The Throg task force struck the Terran Survey
camp without warning a few minutes after dawn. The alien invaders
sent eye-searing lances of energy flashing back and forth across
the base with methodical accuracy. And a single cowering witness,
flattened on a ledge in the heights above, knew that when the last
of those yellow-red bolts fell, nothing human would be left alive
down there. His teeth clamped hard upon the thick stuff of the
sleeve covering his thin forearm, and a scream of terror and rage
was stillborn in his heart.
More than caution kept him pinned on that narrow shelf of rock.
Watching that holocaust below, Shann Lantee could not force himself
to move. The sheer ruthlessness of the Throg attack left him
momentarily weak. To listen to a tale of Throgs in action, and to
be an eyewitness to such action, were two vastly different things.
He shivered in spite of the warmth of the Survey Corps uniform.
As yet he had sighted none of the aliens, only their plateshaped
flyers. They would stay aloft until their long-range weapon cleared
out all opposition. But how had they been able to annihilate the
Terran force so completely? The last report had placed the nearest
Throg nest at least two systems away from Warlock. And a patrol
lane had been drawn about the Circe system the minute that Survey
had marked its second planet ready for colonization. Somehow the
beetles had slipped through that supposedly tight cordon and would
now consolidate their gains with their usual speed. Once their
energy attack finished the small Terran force, then they would
simply take over.
A month later, or maybe two months, and they could not have done
it. The grids would have been up, and any Throg ship venturing into
Warlock’s amber-tinted sky would abruptly cease to be. In the
race for survival as a galactic power, Terra had that one small
edge over the swarms of the enemy. They need only stake out their
new-found world and get the grids assembled on its surface; then
that planet would be locked to the beetles. The critical period was
between the first discovery of a suitable colony world and the
completion of grid control. Planets in the past had been lost
during that time lag, just as Warlock was being lost now.
Throgs and Terrans . . . For more than a
century now, planet time, they had been fighting their bitter war
among the stars. Terrans hunted worlds for colonization, the old
hunger for land of their own driving men from the overpopulated
worlds, out of Sol’s system to the far stars. And those
worlds barren of intelligent native life, open to settlers, were
none too many and widely scattered. Perhaps half a dozen were found
in a quarter century, and of that six maybe only one was suitable
for human life without any costly and lengthy adaptation of man or
world. Warlock was one of the lucky finds which came so seldom.
Throgs were predators, living on the loot they garnered. As yet,
mankind had not been able to discover whether they did indeed swarm
from any home world. Perhaps they lived eternally on board their
plate ships with no permanent base, forced into a wandering life by
the destruction of the planet on which they had originally been
spawned. But they were raiders now, laying waste to defenseless
worlds, picking up the wealth of shattered cities in which no
native life remained. Although their hidden temporary bases were
looped about the galaxy, their need for worlds with an atmosphere
similar to Terra’s was as necessary as that of man. For in
spite of their grotesque insectile bodies, their wholly alien
minds, the Throgs were warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing
creatures.
After the first few clashes the early Terran explorers had
endeavored to promote a truce between the species, only to discover
that between Throg and man there appeared to be no meeting ground
at all—a total difference of mental processes producing
insurmountable misunderstanding. There was simply no point of
communication. So the Terrans had suffered one smarting defeat
after another until they perfected the grid. And now their colonies
were safe, at least when time worked in their favor.
It had not on Warlock.
A last vivid lash of red cracked over the huddle of domes in the
valley. Shann blinked, half blinded by that glare. His jaws ached
as he unclenched his teeth. That was the finish. Breathing
raggedly, he raised his head, beginning to realize that he was the
only one of his kind left alive on a none-too-hospitable world
controlled by enemies—without shelter or supplies.
He edged back into the narrow cleft which was the entrance to
the ledge. As a representative of his species he was not
impressive, and now, with those shudders he could not master
shaking his thin body, he looked even smaller and more vulnerable.
