“Well, it works as good as new.”
Shann held his hand and arm out into the full path of the sun. He
had just stripped off the skin-case bandage, to show the raw seam
of a half-healed scar, but as he flexed muscles, bent and twisted
his arm, there was only a small residue of soreness left.
“Now what, or where?” he asked Thorvald with some
eagerness. Several days’ imprisonment in this room had made
him impatient for the outer world again. Like the officer, he now
wore breeches of the green fabric, the only material known to the
Wyverns, and his own badly worn boots. Oddly enough, the
Terrans’ weapons, stunner and knife, had been left to them, a
point which made them uneasy, since it suggested that the Wyverns
believed they had nothing to fear from clumsy alien arms.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Thorvald answered
that double question. “But it is you they want to see; they
insisted upon it, rather emphatically in fact.”
The Wyvern city existed as a series of cell-like hollows in the
interior of a rock-walled island. Outside there had been no
tampering with the natural rugged features of the escarpment, and
within, the silence was almost complete. For all the Terrans could
learn, the population of the stone-walled hive might have been
several thousand, or just the handful that they had seen with their
own eyes along the passages which had been declared open territory
for them.
Shann half expected to find again a skull-walled chamber where
witches tossed colored sticks to determine his future. But he came
with Thorvald into an oval room in which most of the outer wall was
a window. And seeing what lay framed in that, Shann halted, again
uncertain as to whether he actually saw that, or whether he was
willed into visualizing a scene by the choice of his hostesses.
They were lower now than the room in which he had nursed his
wound, not far above water level. And this window faced the sea.
Across a stretch of green water was his red-purple skull, the waves
lapping its lower jaw, spreading their foam in between the gaping
rock-fringe which formed its teeth. And from the eye hollows
flapped the clak-claks of the sea coast, coming and going as if
they carried to some brain imprisoned within that giant bone case
messages from the outer world.
“My dream—” Shann said.
“Your dream.” Thorvald had not echoed that; the
answer had come in his brain.
Shann turned his head and surveyed the Wyvern awaiting them with
a concentration which was close to the rudeness of an outright
stare, a stare which held no friendship. For by her skin patterns
he knew her for the one who had led that trio who had sent him into
the cavern of the mist. And with her was the younger witch he had
trapped on the night that all this baffling action had begun.
“We meet again,” he said slowly. “To what
purpose?”
“To our purpose . . . and
yours—”
“I do not doubt that it is to yours.” The
Terran’s thoughts fell easily now into a formal pattern he
would not have used with one of his own kind. “But I do not
expect any good to
me . . . ”
There was no readable expression on her face; he did not expect
to see any. But in their uneven mind touch he caught a fleeting
suggestion of bewilderment on her part, as if she found his mental
processes as hard to understand as a puzzle with few leading
clues.
“We mean you no ill, star voyager. You are far more than
we first thought you, for you have dreamed false and have known.
Now dream true, and know it also.”
“Yet,” he challenged, “you would set me a task
without my consent.”
“We have a task for you, but already it was set in the
pattern of your true dreaming. And we do not set such patterns,
star man; that is done by the Greatest Power of all. Each lives
within her appointed pattern from the First Awakening to the Final
Dream. So we do not ask of you any more than that which is already
laid for your doing.”
She arose with that languid grace which was a part of their
delicate jeweled bodies and came to stand beside him, a child in
size, making his Terran flesh and bones awkward, clodlike in
contrast. She stretched out her four-digit hand, her slender arm
ringed with gemmed circles and bands, measuring it beside his own,
bearing that livid scar.
“We are different, star man, yet still are we both
dreamers. And dreams hold power. Your dreams brought you across the
dark which lies between sun and distant sun. Our dreams carry us on
even stranger roads. And yonder”—one of her fingers
stiffened to a point, indicating the skull—“there is
another who dreams with power, a power which will destroy us all
unless the pattern is broken speedily.”
“And I must go to seek this dreamer?” His vision of
climbing through that nose hole was to be realized then.
“You go.”
Thorvald stirred and the Wyvern turned her head to him.
“Alone,” she added. “For this is your dream only,
as it has been from the beginning. There is for each his own dream,
and another cannot walk through it to alter the pattern, even to
save a life.”
