The hunting party set off and Hook went with them. He still had a reasonable supply of ammunition for the Zable-White and he had not used the Tonota since showing off to his captors.
They trudged on, and Hook had to slog more and more as he didn't want to run the ag-pak right out.
Half a dozen of the hideous brightly-scaled bog-lizards were captured and put into the nets ready for transport. No carts would run here. The sun shone. They moved out into a pool and searched the surface for the tell-tale snouts. The lizards were almost as large as alligators, and twice as fierce. A cry went up, and the hunting group threw their nets. A wild thrashing in the water took all their attention.
Then — with a heart-stopping suddenness, a fernman screeched and twisted into the jaws of the lizard. The great jaws closed.
Hook glared up.
Over the tops of the nearest ferns a cloud of Curlmen on their ag-paks drifted, shining in the sun, firing down with rifles. The bullets scythed into the water, exploding in gouts of steam. The lizard was struck along with the man it had grasped. Torca gave a great yell.
"Run, my friends, run!"
Everyone set off splashing through the muddy water.
Bullets splashed and pinked all about them.
Absolute terror held the Voydun in a grip they could not break.
"For our sins!" screamed Torca.
Hook felt a blow across his back and stumbled forward. He was not wounded; a chunk of shoulder blade from a smashed Voydun had struck him.
He skidded in the muddy water, slipped, fell. A giant lizard opened its alligator jaws, bearing down on him. He saw the scarlet mouth, the yellow teeth, the gleam of black eyes in that squat scaled head.
The Curlmen above were enjoying their fun, shooting down on the defenceless Voydun below. Hook slipped and flopped in the ooze and the jagged jaws of the alligator-lizard crunched down on him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THESE ferocious jaws clenching down onto Ryder Hook's legs were equipped by a benificient nature with six-inch long fangs, hard curved yellow fangs that would puncture through Hook's flesh and blood despite all the half-boosted strengths of his body. And yet if he used the Zable-White in his fists now and blew the lizard's head off the Curlmen up there would know at once — at once for they would never overlook the obvious — that Hook was still alive. And then the powerguns would blaze in a cleansing fire and whiff all the pool and the ferns and the lizards and the fernmen — and Ryder Hook — into black oblivion.
Up to now they had not realised a Homo sapiens ran with the fernmen, and Hook wanted to keep it that way.
The fanged jaws crunched down on him.
He rammed the Zable-White vertically into those jaws muzzle uppermost. The butt plate spread the force and the massive closing snap halted; had he shoved the rifle in muzzle down it would probably have torn clean through the skin and membrane and flesh covering the wedge-shaped lower jaw. As it was, the lizard choked on the rifle and the jaws remained jammed open.
Hook dived flat half in and half across the water and made it to the bank where ferns closed above him.
Only an optical sight would catch him, for his skull-mounted anti-homotrop gear baffled the devices in the hands of the hunters' techs.
He glared up and the murder in his face mirrored and magnified that in the gloating faces of the Curlmen above.
"Stinking gonils!" he said, raving, cursing, his hand now really shaking over the butt of the holstered Tonota. But he did not fire. If he shot all this hunting party there would be another one, and this time a fiercely-determined foray to obliterate him once and for all. And yet — and yet he did not cower in cover to save his own skin. It was not for his own safety that he refrained from shooting back.
Had he been alone he would have blasted the lot of them from star city, have battled them all from Stellopolis as they came for him.
Torca blundered splashing into the Shallows and hauled himself up beneath the ferns.
"You have lost your weapon, Hook."
Torca appeared to Hook amazingly calm.
"Yes."
"They have killed enough of us now, and will fly away. We know their habits, and our sins have been paid for for a time."
The screams and shrieks faded as the fernmen reached their illusory safety, all unknowing that the ferns could never conceal them from a homotropic device. But the Curlmen were hauling off. Hook could hear them laughing and recounting some of the more splendid passages of the recent game. They were satisfied that they had instilled enough fear in the Voydun and had killed enough to provide a highly delectable session for the Exper. Continuous hunting was in their view necessary, for fresh people wished to experience both the thrill of killing and the horror of being killed at one and the same time.
Hook studied Torca. A little more research . . .
"You were filled with fear, in the pool, when the starmen were slaying our friends, Torca?"
Torca's brilliant bone-hooded eyes filled with pain.
"I was frightened, Hook, for is not that a part of the punishment we must endure?"
"It is not, as I have told you." Hook was as well aware as any galactic wanderer of the dangers of interfering with any culture, particularly a primitive culture. Taboos and beliefs were there; questioning them, interfering with them, could get you dead real quick. "You must have also felt that you did not like the starmen when they killed our friends?"
"That is true. I do not like the starmen."
Other fernmen splashed wearily out of the pool. The flying hunters whirled away, going back to the matra block and from thence to Stellopolis. They'd have a big party tonight, in the artificial day-and-night cycle of star city. A boy splashed up with his arm broken and held to his chest by the other. He was not crying; but his alien face twisted in pain.
"And is that all you feel about this murder affair, Torca? Just that you do not like the killers?"
"The Living Sap demands we live, and the Dying Sap demands we die —"
"But in your own time! Not because these curds come down and slaughter you!"