Shann drew his knees up close under his chin. The hood of his
woodsman’s jacket was pushed back in spite of the chill of
the morning, and he wiped the back of his hand across his lips and
chin in an oddly childish gesture.
None of the men below who had been alive only minutes earlier
had been close friends of his. Shann had never known anyone
but acquaintances in his short, roving life. Most people had
ignored him completely except to give orders, and one or two had
been actively malicious—like Garth Thorvald. Shann grimaced
at a certain recent memory, and then that grimace faded into
wonder. If young Thorvald hadn’t purposefully tried to get
Shann into trouble by opening the wolverines’ cage, Shann
wouldn’t be here now—alive and safe for a
time—he’d have been down there with the others.
The wolverines! For the first time since Shann had heard the
crackle of the Throg attack he remembered the reason he had been
heading into the hills. Of all the men on the Survey team, Shann
Lantee had been the least important. The dirty, tedious clean-up
jobs, the dull routines which required no technical training but
which had to be performed to keep the camp functioning comfortably,
those had been his portion. And he had accepted that status
willingly, just to have a chance to be included among Survey
personnel. Not that he had the slightest hope of climbing up to
even an S-E-Three rating in the service.
Part of those menial activities had been to clean the animal
cages. And there Shann Lantee had found something new, something so
absorbing that most of the tiring dull labor had ceased to exist
except as tasks to finish before he could return to the fascination
of the animal runs.
Survey teams had early discovered the advantage of using mutated
and highly trained Terran animals as assistants in the exploration
of strange worlds. From the biological laboratories and breeding
farms on Terra came a trickle of specialized assistants to
accompany man into space. Some were fighters, silent, more deadly
than weapons a man wore at his belt or carried in his hands. Some
were keener eyes, keener noses, keener scouts than the human kind
could produce. Bred for intelligence, for size, for adaptability to
alien conditions, the animal explorers from Terra were prized.
Wolverines, the ancient “devils” of the northlands
on Terra, were being tried for the first time on Warlock. Their
caution, a quality highly developed in their breed, made them
testers for new territory. Able to tackle in battle an animal three
times their size, they should be added protection for the man they
accompanied into the wilderness. Their wide ranging, their ability
to climb and swim, and above all, their curiosity were significant
assets.
Shann had begun contact by cleaning their cages; he ended
captivated by these miniature bears with long bushy tails. And to
his unbounded delight the attraction was mutual. Alone to Taggi and
Togi he was a person, an important person. Those teeth, which could
tear flesh into ragged strips, nipped gently at his fingers. They
closed without any pressure on arm, even on nose and chin in what
was the ultimate caress of their kind. Since they were escape
artists of no mean ability, twice he had had to track and lead them
back to camp from forays of their own devising.
But the second time he had been caught by Fadakar, the chief of
animal control, before he could lock up the delinquents. And the
memory of the resulting interview still had the power to make him
flush with impotent anger. Shann’s explanation had been
contemptuously brushed aside, and he had been delivered an
ultimatum. If his carelessness occurred again, he would be sent
back on the next supply ship, to be dismissed without an official
sign-off on his work record, thus locked out of even the lowest
level of Survey for the rest of his life.
That was why Garth Thorvald’s act of the night before had
made Shann brave the unknown darkness of Warlock alone when he had
discovered that the test animals were gone. He had to locate and
return them before Fadakar made his morning inspection; Garth
Thorvald’s attempt to get him into bad trouble had saved his
life.
Shann cowered back, striving to make his huddled body as small
as possible. One of the Throg flyers appeared silently out of the
misty amber of the morning sky, hovering over the silent camp. The
aliens were coming in to inspect the site of their victory. And the
safest place for any Terran now was as far from the vicinity of
those silent domes as he could get. Shann’s slight body was
an asset as he wedged through the narrow mouth of a cleft and so
back into the cliff wall. The climb before him he knew in part, for
this was the path the wolverines had followed on their two other
escapes. A few moments of tricky scrambling and he was out in a
cuplike depression choked with the purple-leaved brush of Warlock.
