There was a small eruption of earth and stone
as the hound came alive, fighting to reach its tormentors. The
resulting din was deafening. Shann, avoiding by a hand’s
breadth a snap of jaws with power to crush his leg into bone shards
and mangled flesh, cuffed Togi across her nose. He buried his hands
in the fur about Taggi’s throat as he heaved the male
wolverine back from the struggling monster. He shouted orders, and
to his surprise Togi did obey, leaving him free to yank Taggi away.
Perhaps neither wolverine had expected the full fury of the
hound.
Though he suffered a slash across the back of one hand,
delivered by the over-excited Taggi, in the end Shann was able to
get both animals away from the hole, now corked so effectively by
the slavering thing. Thorvald was actually laughing as he watched
his younger companion in action.
“This ought to slow up the beetles! If they haul their
little doggie back, it’s apt to take out some of its rage on
them, and I’d like to see them dig around it.”
Considering that the monstrous head was swinging from side to
side in a collar of what seemed to be immovable rocks, Shann
thought Thorvald right. He went down on his knees beside the
wolverines, soothing them with hand and voice, trying to get them
to obey his orders willingly.
“Ha!” Thorvald brought his mud-stained hands
together with a clap, the sharp sound attracting the attention of
both animals.
Shann scrambled up, swung out his bleeding hand in the simple
motion which meant to hunt, being careful to signal down the valley
westward. Taggi gave a last reluctant growl at the hound, to be
answered by one of its ear-torturing howls, and then trotted off,
Togi tagging behind.
Thorvald caught Shann’s slashed hand, inspecting the
bleeding cut. From the aid packet at his belt he brought out powder
and a strip of protecting plasta-flesh to cleanse and bind the
wound.
“You’ll do,” he commented. “But
we’d better get out of here before full dark.”
The small paradise of the valley was no safe campsite. It could
not be so long as that monstrosity on the hillside behind them
roared and howled its rage to the darkening sky. Trailing the
wolverines, the men caught up with the animals drinking from a
small spring and thankfully shared that water. Then they pushed on,
not able to forget that somewhere in the peaks about must lurk the
Throg flyer ready to attack on sight.
Only darkness could not be held off by the will of men. Here in
the open there was no chance to use the torch. As long as they were
within the valley boundaries the phosphorescent bushes marked a
path. But by the coming of complete darkness they were once more
out in a region of bare rock.
The wolverines had killed a brace of skitterers, consuming hide
and soft bones as well as the meager flesh which was not enough to
satisfy their hunger. However, to Shann’s relief, they did
not wander too far ahead. And as the men stopped at last on a ledge
where a fall of rock gave them some limited shelter both animals
crowded in against the humans, adding the heat of their bodies to
the slight comfort of that cramped resting place.
From time to time Shann was startled out of a troubled half
sleep by the howl of the hound. Luckily that sound never seemed any
louder. If the Throgs had caught up with their hunter, and
certainly they must have done so by now, they either could not, or
would not free it from the trap. Shann dozed again, untroubled by
any dreams, to awake hearing the shrieks of clak-claks. But when he
studied the sky he was able to sight none of the cliff-dwelling
Warlockian bats.
“More likely they are paying attention to our friend back
in the valley,” Thorvald said dryly, rightly reading
Shann’s glance to the clouds overhead. “Ought to keep
them busy.”
Clak-claks were meat eaters, only they preferred their chosen
prey weak and easy to attack. The imprisoned hound would certainly
attract their kind. And those shrill cries now belling through the
mountain heights ought to draw everyone of their species within
miles.
“There it is!” Thorvald, pulling himself to his feet
by a rock handhold, gazed westward, his gaunt face eager.
Shann, expecting no less than a cruising Throg ship, searched
for cover on their perch. Perhaps if they flattened themselves
behind the fall of stones, they might be able to escape attention.
Yet Thorvald made no move into hiding. And so Shann followed the
line of the other’s fixed stare.
Before and below them lay a maze of heights and valleys, sharp
drops, and saw-toothed rises. But on the far rim of that section of
badlands shone the green of a Warlockian sea rippling on to the
only dimly seen horizon. They were now within sight of their
goal.
