They lay side by side, watching the base. The
flyer had taken off, leaving behind one of its passengers; with the
officer, he had returned to the domes. Again the site was seemingly
deserted.
“That is a Patrol scout ship down there,” Charis
said. “Would any Company dare move outwardly against the
Patrol?”
“With a good cover story they could risk it,” Lantee
replied. “A scout isn’t on a tight report schedule,
remember. They could say that they found this base deserted and
blame any trouble on the Wyverns if it became necessary to provide
an explanation. What I'd like to know is—if this is
a Company grab—how they came to learn of the Power. Jagan
ever say anything about it?”
“Yes, he mentioned it once. But he spoke mostly about
things such as this cloth.” Charis plucked at the stuff of
her tunic which was standing the hard usage better than
Lantee’s uniform. “He was gambling to make a high
stake, but I thought trade material was mostly fishing on his
part.”
“He got in here over Thorvald’s protest,”
Lantee commented. “We couldn’t see how he rated a
permit in the first place, he was so close to the
fringe.”
“Could he have been used as a Company cover? Maybe without
his even knowing it?”
Lantee nodded. “Could well be. Send him in as an opening
wedge and have his reports to add to their general knowledge since
our files are closed—if any files are ever closed when the
grab is big enough!” he ended cynically. “Somebody
passed over a bag of credits in this deal. I’d swear
blood-oath on that.”
“Just what can you do down there?” Charis
asked.
“If the com isn’t out and if I can reach it, just
one signal set on repeat will bring in such help as’ll make
these blaster merchants think someone’s put a couple of
earth-wasps under their tunic collars!”
“Several ifs in that.”
Lantee smiled his humorless, lip-stretching smile. “Life
is full of ifs, Gentle Fem. I’ve carried a pack of them for
years.”
“Where are you from, Shann?”
“Tyr.” The answer was short, bitten off as if meant
to be final.
“Tyr,” Charis repeated. The name meant nothing to
her, but who could ever catalogue the thousands of worlds where
Terran blood had rooted, flowered, branched, and broken free to
roam inward.
“Mining world. Right—right about there!” He
had lifted his head and now he pointed northward into the sky which
was displaying the more brilliant shades of sunset.
“I was born on Minos. But that doesn’t mean much
since my father was an Education officer. I’ve lived
on—five—six—Demeter was the seventh
world.”
“Education officer?” Lantee echoed. “Then how
did you get with Jagan? You beamed in a tape asking for aid. What
was that all about anyway?”
She cut the story of Demeter and the labor contract to its bare
bones as she told it.
“I don’t know whether Jagan could have held you to
that contract here on Warlock. On some worlds it’d be legal,
but anyway you could have fought him with Thorvald’s
backing,” he observed when she was done.
“Doesn’t matter much now. You know—I
didn’t like Warlock at first. It—it was almost
frightening. But now, even with all this, I want to stay
here.” Charis was surprised at her own words. She had said
them impulsively but she knew they were true.
“By ordinary standards, this will never be a settlement
world under the code.”
“I know—intelligent native life over the fifth
degree—so we stay out. How many Wyverns are there
anyway?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? They must have more than one
settlement among the off-shore islands, but we do not go except to
their prime base and then only on permission. You perhaps know more
about them than we do.”
“This dreaming,” Charis mused. “Who can be
sure of anything with them? But can the Power really be used by
males? They are so certain that it can’t. And if they're
right about that, what can the Company do?”
“Follow Jagan’s lead and bring in women,” he
retorted. “But we’re not sure that they are right.
Maybe their males can’t ‘dream true,’ as
they express it, but I dreamed, and Thorvald did, when they put us
through their test at first contact. Whether I could use a disk or
pattern as you have I don’t know. Their whole setup is so
one-sided that contact with another way of life could push it
entirely off base. Maybe if they were willing to
try—”
“Listen!” Charis caught at his sleeve. Speculation
about the future was interesting, but action was needed now.
“What if you can use a pattern? You know the whole base; you
could get down there and out again if you have to. It would be the
perfect way to scout!”
Lantee stared at her. “If it did work—!” She
watched him catch some of her enthusiasm. “If it just
would work!”
He studied the base. The shadows cast by the domes were far more
pronounced, though the sky was still bright over their heads.
“I could try for my own quarters. But how would I get out
again? There’s no disk—”
“We’ll have to make one or its equivalent.