On the other side of that was a small cut to a sloping hillside,
giving on another valley, not as wide as that in which the camp
stood, but one well provided with cover in the way of trees and
high-growing bushes.
A light wind pushed among the trees, and twice Shann heard the
harsh, rasping call of a clak-clak—one of the batlike
leather-winged flyers that laired in pits along the cliff walls.
That present snap of two-tone complaint suggested that the land was
empty of strangers. For the clak-claks vociferously and loudly
resented encroachment on their chosen hunting territory.
Shann hesitated. He was driven by the urge to put as much
distance between him and the landing Throg ship as he could. But to
arouse the attention of inquisitive clak-claks was asking for
trouble. Perhaps it would be best to keep on along the top of the
cliff, rather than risk a descent to take cover in the valley the
flyers patrolled.
A patch of dust, sheltered by a tooth-shaped projection of rock,
gave the Terran his first proof that Taggi and his mate had
preceded him, for printed firmly there was the familiar paw mark of
a wolverine. Shann began to hope that both animals had taken to
cover in the wilderness ahead.
He licked dry lips. Having left secretly without any emergency
pack, he had no canteen, and now Shann inventoried his scant
possessions—a field kit, heavy-duty clothing, a short hooded
jacket with attached mittens, the breast marked with the Survey
insignia. His belt supported a sheathed stunner and bush knife, and
seam pockets held three credit tokens, a twist of wire intended to
reinforce the latch of the wolverine cage, a packet of bravo
tablets, two identity and work cards, and a length of cord. No
rations—save the bravos—no extra charge for his
stunner. But he did have, weighing down a loop on the jacket, a
small power torch.
The path he followed ended abruptly in a cliff drop, and Shann
made a face at the odor rising from below, even though that scent
meant he could climb down to the valley floor here without fearing
any clak-clak attention. Chemical fumes from a mineral spring
funneled against the wall, warding off any nesting in this
section.
Shann drew up the hood of his jacket and snapped the transparent
face mask into place. He must get away—then find food, water,
a hiding place. That will to live which had made Shann Lantee fight
innumerable battles in the past was in command, bracing him with a
stubborn determination.
The fumes swirled up in a smoke haze about his waist, but he
strode on, heading for the open valley and cleaner air. That sickly
lavender vegetation bordering the spring deepened in color to the
normal purple-green, and then he was in a grove of trees, their
branches pointed skyward at sharp angles to the rust-red
trunks.
A small skitterer burst from moss-spotted ground covering,
giving an alarmed squeak, skimming out of sight as suddenly as it
had appeared. Shann squeezed between two trees and then paused. The
trunk of the larger was deeply scored with scratches dripping
viscous gobs of sap, a sap which was a bright froth of scarlet.
Taggi had left his mark here, and not too long ago.
The soft carpet of moss showed no paw marks, but he thought he
knew the goal of the animals—a lake down-valley. Shann was
beginning to plan now. The Throgs had not blasted the Terran camp
entirely out of existence; they had only made sure of the death of
its occupiers. Which meant they must have some use for the
installations. For the general loot of a Survey field camp would be
relatively worthless to those who picked over the treasure of
entire cities elsewhere. Why? What did the Throgs want? And would
the alien invaders continue to occupy the domes for long?
Shann was still reeling from the shock of the Throgs’
ruthless attack. But from early childhood, when he had been thrown
on his own to scratch a living—a borderline existence of a
living—on the Dumps of Tyr, he had had to use his wits to
keep life in a scrawny and undersized body. However, since he had
been eating regularly from Survey rations, he was not quite so
scrawny anymore.
His formal education was close to zero, his informal and
off-center schooling vast. And that particular toughening process
which had been working on him for years now aided in his speedy
adaptation to a new set of facts, formidable ones. He was alone on
a strange and perhaps hostile world. Water, food, safe shelter,
those were important now. And once again, away from the ordered
round of the camp where he had been ruled by the desires and
requirements of others, he was thinking, planning in freedom. Later
(his hand went to the butt of his stunner) perhaps later he might
just find a way of extracting an accounting from the beetle-heads,
too.