Had they had one of the exploration sky-flitters from the
overrun camp, they could have walked its beach sands within the
hour. Instead, they fought their way through a devil-designed
country for the next two days. Twice they had narrow escapes from
the Throg ship—or ships—which continued to sweep across
the rugged line of the coast, and only a quick dive to cover,
wasting precious time cowering like trapped animals, saved them
from discovery. But at least the hound did not bay again on the
tangled trail they left, and they hoped that the trap and the
clak-claks had put that monster permanently out of service.
On the third day they came down to one of those fiords which
tongued inland, fringing the coast. There had been no lack of
hunting in the narrow valleys through which they had threaded, so
both men and wolverines were well fed. Though the animals’
fur wore better than the now tattered uniforms of the men.
“Now where?” Shann asked.
Would he now learn the purpose driving Thorvald on to this
coastland? Certainly such broken country afforded good hiding, but
no better concealment than the mountains of the interior.
The Survey officer turned slowly around on the shingle, studying
the heights behind them as well as the angle of the inlet where the
wavelets lapped almost at their battered boot tips. Opening his
treasured map case, he began a patient checking of landmarks
against several of the strips he carried. “We’ll have
to get on down to the true coast.”
Shann leaned against the trunk of a conical branched mountain
tree, pulling absently at the shreds of wine-colored bark being
shed in seasonal change. The chill they had known in the upper
valleys was succeeded here by a humid warmth. Spring was becoming a
summer such as this northern continent knew. Even the fresh wind,
blowing in from the outer sea, had already lost some of the bite
they had felt two days before when its salt-laden mistiness had
first struck them.
“Then what’ll we do there?” Shann
persisted.
Thorvald brought over the map, his black-rimmed nail tracing a
route down one of the fiords, slanting out to indicate a lace of
islands extending in a beaded line across the sea.
“We head for these.”
To Shann that made no sense at all. Those
islands . . . why, they would offer less chance
of establishing a safe base than the broken land in which they now
stood. Even the survey scouts had given those spots of
sea-encircled earth the most cursory examination from the air.
“Why?” he asked bluntly. So far he had followed
orders because they had for the most part made sense. But he was
not giving obedience to Thorvald as a matter of rank alone.
“Because there is something out there, something which may
make all the difference now. Warlock isn’t an empty
world.”
Shann jerked free a long thong of loose bark, rolling it between
his fingers. Had Thorvald cracked? He knew that the officer had
disagreed with the findings of the team. He had been an unconvinced
minority of one who had refused to subscribe to the report that
Warlock had no native intelligent life and therefore was ready and
waiting for human settlement because it was technically an empty
world. But to continue to cling to that belief without a single
concrete proof was certainly a sign of mental imbalance.
And Thorvald was regarding him now with frowning impatience. You
were supposed to humor delusions, weren’t you? Only, could
you surrender and humor a wild idea which might mean your death? If
Thorvald wanted to go island-hopping in chance of discovering what
never had existed, Shann need not accompany him. And if the officer
tried to use force, well, Shann was armed with a stunner, and had,
he believed, more control over the wolverines. Perhaps if he merely
gave lip agreement to this project . . . Only
he didn’t believe, noting the light deep in those gray eyes
holding on him, that anybody could talk Thorvald out of this
particular obsession.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” The impatience
arose hotly in that demand.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Shann tried to temporize.
“You’ve had a lot of exploration experience; you should
know about such things. I don’t pretend to be any
authority.”
Thorvald refolded the map and placed it in the case. Then he
pulled at the sealing of his blouse, groping in an inner secret
pocket. He uncurled his fingers to display his treasure.
On his palm lay a coin-shaped medallion, bone-white but
possessing an odd luster which bone would not normally show. And it
was carved. Shann put out a finger, though he had a strange
reluctance to touch the object. When he did he experienced a
sensation close to the tingle of a mild electric shock. And once he
had made that contact, he was also impelled to pick up that disk
and examine it more closely.