Shann grinned crookedly, without humor. “It seems that
I’m elected,” he said as much to himself as to
Thorvald. “But what do I do with this other
dreamer?”
“What your pattern moves you to do. Save that you do not
slay him—”
“Throg!” Thorvald started forward. “You
can’t just walk in on a Throg barehanded and be bound by
orders such as that!”
The Wyvern must have caught the sense of that vocal protest, for
her communication touched them both. “We cannot deal with
that one as his mind is closed to us. Yet he is an elder among his
kind and his people have been searching land and sea for him since
his air rider broke upon the rocks and he entered into hiding over
there. Make your peace with him if you can, and also take him
hence, for his dreams are not ours, and he brings confusion to the
Reachers when they retire to run the Trails of Seeking.”
“Must be an important Throg,” Shann deduced.
“They could have an officer of the beetle-heads under wraps
over there. Could we use him to bargain with the rest?”
Thorvald’s frown did not lighten. “We’ve never
been able to establish any form of contact in the past, though our
best qualified minds, reinforced by training, have
tried . . . ”
Shann did not take fire at that rather delicate estimate of his
own lack of preparation for the carrying out of diplomatic
negotiations with the enemy; he knew it was true. But there was one
thing he could try—if the Wyvern permitted.
“Will you give a disk of power to this star man?” He
pointed to Thorvald. “For he is my Elder One and a Reacher
for Knowledge. With such a focus his dream could march with mine
when I go to the Throg, and perhaps that can aid in my doing what I
could not accomplish alone. For that is the secret of my
people, Elder One. We link our powers together to make a shield
against our enemies, a common tool for the work we must
do.”
“And so it is with us also, star voyager. We are not so
unlike as the foolish might think. We learned much of you while you
both wandered in the Place of False Dreams. But our power disks are
our own and can not be given to a stranger while their owners live.
However . . . ” She
turned again with an abruptness foreign to the usual Wyvern manner
and faced the older Terran.
The officer might have been obeying an unvoiced order as he put
out his hands and laid them palm to palm on those she held up to
him, bending his head so gray eyes met golden ones. The web of
communication which had held all three of them snapped. Thorvald
and the Wyvern were linked in a tight circuit which excluded
Shann.
Then the latter became conscious of movement beside him. The
younger Wyvern had joined him to watch the clak-claks in their
circling of the bare dome of the skull island.
“Why do they fly so?” Shann asked her.
“Within they nest, care for their young. Also they hunt
the rock creatures that swarm in the lower darkness.”
“The rock creatures?” If the skull’s interior
was infested by some other native fauna, he wanted to know it.
By some method of her own the young Wyvern conveyed a strong
impression of revulsion, which was her personal reaction to the
“rock creatures.”
“Yet you imprison the Throg there—” he
remarked.
“Not so!” Her denial was instantaneous and vehement.
“The other worlder fled into that place in spite of our
calling. There he stays in hiding. Once we drew him out to the sea,
but he broke the power and fled inside again.”
“Broke free—” Shann pounced upon that.
“From disk control?”
“But surely.” Her reply held something of wonder.
“Why do you ask, star voyager? Did you not also break free
from the power of the disk when I led you by the underground ways,
awaking in the river? Do you then rate this other one as less than
your own breed that you think him incapable of the same
action?”
“Of Throgs I know as much as
this . . . ” He
held up his hand, measuring off a fraction of space between thumb
and forefinger.
“Yet you knew them before you came to this
world.”
“My people have known them for long. We have met and
fought many times among the stars.”
“And never have you talked mind to mind?”
“Never. We have sought for that, but there has been no
communication between us, neither of mind nor voice.”
“This one you name Throg is truly not as you,” she
assented. “And we are not as you, being alien and female.
Yet, star man, you and I have shared a dream.”
Shann stared at her, startled, not so much by what she said as
the human shading of those words in his mind. Or had that also been
illusion?
“In the veil . . . that creature which
came to you on wings when you remembered that. A good dream, though
it came out of the past and so was false in the present. But I have
gathered it into my own store: such a fine dream, one that you have
cherished.”
“Trav was to be cherished,” he agreed soberly.