For the present, he would have to keep away from the Throgs,
which meant well away from the camp. A fleck of green showed
through the amethyst foliage before him—the lake! Shann
wriggled through a last bush barrier and stood to look out over
that surface. A sleek brown head bobbed up. Shann put fingers to
his mouth and whistled. The head turned, black button eyes regarded
him, short legs began to churn water. To his relief the swimmer was
obeying his summons.
Taggi came ashore, pausing on the fine gray sand of the verge to
shake himself vigorously. Then the wolverine ran upslope at a
clumsy gallop to Shann. With an unknown feeling swelling inside him
the Terran went down on both knees, burying both hands in the
coarse brown fur, warming to the uproarious welcome Taggi gave
him.
“Togi?” Shann asked as if the other could answer. He
gazed back to the lake, but Taggi’s mate was nowhere in
sight.
The blunt head under his hand swung around, black button nose
pointed north. Shann had never been sure just how intelligent, as
mankind measured intelligence, the wolverines were. He had come to
suspect that Fadakar and the other experts had underrated them and
that both beasts understood more than they were given credit for.
Now he followed an experiment of his own, one he had had a chance
to try only a few times before and never at length. Pressing his
palm flat on Taggi’s head, Shann thought of Throgs and of
their attack, trying to arouse in the animal a corresponding
reaction to his own horror and anger.
And Taggi responded. A mutter became a growl, teeth
gleamed—those cruel teeth of a carnivore to whom they were
weapons of aggression. Danger . . . Shann
thought “danger.” Then he raised his hand, and the
wolverine shuffled off, heading north. The man followed.
They discovered Togi busy in a small cove where a jagged tangle
of drift made a mat dating from the last high-water period. She was
finishing a hearty breakfast, the remains of a water rat which she
was burying thriftily against future need after the instincts of
her kind. When she was done she came to Shann, inquiry plain to
read in her eyes.
There was water here, and good hunting. But the site was too
close to the Throgs. Let one of their exploring flyers sight them,
and the little group was finished. Better cover, that’s what
the three fugitives must have. Shann scowled, not at Togi, but at
the landscape. He was tired and hungry, but he must keep on
going.
A stream fed into the cove from the west, a guide of sorts. With
very little knowledge of the countryside, Shann was inclined to
follow that.
Overhead the sun made its usual golden haze of the sky. A flight
of vivid green streaks marked a flock of lake ducks coming for a
morning feeding. Lake duck was good eating, but Shann had no time
to hunt one now. Togi started down the bank of the stream, Taggi
behind her. Either they had caught his choice subtly through some
undefined mental contact, or they had already picked that road on
their own.
Shann’s attention was caught by a piece of the drift. He
twisted the length free and had his first weapon of his own
manufacture, a club. Using it to hold back a low sweeping branch,
he followed the wolverines.
Within the half hour he had breakfast, too. A pair of limp
skitterers, their long hind feet lashed together with a thong of
grass, hung from his belt. They were not particularly good eating,
but at least they were meat.
The three, man and wolverines, made their way up the stream to
the valley wall and through a feeder ravine into the larger space
beyond. There, where the stream was born at the foot of a falls,
they made their first camp. Judging that the morning haze would
veil any smoke, Shann built a pocket-size fire. He seared rather
than roasted the skitterers after he had made an awkward and messy
business of skinning them, and tore the meat from the delicate
bones in greedy mouthfuls. The wolverines lay side by side on the
gravel, now and again raising a head alertly to test the scent on
the air, or gaze into the distance.
Taggi made a warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed
handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling
himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his
uniform would fade into the color of the earth on which he lay,
every muscle tense.
A shadow swung across the hillside. Shann’s shoulders
hunched, and he cowered again. That terror he had known on the
ledge was back in full force as he waited for the beam to lick at
him as it had earlier at his fellows. The Throgs were on the
hunt . . .