The intricately carved pattern had been done with great delicacy
and skill, though the whorls, oddly shaped knobs, ribbon tracings,
made no connected design he could determine. After a moment or two
of study, Shann became aware that his eyes, following those twists
and twirls, were “fixed,” that it required a distinct
effort to look away from the thing. Feeling some of that same alarm
as he had known when he first heard the wailing of the Throg hound,
he let the disk fall back into Thorvald’s hold, even more
disturbed when he discovered that to relinquish his grasp required
some exercise of will.
“What is it?”
Thorvald restored the coin to his hiding place.
“You tell me. I can say this much, there is no listing for
anything even remotely akin to this in the Archives.”
Shann’s eyes widened. He absently rubbed the fingers which
had held the bone coin—if it was a coin—back and forth
across the torn front of his blouse. That
tingle . . . did he still feel it? Or was his
imagination at work again? But an object not listed in the
exhaustive Survey Archives would mean some totally new
civilization, a new stellar race.
“It’s definitely a fabricated article,” the
Survey officer continued. “And it was found on the beach of
one of those sea islands.”
“Throg?” But Shann already knew the answer to
that.
“Throg work—this?” Thorvald was
openly scornful. “Throgs have no conception of such art. You
must have seen their metal plates—those are the
beetle-heads’ idea of beauty. Have those the slightest
resemblance to this?”
“Then who made it?”
“Either Warlock has—or once had—a native race
advanced enough in a well-established form of civilization to
develop such a sophisticated type of art, or there have been other
visitors from space here before us and the Throgs. And the latter
possibility I don’t believe—”
“Why?”
“Because this was carved of bone or an allied substance.
We haven’t been quite able to identify it in the labs, but
it’s an organic material. It was found exposed to the weather
and yet it is in perfect condition, could have been carved any time
within the past five years. It has been handled, yes, but not
roughly. And we have come across evidences of no other
star-cruising races or species in this sector save ourselves and
the Throgs. No, I say this was made here on Warlock, not too long
ago, and by intelligent beings of a very high level of
civilization.”
“But they would have cities,” protested Shann.
“We’ve been here for months, explored all over this
continent. We’d have seen them or some traces of
them.”
“An old race, maybe,” Thorvald mused, “a very
old race, perhaps in decline, reduced to a remnant in numbers with
good reason to retire into hiding. No, we’ve discovered no
cities, no evidence of a native culture past or present. But
this—” he touched the front of his
blouse—“was found on the shore of an island. We may
have been looking in the wrong place for our natives.”
“The
sea . . . ” Shann
glanced with new interest at the green water surging in wavelets
along the edge of the fiord.
“Just so, the sea!”
“But scouts have been here for more than a year, one team
or another. And nobody saw anything or found any traces.”
“All four of our base camps were set inland, our
explorations along the coast were mainly carried out by flitter,
except for one party—the one which found this. And there may
be excellent local reasons why no native ever showed himself to us.
For that matter, they may not be able to exist on land at all, any
more than we could live without artificial aids in the
sea.”
“Now—?”
“Now we must make a real attempt to find them if they do
exist anywhere near here. A friendly native race could make all the
difference in the world in any struggle with the Throgs.”
“Then you did have more than the dreams to back you when
you argued with Fenniston!” Shann cut in.
Thorvald’s eyes were on him again. “When did you
hear that, Lantee?”
To his great embarrassment, Shann found himself flushing.
“I heard you, the day you left for Headquarters,” he
admitted, and then added in his own defense, “Probably half
the camp did, too.”
Thorvald’s gathering frown flickered away. He gave a snort
of laughter. “Yes, I guess we did rather get to the bellowing
point that morning. The dreams—” he came back to the
subject—“Yes, the dreams
were—are—important. We had their warning from the
start. Lorry was the First-In Scout who charted Warlock, and
he’s a good man. I guess I can break secret now to tell you
this his ship was equipped with a new experimental device which
recorded—well, you might call it an
‘emanation’—a radiation so faint its source could
not be traced. And it registered whenever Lorry had one of those
dreams. Unfortunately, the machine was very new, very much in the
untested stage, and its performance when checked later in the lab
was erratic enough so the powers-that-be questioned all its
readings. They produced a half dozen answers to account for that
tape, and Lorry only caught the signal as long as he was on a big
bay to the south.
