The newcomer was of a height with Charis so
they could match eye to eye as they stood there, Charis gripping
the fabric length tightly with both hands, the other woman
continuing to laugh in a way which was worse than any scream. She
must have been plump once, for her skin was loose in pouches and
wrinkles on her face and in flabby flaps on her arms. Her black
hair hung in lank, greasy strings about her wrinkled neck to her
hunched shoulders.
“Pretty.” She reached out crooked fingers and Charis
instinctively retreated, but not until those crooked nails caught
in the material and jerked at it viciously.
The stranger’s own garments were a bundle of
stuffs—a gaudy robe much like the one Charis had been given,
pulled on crookedly over a tunic of another and clashing shade. And
she wore the heavy, metal-plated boots of a space man.
“Who are you?” Charis demanded. Oddly enough,
something in her tone appeared to awaken a dim flash of reason in
the other.
“Sheeha,” she replied as simply as a child.
“Pretty.” Her attention returned again to the fabric.
“Want—” she snatched, ripping the length from
Charis’s grasp. “Not to the snakes—not give to
the snakes!” Her lips drew flat across her teeth in an ugly
way and she retreated until her shoulders were once more set
against the door panel, the material now wreathed and twisted in
her own claw hands.
“The snakes won’t get this pretty?” she
announced. “Even if they dream. No—not even if they
dream . . . ”
Charis was afraid to move. Sheeha had crossed the border well
into a country for which there was no map of any sane devising.
“They have dreamed,” Sheeha’s croak of a voice
was crooning, “so many times they have dreamed—calling
Sheeha. But she did not go, not to the snakes, no!” Her locks
of hair bobbed as she shook her head vigorously. “Never did
she go. Don’t you go—never—not to the
snakes.”
She was busy thrusting the material she had balled into a wad
into a bag in her robe. Now she looked beyond Charis at the blue
robe on the cot, reaching out for that, also.
“Pretty—not for the snakes—no!”
Charis snatched the garment up and pushed it into that clawing
hand.
“For Sheeha—not the snakes,” she agreed,
trying to keep her fear from showing.
Again the woman nodded. But this time as she took the robe, she
caught at Charis with her other hand, linking fingers tight about
the girl’s wrist. Charis was afraid to struggle. But the
touch of the other’s dry, burning skin against her own made
her flesh shrink, and a shudder ran through her.
“Come!” Sheeha ordered. “Snakes will get
nothing. We shall make sure.”
She jerked Charis toward her as she swung around. The door-slit
opened and Sheeha pulled the unresisting girl out into the
corridor. Dared she call for help? Charis wondered. But the grasp
on her wrist, the strength the other displayed, was a warning
against centering Sheeha’s attention on her.
As far as Charis could see, the trading post was deserted save
for the two of them. The doors along the hall were shut, but that
to the store was open and the light there beckoned them on. It must
be early evening. Was Sheeha going out into the night? Charis,
remembering the broken country about the perimeter of the post, had
hopes of escape there if she could break the hold the other had on
her.
But it appeared that Sheeha was bound no farther than the outer
room where the shelves were crowded with the trade wares. As her
eyes settled on that wealth of miscellaneous goods, she did drop
her hold on Charis.
“Not to the snakes!”
She had moved down the corridor at a rapid shuffle, as if the
weight of the space boots had been a handicap. But now she fairly
sprang at the nearest shelf on which stood rows of small glass
bottles, sweeping her arms along to send them smashing to the
floor. A cloud of overpowering and mingled scents arose. Not
content with clearing them from the shelves, Sheeha was now
stamping on the shards which survived the first crash, her cry of
“Not to the snakes!” becoming a chant.
“Sheeha!”
She had finished with the bottles and was now grabbing at rolls
of materials, tearing at the stuff with her claws. But her first
assault had brought a response from the owner of the post. Charis
was brushed aside with a force which sent her back against the long
table as Jagan burst in from the corridor and hurled himself at the
frantic woman, his arms clamping hers tight to her body though she
threshed and fought in his grasp, her teeth snapping as her head
turned back and forth trying for a wolfish-fang grip on her captor.
She was screaming, high, harsh, and totally without mind.
Two more men came on the run, one from outside, the
other—whom Charis recognized as the one who had brought her
the food—from the corridor. But it took all three of them to
control Sheeha.
She cried as they looped a length of unrolled fabric about her,
imprisoning her arms against her body, making her into a
package.
