A soft swish of sound, a light touch on her
body.
Charis looked about her with an acceptance which was in itself
part of the strangeness of this experience. She had been huddled in
the seat before the com, beating out on its keys her call for
attention. Then—she was here, back somehow in the dream.
But, she knew a second or so later after the dawn of that
realization, this was not quite the same dream after all. She wore
the coverall she had pulled on before she began her night’s
prowling of the deserted post. Her bare feet sent small messages of
pain along nerves and she glanced down at them. They were bruised
and there was a scrape along one instep which oozed drops of blood.
Instead of that feeling of oneness and satisfaction she had had
before, now she was tired and confused.
There, as it had before, rolled the sea under the light of
morning. And about her were rocky cliffs, while her sore feet sank
into loose and powdery sand. She was on the shore—there was
no doubting that, but this could not be a dream.
Charis turned, expecting to see the post on its narrow tongue of
water, but behind her was a cliff wall. She could sight a line of
depressions in the sand, ending at the point where she now stood,
marking her trail, and those led back out of sight. Where she was
and how she had come here she did not know.
Her heart picked up the beat of fear, her breath came faster in
shallow gasps. She could not remember. No forcing of thought could
bring back memory.
Back? Maybe she could trace her way back along her trail. But
even as she turned to try that, Charis found she could not. There
was a barrier somehow, a sensation almost as keen as physical pain,
which kept her from retracing. Literally she could not take the
first step back. Shaking, Charis faced around and tried again to
move. And the energy she expended nearly sent her sprawling on her
face. If she could not return, there was nothing to prevent her
going forward.
She tried to equate the points of the compass. Had she strayed
north or south from the post? She thought south. South—the
government base lay to the south. If she kept on, she had a chance
of reaching that.
How small that chance might be Charis dared not consider.
Without supplies, without even shoes, how long could she keep
going? Some wild thoughts troubled her. Had she brought this upon
herself because she had striven to contact the base by com? She
cupped her hands over her eyes and stood, trying to understand,
trying to trace the compulsion which must have led her to this
place. Had her conscious mind blanked out? Her need for escape, for
reaching the government base, had that then taken over? It made
sense of a sort, but it had also led her into trouble.
Charis limped down to the sea and sat on a rock to inspect her
feet. They were bruised, and there was another cut on the tip of a
toe. She lowered them into the water and bit her lip against the
sting of the liquid in her wounds.
This might be a world without life, Charis thought. The
golden-amber sky held floating clouds, but no birds or winged
things cut across its serenity. The sand and rocks about her were
bare of any hint of growing things, and there was no break on the
smooth surface of the beach save the hollows of her own
footprints.
Charis pulled open the seal of her coverall and took off her
undershirt. It was a struggle to tear that, but at the cost of a
broken nail she at last had a series of strips which she bound
about her feet. They would be some protection since she could not
remain where she was forever.
Some hundred feet or so to the south, the cliff pointed out to
meet the sea with no strip of easily traveled beach at its foot.
She would have to climb there. But Charis sat where she was for a
while, marking the hand- and foot-holds to use, when she had
to.
She was hungry—as hungry as she had been back on the
mountain on Demeter, and there was not even a hunk of bread for her
this time. Hungry and thirsty—although the water washed
before her mockingly. To go on into a bare wilderness was sheer
folly, yet there was that invisible barrier on the back trail. Now,
even to turn her head and retrace by eye the hollow sand prints
required growing effort.
Grimly she rose on her bandaged feet and limped to the cliff.
She could not stay there, growing weaker with hunger. There could
be hope that beyond the cliff there was more than just sand and
rock.
The climb taxed her strength, scraped her palms and fingers
almost as badly as her feet. She pulled out on the pitted surface
of the crest and lay with her hands tight against her breast,
sobbing a little. Then she raised her head to look about.
She had reached the lip of another foliage-choked, narrow valley
such as the one which held the trading post. But here were no
buildings, nothing but trees and brush. However, not too far away a
thread of water splashed down to make a stream flowing seaward.
Charis licked dry lips and started for that. Within seconds she
crouched on blue earth, her hands tingling in the chill of the
spring water as she drank from cupped palms, not caring whether her
immunization shots, intended for any lurking danger on Demeter,
would hold on Warlock.