“Then when two check flights came in later, carrying
perfected machines and getting no recordings, it was all written
off as a mistake in the first experiment. A planet such as Warlock
is too big a find to throw away when there was no proof of
occupancy. And the settlement boys rushed matters right
along.”
Shann recalled his own vivid dream of the skull-rock set in the
lap of water—this sea? And another small point fell into
place to furnish the beginning of a pattern. “I was asleep on
the raft when I dreamed about that skull-mountain,” he said
slowly, wondering if he were making sense.
Thorvald’s hand came up with the alert stance of Taggi on
a strong game scent.
“Yes, on the raft you dreamed of a skull-rock. And I of a
cavern with a green veil. Both of us were on water—water
which had an eventual connection with the sea. Could water be a
conductor? I
wonder . . . ” Once
again his hand went into his blouse. He crossed the strip of gravel
beach and dipped fingers into the water, letting the drops fall on
the carved disk he now held in his other hand.
“What are you doing?” Shann could see no purpose in
that.
Thorvald did not answer. He had pressed wet hand to dry now,
palm to palm, the coin cupped tightly between them. He turned a
quarter circle, to face the still distant open sea.
“That way.” He spoke with a new odd
tonelessness.
Shann stared into the other’s face. All the eager
alertness of only a moment earlier had been wiped away. Thorvald
was no longer the man he had known, but in some frightening way a
husk, holding a quite different personality. The younger Terran
answered his fear with an attack from the old days of rough
in-fighting in the Dumps of Tyr. He brought his right hand down
hard in a sharp chop across the officer’s wrists. The bone
coin spun to the sand and Thorvald stumbled, staggering forward a
step or two. Before he could recover balance Shann had stamped on
the medallion.
Thorvald whirled, his stunner drawn with a speed for which Shann
gave him high marks. But the younger man’s own weapon was
already out and ready. And he talked—fast.
“That thing’s dangerous! What did you do—what
did it do to you?”
His demand got through to a Thorvald who was himself again.
“What was I doing?” came a counter
demand.
“You were acting like you were mind-controlled.”
Thorvald stared at him incredulously, then with a growing spark
of interest.
“The minute you dripped water on that thing you
changed,” Shann continued.
Thorvald reholstered his stunner. “Yes,” he mused,
“why did I want to drip water on it? Something
prompted me . . . ”
He ran his still-damp hand up the angle of his jaw, across his
forehead as if to relieve some pain there. “What else did I
do?”
“Faced to the sea and said ‘that way,’”
Shann replied promptly.
“And why did you move in to stop me?”
Shann shrugged. “When I first touched that thing I felt a
shock. And I’ve seen mind-controlled people—” He
could have bitten his tongue for betraying that. The world of the
mind-controlled was very far from the life Thorvald and his kind
knew.
“Very interesting,” commented the other. “For
one of so few years you seem to have seen a lot, Lantee—and
apparently remembered most of it. But I would agree that
you’re right about this little plaything; it carries a danger
with it, being far less innocent than it looks.” He tore off
one of the fluttering scraps of rag which now made up his sleeve.
“If you’ll just remove your foot, we’ll put it
out of business for now.”
He proceeded to wrap the disk well in his bit of cloth, taking
care not to touch it again with his bare fingers while he stowed it
away.
“I don’t know what we have in this—a key to
unlock a door, a trap to catch the unwary. I can’t guess how
or why it works. But we can be reasonably sure it’s not just
some carefree maiden’s locket, nor the equivalent of a credit
to spend in the nearest bar. So it pointed me to the sea, did it?
Well, that much I am willing to allow. Maybe we’ll be able to
return it to the owner, after we learn who—or
what—that owner is.”
Shann gazed down at the green water, opaque, not to be pierced
to the depths by human sight. Anything might lurk there. Suddenly
the Throgs became normal when balanced against an unknown living in
the murky depths of an aquatic world. Another attack on the
Throg-held camp could be well preferred to such exploration as
Thorvald had in mind. Yet Shann did not voice any protest as the
Survey officer faced again in the same direction as the disk had
pointed him moments before.
