by Andre Norton
“The plains people have always been afraid of the Blue.”
“But not for any reason such as monsters, for they do talk of those giant killer birds and every other known natural menace.”
“Which means—?”
“That if these things were alive only a short time ago, historically speaking, say a century or so in the past, they might have been confined to underground places such as this, known only to victims trapped here.”
“And that some three-eye could be waitin’ right around the next bend now?” Logan got to his feet and brushed sand from his hands. “That isn’t the most cheerful news in the world?”
“I could be wrong.” But Hosteen was not going to relax any vigilance on that count. And how much advantage would an antiperso grenade give him over sudden death watching through three eyes?
They went on down the beach at a slower pace, using the torch on every dark spot before them, alert to any sound. Yet the lap of the water, the crunch of their boots on the coarse gravel was all they heard.
So far none of those shadows had concealed any further openings. But they were well away from the wharf when Logan again caught at Hosteen’s touch hand, directing the beam higher on the wall.
“Somethin’ moved—up there!”
Out into the path of the light flew a winged creature uttering a small, mewling cry. The light brought into vivid life yellow wings banded with white.
“Feefraw!” Logan named one of the common berry-feeding birds to be found along any mountainside. “But what is it doing in here?”
“It could be showing us a way out.” Hosteen aimed his light straight for the spot from which the bird had come. There was an opening deeper than any of the shallow crevices they had discovered so far. The feefraw must have gotten into the mountain somewhere, perhaps down this very passage.
The bird circled around in the path of the beam, and now, as if guided by the light, went back to the hole above, where it settled down on the edge, still mewling mournfully.
“Back door?” Logan suggested.
“No harm in trying it.”
An advantage of that hole was that it certainly did not look large enough to accommodate the bulk of any creature with a skull as big as the one they had found. One could travel that road without fearing a monster lurking behind every rock ahead. Hosteen tucked the torch into the front of his shirt and began to climb toward that promising niche.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
T
hey stood together in the opening of another cave. Could they hope by the evidence of the bird that it was the mouth of a passage, a passage giving upon light, air, and the clean outer world?
If this was a passage, it was not a smoothed, coated one, made ready for use by the Unknowns. Here there was no black coating on the walls, only the rough purple-red of the native stone. But there was a way before them, and as they started, the feefraw cried and fluttered along behind as if drawn by the torch light.
Unhappily the way did not slope upward but ran straight, in some places so narrow that they had to turn sidewise and scrape through between jutting points of rock. But the air was a moving current, and it lacked the strange quality of that in the alien ways.
Logan sniffed again. “Not too good.”
It was back, the musky taint that had been strong before they came out into the cavern of the river. Musky taint, and damp—yet Hosteen was sure they had not circled back. They could not have returned to the beach beyond the wharf.
The feefraw had continued to flutter behind. Now its mewling became a mournful wail, and it flew with blind recklessness between the two men and vanished ahead down the passage. Hosteen pushed the pace as they came out into a gray twilight. He snapped off the torch, advanced warily, and looked down onto a scene so weird that for a moment he could almost believe he was caught in a dream nightmare.
They were perched in a rounded pocket in the wall of another cavern—but a cavern with such dimensions that perhaps only an aerial survey could chart it. Here, too, was water—streams, ponds, even a small lake. But the water was housed between walls. The floor of the cavern as far as he could see in the grayish light, was a giant game board. Walled squares enclosed a pond and a small scrap of surrounding land, or land through which a stream wandered. For what purpose? There were no signs of cultivated vegetation such as a farm field might show.
“Pens.” Logan’s inspiration clicked from possibility to probability.
Those geometrically correct enclosures could be pens—like the home corrals of a holding in the plains. But pens to confine what—and why?
They squatted together trying to note any sign of movement in the nearest enclosures. The vegetation there was coarse, reedy stuff, as pallidly gray as the light, or low-growing plants with thick, unwholesome-looking fleshy leaves. The whole scene was repellent, not enticing as the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had been.
“This has been here a long time,” Logan observed. “Look at that wall there—”
Hosteen sighted on the section Logan indicated. The walls had collapsed, giving access to two other enclosures. Yes, and beyond was another tumbled wall. The pens, if pens they had been, were no longer separated. He stood up and unhooked the distance lenses from his belt. The light was poor, but perhaps he could see what lay beyond their immediate vicinity.
He swept the glasses slowly across the territory from right to left. Pens, water, growing stuff, the same as those that lay below them. There was a difference in the type of vegetation in several places, he thought. And one or two of the enclosures were bare and desertlike, either by design or the failure of the odd “crop” once grown there.
The walls were not the only evidence of once purposeful control, Hosteen discovered, as his distance lenses caught a shadowy pile at the far left. It was a building of some sort, he believed, and said as much to Logan. The other, taking the lenses in turn, confirmed his guess.
“Head for that?” he wanted to know.
It was a logical goal. At the same time, surveying those “pens,” Hosteen was aware of a strange reluctance to venture down into the walled squares and oblongs, to force a way through the sickly and sinister-looking growth they held. And Logan put the same squeamishness into words.
“Don’t like to trail through that somehow—”
Hosteen took back the glasses and studied the distant building. The murky dusk of the cavern’s atmosphere made it somehow unsubstantial when one attempted to pin down a definite line of wall or a roof or even the approximate size of the structure. This was like trying to see clearly an object that lay beyond a misty, water-splashed window. And perhaps that was part of the trouble—the dank air here was not far removed from fog.
There was certainly no sign of any movement about the place, just as there was none in the pens, save the ripple of some wandering stream. Hosteen did not believe that intelligence lingered here, though perhaps other life might. And the building might not only explain the purpose of the cavern but also show them some form of escape. Those who had built this place had surely had another mode of entrance than the narrow, ragged rock fault that had led the settlers in.