If the sea beach had been empty of life, the same was not true
of this valley. Her thirst assuaged, Charis squatted back on her
heels and noticed a gauzy-winged flying thing skim across the
water. It rose again, a white thread-like creature writhing in the
hold of its two pincer-equipped forelegs, and was gone with its
victim between a bush and the cliff wall.
Then, from over her head, burst a clap of sound as if someone
had brought two pieces of bone sharply together. Another flyer, a
great deal more substantial and a hundred times larger than the
insect hunter, shot out of a hole in the cliff and darted back and
forth over her. The thing had leathery skin-wings, its body naked
of any feathers or fur, the hide wrinkled and seamed. The head was
very large in proportion and split halfway down its length most of
the time as an enormous fang-set mouth uttered
“clak-clak” noises.
A second flyer joined the first, then a third, and the racket of
their cries was deafening. They swooped lower and lower and
Charis’s first curiosity turned to real alarm. One alone
would have been no threat, but a flock of the things, plainly set
upon her as a target for their dives, could mean real trouble. She
looked about for cover and plunged in under the matted branches of
the stunted-tree grove.
Apparently her passage was not hidden from the clakers even
though they could not reach her, for she could hear their cries
following her as she moved toward the sea. Something leaped up from
just before her and squealed as it ran for the deeper shadows.
Now she hesitated, unsure of what else might lie in this
wood—waiting. The smell of growing things—some
pleasant, some disagreeable to her off-world senses—was
strong here. Her foot came down on a soft object which burst before
she could shift her weight and she saw a mashed fruit. More of
these hung from the branches of the tree under which she stood and
lay on the ground where the squealing creature had been
feeding.
Charis plucked one and held it to her nose, sniffing an
unfamiliar odor which she could not decide was pleasant or the
reverse. It was food, but whether she could eat it was another
question. Still holding the fruit, Charis pushed on seaward.
The clamor of the clakers had not stilled but kept pace with her
progress, yet the open water tugged at her with a strange promise
of safety. She came to the last screen of brush from which the
vegetation straggled on to vanish in a choke of gray sand.
There was a smudge on the horizon which was more, Charis
believed, than a low-flying cloud bank. An island? She was so
intent upon that that she did not, at first, note the new activity
of the clakers.
They were no longer circling about her but had changed course,
flying out to sea where they wheeled and wove aerial patterns over
the waves. And there was a disturbance in those same waves, marking
action below their surface. Something was coming inshore, heading
directly toward her.
Charis unconsciously squeezed the fruit until its squashed pulp
oozed between her fingers. Judging by the traces, the
swimmer—who or what that might be—was large.
But she did not expect nightmare to splash out of the surf and
face her across so narrow a strip of beach. Armor plate in the form
of scales, greened by clinging seaweed laced over the brown
serrations, a head which was also armed with hornlike extensions
projecting above each wide eye, a snout to gape in a fang-filled
mouth . . .
The creature clawed its way up out of the wash of the waves. Its
legs ended in web-jointed talons. Then it whipped up a tail, forked
into two spike-tipped equal lengths, spattering water over and
ahead. The clakers set up a din and scattered, soaring up, but they
did not abandon the field to the sea monster. But the creature paid
them no attention in return.
At first Charis was afraid it had seen her, and when it did not
advance she was temporarily relieved. A few more wadding steps
brought it out of the water, and then it flattened its body on the
sand with a plainly audible grunt.
The head swung back and forth and then settled, snout resting
outstretched on the scaled forelegs. It had all the appearance of
desiring a nap in the warmth of the sun. Charis hesitated. Since
the clakers had directed their attention to the fork-tail they
might have forgotten her. It was the time to withdraw.
Her inner desire was to run, to crash back into the brush and so
win out of the valley, which had taken on the semblance of a trap.
But wisdom said she was to creep rather than race. Still facing the
beast on the shingle, Charis retreated. For some precious seconds
she thought her hope was succeeding.
Then . . .
The screech overhead was loud, summoning. A claker spied her.
And its fellows screamed in to join it. Then Charis heard that
other sound, a whistling, pitched high to hurt her ears. She did
not need to hear those big feet pounding on the shingle or the
crackle of broken brush to know that the fork-tail thing was
aroused and coming.