“I found her in a broken sleep cage at a spaceport when I was
a child. We were both cold and hungry, alone and hurt. So I stole
and was glad that I stole Trav. For a little space we both were
very happy . . . ”
Forcibly he stifled memory.
“So, though we are unlike in body and in mind, yet we find
beauty together if only in a dream. Therefore, between your people
and mine there can be a common speech. And I may show you
my dream store for your enjoyment, star voyager.”
A flickering of pictures, some weird, some beautiful, all a
little distorted—not only by haste, but also by the haze of
alienness which was a part of her memory pattern—crossed
Shann’s mind.
“Such a sharing would be a rich feast,” he
agreed.
“All right!” Those crisp words in his own tongue
brought Shann away from the window to Thorvald. The Survey officer
was no longer locked hand to hand with the Wyvern witch, but his
features were alive with a new eagerness.
“We are going to try your idea, Lantee. They’ll
provide me with a new, unmarked disk, show me how to use it. And
I’ll do what I can to back you with it. But they insist that
you go today.”
“What do they really want me to do? Just root out that
Throg? Or try to talk him into being a go-between with his people?
That does come under the heading of dreaming!”
“They want him out of there, back with his own kind if
possible. Apparently he’s a disruptive influence for them; he
causes some kind of a mental foul up which interferes drastically
with their ‘power.’ They haven’t been able to get
him to make any contact with them. This Elder One is firm about
your being the one ordained for the job, and that you’ll know
what action to take when you get here.”
“Must have thrown the sticks for me again,” Shann
commented.
“Well, they’ve definitely picked you to smoke out
the Throg, and they can’t be talked into changing their minds
about that.”
“I’ll be the smoked one if he has a
blaster.”
“They say he’s unarmed—”
“What do they know about our weapons or a
Throg’s?”
“The other one has no arms.” Wyvern words in his
mind again. “This fact gives him great fear. That which he
has depended upon is broken. And since he has no weapon, he is shut
into a prison of his own terrors.”
But an adult Throg, even unarmed, was not to be considered easy
meat, Shann thought. Armored with horny skin, armed with claws and
those crushing mandibles of the beetle
mouth . . . a third again as tall as he himself
was. No, even unarmed, the Throg had to be considered a menace.
Shann was still thinking along that line as he splashed through
the surf which broke about the lower jaw of the skull island,
climbed up one of the pointed rocks which masqueraded as a tooth,
and reached for a higher hold to lead him to the nose slit, the
gateway to the alien’s hiding place.
The clak-claks screamed and dived about him, highly resentful of
his intrusion. And when they grew so bold as to buffet him with
their wings, threaten him with their tearing beaks, he was glad to
reach the broken rock edging his chosen door and duck inside. Once
there, Shann looked back. There was no sighting the cliff window
where Thorvald stood, nor was he aware in any way of mental contact
with the Survey officer; their hope of such a linkage might be
futile.
Shann was reluctant to venture farther. His eyes had
sufficiently adjusted to the limited supply of light, and now the
Terran brought out the one aid the Wyverns had granted him, a green
crystal such as those which had played the role of stars on the
cavern roof. He clipped its simple loop setting to the front of his
belt, leaving his hands free. Then, having filled his lungs for the
last time with clean, sea-washed air, he started into the dome of
the skull.
There was a fetid thickness to this air only a few feet away
from the outer world. The odor of clak-clak droppings and refuse
from their nests was strong, but there was an added staleness, as
if no breeze ever scooped out the old atmosphere to replace it with
new. Fragile bones crunched under Shann’s boots, but as he
drew away from the entrance, the pale glow of the crystal increased
its radiance, emitting a light not unlike that of the
phosphorescent bushes, so that he was not swallowed up by dark.
The cave behind the nose hole narrowed quickly into a cleft, a
narrow cleft which pierced into the bowl of the skull. Shann
proceeded with caution, pausing every few steps. There came a
murmur rising now and again to a shriek, issuing, he guessed, from
the clak-clak rookery above. And the pound of sea waves was also a
vibration carrying through the rock. He was listening for something
else, at the same time testing the ill-smelling air for that
betraying muskiness which spelled Throg.
When a twist in the narrow passage cut off the splotch of
daylight, Shann drew his stunner. The strongest bolt from that
could not jolt a Throg into complete paralysis, but it would slow
up any attack.