Let’s see.” Charis wriggled about under their brush
cover. The initial pattern to get in by—she could draw that
on the ground as she had before. But the other one—to bring
Lantee out again—he’d have to carry that with him.
How?
“Could you use this?” The Survey man pulled free a
wide, dark leaf. Its purple surface was smooth save for a center
rib and it was as big as her two hands.
“Try this to mark with.” He had out his case of
small tools and handed her a sharply pointed rod.
Carefully Charis traced the design which had unlocked so many
strange places since she had first used it. Luckily the marks
showed up well. When she had done, she handed the leaf to
Lantee.
“It works so. First, you picture in your mind as clearly
as you can the place you want to go. Then you concentrate on
following this design with your eyes, from right to
left—”
He glanced from the leaf to the base. “They can’t be
everywhere,” he muttered.
Charis bit back a warning. Lantee knew the terrain better than
she. Perhaps he, too, was chafing at inactivity. And, if the leaf
pattern worked, he could be in and out of any danger before those
who discovered him could move. It would be, or should be,
sufficiently disconcerting to have a man materialize out of thin
air before one, to give the materializer some seconds of advantage
in any surprise confrontation.
Lantee’s expression changed. He had made up his mind.
“Now!”
Charis could not bring herself to agree in this final moment. As
he had said earlier, there were so many ifs. But neither had she
the right to persuade him not to make the try.
He slid down the slope behind them, putting the hill between him
and the base before getting to his feet, the leaf in his hands. His
jaw set, his whole face became a mask of concentration. Nothing
happened. When he looked up at her, his expression was bleak and
pinched.
“The witches are right. It won’t work for
me!”
“Perhaps—” Charis had another thought.
“They must be right! It didn’t work.”
“Maybe for another reason. That’s my
pattern, the one they gave me in the beginning.”
“You mean the patterns are individual—separate
codes?”
“It’s reasonable to believe that. You know how they
wear those decorative skin patterns, made up partially of their
ancestors’ private designs, in order to increase their own
Power. But each of them has her disk with her own design on it. It
could be that only that works really.”
“Then I do it the hard way,” he replied. “Go
in after dark.”
“Or I could go, if you’d give me a reference point
as you did when we came here.”
“No!” There was no arguing against that; she read an
adamant refusal in his whole stance.
“Together—as we came here?”
He balanced the leaf in his hand. Charis knew that he longed to
be as decisive with another “no,” but there were
advantages in her second suggestion which he had to recognize. She
pushed that indecision quickly; not that she had any desire to
penetrate into the enemy’s camp, but neither did she want to
remain here alone and perhaps witness Lantee’s capture. To
her mind, with the Power the two of them would have a better chance
working together than the Survey man had as a lone scout.
“We can get in—and out—in a hurry.
You’ve already agreed that’s true.”
“I don’t like it.”
She laughed. “What can one like about this? It is
something we have agreed must be done. Or shall we just take to the
countryside and wait out whatever they are planning to do?”
Such prodding was not fair of her, but her impatience was rising to
a point where it threatened her control.
“All right!” He was angry. “The room is like
this.” Down on one knee, he sketched out a plan, explaining
curtly. Then, before she could move, those same brown fingers were
against her forehead, giving her once more that fuzzy picture.
Charis jerked away from that contact.
“I told you—not that! Not again!” The girl had
no desire to recall any of the earlier dizzy, frightening time when
they joined minds after a fashion, when the strange thoughts strove
to storm her own mental passages.
Lantee flushed and drew his hand back. Her uneasiness and faint
disgust were at once overlaid by a feeling of guilt. After all, he
was doing the best he could to insure the success of their
action.
“I have the picture now as clearly as I had this place,
and we came here safely,” she said hurriedly.
“Let’s go!” For a moment his hand resisted her
grasp as she caught it, then his hold tightened on hers.
First the room—then the pattern. It was becoming a
familiar exercise, one she had full confidence in. But
now—nothing happened.
It was as if she had thrown herself against some immovable and
impenetrable wall! The barrier the Wyverns had reared to control
her movements earlier? It was not that. She would have known it for
what it was. This was different—a new sensation
altogether.
She opened her eyes. “Did you feel it?” Lantee might
not be able to work the transference on his own; but, linked, they
had done it successfully once, so perhaps some part of the present
failure had reached him.
“Yes. You know what it means? They do have a nullifier to
protect them!”