“The dreams—not the dreams—not the
snakes!” The words broke from her as a plea.
Charis was surprised to see the emotion on Jagan’s face.
His hands rested gently on Sheeha’s shoulders as he turned
her around to face, not the interior corridor of the post but the
outer door.
“She goes to the ship,” he said. “Maybe
there . . . ” He
did not complete that sentence but, steering the woman before him,
he went out into the night.
The overwhelming odors of the spilt perfumes were thick enough
to make Charis sneeze. Trails of trade fabrics cascaded down from
the second shelf Sheeha had striven to clean off. Mechanically
Charis went over to loop the material up from the mess on the
floor, circling about the glass shards which were still visible in
the powder Sheeha’s boots had ground.
“You—” She glanced up as the man by the table
spoke. “You’d better go back now.”
Charis obeyed, glad to be out of the wreckage. She was shivering
as she sat down upon her cot once again, trying to understand what
had happened. Jagan said he needed a woman to contact the natives.
But before Charis’s coming there had already been a woman
here—Sheeha. And that Sheeha was to the captain something
more than a tool Charis was sure, having watched his handling of
her frenzy.
The snakes—the dreams? What had moved Sheeha to her wild
talk and acts? Charis’s own first impression of Warlock, that
it was not a world to welcome her kind—was that the truth and
not just a semiconscious, emotional reaction to certain landscape
coloring? What was happening here?
She could go out, demand an explanation. But Charis discovered
that her will this time was not strong enough to make her cross
that threshold again. And when she did try the door and found she
could not open it, she sighed in relief. In this small cell she
felt safe; she could see every inch of it and know she was
alone.
The light from the glow-track running along the ceiling of the
bubble was growing dimmer. Charis deduced they were slacking power
for the night. She curled up on the cot. Odd. Why was she so sleepy
all at once? There was a flicker of alarm at her realization of
that oddness. Then . . .
Light again, all around her. Charis was aware of that light even
though her eyes were closed. Light and warmth. Then came the desire
to know from whence they reached her. She opened her eyes and
looked up into a serene, golden sky. Golden sky? She had
seen a golden sky—where? When? A part of her pushed away
memory. It was good to lie here under the gold of the sky. She had
not rested so, uncaring, for a long, long time.
A tickle at her toes, a lapping about her ankles, up around her
calves. Charis stirred, used her elbows to prop herself up. She lay
in warm, gray sand in which there were small, glittering points of
red, blue, yellow, green. Her body was bare, but she felt no need
for any clothing; the warmth was covering of a sort. And she lay on
the very verge of a green sea with its foremost wavelets lapping
gently at her feet and legs. A green
sea . . . As with the golden sky, that
triggered memory, memory which something within her feared and
fought.
She was languorous, relaxed, happy—if this freedom could
be called happiness. This was right! Life should always be a clear
gold sky, a green sea, jeweled sand, warmth, no memories—just
here and now!
Save for the kiss and go of the waves there was no movement.
Then Charis wanted more than this flaccid content and sat up. She
turned her head to find that she was in a pocket of rock with a
steep red cliff behind and about her and, seemingly, no path out.
Yet that did not disturb her in the least. With her fingers she
idly shifted the sand, blinking at the winks of color. The water
was washing higher, up to her knees now, but she had no wish to
withdraw from its warm caress.
Then—all the languor, the content, vanished. She was not
afraid, but aware. Aware of what? one part of her awakening mind
demanded. Of what? Of—of an intelligence, another awareness.
She scrambled up from the sand which had hollowed about her body
and stood, this time giving the rock walls about her a closer
examination. But there was nothing there, nothing save herself
stood alive in this pocket cup of rock and sand.
Charis looked to the sea. Surely there—right
there—was a troubling of the water. Something was emerging,
coming to her. And she . . .
Charis gasped, gasped as if the air could not readily fill too
empty lungs. She was on her back, and it was no longer gold day but
dim pale night about her. To her right was the curve of the bubble
wall. She could barely make it out, but her outflung hand proved it
solid and real. But—that sand had also been real as it had
shifted between her fingers. The soft lap of the sea water, the sun
and air on her skin? They, too, had been real.
A dream—more vivid and substantial than any she had ever
known before? But dreams were broken bits of things, like the
shards Sheeha had left on the floor of the trade room. And this had
not been broken, contained nothing which did not fit. That
awareness at the end, that belief that there was something rising
from the sea to meet her?