The Throg task force struck the Terran Survey
camp without warning a few minutes after dawn. The alien invaders
sent eye-searing lances of energy flashing back and forth across
the base with methodical accuracy. And a single cowering witness,
flattened on a ledge in the heights above, knew that when the last
of those yellow-red bolts fell, nothing human would be left alive
down there. His teeth clamped hard upon the thick stuff of the
sleeve covering his thin forearm, and a scream of terror and rage
was stillborn in his heart.
More than caution kept him pinned on that narrow shelf of rock.
Watching that holocaust below, Shann Lantee could not force himself
to move. The sheer ruthlessness of the Throg attack left him
momentarily weak. To listen to a tale of Throgs in action, and to
be an eyewitness to such action, were two vastly different things.
He shivered in spite of the warmth of the Survey Corps uniform.
As yet he had sighted none of the aliens, only their plateshaped
flyers. They would stay aloft until their long-range weapon cleared
out all opposition. But how had they been able to annihilate the
Terran force so completely? The last report had placed the nearest
Throg nest at least two systems away from Warlock. And a patrol
lane had been drawn about the Circe system the minute that Survey
had marked its second planet ready for colonization. Somehow the
beetles had slipped through that supposedly tight cordon and would
now consolidate their gains with their usual speed. Once their
energy attack finished the small Terran force, then they would
simply take over.
A month later, or maybe two months, and they could not have done
it. The grids would have been up, and any Throg ship venturing into
Warlock’s amber-tinted sky would abruptly cease to be. In the
race for survival as a galactic power, Terra had that one small
edge over the swarms of the enemy. They need only stake out their
new-found world and get the grids assembled on its surface; then
that planet would be locked to the beetles. The critical period was
between the first discovery of a suitable colony world and the
completion of grid control. Planets in the past had been lost
during that time lag, just as Warlock was being lost now.
Throgs and Terrans . . . For more than a
century now, planet time, they had been fighting their bitter war
among the stars. Terrans hunted worlds for colonization, the old
hunger for land of their own driving men from the overpopulated
worlds, out of Sol’s system to the far stars. And those
worlds barren of intelligent native life, open to settlers, were
none too many and widely scattered. Perhaps half a dozen were found
in a quarter century, and of that six maybe only one was suitable
for human life without any costly and lengthy adaptation of man or
world. Warlock was one of the lucky finds which came so seldom.
Throgs were predators, living on the loot they garnered. As yet,
mankind had not been able to discover whether they did indeed swarm
from any home world. Perhaps they lived eternally on board their
plate ships with no permanent base, forced into a wandering life by
the destruction of the planet on which they had originally been
spawned. But they were raiders now, laying waste to defenseless
worlds, picking up the wealth of shattered cities in which no
native life remained. Although their hidden temporary bases were
looped about the galaxy, their need for worlds with an atmosphere
similar to Terra’s was as necessary as that of man. For in
spite of their grotesque insectile bodies, their wholly alien
minds, the Throgs were warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing
creatures.
After the first few clashes the early Terran explorers had
endeavored to promote a truce between the species, only to discover
that between Throg and man there appeared to be no meeting ground
at all—a total difference of mental processes producing
insurmountable misunderstanding. There was simply no point of
communication. So the Terrans had suffered one smarting defeat
after another until they perfected the grid. And now their colonies
were safe, at least when time worked in their favor.
It had not on Warlock.
A last vivid lash of red cracked over the huddle of domes in the
valley. Shann blinked, half blinded by that glare. His jaws ached
as he unclenched his teeth. That was the finish. Breathing
raggedly, he raised his head, beginning to realize that he was the
only one of his kind left alive on a none-too-hospitable world
controlled by enemies—without shelter or supplies.
He edged back into the narrow cleft which was the entrance to
the ledge. As a representative of his species he was not
impressive, and now, with those shudders he could not master
shaking his thin body, he looked even smaller and more vulnerable.