“And it works!” Charis shivered, her hand creasing
the leaf into a pulp.
“We were already sure that it did,” he reminded her.
“Now—I shall go by myself.”
She did not want to admit that he was right, but she had to.
Lantee knew every inch of the base; she was a stranger there. The
invaders might have other safeguards besides the nullifier.
“You don’t even have a
stunner . . . ”
“If I can get in down there, that little matter can be
corrected. More than a stunner is needed now. This you can
do—work your way around to the landing strip. If I succeed,
we’ll make use of the copter. You can fly one?”
“Of course! But where will we go?”
“To the Wyverns. They’ll have to be made to
understand what they are up against here. I ought to find evidence
of one kind or another as to whether this is a Company grab. The
witches may be able to blanket you out of their own mode of travel,
but I’ll swear they have no way of preventing the copter from
reaching their prime base. Let us just get to them and they can
pick the truth out of our minds whether they want to or
not.”
It sounded simple and as if it might work, Charis had to admit.
But there was that tall hedge of ifs in between.
“All right. When do we move?”
Lantee crawled up to their former vantage point and she trailed
him. After he surveyed the landscape he spoke, but he did not
answer her question.
“You circle around in that direction, giving me a
hundred-count start. We haven’t spotted any guards about the
strip, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t plugged
it with sniffers, and those may even be paired with anti-persona
bombs into the bargain.”
Was he deliberately trying to make her regret any part in
this?
“We could certainly use the wolverines now. No sniffer
could baffle them,” he continued.
“We could use a detachment of the Patrol, too,”
Charis retorted tartly.
Lantee did not rise to that. “I’ll come in from that
direction.” He pointed south. “Let’s hope our
wild stars have the value we hope they do on this board.
Luck!”
Before she could more than blink he had gone, vanished into the
brush as if one of the disks had whirled him into Otherwhere.
Charis strove to fight down her excitement and began a slow count.
For some seconds she heard a subdued rustling which she was sure
marked his retreat—then nothing.
No movement about the domes. Lantee was right; they
could have used the wolverines and Tsstu to advantage now.
Animal senses, so much keener than human, could have scouted for
them both. She thought of an anti-persona bomb twinned to a sniffer
detector, and her own part in the action had less and less appeal.
The copter was far too tempting a bait; those below must
have some watch on it! Unless they believed that they had
effectively disposed of all resistance.
“—ninety-five—ninety-six—” Charis
counted, hoping she was not speeding up. It was always far easier
to be on the move than to lie and wait.
“—ninety-nine—one hundred!” She crept
down slope to the east on the first lap of her own journey. The
light held enough so that she kept to cover, pausing within each
shadowed shelter to study the next few feet or yards of advance.
And, to keep in concealment, she pulled her circle arc into a
segment of oval. When she knew that she must head in again to meet
the landing strip, Charis’s mouth was dry in contrast to her
damp palms, while her heart thudded in a heavy beat.
She found a tree limb, old and brittle—dry but long enough
for her purpose. A sniffer activated to catch a prowler would be
set about so high—knee-high for a walking man—or less.
Would they expect someone to crawl in? All right, then, to be on
the safe side—calf-high Charis set about stripping small
branches for handfuls of leaves. Several tough ground-vines gave
her cords to lash the mass of vegetation to the stick.
As a device for triggering a trap, it was very crude, but it
lessened the odds against her somewhat. Now her wriggling advance
was even slower as she worked the bundle before her, testing each
foot of the way.
The pole was hard to hold in her sweating hands, her shoulders
ached with the effort necessary to keep it at what she believed to
be the right height. And her goal could have been half the
continent away since she appeared to draw no closer to it in spite
of her continued struggles.
But so far—no sniffer. And there had to be an end
sometime. Charis paused for a breather. No sound came from the
domes, no indication there were any guards, either human or
machine. Were the invaders under the impression they had nothing to
fear, no reason to post sentries?
Must not let growing confidence make her careless, Charis told
herself. She did not have one hand on the copter door yet.
And—why!—that might be it! The machine itself could be
rigged as a trap. And if that were so, could she discover and
disarm it?
One thing at a time—just one thing at a
time . . .
She had raised her bundle probe, was on the creep again when the
twilight breeze brought her a faint scent. Wolverine! When aroused
in fear or anger, Charis knew, the animals emitted a rank odor. Was
this a mark of the passing of Togi and her cubs?