Red—pinpoints of red—were edging a break in the rock
wall. They were gone in a flash. Eyes? Perhaps of the rock dwellers
which the Wyverns hated? More red dots, farther ahead. Shann
listened for a sound he could identify.
But smell came before sound. That trace of effluvia, which in
force could sicken a Terran, was his guide. The cleft ended in a
space to which the limited gleam of the crystal could not provide a
far wall. But that faint light did show him his quarry.
The Throg was not on his feet, ready for trouble, but hunched
close to the wall. And the alien did not move at Shann’s
coming. Did the beetle-head sight him? Shann wondered. He moved
cautiously. And the round head, with its bulbous eyes, turned a
fraction; the mandibles about the ugly mouth opening quivered. Yes,
the Throg could see him.
But still the alien made no move to rise out of his crouch, to
come at the Terran. Then Shann saw the fall of rock, the stone
which pinned a double-kneed leg to the floor. And in a circle about
the prisoner were the small, crushed, furred things which had come
to prey on the helpless to be slain themselves by the well-aimed
stones which were the Throg’s only weapons of defense.
Shann sheathed his stunner. It was plain the Throg was helpless
and could not reach him. He tried to concentrate mentally on a
picture of the scene before him, hoping that Thorvald or one of the
Wyverns could pick it up. There was no answer, no direction. Choice
of action remained solely his.
The Terran made the oldest friendly gesture of his kind; his
empty hands held up, palm out. There was no answering move from the
Throg. Neither of the other’s upper limbs stirred, their
claws still gripping the small rocks in readiness for throwing. All
Shann’s knowledge of the alien’s history argued against
an unarmed advance. The Throg’s marksmanship, as borne out by
the circle of small bodies, was excellent. And one of those rocks
might well thud against his own head, with fatal results. Yet he
had been sent there to get the Throg free and out of Wyvern
territory.
So rank was the beetle smell of the other that Shann coughed.
What he needed now was the aid of the wolverines, a diversion to
keep the alien busy. But this time there was no disk working to
produce Taggi and Togi out of thin air. And he could not continue
to just stand there staring at the Throg. There remained the
stunner. Life on the Dumps tended to make a man a fast draw, a
matter of survival for the fastest and most accurate marksman. And
now one of Shann’s hands swept down with a speed which,
learned early, was never really to be forgotten.
He had the rod out and was spraying on tight beam straight at
the Throg’s head before the first stone struck his shoulder
and his weapon fell from a numbed hand. But a second stone tumbled
out of the Throg’s claw. The alien tried to reach for it, his
movements slow, uncertain.
Shann, his arm dangling, went in fast, bracing his good shoulder
against the boulder which pinned the Throg. The alien aimed a blow
at the Terran’s head, but again so slowly Shann had no
difficulty in evading it. The boulder gave, rolled, and Shann
cleared out of range, back to the opening of the cleft, pausing
only to scoop up his stunner.
For a long moment the Throg made no move; his dazed wits must
have been working at very slow speed. Then the alien heaved up his
body to stand erect, favoring the leg which had been trapped. Shann
tensed, waiting for a rush. What now? Would the Throg refuse to
move? If so, what could he do about it?
With the impact of a blow, the message Shann had hoped for
struck into his mind. But his initial joy at that contact was wiped
out with the same speed.
“Throg ship . . . overhead.”
The Throg stood away from the wall, limped out, heading for
Shann, or perhaps only the cleft in which he stood. Swinging the
stunner awkwardly in his left hand, the Terran retreated, mentally
trying to contact Thorvald once more. There was no answer. He was
well up into the cleft, moving crabwise, unwilling to turn his back
on the Throg. The alien was coming as steadily as his injured limb
would allow, trying for the exit to the outer world.
A Throg ship overhead . . . Had the castaway
somehow managed to call his own kind? And what if he, Shann Lantee,
were to be trapped between the alien and a landing party from the
flyer? He did not expect any assistance from the Wyverns, and what
could Thorvald possibly do? From behind him, at the entrance of the
nose slit, he heard a sound—a sound which was neither the
scolding of a clak-clak nor the eternal growl of the sea.
