Even as he looked, a vent opened in the side of the cone and a monstrous belch of vapor emerged. It formed a bulging cloud, completely opaque, that gathered, swelled, and rolled down the incline towards the river. Behind it was conflagration: a swath of blistered rock, shorn of its former veneer of life.
The cloud was large - he could see the top of it even as it dipped into the gully of the river several miles upstream. He heard the hiss of boiling water, and in a moment saw the cloud expand enormously as water vapor distended it.
The mountain trembled again, roused into action by the initial quake and now finished with the preliminaries. From the vent in its side poured a golden syrup, splashing down the smoking channel left by the cloud. Where it spread to touch the fringe of vegetation, flames erupted and smoke gouted up. The lava, like the gas, obliterated everything in its path except the ground itself.
Orn knew about this also. Perhaps the searching molten rock would solidify and stop before reaching the sea, but probably more would come, overriding the first mass as it cooled, until the entire island lay buried beneath it and all life was gone.
Fire now raged through the forest, charging the air with its odors. Minor tremors continued. Tiny animals fled the forest and milled on the beach, doomed.
Orn waded into the water, knowing he could not afford to wait longer. There was a chance that the ocean predators would be frightened or confused by the shocks, or even stunned, so that he could swim across with no more than the water to contend with. A chance - but he entertained no unrealistic hopes.
The water appeared calm from a distance, but this was illusory. The surface had been churned into ugly foam. Hidden objects banged into his feet and chafed his legs, and the violent currents beneath the froth tugged strenuously at his balance. He flapped his wings, fouling them in the dirty spray, and held his beak high - but for nothing. He was soon swept off his feet and dunked in the grainy liquid.
He swam, using his legs as ballast and rudder, while paddling messily with his wings. Aquatic birds had webbed feet, but his own were clawed and virtually useless for propulsion in the water. Everything was wrong for him; he was poorly structured for swimming and had to hold his head low lest he capsize. That interfered with visibility. His nictitating membranes protected his eyes from the salt spume, but the constant dousing inhibited his breathing. He was not enjoying himself.
Storm clouds gathered overhead and wind whipped savagely across the surface. Orn rode the growing swells, up and down, up and down, fighting for equilibrium and orientation. The gusts of air were warm, not cool, and carried the stifling fumes of the volcano. Substance descended from the storm above - not rain but particles of rock-ash that chipped away at his feathers and smeared his plumage dark. Only his acute sense of direction kept him facing the invisible mainland.
Then his feet banged into something solid. For a moment he thought he had made it across, but his vector sense reminded him that this was impossible. But he was also far from the island. A sand bar must have developed since the crossings of his ancestors, for there was no hint of shallow water here in his memory. Full grown, the prior crossers had been more powerful swimmers and had made competent surveys of the local geography; there was a firm image of deep water here. The contours of the land and island had changed, fuzzing their images, but the depth of the water had been stable.
He stood, and the ocean fell away around him while the windborne fragments pelted down. A ridge of land ascended from the waves, mottled with fragments of seaweed. No - this was no sand bar, though the bottom was not as deep as it had been at one time. Instead, the water was receding, laying bare the ocean floor.
He could walk to the other side, but he realized that the chances for his survival had just dropped again. To the earthquakes and volcanos had been added a third threat.
He trod upon an old-time coral reef, the shells now largely broken and compacted. Great sponges branched out of the crevices, and jellyfish lay sprawled helplessly. Most of the true fish had escaped with the water, but a few were wedged fatally in barnacle-encrusted declivities. Crabs scrambled frantically, their claws suddenly dead weights, and a starfish that had folded about a clam now found itself prey to circumstance.
This was a world less familiar to Orn, and despite the danger - or perhaps because he had given up hope of living when he realized what the dropping of the sea meant - he contemplated it avidly. There were many marine plants he had seldom tasted, even in memory, so many exotic forms of life. Many of them had changed little since his ancestral line left the water; others were quite new. He had so little time to live; he wanted to learn as much as he could before he lost the opportunity forever.
He had been picking his way along, and had made incidental progress toward the shore while he observed all this. Now he began to give way to his reflexes, despite the uselessness of this. Behind him it was coming, as he had known it would: a massive swell of water traveling better than ten times his own maximum running speed. Around his feet the level was rising, seeping him quietly. But the major wave was another matter.
The wave would crush him; there was no way he could get out of its range in time, nor had there been since the water dropped. But the blind instinct for survival swept through his body at that sight, and he had to yield to it. He flapped his wings and stretched his neck forward, putting all his strength into the sprint, running over the ragged coral without regard for his feet. He could hear it now, as the giant wave tripped over the shallow island shelf, looming higher and higher. It had exchanged forward momentum for elevation, but still closed the gap rapidly.
That slowing of pace as it gained height had not been clear in his memory. He had more time than he had supposed, though still not enough. He kept running.