Was it that which had broken the dream pattern, brought her
awake and into that frightening sense, for a fraction of a second,
that she was drowning—not in the sea which had welcomed and
caressed her but in something which now lay between the realization
of that sea and this room?
Charis wriggled off the cot and padded to the seat by the table.
She was excited, experiencing the sensation which she had known
when she anticipated some pleasure yet to come. Would a second try
at sleep return her to the sea, the sand, the place in space and
time where something—or someone—awaited her?
But the sensation of well-being which she had brought with her
from the dream, if dream it had been, was seeping away. In its
place flowed the same vague discomfort and repugnance which had
claimed her from her first leaving the spacer. Charis found herself
listening, as it seemed, not only with her ears but with every part
of her.
No sound at all. Without knowing exactly why, she went to the
door. There was still light from the roof, dimmed to twilight but
enough to see her way around. Charis set her hands on either side
of the slit and applied pressure. And the portal opened, allowing
her to look down the corridor.
This time she faced no string of closed doors; they all gaped
open. Again she listened, trying to still her own breathing. What
did she expect to hear? A murmur of voices, the sound of some
sleeper’s heavy intake and expulsion of air? But there was
nothing at all.
Earlier her room had seemed a haven of safety, the only security
she could hope to find. Now she was not so sure, just as she could
not put name to the intangible atmosphere which made her translate
her growing uneasiness into action she could not have assayed
before.
Charis started down the hall. Her bare feet made no sound on the
floor which was too chill as she paused at the first door. That was
open wide enough to show her another cot—empty, just as the
room was empty. The second room, more sleeping quarters without a
sleeper. A third room with the same deserted bareness. But the
fourth room was different. Even by this dim light she could make
out one promising feature, a com visa-screen against the far wall.
There was a table here, two chairs, a pile of record tapes. Ugly,
distorted—
She was startled into immobility. It was almost as if she had
seen this room and its furnishings through eyes which measured and
disdained it and all it stood for. But that odd disorientation had
been only a flash, the visa-screen drew her. It was undoubtedly set
there to be a link between a planeting ship and the post. But, too,
it might just furnish her with a key to freedom. Somewhere on
Warlock there was a government base. And this com could pick up
that station, would pick it up if she had the patience and time to
make a sweep-beam search. Patience she could produce; time was
another matter. Where were the traders? All back to the spacer for
some reason? But why?
Where earlier she had crept, now Charis sped, making the round
of the post: the sleeping rooms—all empty; the cook unit with
its smell of recently heated rations and quaffa still lingering but
otherwise closed tight; the larger outer room, where the smashed
glass had been brushed into a pile and then left, where one strip
of tangled and creased material still fluttered from a hastily
wrapped roll; back to the com room. She was alone in the post. Why
and for how long she could not tell, but for the moment she
was alone.
Now it was a matter of time, luck, and distance. She could
operate the sweep, set its probe going to pick up any other
com-beam within a good portion of planet surface. If this was the
middle of a Warlockian night, there might be no one on duty at the
government base com. Still she could set a message to be picked up
on its duty tape, a message which would bring the authorities here
and give her a chance to tell her story.
Pity she could not increase the glow of lights, but she had not
found the control switch. So Charis had to lean very close to the
keyboard of the unit to pick out the proper combination to start
the sweep.
For a moment or two Charis was bewildered by a strange and
unorthodox arrangement of buttons. Then she understood. Just as the
ship Jagan captained was certainly not new or first class, this was
a com of an older type than any she had seen before. And a small
worry dampened her first elation. What would be the range
of sweep on such an antiquated installation? If the government base
was too far away, she might have little hope of a successful
contact.
Charis pressed the button combination slowly, intent upon making
no error in setting up a sweep. But the crackles of sound which the
activated beam fed back into the room was only the natural
atmospheric response of an empty world. Charis had heard that on
Demeter the times she had practiced the same drill.
Only the beep-beep spark traveling from one side of a small
scan-plate to the other assured her that the sweep was active. Now
she had nothing to do but wait, either to catch another wave or
face the return of the traders.
Having set the com to work, Charis returned to her other
problem. Why had she been left alone in the station at night? From
the deeply cleft valley of the inlet she could not see the landing
site of the plateau where the spacer had planeted. Jagan had taken
Sheeha to the ship, but he had left at least two men here. Had they
believed her safely locked in her room so they could leave for some
other necessary duty? All she knew of the general routine of the
post she had learned from the captain, and that had been identical
to the cramming of what he had wanted her to know of his
business.