“Well, it works as good as new.”
Shann held his hand and arm out into the full path of the sun. He
had just stripped off the skin-case bandage, to show the raw seam
of a half-healed scar, but as he flexed muscles, bent and twisted
his arm, there was only a small residue of soreness left.
“Now what, or where?” he asked Thorvald with some
eagerness. Several days’ imprisonment in this room had made
him impatient for the outer world again. Like the officer, he now
wore breeches of the green fabric, the only material known to the
Wyverns, and his own badly worn boots. Oddly enough, the
Terrans’ weapons, stunner and knife, had been left to them, a
point which made them uneasy, since it suggested that the Wyverns
believed they had nothing to fear from clumsy alien arms.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Thorvald answered
that double question. “But it is you they want to see; they
insisted upon it, rather emphatically in fact.”
The Wyvern city existed as a series of cell-like hollows in the
interior of a rock-walled island. Outside there had been no
tampering with the natural rugged features of the escarpment, and
within, the silence was almost complete. For all the Terrans could
learn, the population of the stone-walled hive might have been
several thousand, or just the handful that they had seen with their
own eyes along the passages which had been declared open territory
for them.
Shann half expected to find again a skull-walled chamber where
witches tossed colored sticks to determine his future. But he came
with Thorvald into an oval room in which most of the outer wall was
a window. And seeing what lay framed in that, Shann halted, again
uncertain as to whether he actually saw that, or whether he was
willed into visualizing a scene by the choice of his hostesses.
They were lower now than the room in which he had nursed his
wound, not far above water level. And this window faced the sea.
Across a stretch of green water was his red-purple skull, the waves
lapping its lower jaw, spreading their foam in between the gaping
rock-fringe which formed its teeth. And from the eye hollows
flapped the clak-claks of the sea coast, coming and going as if
they carried to some brain imprisoned within that giant bone case
messages from the outer world.
“My dream—” Shann said.
“Your dream.” Thorvald had not echoed that; the
answer had come in his brain.
Shann turned his head and surveyed the Wyvern awaiting them with
a concentration which was close to the rudeness of an outright
stare, a stare which held no friendship. For by her skin patterns
he knew her for the one who had led that trio who had sent him into
the cavern of the mist. And with her was the younger witch he had
trapped on the night that all this baffling action had begun.
“We meet again,” he said slowly. “To what
purpose?”
“To our purpose . . . and
yours—”
“I do not doubt that it is to yours.” The
Terran’s thoughts fell easily now into a formal pattern he
would not have used with one of his own kind. “But I do not
expect any good to
me . . . ”
There was no readable expression on her face; he did not expect
to see any. But in their uneven mind touch he caught a fleeting
suggestion of bewilderment on her part, as if she found his mental
processes as hard to understand as a puzzle with few leading
clues.
“We mean you no ill, star voyager. You are far more than
we first thought you, for you have dreamed false and have known.
Now dream true, and know it also.”
“Yet,” he challenged, “you would set me a task
without my consent.”
“We have a task for you, but already it was set in the
pattern of your true dreaming. And we do not set such patterns,
star man; that is done by the Greatest Power of all. Each lives
within her appointed pattern from the First Awakening to the Final
Dream. So we do not ask of you any more than that which is already
laid for your doing.”
She arose with that languid grace which was a part of their
delicate jeweled bodies and came to stand beside him, a child in
size, making his Terran flesh and bones awkward, clodlike in
contrast. She stretched out her four-digit hand, her slender arm
ringed with gemmed circles and bands, measuring it beside his own,
bearing that livid scar.
“We are different, star man, yet still are we both
dreamers. And dreams hold power. Your dreams brought you across the
dark which lies between sun and distant sun. Our dreams carry us on
even stranger roads. And yonder”—one of her fingers
stiffened to a point, indicating the skull—“there is
another who dreams with power, a power which will destroy us all
unless the pattern is broken speedily.”
“And I must go to seek this dreamer?” His vision of
climbing through that nose hole was to be realized then.
“You go.”
Thorvald stirred and the Wyvern turned her head to him.
“Alone,” she added. “For this is your dream only,
as it has been from the beginning. There is for each his own dream,
and another cannot walk through it to alter the pattern, even to
save a life.”