Her only chance now was the narrow upper end of the valley where
the cliff wall might give her handholds to rise. Bushes raked and
tore at her clothing and skin as she thrust through any thin spot
she could sight. Past the spring and its draining brook she
staggered to a glade where lavender grass grew thickly, twisted
about her feet, whipped blood from her with sharp leaf edges.
Always above, the clakers screamed, whirled, dived to get at
her, never quite touching her head but coming so close that she
ducked and turned until she realized that she was losing ground in
her efforts to evade their harassing. She threw herself into the
cover on the other side of that open space, using her arm as a
shield to protect her face as she beat her way in by the weight of
her body.
Then she was at her goal, the rock wall which rimmed the valley.
But would the clakers let her climb? Charis flattened herself
against the stone to look up at the flock of leather-wings from
under the protection of her crooked arm. She glanced back where
shaking foliage marked the sea beast moving in.
They were all coming down at her! Charis screamed, beat
out with both arms.
Cries . . .
She flailed out defensively, wildly, before she saw what was
happening. The flight of the clakers had brought them to a line
which crossed the more leisurely advance of the fork-tail. And so
they had run into trouble. For, as storm lightning might strike,
the forked tail swept up and lashed at the flyers, hurling bodies
on and out to smash against the cliff wall.
Twice that tail struck, catching the avid first wave of
attackers, and then some of the second wave who were too intent
upon their target or too slow to change course. Perhaps five
screeched their way up into the air to circle and clak, but not to
venture down again.
Charis spun around and feeling for hand- and foot-holds, began
to climb. The fork-tail was now between her and the remaining
clakers. Until she had reached a higher point, she might not have
to fear a second attack. She centered all her energy upon reaching
a ledge where some vines dropped ragged loops not too far from her
groping fingers.
She pushed up and into the tangle of vine growth which squashed
under her squirming body, rolling over as fast as she could to look
back at the enemy. The clakers were in a frenzy, rising as if
wishing to skim down at her, while below, Charis cringed back.
The fork-tail was at the foot of the cliff, its webbed talons
clawing at the rock. Twice it managed to gain a small hold and was
able to pull up a little, only to crash back again. Either the
holds were not deep enough to sustain its weight or some clumsiness
hindered its climb. For it moved awkwardly, as if on land its bulk
were a liability.
But its determination to follow her was plain in those continued
efforts to find talon-holds on the stone. Charis sidled along the
vine-grown ledge with care lest one of those loops of tough
vegetation trip her. She stopped once to tear loose a small length
of the stuff, using it to lash out at a claker which had gathered
resolution enough to dive at her head. The whip of vine did not
touch the flyer, but it did send it soaring away in haste.
She could use that defense as long as she traveled the ledge,
but when she turned to climb once more, she could not so arm
herself. And she was approaching a point where the shelf was too
narrow to afford foot room.
The fork-tail still raised on hind feet below, clawing at the
cliff wall with single-minded tenacity. A slip on her part would
topple her into its reach. And she dared not climb with the clakers
darting at her head and shoulders. Now she could keep them off with
the lashing vine, but they were growing bolder, their attacks
coming closer together, so that her arm was already tired of
wielding the improvised whip.
Charis leaned against the cliff wall. So far it looked as if the
reptilian attacker could not reach her. But the clakers’
harassment continued unabated, and she was tired, so tired that she
was beginning to fear that even if they did withdraw, she would not
have the strength left to finish the pull up to the top of the
cliff.
She rubbed her hand across her eyes and tried to think, though
the continuing din of the attackers made her feel stupid, as if her
brain was befuddled and cocooned in the noise. It was the cessation
of that clamor which brought her to full consciousness again.
Overhead the ugly creatures had ceased to wheel. Instead they
turned almost as one and winged across the valley, to snap into the
holes in the rock from which they had earlier emerged. Bewildered,
the girl could only stare after them. Then, that sound from
below— Steadying her body with one hand on the rock wall,
Charis looked down.
The fork-tail had turned and, on four feet once again, was
making a ponderous way back through the smashed and crushed growth,
heading seaward without a backward glance to the ledge where she
stood. It was almost as if the clakers and the sea beast had been
ordered away from her . . .