"It has always been so —"
Only for a couple of hundred years, Hook knew; but Torca would scarcely be expected to understand that he was a descendant of ancestors who had been brought to this dismal part of the world for sport and games. Doubtless the Curlmen had had other sporty planets to orbit before this. He read them as a people who loving luxury would always take the easy way out. Torca down here and his fernmen, hunted and slaughtered, took the road of fatalism.
"If I blew dried fern spores in your face, Torca, and you sneezed, you would not like that?"
"No. We use the dried spores and that would be a waste."
"But — would you dislike that more or less than seeing your friends killed?"
Torca shook his head. "I would not like either."
Hook felt a suspicion flowering in him. Why should not the Curlmen have implanted a command so that the fernmen and their children were incapable of hate? Hatred would hamper the enjoyment of the Curlmen. If he could get a good old scarlet hatred going he might rupture the Exper game.
The wounded were collected and carried back. The dead, also, were collected and brought in for the rituals demanded by the Sap of Death. Later the fernmen returned for the lizards. Hook got his Zable-White back. It was unharmed. He hefted the rifle and he looked up at the bright sky, and he pondered,
Even if by some trickery he convinced the Voyduns to hate the killers from space, that would not do what he wanted. He had at first thought that if the recording instruments could be swamped by concentrated doses of hatred, the fun and games would go out of the Exper. But he remembered Lars Cu-Foylty, as he remembered Inlander and Andrews and the other Curlmen of Stellopolis. They were accustomed to being hated, and their own self-sufficient pride would tell them how superior they were; hatred would not touch them. They were so smug, up there in their star city, lording it over these poor miserable creatures in the bogs below.
There were many other areas of Voydun that would be beautiful and marvellous places in which to live. Even the fernmen with their splayed flat feet could live more happily in a pleasant climate. They'd have to be near ferns, for a start, with the concomitant reassurance of the bogs and water; but gradually they'd move to more congenial surroundings, and they'd find forests that were not scarlet and jagged and repellent, and they'd build a culture of which any race could be proud.
All that was mere fanciful dreaming until the Curlmen of star city were off their backs.
So confident, so puffed with pride, so conscious of their superiority were the Curlmen. They'd treated Terifia and himself with that condescending patronising air that so infuriated a man. They knew they were envied in many parts of the galaxy for their luxury and their ways of life that gave them so much pleasure, and which they could sell to distinguished guests, providing them with the ecstatic spiritual convulsions of the Exper game. The inhabitants of star city were a supercilious disdainful bunch of bastards.
The humbleness of the Voydun infuriated Ryder Hook. He, the galactic adventurer to whom no man presented a problem, who cared not a single damn for a single soul — with the exception of Shaeel — found himself emotionally caught up with the patient fernmen and he hated every minute of it.
The situation had subtly changed for Ryder Hook and now he sweated out the days until the summer solstice gathering. At last the tribe set off deep into the heart of the bogs, and they carried out their primitive and pitiful attempts at covering their trail. A homotropic device would reck nothing of the careful wiping out of the marks of the tribe's passage.
The gathering convened on a boggy island in the centre of a massive area runneled with waterways and smothered with giant ferns. Enormous monsters cavorted in the pools, snorting and coughing with menace, and the way lay through dangers that brought the Zable-White into action more than once. But the tribes gathered. The boggy island contained at its heart a rocky outcrop, sheer-sided, steep, and at its centre a vast hollow worn from the weathered rock. Here, under cover of the ferns and of trees, the tribes met.
Hook took stock of all that went on, and, although fascinated by the bartering, by the dancing — huge ludicrous dancing on massive flat feet — and by the engagements that were made and troths that were plighted, by the contests of skills, by all the colourful activity, he fretted for the time when the speeches would be made and his time would have come.
"I have spoken to the other fernmasters, Hook. You are regarded with some amazement. Never before has a starman come among us."
"I hope you made it clear I am not a starman of the kind who fly above you and kill you."
"They accept that, Hook, for I have told them of what you have done."
Hook discovered that the fernmasters believed they would not be subjected to the divine wrath of the Sap of Death whilst they were gathered here. Never had they been attacked by the starmen when gathered in the great summer meeting. "There's always a first time," grunted Hook. But the chances of an attack on the gathered tribes was slender — and that made Hook annoyed. There'd never be a better opportunity for his plan to work. He had a plan. A weak, fearful, fragile little plan; but it was all he had. After the dispersal of the tribes, to make that plan work would be much harder than making it work now, with the tribes gathered under his intolerant eye.
Ryder Hook spoke to the assembled fernmen. Men, women, children, they clustered on the rocks amid the ferns, and all their brilliant bone-hooded eyes regarded him as he stood on the central rock with its carvings and hieroglyphs and lifted his arms and addressed them.
He began with a preamble in which he extolled the virtue of the fernmen. He told them a little of the galaxy and led them gently into an understanding that the little chips of icy fire they called the stars were suns, like Purlon Major, their own sun, and that many peoples lived on the worlds dancing around those suns. "There are men and women like you — like me — out there. I am just an ordinary man. The starmen are just ordinary men. They have not been sent by the Sap of Death to chastise you." He went on to drive into their skulls the facts he had observed, of their daily lives, of the help they gave one another, of their dislike of death and of those who caused death in other men.