Shann grinned crookedly, without humor. “It seems that
I’m elected,” he said as much to himself as to
Thorvald. “But what do I do with this other
dreamer?”
“What your pattern moves you to do. Save that you do not
slay him—”
“Throg!” Thorvald started forward. “You
can’t just walk in on a Throg barehanded and be bound by
orders such as that!”
The Wyvern must have caught the sense of that vocal protest, for
her communication touched them both. “We cannot deal with
that one as his mind is closed to us. Yet he is an elder among his
kind and his people have been searching land and sea for him since
his air rider broke upon the rocks and he entered into hiding over
there. Make your peace with him if you can, and also take him
hence, for his dreams are not ours, and he brings confusion to the
Reachers when they retire to run the Trails of Seeking.”
“Must be an important Throg,” Shann deduced.
“They could have an officer of the beetle-heads under wraps
over there. Could we use him to bargain with the rest?”
Thorvald’s frown did not lighten. “We’ve never
been able to establish any form of contact in the past, though our
best qualified minds, reinforced by training, have
tried . . . ”
Shann did not take fire at that rather delicate estimate of his
own lack of preparation for the carrying out of diplomatic
negotiations with the enemy; he knew it was true. But there was one
thing he could try—if the Wyvern permitted.
“Will you give a disk of power to this star man?” He
pointed to Thorvald. “For he is my Elder One and a Reacher
for Knowledge. With such a focus his dream could march with mine
when I go to the Throg, and perhaps that can aid in my doing what I
could not accomplish alone. For that is the secret of my
people, Elder One. We link our powers together to make a shield
against our enemies, a common tool for the work we must
do.”
“And so it is with us also, star voyager. We are not so
unlike as the foolish might think. We learned much of you while you
both wandered in the Place of False Dreams. But our power disks are
our own and can not be given to a stranger while their owners live.
However . . . ” She
turned again with an abruptness foreign to the usual Wyvern manner
and faced the older Terran.
The officer might have been obeying an unvoiced order as he put
out his hands and laid them palm to palm on those she held up to
him, bending his head so gray eyes met golden ones. The web of
communication which had held all three of them snapped. Thorvald
and the Wyvern were linked in a tight circuit which excluded
Shann.
Then the latter became conscious of movement beside him. The
younger Wyvern had joined him to watch the clak-claks in their
circling of the bare dome of the skull island.
“Why do they fly so?” Shann asked her.
“Within they nest, care for their young. Also they hunt
the rock creatures that swarm in the lower darkness.”
“The rock creatures?” If the skull’s interior
was infested by some other native fauna, he wanted to know it.
By some method of her own the young Wyvern conveyed a strong
impression of revulsion, which was her personal reaction to the
“rock creatures.”
“Yet you imprison the Throg there—” he
remarked.
“Not so!” Her denial was instantaneous and vehement.
“The other worlder fled into that place in spite of our
calling. There he stays in hiding. Once we drew him out to the sea,
but he broke the power and fled inside again.”
“Broke free—” Shann pounced upon that.
“From disk control?”
“But surely.” Her reply held something of wonder.
“Why do you ask, star voyager? Did you not also break free
from the power of the disk when I led you by the underground ways,
awaking in the river? Do you then rate this other one as less than
your own breed that you think him incapable of the same
action?”
“Of Throgs I know as much as
this . . . ” He
held up his hand, measuring off a fraction of space between thumb
and forefinger.
“Yet you knew them before you came to this
world.”
“My people have known them for long. We have met and
fought many times among the stars.”
“And never have you talked mind to mind?”
“Never. We have sought for that, but there has been no
communication between us, neither of mind nor voice.”
“This one you name Throg is truly not as you,” she
assented. “And we are not as you, being alien and female.
Yet, star man, you and I have shared a dream.”
Shann stared at her, startled, not so much by what she said as
the human shading of those words in his mind. Or had that also been
illusion?
“In the veil . . . that creature which
came to you on wings when you remembered that. A good dream, though
it came out of the past and so was false in the present. But I have
gathered it into my own store: such a fine dream, one that you have
cherished.”
“Trav was to be cherished,” he agreed soberly.