Suddenly the mainland beach was there, and he was scrambling across it. He charged into the brush, leaping over what he could and tunneling through the rest, heedless of the plumage torn out in the process. It was growing dark; the shadow of the wave was enveloping him. The breeze was suddenly chill - and it moved toward the water.
Still he ran, over rocks, around trees, up and away from the shore. He had expected the leaning wall of water to fall on him before this, ending everything, but that doom hovered, hovered.
And fell. It struck so abruptly that he wasn't aware of it until he found himself caught up and hurled forward, completely inundated and helpless. It was as though he were drowning in a fierce ocean current - but as he was whirled about, he saw a landscape in the sky, falling sideways.
Then he was sinking through increasingly tenuous foam, losing support yet not really falling. He flapped his wings and felt froth splashing against them. His rump landed hard, and he clutched at foliage with his beak, afraid of being sucked back out to sea though the alternative was to be dashed against the ground and crushed.
But he had already landed, and was no longer moving. Somehow he had survived the blast, through no doing of his own.
The water continued to subside, leaving him on a green island. He was dizzy but whole - and on the mainland! He looked about.
He was perched on the stout upper foliage of a broken-topped fir, six times his own height above the ground.
IV - VEG
They were in a cavern - not a natural one. Solid rock had been melted to form an irregular chamber, in whose wall was set the receiving focus. Below that entrance were scattered boxes of supplies, as though they had simply been dumped without supervision.
Just the way the seven of them had been, Veg thought. It was a pretty unimpressive way to begin a mission.
'No receiver, since this is what might be termed a probability shift,' Cal observed. He seemed to have worked it all out already. He always knew the score before the game got started.
'The effect would resemble that of a spurting firehose: it can affect the volume in front of the nozzle, but not very much behind it. They must have fired a heat-beam through and melted out a cylindrical cavity. Then supplies, never risking any men...'<
br />
The mantas were already spreading out. One had found a drill hole projecting straight up, and was shining its eye into it; another poked into the dark horizontal recess.
'But where did all the stone go?' Aquilon asked. 'Solid or melted, it can't just disappear.'
'Not if they reverse the flow and suck it out through the aperture - or rather, let its own gaseous pressure drive it through. A ticklish operation, but feasible, it would seem.'
Veg followed the manta - Hex, he was sure - beyond the tumble of supplies, his flash beam flicking about. A yard-high tube curved away into darkness. 'No sense sitting around until our air runs out,' he called back.
Aquilon joined him, seeming to agree. They were committed; it was pointless to procrastinate. A new adventure beckoned.
'That would be the corkscrew leading to the surface,' Cal said. 'The small vertical shaft would have been intended to provide air, but of course that failed. I imagine they used it to fire up the observation rocket instead, then let it seal, over again. There's a fair amount of work ahead before we leave this region.'
Veg moved along, knowing Cal was probably right, but disinclined to dawdle while the tunnel lay unexplored. He did not suffer from claustrophobia, but did prefer open range when available. He slung the flash around his neck and proceeded on hands and knees. He could hear Aquilon following, and wished he had a pretext to glance back at her in that position. She was a well-structured woman.
The passage curved steadily to the left. He soon lost his orientation, retaining only the nebulous impression that he had navigated at least one complete circle. His knees were chafed; there was not room to go on hands and feet. But with Aquilon behind (and not complaining about her knees), he could not hesitate. Hex had long since disappeared ahead, managing to travel nicely in the confined tube.
The loops were interminable. The officer, noodlebrain, had said something about using a borer to cut through the rock, but he hadn't hinted at the distance! Veg was beginning to feel constrained.
At last he came up to the manta Hex, who was humped before a metal barrier. This was a plug that filled the tunnel almost completely, rimmed by a rubberlike flashing that squeezed tight against the circular wall. In the center of the plug was a dial and knob resembling the face of a combination lock. That was all.
'What's the matter, slowpoke?' Aquilon inquired. It meant nothing negative and nothing positive, but he felt a certain happy tension whenever she addressed him, especially with a friendly teasing comment like this.
'Can't get around Hex,' he said, straightening so that there was room for her to squirm up beside him. She did, moving lithely - but the process still entailed a certain amount of contortion and physical abrasion. As if anything as rounded and resilient as Aquilon's torso could abrade in any but an esthetic sense. Esthetic? Least of all that!
'That's not Hex,' she said. 'That's Circe.'
What a woman she was! Since he had met her, Veg had lost interest in the fleshy shells that masqueraded as human femininity. He had not realized how deeply Aquilon affected him until they had parted, after Nacre. On Nacre, home planet of the mantas, he had bantered with her in the midst of mystery and danger, thinking it no more than a passing fancy; but back on Earth when the trio split up in order to protect the growing mantas -
'Wake up, vegetable,' she said, snapping her fingers under his nose. Even those were slender and shapely. 'I said you had the wrong manta.'
'You're crazy,' he mumbled, embarrassed at the chain of thought her nearness had started. Yet what other thoughts were possible when she was this close?