What made her put that interpretation on their movements? Charis
absently rubbed the rest of the sticky fruit pulp from her hand on
a fibrous vine leaf. Silence—nothing stirring. The whole
valley as she could now see it, save for the waving foliage where
the fork-tail retreated, could have been empty of life. She must
make the most of this oddly granted breathing spell.
Doggedly she set about reaching the top of the rise, expecting
any moment to have the clakers burst at her. But the silence held.
She stood up on the crest, looked beyond for cover.
This was a plateau much like the one Jagan had used as a landing
space. Only this showed no rocket scarring. South, it stretched on
as might the surface of a wall well above the sea, open to air and
sun with no cover. But Charis doubted if she could descend again.
So she turned south, limping on her tender feet, always listening
for the clak-clak of the enemy.
A splotch of color, vivid against the dull, black-veined, deep
red of the rocks. Odd that she had not seen that earlier when she
first surveyed this height. It was so brightly visible now that it
drew her as might a promise of food.
Food . . . Her hand came up over her eyes
and fell again as she strove to make sure that this was not a
hallucination but that it did exist outside of her craving
hunger.
But if part of a hallucination, would not the so-pictured foods
have been familiar—viands she had known on Demeter or other
worlds where she had lived? This was no pile of emergency rations,
no setting out of known breads, fruits, meats. On the strip of
green were several round balls of a deeper green, a shining white
basin filled with a yellow lumpy substance, a pile of flat rounds
which were a light blue. A tablecloth spread with a meal! It
had to be a hallucination! It could not have been there
earlier or she would have seen it at once.
Charis shuffled to the cloth and looked at the objects on it.
She put out a scratched and grimy hand and touched fingers to the
side of the bowl to find it warm. The odor which rose from it was
strange—neither pleasant nor unpleasant—just strange.
She hunkered down, fighting the wild demand of her body to be fed
while she considered the strangeness of this food out of nowhere.
Dream? But she could touch it.
She took up one of the blue rounds, found it had the consistency
of a kind of tough pancake. Rolling it into a scoop, Charis ladled
up a mouthful of the yellow—was it stew? Dream or not, she
could chew it, taste it, swallow it down. After that first
experimental mouthful, she ate, greedily, without caring in the
least about dream or reality.
A soft swish of sound, a light touch on her
body.
Charis looked about her with an acceptance which was in itself
part of the strangeness of this experience. She had been huddled in
the seat before the com, beating out on its keys her call for
attention. Then—she was here, back somehow in the dream.
But, she knew a second or so later after the dawn of that
realization, this was not quite the same dream after all. She wore
the coverall she had pulled on before she began her night’s
prowling of the deserted post. Her bare feet sent small messages of
pain along nerves and she glanced down at them. They were bruised
and there was a scrape along one instep which oozed drops of blood.
Instead of that feeling of oneness and satisfaction she had had
before, now she was tired and confused.
There, as it had before, rolled the sea under the light of
morning. And about her were rocky cliffs, while her sore feet sank
into loose and powdery sand. She was on the shore—there was
no doubting that, but this could not be a dream.
Charis turned, expecting to see the post on its narrow tongue of
water, but behind her was a cliff wall. She could sight a line of
depressions in the sand, ending at the point where she now stood,
marking her trail, and those led back out of sight. Where she was
and how she had come here she did not know.
Her heart picked up the beat of fear, her breath came faster in
shallow gasps. She could not remember. No forcing of thought could
bring back memory.
Back? Maybe she could trace her way back along her trail. But
even as she turned to try that, Charis found she could not. There
was a barrier somehow, a sensation almost as keen as physical pain,
which kept her from retracing. Literally she could not take the
first step back. Shaking, Charis faced around and tried again to
move. And the energy she expended nearly sent her sprawling on her
face. If she could not return, there was nothing to prevent her
going forward.
She tried to equate the points of the compass. Had she strayed
north or south from the post? She thought south. South—the
government base lay to the south. If she kept on, she had a chance
of reaching that.
How small that chance might be Charis dared not consider.
Without supplies, without even shoes, how long could she keep
going? Some wild thoughts troubled her. Had she brought this upon
herself because she had striven to contact the base by com? She
cupped her hands over her eyes and stood, trying to understand,
trying to trace the compulsion which must have led her to this
place. Had her conscious mind blanked out? Her need for escape, for
reaching the government base, had that then taken over? It made
sense of a sort, but it had also led her into trouble.