“I found her in a broken sleep cage at a spaceport when I was
a child. We were both cold and hungry, alone and hurt. So I stole
and was glad that I stole Trav. For a little space we both were
very happy . . . ”
Forcibly he stifled memory.
“So, though we are unlike in body and in mind, yet we find
beauty together if only in a dream. Therefore, between your people
and mine there can be a common speech. And I may show you
my dream store for your enjoyment, star voyager.”
A flickering of pictures, some weird, some beautiful, all a
little distorted—not only by haste, but also by the haze of
alienness which was a part of her memory pattern—crossed
Shann’s mind.
“Such a sharing would be a rich feast,” he
agreed.
“All right!” Those crisp words in his own tongue
brought Shann away from the window to Thorvald. The Survey officer
was no longer locked hand to hand with the Wyvern witch, but his
features were alive with a new eagerness.
“We are going to try your idea, Lantee. They’ll
provide me with a new, unmarked disk, show me how to use it. And
I’ll do what I can to back you with it. But they insist that
you go today.”
“What do they really want me to do? Just root out that
Throg? Or try to talk him into being a go-between with his people?
That does come under the heading of dreaming!”
“They want him out of there, back with his own kind if
possible. Apparently he’s a disruptive influence for them; he
causes some kind of a mental foul up which interferes drastically
with their ‘power.’ They haven’t been able to get
him to make any contact with them. This Elder One is firm about
your being the one ordained for the job, and that you’ll know
what action to take when you get here.”
“Must have thrown the sticks for me again,” Shann
commented.
“Well, they’ve definitely picked you to smoke out
the Throg, and they can’t be talked into changing their minds
about that.”
“I’ll be the smoked one if he has a
blaster.”
“They say he’s unarmed—”
“What do they know about our weapons or a
Throg’s?”
“The other one has no arms.” Wyvern words in his
mind again. “This fact gives him great fear. That which he
has depended upon is broken. And since he has no weapon, he is shut
into a prison of his own terrors.”
But an adult Throg, even unarmed, was not to be considered easy
meat, Shann thought. Armored with horny skin, armed with claws and
those crushing mandibles of the beetle
mouth . . . a third again as tall as he himself
was. No, even unarmed, the Throg had to be considered a menace.
Shann was still thinking along that line as he splashed through
the surf which broke about the lower jaw of the skull island,
climbed up one of the pointed rocks which masqueraded as a tooth,
and reached for a higher hold to lead him to the nose slit, the
gateway to the alien’s hiding place.
The clak-claks screamed and dived about him, highly resentful of
his intrusion. And when they grew so bold as to buffet him with
their wings, threaten him with their tearing beaks, he was glad to
reach the broken rock edging his chosen door and duck inside. Once
there, Shann looked back. There was no sighting the cliff window
where Thorvald stood, nor was he aware in any way of mental contact
with the Survey officer; their hope of such a linkage might be
futile.
Shann was reluctant to venture farther. His eyes had
sufficiently adjusted to the limited supply of light, and now the
Terran brought out the one aid the Wyverns had granted him, a green
crystal such as those which had played the role of stars on the
cavern roof. He clipped its simple loop setting to the front of his
belt, leaving his hands free. Then, having filled his lungs for the
last time with clean, sea-washed air, he started into the dome of
the skull.
There was a fetid thickness to this air only a few feet away
from the outer world. The odor of clak-clak droppings and refuse
from their nests was strong, but there was an added staleness, as
if no breeze ever scooped out the old atmosphere to replace it with
new. Fragile bones crunched under Shann’s boots, but as he
drew away from the entrance, the pale glow of the crystal increased
its radiance, emitting a light not unlike that of the
phosphorescent bushes, so that he was not swallowed up by dark.
The cave behind the nose hole narrowed quickly into a cleft, a
narrow cleft which pierced into the bowl of the skull. Shann
proceeded with caution, pausing every few steps. There came a
murmur rising now and again to a shriek, issuing, he guessed, from
the clak-clak rookery above. And the pound of sea waves was also a
vibration carrying through the rock. He was listening for something
else, at the same time testing the ill-smelling air for that
betraying muskiness which spelled Throg.
When a twist in the narrow passage cut off the splotch of
daylight, Shann drew his stunner. The strongest bolt from that
could not jolt a Throg into complete paralysis, but it would slow
up any attack.