'And you claimed you knew your own manta!' She dismissed the matter as though it were settled (as probably it was; he hadn't identified the manta that surely) and peered ahead. 'Must be an air-lock.' Her lovely face with its tangled blonde hair was so close to his that her breath caressed his cheek. The skin stretched over the delicate curve of her chin, close enough to kiss. She lay on her left side, he on his right.
Dolt that he was, he hadn't realized how strongly he felt about her until that government agent, Subble, had tricked him into the admission, after beating him in a fair fight...
'There must be some way to open it,' she continued, oblivious to his turbulent yearnings. 'Is that a combination lock?'
'Maybe.' There had been no element of flirtation in her contact. She was unaware of the electrifying effect of a perfect breast as it touched a man, even sheathed as hers was by layers of clothing. Once it had seemed that she returned his developing interest, but obviously that had passed. She did not need to say a thing; her indifference to his maleness was manifest in so many little ways. He was a friend, not a man friend.
'Let me try it.' She brought her right arm up, threading it between them and reached for the dial. As she twisted, Veg was treated to a scenic view of her right breast flexing under the coverall in response to the motion of her arm.
A woman with a mind, yes. But not one of the pinched genius types. He had regarded the gender with a certain veiled contempt in earlier years, to be appreciated in purely physical fashion - until he discovered in Aquilon what a woman could be. A complete woman. She had said she did not eat meat any more...
Yet of course he had little to offer a real woman. He appreciated intellect without being intellectual himself, much as a working man appreciated wealth without possessing it. And no windfall income could rectify that.
There was a click, and Circe moved aside somewhat. 'I've got it,' Aquilon exclaimed. 'It's not really a combination, just a kind of safety catch. I'll have it open in a moment.'
Her eyes, as she peered up, were gray-blue; her lips, as she talked, compelling. 'Moment,' she had said - that word like two kisses strung together.
'Careful.' It was Cal, behind them, startling them both 'Remember, we're under water.'
Aquilon's hand froze on the knob. 'Water!' she exclaimed, as though she hadn't known.
'That's right, I forgot!' Veg said, taken aback. He imagined a torrent of salty liquid smashing in, washing them down the tube as though it were a drainpipe, swirling them in among the boxes of supplies like so many drowned rats. What would they do without Cal's innate caution?
'That would be the borer,' Cal said, shining his own light between them. Grotesque shadows blotted out most of the beam. 'Probably it is watertight, and of course we'll use it as an exit-lock, once we have our diving suits on. But it would be wise to verify - '
'The borer?' Aquilon asked.
'My dear, I fear you were not paying proper attention to that attendant's lecture,' Cal said reprovingly, and her fair skin colored slightly in the angled beam. Veg saw it then: if she had real interest in either man, it was Cal. Cal, with his brain, was the trouble. A woman without a mind looked for a strong man or a handsome one; a woman with a mind looked for an intelligent man. The kind of woman Veg could appreciate was also the kind who would naturally prefer Cal. Cal was only small and weak when you looked at him, never when you listened to him.
The borer, as Cal explained for Aquilon's benefit (and for Veg's too - he had not paid proper attention to Noodlebrain's lecture either), was a tractorlike device with a diamond-surfaced bit that ground into rock and pulverized it. The dust and chunks were blown back down through the tube for disposal. In this instance the borer had been stopped the moment its nose projected into the water, so as not to flood the passage. It could be entered by reopening the sealed exhaust section, and also by the service gate set into its side. The dial in its rear would indicate internal pressure and the proper setting would activate the water pump and evacuate the interior as required.
In the end Veg had to back away so Cal could pass him and Aquilon and Circe and come up to manipulate the control. Veg felt as though he had been demoted - but it was good that someone here knew what he was doing! The thought of all that sea water pouring in -
'Clear,' Cal announced. He clicked the dial. 'Should come open now -'
It didn't. Cal manipulated the knob again, puzzled,
but still nothing happened.
'Must be jammed,' Veg said. 'Want me to - ?'
'There's no handhold,' Aquilon pointed out. 'No way to yank. Unless the dial can be -'
She was right. He remembered the featureless wall of metal.
And obviously it would be unwise to tug too hard at the knob. He pictured delicate wiring tearing, tumblers jamming, so that the group was sealed in permanently behind a ruined mechanism. A fine report to take back to Earth: 'Sorry - the door was stuck!'
But if the connection to Earth was out of phase, or whatever that problem was, they could stay cooped up in the worm-bore for weeks or months. How much canned air did they have?
'I'm afraid Veg is right,' Cal said after another fruitless minute. 'It is jammed. It should open but it doesn't.'
'We could try it again in a few hours,' Aquilon said without enthusiasm.
'And let it rust even worse?' Veg demanded. He put one large hand on Aquilon's slim ankle and tugged gently. 'Back off, both of you. And Circe too. I'll get it open!'
Of Man and Manta Omnibus Page 22