Charis limped down to the sea and sat on a rock to inspect her
feet. They were bruised, and there was another cut on the tip of a
toe. She lowered them into the water and bit her lip against the
sting of the liquid in her wounds.
This might be a world without life, Charis thought. The
golden-amber sky held floating clouds, but no birds or winged
things cut across its serenity. The sand and rocks about her were
bare of any hint of growing things, and there was no break on the
smooth surface of the beach save the hollows of her own
footprints.
Charis pulled open the seal of her coverall and took off her
undershirt. It was a struggle to tear that, but at the cost of a
broken nail she at last had a series of strips which she bound
about her feet. They would be some protection since she could not
remain where she was forever.
Some hundred feet or so to the south, the cliff pointed out to
meet the sea with no strip of easily traveled beach at its foot.
She would have to climb there. But Charis sat where she was for a
while, marking the hand- and foot-holds to use, when she had
to.
She was hungry—as hungry as she had been back on the
mountain on Demeter, and there was not even a hunk of bread for her
this time. Hungry and thirsty—although the water washed
before her mockingly. To go on into a bare wilderness was sheer
folly, yet there was that invisible barrier on the back trail. Now,
even to turn her head and retrace by eye the hollow sand prints
required growing effort.
Grimly she rose on her bandaged feet and limped to the cliff.
She could not stay there, growing weaker with hunger. There could
be hope that beyond the cliff there was more than just sand and
rock.
The climb taxed her strength, scraped her palms and fingers
almost as badly as her feet. She pulled out on the pitted surface
of the crest and lay with her hands tight against her breast,
sobbing a little. Then she raised her head to look about.
She had reached the lip of another foliage-choked, narrow valley
such as the one which held the trading post. But here were no
buildings, nothing but trees and brush. However, not too far away a
thread of water splashed down to make a stream flowing seaward.
Charis licked dry lips and started for that. Within seconds she
crouched on blue earth, her hands tingling in the chill of the
spring water as she drank from cupped palms, not caring whether her
immunization shots, intended for any lurking danger on Demeter,
would hold on Warlock.
If the sea beach had been empty of life, the same was not true
of this valley. Her thirst assuaged, Charis squatted back on her
heels and noticed a gauzy-winged flying thing skim across the
water. It rose again, a white thread-like creature writhing in the
hold of its two pincer-equipped forelegs, and was gone with its
victim between a bush and the cliff wall.
Then, from over her head, burst a clap of sound as if someone
had brought two pieces of bone sharply together. Another flyer, a
great deal more substantial and a hundred times larger than the
insect hunter, shot out of a hole in the cliff and darted back and
forth over her. The thing had leathery skin-wings, its body naked
of any feathers or fur, the hide wrinkled and seamed. The head was
very large in proportion and split halfway down its length most of
the time as an enormous fang-set mouth uttered
“clak-clak” noises.
A second flyer joined the first, then a third, and the racket of
their cries was deafening. They swooped lower and lower and
Charis’s first curiosity turned to real alarm. One alone
would have been no threat, but a flock of the things, plainly set
upon her as a target for their dives, could mean real trouble. She
looked about for cover and plunged in under the matted branches of
the stunted-tree grove.
Apparently her passage was not hidden from the clakers even
though they could not reach her, for she could hear their cries
following her as she moved toward the sea. Something leaped up from
just before her and squealed as it ran for the deeper shadows.
Now she hesitated, unsure of what else might lie in this
wood—waiting. The smell of growing things—some
pleasant, some disagreeable to her off-world senses—was
strong here. Her foot came down on a soft object which burst before
she could shift her weight and she saw a mashed fruit. More of
these hung from the branches of the tree under which she stood and
lay on the ground where the squealing creature had been
feeding.
Charis plucked one and held it to her nose, sniffing an
unfamiliar odor which she could not decide was pleasant or the
reverse. It was food, but whether she could eat it was another
question. Still holding the fruit, Charis pushed on seaward.
The clamor of the clakers had not stilled but kept pace with her
progress, yet the open water tugged at her with a strange promise
of safety. She came to the last screen of brush from which the
vegetation straggled on to vanish in a choke of gray sand.