Red—pinpoints of red—were edging a break in the rock
wall. They were gone in a flash. Eyes? Perhaps of the rock dwellers
which the Wyverns hated? More red dots, farther ahead. Shann
listened for a sound he could identify.
But smell came before sound. That trace of effluvia, which in
force could sicken a Terran, was his guide. The cleft ended in a
space to which the limited gleam of the crystal could not provide a
far wall. But that faint light did show him his quarry.
The Throg was not on his feet, ready for trouble, but hunched
close to the wall. And the alien did not move at Shann’s
coming. Did the beetle-head sight him? Shann wondered. He moved
cautiously. And the round head, with its bulbous eyes, turned a
fraction; the mandibles about the ugly mouth opening quivered. Yes,
the Throg could see him.
But still the alien made no move to rise out of his crouch, to
come at the Terran. Then Shann saw the fall of rock, the stone
which pinned a double-kneed leg to the floor. And in a circle about
the prisoner were the small, crushed, furred things which had come
to prey on the helpless to be slain themselves by the well-aimed
stones which were the Throg’s only weapons of defense.
Shann sheathed his stunner. It was plain the Throg was helpless
and could not reach him. He tried to concentrate mentally on a
picture of the scene before him, hoping that Thorvald or one of the
Wyverns could pick it up. There was no answer, no direction. Choice
of action remained solely his.
The Terran made the oldest friendly gesture of his kind; his
empty hands held up, palm out. There was no answering move from the
Throg. Neither of the other’s upper limbs stirred, their
claws still gripping the small rocks in readiness for throwing. All
Shann’s knowledge of the alien’s history argued against
an unarmed advance. The Throg’s marksmanship, as borne out by
the circle of small bodies, was excellent. And one of those rocks
might well thud against his own head, with fatal results. Yet he
had been sent there to get the Throg free and out of Wyvern
territory.
So rank was the beetle smell of the other that Shann coughed.
What he needed now was the aid of the wolverines, a diversion to
keep the alien busy. But this time there was no disk working to
produce Taggi and Togi out of thin air. And he could not continue
to just stand there staring at the Throg. There remained the
stunner. Life on the Dumps tended to make a man a fast draw, a
matter of survival for the fastest and most accurate marksman. And
now one of Shann’s hands swept down with a speed which,
learned early, was never really to be forgotten.
He had the rod out and was spraying on tight beam straight at
the Throg’s head before the first stone struck his shoulder
and his weapon fell from a numbed hand. But a second stone tumbled
out of the Throg’s claw. The alien tried to reach for it, his
movements slow, uncertain.
Shann, his arm dangling, went in fast, bracing his good shoulder
against the boulder which pinned the Throg. The alien aimed a blow
at the Terran’s head, but again so slowly Shann had no
difficulty in evading it. The boulder gave, rolled, and Shann
cleared out of range, back to the opening of the cleft, pausing
only to scoop up his stunner.
For a long moment the Throg made no move; his dazed wits must
have been working at very slow speed. Then the alien heaved up his
body to stand erect, favoring the leg which had been trapped. Shann
tensed, waiting for a rush. What now? Would the Throg refuse to
move? If so, what could he do about it?
With the impact of a blow, the message Shann had hoped for
struck into his mind. But his initial joy at that contact was wiped
out with the same speed.
“Throg ship . . . overhead.”
The Throg stood away from the wall, limped out, heading for
Shann, or perhaps only the cleft in which he stood. Swinging the
stunner awkwardly in his left hand, the Terran retreated, mentally
trying to contact Thorvald once more. There was no answer. He was
well up into the cleft, moving crabwise, unwilling to turn his back
on the Throg. The alien was coming as steadily as his injured limb
would allow, trying for the exit to the outer world.
A Throg ship overhead . . . Had the castaway
somehow managed to call his own kind? And what if he, Shann Lantee,
were to be trapped between the alien and a landing party from the
flyer? He did not expect any assistance from the Wyverns, and what
could Thorvald possibly do? From behind him, at the entrance of the
nose slit, he heard a sound—a sound which was neither the
scolding of a clak-clak nor the eternal growl of the sea.