Could Charis contact the female wolverine who had no knowledge
of her as friendly? Lantee had said that afternoon that Togi was
less amenable to human contact or control since she had become a
mother; the wolverines were noted hunters, accustomed to living off
the land. Was Togi now hunting?
Charis sniffed, hoping for some clue as to direction. But the
scent was faint, perhaps only a lingering reminder of some earlier
passage of an angry wolverine clinging to grass or bush. And there
stood the beacon of the Patrol scout not too far to her left. She
was close to the fringe of the landing strip. Charis thrust her
bundle detector before her and crept on.
A screech—a snarling—a thrashing in the brush to her
left. A second cry cut into a horrible bubbling noise.
Charis bit her tongue, painfully muffling a cry of her own.
Wide-eyed she watched that wildly waving bush. Another
cry—this time not unlike a thin, pulsating whistle. Then
suddenly there were figures out in the open, running toward the
commotion. As they neared, Charis could see them better.
Not the off-worlders she and Lantee had watched from the hill.
Wyverns? No.
For the second time, Charis choked back a cry. For these running
figures carried spears, the same type of spear she and Lantee had
found at the post. And they were taller than the Wyverns Charis
knew, their spiky head and shoulder growths smaller so that they
resembled ragged and ugly spines rather than small wings: the
Wyvern males Charis had never seen in all her days among the
witches!
They cried out shrilly in a way which rasped Charis’s
nerves and hurt her ears. Two of them hurled spears into the now
quiet bush.
A shout from behind, from the domes; this surely had issued from
a human throat. No words Charis could distinguish but it brought
confusion to the Wyverns. The two at the rear stopped, looked over
their shoulders; then, at a second shout, they turned and ran
swiftly in the direction of that call. The foremost attackers had
reached the bushes, spears thrust ahead. One of them cried out.
Again no words, but Charis judged the tone to be one of
disappointment and rage.
They milled around out of her sight and then came back into the
open, two of them carrying a limp body between them. One of their
own kind killed by some means. Togi’s doing?
But Charis had little time to wonder about that for there was
more shouting from the domes, and all but the two Wyverns carrying
the body began to run in that direction.
Lantee—had they found Lantee?
They lay side by side, watching the base. The
flyer had taken off, leaving behind one of its passengers; with the
officer, he had returned to the domes. Again the site was seemingly
deserted.
“That is a Patrol scout ship down there,” Charis
said. “Would any Company dare move outwardly against the
Patrol?”
“With a good cover story they could risk it,” Lantee
replied. “A scout isn’t on a tight report schedule,
remember. They could say that they found this base deserted and
blame any trouble on the Wyverns if it became necessary to provide
an explanation. What I'd like to know is—if this is
a Company grab—how they came to learn of the Power. Jagan
ever say anything about it?”
“Yes, he mentioned it once. But he spoke mostly about
things such as this cloth.” Charis plucked at the stuff of
her tunic which was standing the hard usage better than
Lantee’s uniform. “He was gambling to make a high
stake, but I thought trade material was mostly fishing on his
part.”
“He got in here over Thorvald’s protest,”
Lantee commented. “We couldn’t see how he rated a
permit in the first place, he was so close to the
fringe.”
“Could he have been used as a Company cover? Maybe without
his even knowing it?”
Lantee nodded. “Could well be. Send him in as an opening
wedge and have his reports to add to their general knowledge since
our files are closed—if any files are ever closed when the
grab is big enough!” he ended cynically. “Somebody
passed over a bag of credits in this deal. I’d swear
blood-oath on that.”
“Just what can you do down there?” Charis
asked.
“If the com isn’t out and if I can reach it, just
one signal set on repeat will bring in such help as’ll make
these blaster merchants think someone’s put a couple of
earth-wasps under their tunic collars!”
“Several ifs in that.”
Lantee smiled his humorless, lip-stretching smile. “Life
is full of ifs, Gentle Fem. I’ve carried a pack of them for
years.”
“Where are you from, Shann?”
“Tyr.” The answer was short, bitten off as if meant
to be final.
“Tyr,” Charis repeated. The name meant nothing to
her, but who could ever catalogue the thousands of worlds where
Terran blood had rooted, flowered, branched, and broken free to
roam inward.
“Mining world. Right—right about there!” He
had lifted his head and now he pointed northward into the sky which
was displaying the more brilliant shades of sunset.