There was a smudge on the horizon which was more, Charis
believed, than a low-flying cloud bank. An island? She was so
intent upon that that she did not, at first, note the new activity
of the clakers.
They were no longer circling about her but had changed course,
flying out to sea where they wheeled and wove aerial patterns over
the waves. And there was a disturbance in those same waves, marking
action below their surface. Something was coming inshore, heading
directly toward her.
Charis unconsciously squeezed the fruit until its squashed pulp
oozed between her fingers. Judging by the traces, the
swimmer—who or what that might be—was large.
But she did not expect nightmare to splash out of the surf and
face her across so narrow a strip of beach. Armor plate in the form
of scales, greened by clinging seaweed laced over the brown
serrations, a head which was also armed with hornlike extensions
projecting above each wide eye, a snout to gape in a fang-filled
mouth . . .
The creature clawed its way up out of the wash of the waves. Its
legs ended in web-jointed talons. Then it whipped up a tail, forked
into two spike-tipped equal lengths, spattering water over and
ahead. The clakers set up a din and scattered, soaring up, but they
did not abandon the field to the sea monster. But the creature paid
them no attention in return.
At first Charis was afraid it had seen her, and when it did not
advance she was temporarily relieved. A few more wadding steps
brought it out of the water, and then it flattened its body on the
sand with a plainly audible grunt.
The head swung back and forth and then settled, snout resting
outstretched on the scaled forelegs. It had all the appearance of
desiring a nap in the warmth of the sun. Charis hesitated. Since
the clakers had directed their attention to the fork-tail they
might have forgotten her. It was the time to withdraw.
Her inner desire was to run, to crash back into the brush and so
win out of the valley, which had taken on the semblance of a trap.
But wisdom said she was to creep rather than race. Still facing the
beast on the shingle, Charis retreated. For some precious seconds
she thought her hope was succeeding.
Then . . .
The screech overhead was loud, summoning. A claker spied her.
And its fellows screamed in to join it. Then Charis heard that
other sound, a whistling, pitched high to hurt her ears. She did
not need to hear those big feet pounding on the shingle or the
crackle of broken brush to know that the fork-tail thing was
aroused and coming.
Her only chance now was the narrow upper end of the valley where
the cliff wall might give her handholds to rise. Bushes raked and
tore at her clothing and skin as she thrust through any thin spot
she could sight. Past the spring and its draining brook she
staggered to a glade where lavender grass grew thickly, twisted
about her feet, whipped blood from her with sharp leaf edges.
Always above, the clakers screamed, whirled, dived to get at
her, never quite touching her head but coming so close that she
ducked and turned until she realized that she was losing ground in
her efforts to evade their harassing. She threw herself into the
cover on the other side of that open space, using her arm as a
shield to protect her face as she beat her way in by the weight of
her body.
Then she was at her goal, the rock wall which rimmed the valley.
But would the clakers let her climb? Charis flattened herself
against the stone to look up at the flock of leather-wings from
under the protection of her crooked arm. She glanced back where
shaking foliage marked the sea beast moving in.
They were all coming down at her! Charis screamed, beat
out with both arms.
Cries . . .
She flailed out defensively, wildly, before she saw what was
happening. The flight of the clakers had brought them to a line
which crossed the more leisurely advance of the fork-tail. And so
they had run into trouble. For, as storm lightning might strike,
the forked tail swept up and lashed at the flyers, hurling bodies
on and out to smash against the cliff wall.
Twice that tail struck, catching the avid first wave of
attackers, and then some of the second wave who were too intent
upon their target or too slow to change course. Perhaps five
screeched their way up into the air to circle and clak, but not to
venture down again.
Charis spun around and feeling for hand- and foot-holds, began
to climb. The fork-tail was now between her and the remaining
clakers. Until she had reached a higher point, she might not have
to fear a second attack. She centered all her energy upon reaching
a ledge where some vines dropped ragged loops not too far from her
groping fingers.
She pushed up and into the tangle of vine growth which squashed
under her squirming body, rolling over as fast as she could to look
back at the enemy. The clakers were in a frenzy, rising as if
wishing to skim down at her, while below, Charis cringed back.
The fork-tail was at the foot of the cliff, its webbed talons
clawing at the rock. Twice it managed to gain a small hold and was
able to pull up a little, only to crash back again. Either the
holds were not deep enough to sustain its weight or some clumsiness
hindered its climb. For it moved awkwardly, as if on land its bulk
were a liability.