There was a small eruption of earth and stone
as the hound came alive, fighting to reach its tormentors. The
resulting din was deafening. Shann, avoiding by a hand’s
breadth a snap of jaws with power to crush his leg into bone shards
and mangled flesh, cuffed Togi across her nose. He buried his hands
in the fur about Taggi’s throat as he heaved the male
wolverine back from the struggling monster. He shouted orders, and
to his surprise Togi did obey, leaving him free to yank Taggi away.
Perhaps neither wolverine had expected the full fury of the
hound.
Though he suffered a slash across the back of one hand,
delivered by the over-excited Taggi, in the end Shann was able to
get both animals away from the hole, now corked so effectively by
the slavering thing. Thorvald was actually laughing as he watched
his younger companion in action.
“This ought to slow up the beetles! If they haul their
little doggie back, it’s apt to take out some of its rage on
them, and I’d like to see them dig around it.”
Considering that the monstrous head was swinging from side to
side in a collar of what seemed to be immovable rocks, Shann
thought Thorvald right. He went down on his knees beside the
wolverines, soothing them with hand and voice, trying to get them
to obey his orders willingly.
“Ha!” Thorvald brought his mud-stained hands
together with a clap, the sharp sound attracting the attention of
both animals.
Shann scrambled up, swung out his bleeding hand in the simple
motion which meant to hunt, being careful to signal down the valley
westward. Taggi gave a last reluctant growl at the hound, to be
answered by one of its ear-torturing howls, and then trotted off,
Togi tagging behind.
Thorvald caught Shann’s slashed hand, inspecting the
bleeding cut. From the aid packet at his belt he brought out powder
and a strip of protecting plasta-flesh to cleanse and bind the
wound.
“You’ll do,” he commented. “But
we’d better get out of here before full dark.”
The small paradise of the valley was no safe campsite. It could
not be so long as that monstrosity on the hillside behind them
roared and howled its rage to the darkening sky. Trailing the
wolverines, the men caught up with the animals drinking from a
small spring and thankfully shared that water. Then they pushed on,
not able to forget that somewhere in the peaks about must lurk the
Throg flyer ready to attack on sight.
Only darkness could not be held off by the will of men. Here in
the open there was no chance to use the torch. As long as they were
within the valley boundaries the phosphorescent bushes marked a
path. But by the coming of complete darkness they were once more
out in a region of bare rock.
The wolverines had killed a brace of skitterers, consuming hide
and soft bones as well as the meager flesh which was not enough to
satisfy their hunger. However, to Shann’s relief, they did
not wander too far ahead. And as the men stopped at last on a ledge
where a fall of rock gave them some limited shelter both animals
crowded in against the humans, adding the heat of their bodies to
the slight comfort of that cramped resting place.
From time to time Shann was startled out of a troubled half
sleep by the howl of the hound. Luckily that sound never seemed any
louder. If the Throgs had caught up with their hunter, and
certainly they must have done so by now, they either could not, or
would not free it from the trap. Shann dozed again, untroubled by
any dreams, to awake hearing the shrieks of clak-claks. But when he
studied the sky he was able to sight none of the cliff-dwelling
Warlockian bats.
“More likely they are paying attention to our friend back
in the valley,” Thorvald said dryly, rightly reading
Shann’s glance to the clouds overhead. “Ought to keep
them busy.”
Clak-claks were meat eaters, only they preferred their chosen
prey weak and easy to attack. The imprisoned hound would certainly
attract their kind. And those shrill cries now belling through the
mountain heights ought to draw everyone of their species within
miles.
“There it is!” Thorvald, pulling himself to his feet
by a rock handhold, gazed westward, his gaunt face eager.
Shann, expecting no less than a cruising Throg ship, searched
for cover on their perch. Perhaps if they flattened themselves
behind the fall of stones, they might be able to escape attention.
Yet Thorvald made no move into hiding. And so Shann followed the
line of the other’s fixed stare.
Before and below them lay a maze of heights and valleys, sharp
drops, and saw-toothed rises. But on the far rim of that section of
badlands shone the green of a Warlockian sea rippling on to the
only dimly seen horizon. They were now within sight of their
goal.