“I was born on Minos. But that doesn’t mean much
since my father was an Education officer. I’ve lived
on—five—six—Demeter was the seventh
world.”
“Education officer?” Lantee echoed. “Then how
did you get with Jagan? You beamed in a tape asking for aid. What
was that all about anyway?”
She cut the story of Demeter and the labor contract to its bare
bones as she told it.
“I don’t know whether Jagan could have held you to
that contract here on Warlock. On some worlds it’d be legal,
but anyway you could have fought him with Thorvald’s
backing,” he observed when she was done.
“Doesn’t matter much now. You know—I
didn’t like Warlock at first. It—it was almost
frightening. But now, even with all this, I want to stay
here.” Charis was surprised at her own words. She had said
them impulsively but she knew they were true.
“By ordinary standards, this will never be a settlement
world under the code.”
“I know—intelligent native life over the fifth
degree—so we stay out. How many Wyverns are there
anyway?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? They must have more than one
settlement among the off-shore islands, but we do not go except to
their prime base and then only on permission. You perhaps know more
about them than we do.”
“This dreaming,” Charis mused. “Who can be
sure of anything with them? But can the Power really be used by
males? They are so certain that it can’t. And if they're
right about that, what can the Company do?”
“Follow Jagan’s lead and bring in women,” he
retorted. “But we’re not sure that they are right.
Maybe their males can’t ‘dream true,’ as
they express it, but I dreamed, and Thorvald did, when they put us
through their test at first contact. Whether I could use a disk or
pattern as you have I don’t know. Their whole setup is so
one-sided that contact with another way of life could push it
entirely off base. Maybe if they were willing to
try—”
“Listen!” Charis caught at his sleeve. Speculation
about the future was interesting, but action was needed now.
“What if you can use a pattern? You know the whole base; you
could get down there and out again if you have to. It would be the
perfect way to scout!”
Lantee stared at her. “If it did work—!” She
watched him catch some of her enthusiasm. “If it just
would work!”
He studied the base. The shadows cast by the domes were far more
pronounced, though the sky was still bright over their heads.
“I could try for my own quarters. But how would I get out
again? There’s no disk—”
“We’ll have to make one or its equivalent.
Let’s see.” Charis wriggled about under their brush
cover. The initial pattern to get in by—she could draw that
on the ground as she had before. But the other one—to bring
Lantee out again—he’d have to carry that with him.
How?
“Could you use this?” The Survey man pulled free a
wide, dark leaf. Its purple surface was smooth save for a center
rib and it was as big as her two hands.
“Try this to mark with.” He had out his case of
small tools and handed her a sharply pointed rod.
Carefully Charis traced the design which had unlocked so many
strange places since she had first used it. Luckily the marks
showed up well. When she had done, she handed the leaf to
Lantee.
“It works so. First, you picture in your mind as clearly
as you can the place you want to go. Then you concentrate on
following this design with your eyes, from right to
left—”
He glanced from the leaf to the base. “They can’t be
everywhere,” he muttered.
Charis bit back a warning. Lantee knew the terrain better than
she. Perhaps he, too, was chafing at inactivity. And, if the leaf
pattern worked, he could be in and out of any danger before those
who discovered him could move. It would be, or should be,
sufficiently disconcerting to have a man materialize out of thin
air before one, to give the materializer some seconds of advantage
in any surprise confrontation.
Lantee’s expression changed. He had made up his mind.
“Now!”
Charis could not bring herself to agree in this final moment. As
he had said earlier, there were so many ifs. But neither had she
the right to persuade him not to make the try.
He slid down the slope behind them, putting the hill between him
and the base before getting to his feet, the leaf in his hands. His
jaw set, his whole face became a mask of concentration. Nothing
happened. When he looked up at her, his expression was bleak and
pinched.
“The witches are right. It won’t work for
me!”
“Perhaps—” Charis had another thought.
“They must be right! It didn’t work.”
“Maybe for another reason. That’s my
pattern, the one they gave me in the beginning.”
“You mean the patterns are individual—separate
codes?”
“It’s reasonable to believe that. You know how they
wear those decorative skin patterns, made up partially of their
ancestors’ private designs, in order to increase their own
Power. But each of them has her disk with her own design on it. It
could be that only that works really.”
“Then I do it the hard way,” he replied. “Go
in after dark.”
“Or I could go, if you’d give me a reference point
as you did when we came here.”