But its determination to follow her was plain in those continued
efforts to find talon-holds on the stone. Charis sidled along the
vine-grown ledge with care lest one of those loops of tough
vegetation trip her. She stopped once to tear loose a small length
of the stuff, using it to lash out at a claker which had gathered
resolution enough to dive at her head. The whip of vine did not
touch the flyer, but it did send it soaring away in haste.
She could use that defense as long as she traveled the ledge,
but when she turned to climb once more, she could not so arm
herself. And she was approaching a point where the shelf was too
narrow to afford foot room.
The fork-tail still raised on hind feet below, clawing at the
cliff wall with single-minded tenacity. A slip on her part would
topple her into its reach. And she dared not climb with the clakers
darting at her head and shoulders. Now she could keep them off with
the lashing vine, but they were growing bolder, their attacks
coming closer together, so that her arm was already tired of
wielding the improvised whip.
Charis leaned against the cliff wall. So far it looked as if the
reptilian attacker could not reach her. But the clakers’
harassment continued unabated, and she was tired, so tired that she
was beginning to fear that even if they did withdraw, she would not
have the strength left to finish the pull up to the top of the
cliff.
She rubbed her hand across her eyes and tried to think, though
the continuing din of the attackers made her feel stupid, as if her
brain was befuddled and cocooned in the noise. It was the cessation
of that clamor which brought her to full consciousness again.
Overhead the ugly creatures had ceased to wheel. Instead they
turned almost as one and winged across the valley, to snap into the
holes in the rock from which they had earlier emerged. Bewildered,
the girl could only stare after them. Then, that sound from
below— Steadying her body with one hand on the rock wall,
Charis looked down.
The fork-tail had turned and, on four feet once again, was
making a ponderous way back through the smashed and crushed growth,
heading seaward without a backward glance to the ledge where she
stood. It was almost as if the clakers and the sea beast had been
ordered away from her . . .
What made her put that interpretation on their movements? Charis
absently rubbed the rest of the sticky fruit pulp from her hand on
a fibrous vine leaf. Silence—nothing stirring. The whole
valley as she could now see it, save for the waving foliage where
the fork-tail retreated, could have been empty of life. She must
make the most of this oddly granted breathing spell.
Doggedly she set about reaching the top of the rise, expecting
any moment to have the clakers burst at her. But the silence held.
She stood up on the crest, looked beyond for cover.
This was a plateau much like the one Jagan had used as a landing
space. Only this showed no rocket scarring. South, it stretched on
as might the surface of a wall well above the sea, open to air and
sun with no cover. But Charis doubted if she could descend again.
So she turned south, limping on her tender feet, always listening
for the clak-clak of the enemy.
A splotch of color, vivid against the dull, black-veined, deep
red of the rocks. Odd that she had not seen that earlier when she
first surveyed this height. It was so brightly visible now that it
drew her as might a promise of food.
Food . . . Her hand came up over her eyes
and fell again as she strove to make sure that this was not a
hallucination but that it did exist outside of her craving
hunger.
But if part of a hallucination, would not the so-pictured foods
have been familiar—viands she had known on Demeter or other
worlds where she had lived? This was no pile of emergency rations,
no setting out of known breads, fruits, meats. On the strip of
green were several round balls of a deeper green, a shining white
basin filled with a yellow lumpy substance, a pile of flat rounds
which were a light blue. A tablecloth spread with a meal! It
had to be a hallucination! It could not have been there
earlier or she would have seen it at once.
Charis shuffled to the cloth and looked at the objects on it.
She put out a scratched and grimy hand and touched fingers to the
side of the bowl to find it warm. The odor which rose from it was
strange—neither pleasant nor unpleasant—just strange.
She hunkered down, fighting the wild demand of her body to be fed
while she considered the strangeness of this food out of nowhere.
Dream? But she could touch it.
She took up one of the blue rounds, found it had the consistency
of a kind of tough pancake. Rolling it into a scoop, Charis ladled
up a mouthful of the yellow—was it stew? Dream or not, she
could chew it, taste it, swallow it down. After that first
experimental mouthful, she ate, greedily, without caring in the
least about dream or reality.