Shann drew his knees up close under his chin. The hood of his
woodsman’s jacket was pushed back in spite of the chill of
the morning, and he wiped the back of his hand across his lips and
chin in an oddly childish gesture.
None of the men below who had been alive only minutes earlier
had been close friends of his. Shann had never known anyone
but acquaintances in his short, roving life. Most people had
ignored him completely except to give orders, and one or two had
been actively malicious—like Garth Thorvald. Shann grimaced
at a certain recent memory, and then that grimace faded into
wonder. If young Thorvald hadn’t purposefully tried to get
Shann into trouble by opening the wolverines’ cage, Shann
wouldn’t be here now—alive and safe for a
time—he’d have been down there with the others.
The wolverines! For the first time since Shann had heard the
crackle of the Throg attack he remembered the reason he had been
heading into the hills. Of all the men on the Survey team, Shann
Lantee had been the least important. The dirty, tedious clean-up
jobs, the dull routines which required no technical training but
which had to be performed to keep the camp functioning comfortably,
those had been his portion. And he had accepted that status
willingly, just to have a chance to be included among Survey
personnel. Not that he had the slightest hope of climbing up to
even an S-E-Three rating in the service.
Part of those menial activities had been to clean the animal
cages. And there Shann Lantee had found something new, something so
absorbing that most of the tiring dull labor had ceased to exist
except as tasks to finish before he could return to the fascination
of the animal runs.
Survey teams had early discovered the advantage of using mutated
and highly trained Terran animals as assistants in the exploration
of strange worlds. From the biological laboratories and breeding
farms on Terra came a trickle of specialized assistants to
accompany man into space. Some were fighters, silent, more deadly
than weapons a man wore at his belt or carried in his hands. Some
were keener eyes, keener noses, keener scouts than the human kind
could produce. Bred for intelligence, for size, for adaptability to
alien conditions, the animal explorers from Terra were prized.
Wolverines, the ancient “devils” of the northlands
on Terra, were being tried for the first time on Warlock. Their
caution, a quality highly developed in their breed, made them
testers for new territory. Able to tackle in battle an animal three
times their size, they should be added protection for the man they
accompanied into the wilderness. Their wide ranging, their ability
to climb and swim, and above all, their curiosity were significant
assets.
Shann had begun contact by cleaning their cages; he ended
captivated by these miniature bears with long bushy tails. And to
his unbounded delight the attraction was mutual. Alone to Taggi and
Togi he was a person, an important person. Those teeth, which could
tear flesh into ragged strips, nipped gently at his fingers. They
closed without any pressure on arm, even on nose and chin in what
was the ultimate caress of their kind. Since they were escape
artists of no mean ability, twice he had had to track and lead them
back to camp from forays of their own devising.
But the second time he had been caught by Fadakar, the chief of
animal control, before he could lock up the delinquents. And the
memory of the resulting interview still had the power to make him
flush with impotent anger. Shann’s explanation had been
contemptuously brushed aside, and he had been delivered an
ultimatum. If his carelessness occurred again, he would be sent
back on the next supply ship, to be dismissed without an official
sign-off on his work record, thus locked out of even the lowest
level of Survey for the rest of his life.
That was why Garth Thorvald’s act of the night before had
made Shann brave the unknown darkness of Warlock alone when he had
discovered that the test animals were gone. He had to locate and
return them before Fadakar made his morning inspection; Garth
Thorvald’s attempt to get him into bad trouble had saved his
life.
Shann cowered back, striving to make his huddled body as small
as possible. One of the Throg flyers appeared silently out of the
misty amber of the morning sky, hovering over the silent camp. The
aliens were coming in to inspect the site of their victory. And the
safest place for any Terran now was as far from the vicinity of
those silent domes as he could get. Shann’s slight body was
an asset as he wedged through the narrow mouth of a cleft and so
back into the cliff wall. The climb before him he knew in part, for
this was the path the wolverines had followed on their two other
escapes. A few moments of tricky scrambling and he was out in a
cuplike depression choked with the purple-leaved brush of Warlock.