“No!” There was no arguing against that; she read an
adamant refusal in his whole stance.
“Together—as we came here?”
He balanced the leaf in his hand. Charis knew that he longed to
be as decisive with another “no,” but there were
advantages in her second suggestion which he had to recognize. She
pushed that indecision quickly; not that she had any desire to
penetrate into the enemy’s camp, but neither did she want to
remain here alone and perhaps witness Lantee’s capture. To
her mind, with the Power the two of them would have a better chance
working together than the Survey man had as a lone scout.
“We can get in—and out—in a hurry.
You’ve already agreed that’s true.”
“I don’t like it.”
She laughed. “What can one like about this? It is
something we have agreed must be done. Or shall we just take to the
countryside and wait out whatever they are planning to do?”
Such prodding was not fair of her, but her impatience was rising to
a point where it threatened her control.
“All right!” He was angry. “The room is like
this.” Down on one knee, he sketched out a plan, explaining
curtly. Then, before she could move, those same brown fingers were
against her forehead, giving her once more that fuzzy picture.
Charis jerked away from that contact.
“I told you—not that! Not again!” The girl had
no desire to recall any of the earlier dizzy, frightening time when
they joined minds after a fashion, when the strange thoughts strove
to storm her own mental passages.
Lantee flushed and drew his hand back. Her uneasiness and faint
disgust were at once overlaid by a feeling of guilt. After all, he
was doing the best he could to insure the success of their
action.
“I have the picture now as clearly as I had this place,
and we came here safely,” she said hurriedly.
“Let’s go!” For a moment his hand resisted her
grasp as she caught it, then his hold tightened on hers.
First the room—then the pattern. It was becoming a
familiar exercise, one she had full confidence in. But
now—nothing happened.
It was as if she had thrown herself against some immovable and
impenetrable wall! The barrier the Wyverns had reared to control
her movements earlier? It was not that. She would have known it for
what it was. This was different—a new sensation
altogether.
She opened her eyes. “Did you feel it?” Lantee might
not be able to work the transference on his own; but, linked, they
had done it successfully once, so perhaps some part of the present
failure had reached him.
“Yes. You know what it means? They do have a nullifier to
protect them!”
“And it works!” Charis shivered, her hand creasing
the leaf into a pulp.
“We were already sure that it did,” he reminded her.
“Now—I shall go by myself.”
She did not want to admit that he was right, but she had to.
Lantee knew every inch of the base; she was a stranger there. The
invaders might have other safeguards besides the nullifier.
“You don’t even have a
stunner . . . ”
“If I can get in down there, that little matter can be
corrected. More than a stunner is needed now. This you can
do—work your way around to the landing strip. If I succeed,
we’ll make use of the copter. You can fly one?”
“Of course! But where will we go?”
“To the Wyverns. They’ll have to be made to
understand what they are up against here. I ought to find evidence
of one kind or another as to whether this is a Company grab. The
witches may be able to blanket you out of their own mode of travel,
but I’ll swear they have no way of preventing the copter from
reaching their prime base. Let us just get to them and they can
pick the truth out of our minds whether they want to or
not.”
It sounded simple and as if it might work, Charis had to admit.
But there was that tall hedge of ifs in between.
“All right. When do we move?”
Lantee crawled up to their former vantage point and she trailed
him. After he surveyed the landscape he spoke, but he did not
answer her question.
“You circle around in that direction, giving me a
hundred-count start. We haven’t spotted any guards about the
strip, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t plugged
it with sniffers, and those may even be paired with anti-persona
bombs into the bargain.”
Was he deliberately trying to make her regret any part in
this?
“We could certainly use the wolverines now. No sniffer
could baffle them,” he continued.
“We could use a detachment of the Patrol, too,”
Charis retorted tartly.
Lantee did not rise to that. “I’ll come in from that
direction.” He pointed south. “Let’s hope our
wild stars have the value we hope they do on this board.
Luck!”
Before she could more than blink he had gone, vanished into the
brush as if one of the disks had whirled him into Otherwhere.
Charis strove to fight down her excitement and began a slow count.
For some seconds she heard a subdued rustling which she was sure
marked his retreat—then nothing.
No movement about the domes. Lantee was right; they
could have used the wolverines and Tsstu to advantage now.
Animal senses, so much keener than human, could have scouted for
them both. She thought of an anti-persona bomb twinned to a sniffer
detector, and her own part in the action had less and less appeal.