Had they had one of the exploration sky-flitters from the
overrun camp, they could have walked its beach sands within the
hour. Instead, they fought their way through a devil-designed
country for the next two days. Twice they had narrow escapes from
the Throg ship—or ships—which continued to sweep across
the rugged line of the coast, and only a quick dive to cover,
wasting precious time cowering like trapped animals, saved them
from discovery. But at least the hound did not bay again on the
tangled trail they left, and they hoped that the trap and the
clak-claks had put that monster permanently out of service.
On the third day they came down to one of those fiords which
tongued inland, fringing the coast. There had been no lack of
hunting in the narrow valleys through which they had threaded, so
both men and wolverines were well fed. Though the animals’
fur wore better than the now tattered uniforms of the men.
“Now where?” Shann asked.
Would he now learn the purpose driving Thorvald on to this
coastland? Certainly such broken country afforded good hiding, but
no better concealment than the mountains of the interior.
The Survey officer turned slowly around on the shingle, studying
the heights behind them as well as the angle of the inlet where the
wavelets lapped almost at their battered boot tips. Opening his
treasured map case, he began a patient checking of landmarks
against several of the strips he carried. “We’ll have
to get on down to the true coast.”
Shann leaned against the trunk of a conical branched mountain
tree, pulling absently at the shreds of wine-colored bark being
shed in seasonal change. The chill they had known in the upper
valleys was succeeded here by a humid warmth. Spring was becoming a
summer such as this northern continent knew. Even the fresh wind,
blowing in from the outer sea, had already lost some of the bite
they had felt two days before when its salt-laden mistiness had
first struck them.
“Then what’ll we do there?” Shann
persisted.
Thorvald brought over the map, his black-rimmed nail tracing a
route down one of the fiords, slanting out to indicate a lace of
islands extending in a beaded line across the sea.
“We head for these.”
To Shann that made no sense at all. Those
islands . . . why, they would offer less chance
of establishing a safe base than the broken land in which they now
stood. Even the survey scouts had given those spots of
sea-encircled earth the most cursory examination from the air.
“Why?” he asked bluntly. So far he had followed
orders because they had for the most part made sense. But he was
not giving obedience to Thorvald as a matter of rank alone.
“Because there is something out there, something which may
make all the difference now. Warlock isn’t an empty
world.”
Shann jerked free a long thong of loose bark, rolling it between
his fingers. Had Thorvald cracked? He knew that the officer had
disagreed with the findings of the team. He had been an unconvinced
minority of one who had refused to subscribe to the report that
Warlock had no native intelligent life and therefore was ready and
waiting for human settlement because it was technically an empty
world. But to continue to cling to that belief without a single
concrete proof was certainly a sign of mental imbalance.
And Thorvald was regarding him now with frowning impatience. You
were supposed to humor delusions, weren’t you? Only, could
you surrender and humor a wild idea which might mean your death? If
Thorvald wanted to go island-hopping in chance of discovering what
never had existed, Shann need not accompany him. And if the officer
tried to use force, well, Shann was armed with a stunner, and had,
he believed, more control over the wolverines. Perhaps if he merely
gave lip agreement to this project . . . Only
he didn’t believe, noting the light deep in those gray eyes
holding on him, that anybody could talk Thorvald out of this
particular obsession.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” The impatience
arose hotly in that demand.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Shann tried to temporize.
“You’ve had a lot of exploration experience; you should
know about such things. I don’t pretend to be any
authority.”
Thorvald refolded the map and placed it in the case. Then he
pulled at the sealing of his blouse, groping in an inner secret
pocket. He uncurled his fingers to display his treasure.
On his palm lay a coin-shaped medallion, bone-white but
possessing an odd luster which bone would not normally show. And it
was carved. Shann put out a finger, though he had a strange
reluctance to touch the object. When he did he experienced a
sensation close to the tingle of a mild electric shock. And once he
had made that contact, he was also impelled to pick up that disk
and examine it more closely.