On the other side of that was a small cut to a sloping hillside,
giving on another valley, not as wide as that in which the camp
stood, but one well provided with cover in the way of trees and
high-growing bushes.
A light wind pushed among the trees, and twice Shann heard the
harsh, rasping call of a clak-clak—one of the batlike
leather-winged flyers that laired in pits along the cliff walls.
That present snap of two-tone complaint suggested that the land was
empty of strangers. For the clak-claks vociferously and loudly
resented encroachment on their chosen hunting territory.
Shann hesitated. He was driven by the urge to put as much
distance between him and the landing Throg ship as he could. But to
arouse the attention of inquisitive clak-claks was asking for
trouble. Perhaps it would be best to keep on along the top of the
cliff, rather than risk a descent to take cover in the valley the
flyers patrolled.
A patch of dust, sheltered by a tooth-shaped projection of rock,
gave the Terran his first proof that Taggi and his mate had
preceded him, for printed firmly there was the familiar paw mark of
a wolverine. Shann began to hope that both animals had taken to
cover in the wilderness ahead.
He licked dry lips. Having left secretly without any emergency
pack, he had no canteen, and now Shann inventoried his scant
possessions—a field kit, heavy-duty clothing, a short hooded
jacket with attached mittens, the breast marked with the Survey
insignia. His belt supported a sheathed stunner and bush knife, and
seam pockets held three credit tokens, a twist of wire intended to
reinforce the latch of the wolverine cage, a packet of bravo
tablets, two identity and work cards, and a length of cord. No
rations—save the bravos—no extra charge for his
stunner. But he did have, weighing down a loop on the jacket, a
small power torch.
The path he followed ended abruptly in a cliff drop, and Shann
made a face at the odor rising from below, even though that scent
meant he could climb down to the valley floor here without fearing
any clak-clak attention. Chemical fumes from a mineral spring
funneled against the wall, warding off any nesting in this
section.
Shann drew up the hood of his jacket and snapped the transparent
face mask into place. He must get away—then find food, water,
a hiding place. That will to live which had made Shann Lantee fight
innumerable battles in the past was in command, bracing him with a
stubborn determination.
The fumes swirled up in a smoke haze about his waist, but he
strode on, heading for the open valley and cleaner air. That sickly
lavender vegetation bordering the spring deepened in color to the
normal purple-green, and then he was in a grove of trees, their
branches pointed skyward at sharp angles to the rust-red
trunks.
A small skitterer burst from moss-spotted ground covering,
giving an alarmed squeak, skimming out of sight as suddenly as it
had appeared. Shann squeezed between two trees and then paused. The
trunk of the larger was deeply scored with scratches dripping
viscous gobs of sap, a sap which was a bright froth of scarlet.
Taggi had left his mark here, and not too long ago.
The soft carpet of moss showed no paw marks, but he thought he
knew the goal of the animals—a lake down-valley. Shann was
beginning to plan now. The Throgs had not blasted the Terran camp
entirely out of existence; they had only made sure of the death of
its occupiers. Which meant they must have some use for the
installations. For the general loot of a Survey field camp would be
relatively worthless to those who picked over the treasure of
entire cities elsewhere. Why? What did the Throgs want? And would
the alien invaders continue to occupy the domes for long?
Shann was still reeling from the shock of the Throgs’
ruthless attack. But from early childhood, when he had been thrown
on his own to scratch a living—a borderline existence of a
living—on the Dumps of Tyr, he had had to use his wits to
keep life in a scrawny and undersized body. However, since he had
been eating regularly from Survey rations, he was not quite so
scrawny anymore.
His formal education was close to zero, his informal and
off-center schooling vast. And that particular toughening process
which had been working on him for years now aided in his speedy
adaptation to a new set of facts, formidable ones. He was alone on
a strange and perhaps hostile world. Water, food, safe shelter,
those were important now. And once again, away from the ordered
round of the camp where he had been ruled by the desires and
requirements of others, he was thinking, planning in freedom. Later
(his hand went to the butt of his stunner) perhaps later he might
just find a way of extracting an accounting from the beetle-heads,
too.