The faint beeping of the sweep was a soothing monotone, too
soothing. Charis’s head jerked as she shook herself fully
awake. One third of the circle had registered no pick-up, and at
least a fourth of the circumference must be largely sea, from which
direction she could expect no positive response.
That came just when Charis was almost convinced there was no
hope for her, it came—weak, so weak that the distance must be
great. But she had a direct beam on it and so could increase
receptive volume. Somewhere to the northeast, another off-world com
was beaming.
Charis’s fingers flew, centering her sweep, adding to its
intensity. The visa-plate before her clouded, began to clear again.
She was picking up an answer! Charis reacted more quickly than she
had thought possible as some instinct sent her dodging to one side,
away from the direct line of the plate and so out of sight—or
at least out of focus—for a return cast.
The figure which emerged from the clearing mist was no
government man, though he was a man or at least humanoid
in appearance. He wore the same dingy coveralls as the traders
used; belted at his thick waist was not the legal stunner but a
highly illegal blaster. Charis’s hand shot out and thumbed
the lever which broke connection just as the expression of open
surprise on his face turned to one of searching inquiry.
Breathing fast, the girl crept back to her place before the
screen. Another post—somewhere to the north. But the blaster?
Such a weapon was strictly forbidden to anyone except a member of
the Patrol or Defense forces. She hesitated. Dare she put the sweep
to work again? Try it south? She had not recognized the man
pictured on the plate as one of the ship’s crew, but still he
could be one of Jagan’s men. And so the captain’s
actions here could be more outside the law than she had
guessed.
Standing well to one side of the screen, Charis triggered the
sweep again. Moments later she had a pick-up to the south. However,
what flashed on the screen this time was no armed space man but a
very familiar standby pattern—the insignia of Survey
surmounted by a small Embassy seal, signifying an alien contact
mission manned by Survey personnel. There was no operator on duty;
the standby pattern clarified that. But they would have a pick-up
tape ready to record. She could send a message and know that it
would be read within hours. Charis began to click out the proper
code words.
The newcomer was of a height with Charis so
they could match eye to eye as they stood there, Charis gripping
the fabric length tightly with both hands, the other woman
continuing to laugh in a way which was worse than any scream. She
must have been plump once, for her skin was loose in pouches and
wrinkles on her face and in flabby flaps on her arms. Her black
hair hung in lank, greasy strings about her wrinkled neck to her
hunched shoulders.
“Pretty.” She reached out crooked fingers and Charis
instinctively retreated, but not until those crooked nails caught
in the material and jerked at it viciously.
The stranger’s own garments were a bundle of
stuffs—a gaudy robe much like the one Charis had been given,
pulled on crookedly over a tunic of another and clashing shade. And
she wore the heavy, metal-plated boots of a space man.
“Who are you?” Charis demanded. Oddly enough,
something in her tone appeared to awaken a dim flash of reason in
the other.
“Sheeha,” she replied as simply as a child.
“Pretty.” Her attention returned again to the fabric.
“Want—” she snatched, ripping the length from
Charis’s grasp. “Not to the snakes—not give to
the snakes!” Her lips drew flat across her teeth in an ugly
way and she retreated until her shoulders were once more set
against the door panel, the material now wreathed and twisted in
her own claw hands.
“The snakes won’t get this pretty?” she
announced. “Even if they dream. No—not even if they
dream . . . ”
Charis was afraid to move. Sheeha had crossed the border well
into a country for which there was no map of any sane devising.
“They have dreamed,” Sheeha’s croak of a voice
was crooning, “so many times they have dreamed—calling
Sheeha. But she did not go, not to the snakes, no!” Her locks
of hair bobbed as she shook her head vigorously. “Never did
she go. Don’t you go—never—not to the
snakes.”
She was busy thrusting the material she had balled into a wad
into a bag in her robe. Now she looked beyond Charis at the blue
robe on the cot, reaching out for that, also.
“Pretty—not for the snakes—no!”
Charis snatched the garment up and pushed it into that clawing
hand.
“For Sheeha—not the snakes,” she agreed,
trying to keep her fear from showing.
