by the click of the
caster summoning them back to the ship. The change in the mountains
had been noted on the Queen and both the flitter searching for the wreck and their own were ordered to report in
at once.
There was further change in the atmosphere, a speeding up of the
mists. The swirls above the valley walls combined, formed banks and
began to drop, cutting visibility.
Kosti watched them anxiously. “We’ll have to swing
out—away from the valleys. That stuff is moving too fast. We
can ride the beam in, but I’d rather not unless I
have to—”
But, by the time they were airborne, the mist was down to the
level of the valley floor and was puffing out in threatening
tendrils on to the rough terrain of the burnt-off land. The
mountains had vanished and the foothills were being fast swallowed
up. It was uncanny, terrifying in a way, this wiping away of solid
earth, the substitution of a dirty, rolling mist which swirled and
spun within its mass until one suspicioned movement there, alien,
menacing movement.
Kosti set the controls to full speed, but they had covered
little more than a mile of the return journey before he was forced
to throttle down. For the mist was not only spilling out of the
valleys, it was also curling up from the land under them, each
thread of haze spinning to join and thicken with others.
It was true that they were in no danger of being lost. The thin
reed of sound humming in their ears provided a guide to bring the
flitter back to the parent ship. But they were none the easier
knowing that as they coasted above a curdling sea of mist.
The stuff rose about them forming viscid bubbles on the
windbreak. Only the constant hum of the radar beam linked them with
reality.
“Hope our boys made it down from the mountains before the
worst of this hit,” Kosti broke the strained silence.
“If they didn’t,” Mura replied, “they
will have to land until it clears.”
Kosti throttled down once more as the radar hum sharpened.
“No use crashing into the old lady—”
Within the blanket of mist all sense of direction, of distance
was lost. They might have been up ten thousand feet, or skimming
but one above the broken surface of the rock plain. Kosti hunched over the controls, his usually good-humoured face
pinched, his eyes moving from the mist to the dials before him and
back again.
They sighted the ship—a dark shadow looming through the
veil. With masterly precision Kosti brought the flitter down until
it jarred against the ground. But he was in no hurry to climb out.
Instead he wiped his face with the back of his hand. Mura leaned
forward and patted the big man’s shoulder.
“That was a good job!”
Kosti grinned. “It had to be!”
They crawled out of the flitter and, on impulse, linked hands as
they started for the dim pillar which was the Queen. The contact of
palm against palm was not only insurance and reassurance, but it
was also security of a type Dane felt he needed—and guessed
that his companions wanted also. The menacing, alien mist pressed
in upon them. Its damp congealed greasily on their helmets, dripped
from them as they moved.
But ten paces took them to the welcome arch of the ramp and they
went up, to stand a moment later in the pleasant light and warmth
of the entrance hatch. Jasper Weeks teetered back and forth there,
his pallid little face expressing worry.
“Oh—you—” was his unflattering
greeting.
Kosti laughed. “Who did you expect, little man—a
Sensor dragon breathing fire? Sure, it’s us, and we’re
glad to be back—”
“Something wrong?” Mura interrupted.
Weeks stepped to the outer opening of the hatch once more.
“The other flitter—we haven’t heard from them for
an hour. Captain ordered them back as soon as he saw the fog
closing in. Survey tape says these fogs sometimes last a couple of
days—but they aren’t usual this time of
year.”
Kosti whistled and Mura leaned back against the wall, unbuckling
his helmet.
“Several days.” Dane thought of that. To be lost out
in that soup for days! You’d just have to stay grounded and
hope for the best. But an emergency landing in the mountains under
such conditions—! Now he could understand why Weeks fidgeted
at the hatch. Their own journey over the unobstructed plain
was, under the circumstances, a stroll in a Terran park, compared to
the difficulties those on the other flitter might be forced to
face.
They went up to make their report to the Captain. But all
through it he sat with at least half his attention given to the com
where Tang Ya sat before the master visa-screen, his hand ready for
the key of the caster or to tend the rider beam which might guide
the missing flyer in. Somewhere out in the mystery which was now
Limbo was not only Ali, but Rip, Tau and Steen Wilcox—a good
section of their crew.
“There it is again!” Tang’s forehead creased,
his hands pulled the phones from close contact with his ears. As he
did so the rest heard the clamour which had jolted him. Not unlike
the drone of the rider beam—it scaled up to a screech which
was real pain.
It continued steadily for a space and as Dane listened to it he
became conscious of something else—a muffled rhythm deep
within that drone—a rhythm he had known before—when he
laid his hands upon the wall of the sinister valley. This
disturbance was akin to the vibration in the distant rock!
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the sound was gone. Tang put
on his earphones once more and listened for a signal—either
from the missing flitter or from Ali’s personal com-unit.
“What is that?” Mura asked.
Captain Jellico shrugged. “Your guess is as good as ours.
It may be a signal of some sort—been cutting in at regular
intervals all day.”
“So we must admit—” that was Van Rycke looming
in the door of the control cabin, “that we are not alone on
Limbo. In fact there is much more to Limbo than meets the casual
eye.”
Dane voiced his own suspicion. “Those
archaeologists—” he began, but the Captain favoured him
with a sharp pointed stare that stopped him almost in mid-word.
“We have no idea what is at the root of this,”
Jellico said coldly. “You men get some food and
rest—”
Dane, smarting from his abrupt dismissal, trailed Mura and Kosti
down to the mess cabin. As they passed the Captain’s private
quarters they could hear the wild shrieks of the Hoobat.
That thing sounded, Dane thought, just the way he felt. And even
warm food, bearing no resemblance to the iron rations he had eaten
earlier, did little to raise the general curtain of gloom.
But the meal had an excellent effect on Kosti’s spirits.
“That Rip,” he announced to the table at large,
“he’s got a lot of sense. And Mr. Wilcox, he knows what
he’s doing. They’re all snug somewhere and’ll
stay holed up until this stuff clears. Nobody’ll come out in
this—”
Was Kosti right there, Dane wondered. Suppose there were those
on Limbo who knew the tricks of the climate, who were familiar
enough with such fogs to be able to navigate through them—use
them as a cover—? That signal they had heard blatting out of
the com—could it be a beam to guide some expedition creeping
through the mist? An expedition heading towards the unsuspecting
Queen?