For the present, he would have to keep away from the Throgs,
which meant well away from the camp. A fleck of green showed
through the amethyst foliage before him—the lake! Shann
wriggled through a last bush barrier and stood to look out over
that surface. A sleek brown head bobbed up. Shann put fingers to
his mouth and whistled. The head turned, black button eyes regarded
him, short legs began to churn water. To his relief the swimmer was
obeying his summons.
Taggi came ashore, pausing on the fine gray sand of the verge to
shake himself vigorously. Then the wolverine ran upslope at a
clumsy gallop to Shann. With an unknown feeling swelling inside him
the Terran went down on both knees, burying both hands in the
coarse brown fur, warming to the uproarious welcome Taggi gave
him.
“Togi?” Shann asked as if the other could answer. He
gazed back to the lake, but Taggi’s mate was nowhere in
sight.
The blunt head under his hand swung around, black button nose
pointed north. Shann had never been sure just how intelligent, as
mankind measured intelligence, the wolverines were. He had come to
suspect that Fadakar and the other experts had underrated them and
that both beasts understood more than they were given credit for.
Now he followed an experiment of his own, one he had had a chance
to try only a few times before and never at length. Pressing his
palm flat on Taggi’s head, Shann thought of Throgs and of
their attack, trying to arouse in the animal a corresponding
reaction to his own horror and anger.
And Taggi responded. A mutter became a growl, teeth
gleamed—those cruel teeth of a carnivore to whom they were
weapons of aggression. Danger . . . Shann
thought “danger.” Then he raised his hand, and the
wolverine shuffled off, heading north. The man followed.
They discovered Togi busy in a small cove where a jagged tangle
of drift made a mat dating from the last high-water period. She was
finishing a hearty breakfast, the remains of a water rat which she
was burying thriftily against future need after the instincts of
her kind. When she was done she came to Shann, inquiry plain to
read in her eyes.
There was water here, and good hunting. But the site was too
close to the Throgs. Let one of their exploring flyers sight them,
and the little group was finished. Better cover, that’s what
the three fugitives must have. Shann scowled, not at Togi, but at
the landscape. He was tired and hungry, but he must keep on
going.
A stream fed into the cove from the west, a guide of sorts. With
very little knowledge of the countryside, Shann was inclined to
follow that.
Overhead the sun made its usual golden haze of the sky. A flight
of vivid green streaks marked a flock of lake ducks coming for a
morning feeding. Lake duck was good eating, but Shann had no time
to hunt one now. Togi started down the bank of the stream, Taggi
behind her. Either they had caught his choice subtly through some
undefined mental contact, or they had already picked that road on
their own.
Shann’s attention was caught by a piece of the drift. He
twisted the length free and had his first weapon of his own
manufacture, a club. Using it to hold back a low sweeping branch,
he followed the wolverines.
Within the half hour he had breakfast, too. A pair of limp
skitterers, their long hind feet lashed together with a thong of
grass, hung from his belt. They were not particularly good eating,
but at least they were meat.
The three, man and wolverines, made their way up the stream to
the valley wall and through a feeder ravine into the larger space
beyond. There, where the stream was born at the foot of a falls,
they made their first camp. Judging that the morning haze would
veil any smoke, Shann built a pocket-size fire. He seared rather
than roasted the skitterers after he had made an awkward and messy
business of skinning them, and tore the meat from the delicate
bones in greedy mouthfuls. The wolverines lay side by side on the
gravel, now and again raising a head alertly to test the scent on
the air, or gaze into the distance.
Taggi made a warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed
handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling
himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his
uniform would fade into the color of the earth on which he lay,
every muscle tense.
A shadow swung across the hillside. Shann’s shoulders
hunched, and he cowered again. That terror he had known on the
ledge was back in full force as he waited for the beam to lick at
him as it had earlier at his fellows. The Throgs were on the
hunt . . .