Again the woman nodded. But this time as she took the robe, she
caught at Charis with her other hand, linking fingers tight about
the girl’s wrist. Charis was afraid to struggle. But the
touch of the other’s dry, burning skin against her own made
her flesh shrink, and a shudder ran through her.
“Come!” Sheeha ordered. “Snakes will get
nothing. We shall make sure.”
She jerked Charis toward her as she swung around. The door-slit
opened and Sheeha pulled the unresisting girl out into the
corridor. Dared she call for help? Charis wondered. But the grasp
on her wrist, the strength the other displayed, was a warning
against centering Sheeha’s attention on her.
As far as Charis could see, the trading post was deserted save
for the two of them. The doors along the hall were shut, but that
to the store was open and the light there beckoned them on. It must
be early evening. Was Sheeha going out into the night? Charis,
remembering the broken country about the perimeter of the post, had
hopes of escape there if she could break the hold the other had on
her.
But it appeared that Sheeha was bound no farther than the outer
room where the shelves were crowded with the trade wares. As her
eyes settled on that wealth of miscellaneous goods, she did drop
her hold on Charis.
“Not to the snakes!”
She had moved down the corridor at a rapid shuffle, as if the
weight of the space boots had been a handicap. But now she fairly
sprang at the nearest shelf on which stood rows of small glass
bottles, sweeping her arms along to send them smashing to the
floor. A cloud of overpowering and mingled scents arose. Not
content with clearing them from the shelves, Sheeha was now
stamping on the shards which survived the first crash, her cry of
“Not to the snakes!” becoming a chant.
“Sheeha!”
She had finished with the bottles and was now grabbing at rolls
of materials, tearing at the stuff with her claws. But her first
assault had brought a response from the owner of the post. Charis
was brushed aside with a force which sent her back against the long
table as Jagan burst in from the corridor and hurled himself at the
frantic woman, his arms clamping hers tight to her body though she
threshed and fought in his grasp, her teeth snapping as her head
turned back and forth trying for a wolfish-fang grip on her captor.
She was screaming, high, harsh, and totally without mind.
Two more men came on the run, one from outside, the
other—whom Charis recognized as the one who had brought her
the food—from the corridor. But it took all three of them to
control Sheeha.
She cried as they looped a length of unrolled fabric about her,
imprisoning her arms against her body, making her into a
package.
“The dreams—not the dreams—not the
snakes!” The words broke from her as a plea.
Charis was surprised to see the emotion on Jagan’s face.
His hands rested gently on Sheeha’s shoulders as he turned
her around to face, not the interior corridor of the post but the
outer door.
“She goes to the ship,” he said. “Maybe
there . . . ” He
did not complete that sentence but, steering the woman before him,
he went out into the night.
The overwhelming odors of the spilt perfumes were thick enough
to make Charis sneeze. Trails of trade fabrics cascaded down from
the second shelf Sheeha had striven to clean off. Mechanically
Charis went over to loop the material up from the mess on the
floor, circling about the glass shards which were still visible in
the powder Sheeha’s boots had ground.
“You—” She glanced up as the man by the table
spoke. “You’d better go back now.”
Charis obeyed, glad to be out of the wreckage. She was shivering
as she sat down upon her cot once again, trying to understand what
had happened. Jagan said he needed a woman to contact the natives.
But before Charis’s coming there had already been a woman
here—Sheeha. And that Sheeha was to the captain something
more than a tool Charis was sure, having watched his handling of
her frenzy.
The snakes—the dreams? What had moved Sheeha to her wild
talk and acts? Charis’s own first impression of Warlock, that
it was not a world to welcome her kind—was that the truth and
not just a semiconscious, emotional reaction to certain landscape
coloring? What was happening here?
She could go out, demand an explanation. But Charis discovered
that her will this time was not strong enough to make her cross
that threshold again. And when she did try the door and found she
could not open it, she sighed in relief. In this small cell she
felt safe; she could see every inch of it and know she was
alone.
The light from the glow-track running along the ceiling of the
bubble was growing dimmer. Charis deduced they were slacking power
for the night. She curled up on the cot. Odd. Why was she so sleepy
all at once? There was a flicker of alarm at her realization of
that oddness. Then . . .
Light again, all around her. Charis was aware of that light even
though her eyes were closed. Light and warmth. Then came the desire
to know from whence they reached her. She opened her eyes and
looked up into a serene, golden sky. Golden sky? She had
seen a golden sky—where? When? A part of her pushed away
memory. It was good to lie here under the gold of the sky. She had
not rested so, uncaring, for a long, long time.