The intricately carved pattern had been done with great delicacy
and skill, though the whorls, oddly shaped knobs, ribbon tracings,
made no connected design he could determine. After a moment or two
of study, Shann became aware that his eyes, following those twists
and twirls, were “fixed,” that it required a distinct
effort to look away from the thing. Feeling some of that same alarm
as he had known when he first heard the wailing of the Throg hound,
he let the disk fall back into Thorvald’s hold, even more
disturbed when he discovered that to relinquish his grasp required
some exercise of will.
“What is it?”
Thorvald restored the coin to his hiding place.
“You tell me. I can say this much, there is no listing for
anything even remotely akin to this in the Archives.”
Shann’s eyes widened. He absently rubbed the fingers which
had held the bone coin—if it was a coin—back and forth
across the torn front of his blouse. That
tingle . . . did he still feel it? Or was his
imagination at work again? But an object not listed in the
exhaustive Survey Archives would mean some totally new
civilization, a new stellar race.
“It’s definitely a fabricated article,” the
Survey officer continued. “And it was found on the beach of
one of those sea islands.”
“Throg?” But Shann already knew the answer to
that.
“Throg work—this?” Thorvald was
openly scornful. “Throgs have no conception of such art. You
must have seen their metal plates—those are the
beetle-heads’ idea of beauty. Have those the slightest
resemblance to this?”
“Then who made it?”
“Either Warlock has—or once had—a native race
advanced enough in a well-established form of civilization to
develop such a sophisticated type of art, or there have been other
visitors from space here before us and the Throgs. And the latter
possibility I don’t believe—”
“Why?”
“Because this was carved of bone or an allied substance.
We haven’t been quite able to identify it in the labs, but
it’s an organic material. It was found exposed to the weather
and yet it is in perfect condition, could have been carved any time
within the past five years. It has been handled, yes, but not
roughly. And we have come across evidences of no other
star-cruising races or species in this sector save ourselves and
the Throgs. No, I say this was made here on Warlock, not too long
ago, and by intelligent beings of a very high level of
civilization.”
“But they would have cities,” protested Shann.
“We’ve been here for months, explored all over this
continent. We’d have seen them or some traces of
them.”
“An old race, maybe,” Thorvald mused, “a very
old race, perhaps in decline, reduced to a remnant in numbers with
good reason to retire into hiding. No, we’ve discovered no
cities, no evidence of a native culture past or present. But
this—” he touched the front of his
blouse—“was found on the shore of an island. We may
have been looking in the wrong place for our natives.”
“The
sea . . . ” Shann
glanced with new interest at the green water surging in wavelets
along the edge of the fiord.
“Just so, the sea!”
“But scouts have been here for more than a year, one team
or another. And nobody saw anything or found any traces.”
“All four of our base camps were set inland, our
explorations along the coast were mainly carried out by flitter,
except for one party—the one which found this. And there may
be excellent local reasons why no native ever showed himself to us.
For that matter, they may not be able to exist on land at all, any
more than we could live without artificial aids in the
sea.”
“Now—?”
“Now we must make a real attempt to find them if they do
exist anywhere near here. A friendly native race could make all the
difference in the world in any struggle with the Throgs.”
“Then you did have more than the dreams to back you when
you argued with Fenniston!” Shann cut in.
Thorvald’s eyes were on him again. “When did you
hear that, Lantee?”
To his great embarrassment, Shann found himself flushing.
“I heard you, the day you left for Headquarters,” he
admitted, and then added in his own defense, “Probably half
the camp did, too.”
Thorvald’s gathering frown flickered away. He gave a snort
of laughter. “Yes, I guess we did rather get to the bellowing
point that morning. The dreams—” he came back to the
subject—“Yes, the dreams
were—are—important. We had their warning from the
start. Lorry was the First-In Scout who charted Warlock, and
he’s a good man. I guess I can break secret now to tell you
this his ship was equipped with a new experimental device which
recorded—well, you might call it an
‘emanation’—a radiation so faint its source could
not be traced. And it registered whenever Lorry had one of those
dreams. Unfortunately, the machine was very new, very much in the
untested stage, and its performance when checked later in the lab
was erratic enough so the powers-that-be questioned all its
readings. They produced a half dozen answers to account for that
tape, and Lorry only caught the signal as long as he was on a big
bay to the south.