He dealt gently with them, for they could not be expected to understand everything at once. But he kept hammering away.
The meet would last a full sixteen days.
In that time Hook by public oratory and by private discussion at least gave the Voydun a better understanding of their world, their place in that world, and the star city that floated so serenely by over their heads. There were many who did not believe; there were many who would not believe. Hook knew he was running out of time.
One comfort he had and a very real comfort it was, was that they would not burn him as a heretic. They listened. The Sap of Life could not command them to take another person's life. They were independent enough to want to listen and make up their own minds.
Their gentle approach to life when life impinged on other people made them give him a full and sympathetic hearing. It would be his fault if he failed. It was all up to Ryder Hook.
"When you slay a monster of the swamps, because it is going to kill and eat you or your women or your children, when you trap a lizard for its flesh and its scales, when you fish, do you gloat and glee over killing? Do you joy in the agony and pain you cause that which you kill?"
Shouts broke out at this from the multitudes clustered on the fern-bright rocks. They shouted, shocked at the idea, contemptuous of any idea that Hook might think them joyful at slaying living life.
"Would you dislike a person who killed to give himself pleasure?"
They howled at this, and beat their flat feet against the rocks, and some danced up and down. They understood this well enough.
Torca spoke for them all.
"Such a person would be beneath contempt. He would be a null-thing, a nobody, less than the offal trodden into the slime."
"Beneath contempt!"
"Aye!" they roared back.
Hook left them shouting and arguing among themselves, for this kind of debate provided stronger drink than wine to their meetings. He had given up on creating hatred. He had thought to arouse their feelings of contempt for the starmen; but this reaction proved stronger than all. The fernmen felt a pity, a repudiation, a disdain, for the very idea.
Ryder Hook decided it was time he activated the final stages of this weak and fragile plan. There would never be a better chance than now. He felt a great and nauseous horror that many of his friends would be killed. But he could in all humility see no other way. And one clean final cauterisation would in the end prove more merciful than a long drawn-out campaign.
Ryder Hook made up his mind. He took his rifle and his energy gun and in his old safety-suit, now much bedraggled, he went off a-hunting on his own account.
His ag-pak provided enough power to fly him back to the area where he and Terifia had been attacked by Bunji's goons, and he found the diamond-shaped skeeter still neatly parked beyond the clump of giant ferns. The little craft opened to his loving ministrations with tools taken from his boot and he ducked inside. The twin cones of the central bubble housed a compact control cabin and a small area containing living quarters sufficient for the city-to-planet hops required. The big freighter-globes which carried the skeeters down onplanet would be filled with ore or whatever the Curlmen required from the planet and transport it up to star city. Hook checked the controls and then pre-flighted the section and switched on the various view screens.
Over the speakers a burst of local air-traffic came in, and he sorted that out with a spaceman's automatic shuffling of coded words, strings of figures, vectors, all the technical necessities of handling craft. He even raised a grimace that might have been a smile.
"Globe Ten to P.A. Nine. We are making planetfall."
"Check, Globe Ten. We have you."
Hook routed his sensors through to Glob
e Ten and then he chuckled. The Curlmen had sent a freighter globe down to pick up whatever it was this time out, and the globe was touching down less than ten kilometres away. There would be other globes out and he would have waited; the wait was curtailed.
The skeeter lifted and whined off towards freighter globe Ten.
The globular craft would not actually make contact with the planetary surface but would send out its fleet of skeeters from the ports pocking that smooth and curving hull. Very quickly Hook found himself flying over the hovering globe and could see the string of skeeters lacing away like beads.
The skeeter was equipped with a simple flamer up front, hardly a weapon, more an agricultural tool. Hook warmed the circuits and then triggered a burst directly at the massive globe hovering beneath him. His dive carried him on and past and he deliberately let them get a good look at him. He was taking an infernal chance, he was well aware of that.
The blast from the globe scorched all along the ventral cone of his skeeter.
The little craft swooped up in the air, flopped over onto her back, slid down. She hit the soggy ground with entirely too much momentum and the residual energy knocked Hook across the cramped cabin. The blow had little effect on his body; but he shook his head and cursed. They'd swatted him out of the sky too quickly.
He opened a channel and risked a further shot; over the air he could hear them yelling about some maniac. He turned the gain up full and shouted: "You monkey's uncles are the maniacs! Tell Lars Cu-Foylty there's unfinished business down here! Tell him I'll shoot his guts out this time, for sure."
Hook burst open the canopy and clawed out. The little skimmer in its hatchway flipped up to his frantic stab at the emergency button. His own ag-pak was just about finished. He had to get away from the skeeter before they melted her down. The little skimmer soared away. It was merely a flat round plate something over two metres in diameter, with a shallowly rounded bottom. There were foot stirrups atop and Hook stood there, half crouched, dragging out the clumsy flare-gun from its bracket. The flare gun was designed as a last resort to give a position for rescue, if the skimmer radio was smashed.
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