A tickle at her toes, a lapping about her ankles, up around her
calves. Charis stirred, used her elbows to prop herself up. She lay
in warm, gray sand in which there were small, glittering points of
red, blue, yellow, green. Her body was bare, but she felt no need
for any clothing; the warmth was covering of a sort. And she lay on
the very verge of a green sea with its foremost wavelets lapping
gently at her feet and legs. A green
sea . . . As with the golden sky, that
triggered memory, memory which something within her feared and
fought.
She was languorous, relaxed, happy—if this freedom could
be called happiness. This was right! Life should always be a clear
gold sky, a green sea, jeweled sand, warmth, no memories—just
here and now!
Save for the kiss and go of the waves there was no movement.
Then Charis wanted more than this flaccid content and sat up. She
turned her head to find that she was in a pocket of rock with a
steep red cliff behind and about her and, seemingly, no path out.
Yet that did not disturb her in the least. With her fingers she
idly shifted the sand, blinking at the winks of color. The water
was washing higher, up to her knees now, but she had no wish to
withdraw from its warm caress.
Then—all the languor, the content, vanished. She was not
afraid, but aware. Aware of what? one part of her awakening mind
demanded. Of what? Of—of an intelligence, another awareness.
She scrambled up from the sand which had hollowed about her body
and stood, this time giving the rock walls about her a closer
examination. But there was nothing there, nothing save herself
stood alive in this pocket cup of rock and sand.
Charis looked to the sea. Surely there—right
there—was a troubling of the water. Something was emerging,
coming to her. And she . . .
Charis gasped, gasped as if the air could not readily fill too
empty lungs. She was on her back, and it was no longer gold day but
dim pale night about her. To her right was the curve of the bubble
wall. She could barely make it out, but her outflung hand proved it
solid and real. But—that sand had also been real as it had
shifted between her fingers. The soft lap of the sea water, the sun
and air on her skin? They, too, had been real.
A dream—more vivid and substantial than any she had ever
known before? But dreams were broken bits of things, like the
shards Sheeha had left on the floor of the trade room. And this had
not been broken, contained nothing which did not fit. That
awareness at the end, that belief that there was something rising
from the sea to meet her?
Was it that which had broken the dream pattern, brought her
awake and into that frightening sense, for a fraction of a second,
that she was drowning—not in the sea which had welcomed and
caressed her but in something which now lay between the realization
of that sea and this room?
Charis wriggled off the cot and padded to the seat by the table.
She was excited, experiencing the sensation which she had known
when she anticipated some pleasure yet to come. Would a second try
at sleep return her to the sea, the sand, the place in space and
time where something—or someone—awaited her?
But the sensation of well-being which she had brought with her
from the dream, if dream it had been, was seeping away. In its
place flowed the same vague discomfort and repugnance which had
claimed her from her first leaving the spacer. Charis found herself
listening, as it seemed, not only with her ears but with every part
of her.
No sound at all. Without knowing exactly why, she went to the
door. There was still light from the roof, dimmed to twilight but
enough to see her way around. Charis set her hands on either side
of the slit and applied pressure. And the portal opened, allowing
her to look down the corridor.
This time she faced no string of closed doors; they all gaped
open. Again she listened, trying to still her own breathing. What
did she expect to hear? A murmur of voices, the sound of some
sleeper’s heavy intake and expulsion of air? But there was
nothing at all.
Earlier her room had seemed a haven of safety, the only security
she could hope to find. Now she was not so sure, just as she could
not put name to the intangible atmosphere which made her translate
her growing uneasiness into action she could not have assayed
before.
Charis started down the hall. Her bare feet made no sound on the
floor which was too chill as she paused at the first door. That was
open wide enough to show her another cot—empty, just as the
room was empty. The second room, more sleeping quarters without a
sleeper. A third room with the same deserted bareness. But the
fourth room was different. Even by this dim light she could make
out one promising feature, a com visa-screen against the far wall.
There was a table here, two chairs, a pile of record tapes. Ugly,
distorted—
She was startled into immobility. It was almost as if she had
seen this room and its furnishings through eyes which measured and
disdained it and all it stood for. But that odd disorientation had
been only a flash, the visa-screen drew her. It was undoubtedly set
there to be a link between a planeting ship and the post. But, too,
it might just furnish her with a key to freedom. Somewhere on
Warlock there was a government base. And this com could pick up
that station, would pick it up if she had the patience and time to
make a sweep-beam search. Patience she could produce; time was
another matter. Where were the traders? All back to the spacer for
some reason? But why?