“Then when two check flights came in later, carrying
perfected machines and getting no recordings, it was all written
off as a mistake in the first experiment. A planet such as Warlock
is too big a find to throw away when there was no proof of
occupancy. And the settlement boys rushed matters right
along.”
Shann recalled his own vivid dream of the skull-rock set in the
lap of water—this sea? And another small point fell into
place to furnish the beginning of a pattern. “I was asleep on
the raft when I dreamed about that skull-mountain,” he said
slowly, wondering if he were making sense.
Thorvald’s hand came up with the alert stance of Taggi on
a strong game scent.
“Yes, on the raft you dreamed of a skull-rock. And I of a
cavern with a green veil. Both of us were on water—water
which had an eventual connection with the sea. Could water be a
conductor? I
wonder . . . ” Once
again his hand went into his blouse. He crossed the strip of gravel
beach and dipped fingers into the water, letting the drops fall on
the carved disk he now held in his other hand.
“What are you doing?” Shann could see no purpose in
that.
Thorvald did not answer. He had pressed wet hand to dry now,
palm to palm, the coin cupped tightly between them. He turned a
quarter circle, to face the still distant open sea.
“That way.” He spoke with a new odd
tonelessness.
Shann stared into the other’s face. All the eager
alertness of only a moment earlier had been wiped away. Thorvald
was no longer the man he had known, but in some frightening way a
husk, holding a quite different personality. The younger Terran
answered his fear with an attack from the old days of rough
in-fighting in the Dumps of Tyr. He brought his right hand down
hard in a sharp chop across the officer’s wrists. The bone
coin spun to the sand and Thorvald stumbled, staggering forward a
step or two. Before he could recover balance Shann had stamped on
the medallion.
Thorvald whirled, his stunner drawn with a speed for which Shann
gave him high marks. But the younger man’s own weapon was
already out and ready. And he talked—fast.
“That thing’s dangerous! What did you do—what
did it do to you?”
His demand got through to a Thorvald who was himself again.
“What was I doing?” came a counter
demand.
“You were acting like you were mind-controlled.”
Thorvald stared at him incredulously, then with a growing spark
of interest.
“The minute you dripped water on that thing you
changed,” Shann continued.
Thorvald reholstered his stunner. “Yes,” he mused,
“why did I want to drip water on it? Something
prompted me . . . ”
He ran his still-damp hand up the angle of his jaw, across his
forehead as if to relieve some pain there. “What else did I
do?”
“Faced to the sea and said ‘that way,’”
Shann replied promptly.
“And why did you move in to stop me?”
Shann shrugged. “When I first touched that thing I felt a
shock. And I’ve seen mind-controlled people—” He
could have bitten his tongue for betraying that. The world of the
mind-controlled was very far from the life Thorvald and his kind
knew.
“Very interesting,” commented the other. “For
one of so few years you seem to have seen a lot, Lantee—and
apparently remembered most of it. But I would agree that
you’re right about this little plaything; it carries a danger
with it, being far less innocent than it looks.” He tore off
one of the fluttering scraps of rag which now made up his sleeve.
“If you’ll just remove your foot, we’ll put it
out of business for now.”
He proceeded to wrap the disk well in his bit of cloth, taking
care not to touch it again with his bare fingers while he stowed it
away.
“I don’t know what we have in this—a key to
unlock a door, a trap to catch the unwary. I can’t guess how
or why it works. But we can be reasonably sure it’s not just
some carefree maiden’s locket, nor the equivalent of a credit
to spend in the nearest bar. So it pointed me to the sea, did it?
Well, that much I am willing to allow. Maybe we’ll be able to
return it to the owner, after we learn who—or
what—that owner is.”
Shann gazed down at the green water, opaque, not to be pierced
to the depths by human sight. Anything might lurk there. Suddenly
the Throgs became normal when balanced against an unknown living in
the murky depths of an aquatic world. Another attack on the
Throg-held camp could be well preferred to such exploration as
Thorvald had in mind. Yet Shann did not voice any protest as the
Survey officer faced again in the same direction as the disk had
pointed him moments before.