The copter was far too tempting a bait; those below must
have some watch on it! Unless they believed that they had
effectively disposed of all resistance.
“—ninety-five—ninety-six—” Charis
counted, hoping she was not speeding up. It was always far easier
to be on the move than to lie and wait.
“—ninety-nine—one hundred!” She crept
down slope to the east on the first lap of her own journey. The
light held enough so that she kept to cover, pausing within each
shadowed shelter to study the next few feet or yards of advance.
And, to keep in concealment, she pulled her circle arc into a
segment of oval. When she knew that she must head in again to meet
the landing strip, Charis’s mouth was dry in contrast to her
damp palms, while her heart thudded in a heavy beat.
She found a tree limb, old and brittle—dry but long enough
for her purpose. A sniffer activated to catch a prowler would be
set about so high—knee-high for a walking man—or less.
Would they expect someone to crawl in? All right, then, to be on
the safe side—calf-high Charis set about stripping small
branches for handfuls of leaves. Several tough ground-vines gave
her cords to lash the mass of vegetation to the stick.
As a device for triggering a trap, it was very crude, but it
lessened the odds against her somewhat. Now her wriggling advance
was even slower as she worked the bundle before her, testing each
foot of the way.
The pole was hard to hold in her sweating hands, her shoulders
ached with the effort necessary to keep it at what she believed to
be the right height. And her goal could have been half the
continent away since she appeared to draw no closer to it in spite
of her continued struggles.
But so far—no sniffer. And there had to be an end
sometime. Charis paused for a breather. No sound came from the
domes, no indication there were any guards, either human or
machine. Were the invaders under the impression they had nothing to
fear, no reason to post sentries?
Must not let growing confidence make her careless, Charis told
herself. She did not have one hand on the copter door yet.
And—why!—that might be it! The machine itself could be
rigged as a trap. And if that were so, could she discover and
disarm it?
One thing at a time—just one thing at a
time . . .
She had raised her bundle probe, was on the creep again when the
twilight breeze brought her a faint scent. Wolverine! When aroused
in fear or anger, Charis knew, the animals emitted a rank odor. Was
this a mark of the passing of Togi and her cubs?
Could Charis contact the female wolverine who had no knowledge
of her as friendly? Lantee had said that afternoon that Togi was
less amenable to human contact or control since she had become a
mother; the wolverines were noted hunters, accustomed to living off
the land. Was Togi now hunting?
Charis sniffed, hoping for some clue as to direction. But the
scent was faint, perhaps only a lingering reminder of some earlier
passage of an angry wolverine clinging to grass or bush. And there
stood the beacon of the Patrol scout not too far to her left. She
was close to the fringe of the landing strip. Charis thrust her
bundle detector before her and crept on.
A screech—a snarling—a thrashing in the brush to her
left. A second cry cut into a horrible bubbling noise.
Charis bit her tongue, painfully muffling a cry of her own.
Wide-eyed she watched that wildly waving bush. Another
cry—this time not unlike a thin, pulsating whistle. Then
suddenly there were figures out in the open, running toward the
commotion. As they neared, Charis could see them better.
Not the off-worlders she and Lantee had watched from the hill.
Wyverns? No.
For the second time, Charis choked back a cry. For these running
figures carried spears, the same type of spear she and Lantee had
found at the post. And they were taller than the Wyverns Charis
knew, their spiky head and shoulder growths smaller so that they
resembled ragged and ugly spines rather than small wings: the
Wyvern males Charis had never seen in all her days among the
witches!
They cried out shrilly in a way which rasped Charis’s
nerves and hurt her ears. Two of them hurled spears into the now
quiet bush.
A shout from behind, from the domes; this surely had issued from
a human throat. No words Charis could distinguish but it brought
confusion to the Wyverns. The two at the rear stopped, looked over
their shoulders; then, at a second shout, they turned and ran
swiftly in the direction of that call. The foremost attackers had
reached the bushes, spears thrust ahead. One of them cried out.
Again no words, but Charis judged the tone to be one of
disappointment and rage.
They milled around out of her sight and then came back into the
open, two of them carrying a limp body between them. One of their
own kind killed by some means. Togi’s doing?
But Charis had little time to wonder about that for there was
more shouting from the domes, and all but the two Wyverns carrying
the body began to run in that direction.
Lantee—had they found Lantee?