Where earlier she had crept, now Charis sped, making the round
of the post: the sleeping rooms—all empty; the cook unit with
its smell of recently heated rations and quaffa still lingering but
otherwise closed tight; the larger outer room, where the smashed
glass had been brushed into a pile and then left, where one strip
of tangled and creased material still fluttered from a hastily
wrapped roll; back to the com room. She was alone in the post. Why
and for how long she could not tell, but for the moment she
was alone.
Now it was a matter of time, luck, and distance. She could
operate the sweep, set its probe going to pick up any other
com-beam within a good portion of planet surface. If this was the
middle of a Warlockian night, there might be no one on duty at the
government base com. Still she could set a message to be picked up
on its duty tape, a message which would bring the authorities here
and give her a chance to tell her story.
Pity she could not increase the glow of lights, but she had not
found the control switch. So Charis had to lean very close to the
keyboard of the unit to pick out the proper combination to start
the sweep.
For a moment or two Charis was bewildered by a strange and
unorthodox arrangement of buttons. Then she understood. Just as the
ship Jagan captained was certainly not new or first class, this was
a com of an older type than any she had seen before. And a small
worry dampened her first elation. What would be the range
of sweep on such an antiquated installation? If the government base
was too far away, she might have little hope of a successful
contact.
Charis pressed the button combination slowly, intent upon making
no error in setting up a sweep. But the crackles of sound which the
activated beam fed back into the room was only the natural
atmospheric response of an empty world. Charis had heard that on
Demeter the times she had practiced the same drill.
Only the beep-beep spark traveling from one side of a small
scan-plate to the other assured her that the sweep was active. Now
she had nothing to do but wait, either to catch another wave or
face the return of the traders.
Having set the com to work, Charis returned to her other
problem. Why had she been left alone in the station at night? From
the deeply cleft valley of the inlet she could not see the landing
site of the plateau where the spacer had planeted. Jagan had taken
Sheeha to the ship, but he had left at least two men here. Had they
believed her safely locked in her room so they could leave for some
other necessary duty? All she knew of the general routine of the
post she had learned from the captain, and that had been identical
to the cramming of what he had wanted her to know of his
business.
The faint beeping of the sweep was a soothing monotone, too
soothing. Charis’s head jerked as she shook herself fully
awake. One third of the circle had registered no pick-up, and at
least a fourth of the circumference must be largely sea, from which
direction she could expect no positive response.
That came just when Charis was almost convinced there was no
hope for her, it came—weak, so weak that the distance must be
great. But she had a direct beam on it and so could increase
receptive volume. Somewhere to the northeast, another off-world com
was beaming.
Charis’s fingers flew, centering her sweep, adding to its
intensity. The visa-plate before her clouded, began to clear again.
She was picking up an answer! Charis reacted more quickly than she
had thought possible as some instinct sent her dodging to one side,
away from the direct line of the plate and so out of sight—or
at least out of focus—for a return cast.
The figure which emerged from the clearing mist was no
government man, though he was a man or at least humanoid
in appearance. He wore the same dingy coveralls as the traders
used; belted at his thick waist was not the legal stunner but a
highly illegal blaster. Charis’s hand shot out and thumbed
the lever which broke connection just as the expression of open
surprise on his face turned to one of searching inquiry.
Breathing fast, the girl crept back to her place before the
screen. Another post—somewhere to the north. But the blaster?
Such a weapon was strictly forbidden to anyone except a member of
the Patrol or Defense forces. She hesitated. Dare she put the sweep
to work again? Try it south? She had not recognized the man
pictured on the plate as one of the ship’s crew, but still he
could be one of Jagan’s men. And so the captain’s
actions here could be more outside the law than she had
guessed.
Standing well to one side of the screen, Charis triggered the
sweep again. Moments later she had a pick-up to the south. However,
what flashed on the screen this time was no armed space man but a
very familiar standby pattern—the insignia of Survey
surmounted by a small Embassy seal, signifying an alien contact
mission manned by Survey personnel. There was no operator on duty;
the standby pattern clarified that. But they would have a pick-up
tape ready to record. She could send a message and know that it
would be read within hours. Charis began to click out the proper
code words.