“We’ll try to reach that.” When he voiced those words, Hosteen was surprised at his own dubious tone.
Logan laughed. “Devil-devil country,” he commented. “I’d like it better takin’ this one with some of our boys backin’ our play. Let’s hope our long-toothed, three-eyed whatsit isn’t sittin’ down there easy-like just waitin’ for supper to walk within grabbin’ range, and me without even a knife to do any protestin’ about bein’ the main course. Waitin’ never made a thing easier though. Shall we blast off for orbit?”
He swung over the lip of the drop with Hosteen following. Their boots thudded into the loose soil as they fell free for the last foot or so and found themselves in one of the walled patches where the barriers were at least ten feet tall. Had it not been for broken areas, they might not have been able to make their way from one pocket to the next, for
what remained of the walls was slick-smooth.
Twice they had to form human ladders to win out of pens where the boundaries were still intact. And in one of those they discovered another bony remnant from the past—a skull topping a lace of vertebra and ribs, the whole forming skeletal remains of a creature Hosteen could not identify. There was a long, narrow head with a minute brain pan, the jaws tapering to a point, in the upper portion of which was still socketed a horn, curving up.
Logan caught at that and gave it a twist. It broke loose in his hand, and he held aloft a wicked weapon some ten inches long, sharp as any yoris fang and probably, in its day, even more dangerous.
“Another whatsit.”
“Someone was collecting,” Hosteen guessed, walking around that rack of bones. He thought that was the reason for the pens—the water. Just as the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had represented a botanical collection culled from at least a hundred different worlds for their beauty and fragrance, here another collection had been kept—reptiles, animals—who knew? This could have existed as some sort of zoo or perhaps stockyard. Yet where the gardens had flourished over the centuries or eons after the disappearance of the gardeners, this had not.
“We ought to be glad of that,” was Logan’s quick reply to the Terran’s comment. “I don’t fancy bein’ hunted when I can’t do any markin’ up in return. This would make a good huntin’ trophy.” He balanced the horn in his hand, then thrust its point deep into the empty sheath where his knife had once ridden. “Bet Krotag’s never seen anythin’ like it.”
“Those broken walls—” Hosteen sat side by side with his half-brother on the unbreached one of the skeleton enclosure. “Suppose whoever was in charge here left suddenly—”
“And the stock got hungry and decided to do somethin’ about it?” Logan asked. “Could be. But just think of things that could smash through somethin’ as tough as this!” He slapped his hand on the surface under him. “That would be like seein’ a crusher alive, wild, and rarin’ to blast! Glad we came late—this would be no place to ‘first ship’ when that breakout was goin’ on.”
They kept on their uneven course over walls and through pens. The tablets of emergency rations they had chewed from time to time gave them energy and put off the need for sleep. But Hosteen knew that there was a point past which it was dangerous to depend upon that artificial strength, and they were fast approaching the limit. If they could find refuge in the building ahead, then they could hole up for a space, long enough to get normal rest. Otherwise, the bolstering drug could fail at some crucial moment and send them into helpless collapse.
On top of the last wall they paused again, while Hosteen turned the beam of the torch on the waiting building. Between their present perch and that there was a line of slim, smooth posts set in the earth. But if they had been put there to support a fence, the rest of that barrier had long since disappeared. And as far as the two explorers could see, the way to the wedge-shaped door in the massive two-story structure was open.
Slipping from the wall, they were well out toward those posts when Hosteen halted and flung out an arm quickly to catch at Logan. Memories of safeguards on remote worlds stirred. Because one could not see a barrier was no reason to believe there was none there. If the creatures confined back in the pens had burst through the walls, the keepers of this place must have possessed some form of defense and protection to handle accidents. A force-field now, generated between those poles, he warned. Logan nodded.
“Could be.” He caught up a stone and hurled it through the space directly before them. It struck with a sullen clunk on the wall beside the door of the building, passing the pole area without hindrance.
“If it ever was there—it must be gone now.”
The evidence was clear, yet a part of Hosteen walked in dread as they advanced. Instinct, rained and tested many times in the past, instinct that was a part of that mysterious inborn gift making him one with the team, argued now against this place. He fought that unease as he stepped between the poles.
His hands went to his ears. He cowered, threw himself forward, and rolled across the hard ground in an agony that filled his head with pain, that was vibration, noise, something alien enough so that he could not put name to it! The world was filled with a piercing screaming, which tore at his body, cell by living cell. Hosteen had known physical pain and mental torment in the past, but nothing had ever reached this point—not in a sane world.
When he was again conscious, he lay in the dark, huddled up, hardly daring to breathe lest that punishment return. Then, at last, he moved stiffly, levered himself up, conscious of light at his back. He looked over his shoulder at a wedge-shaped section of gray. Wedge-shaped! The door in the building! He had reached the building then. But what had happened? He forced himself to remember, though the process hurt.
The pole barrier—a sonic, a sonic of some sort! Logan—Logan had been with him! Where was he now?
Hosteen could not make it to his feet; the first attempt made his head whirl. He crawled on his hands and knees back into the open and found Logan on the ramp that led to the doorway, moaning dully, his eyes closed, his hands to his head.
“What was it?” They lay side by side now within the first room of the building. Logan got out the question in a hoarse croak.
“A sonic, I think.”
“That makes sense.” Sonics were known to frawn herders, but the devices were not in general good favor. Such broadcasters had to be used by a master and were not easily controlled. The right degree of sound waves could keep a herd in docile submission, a fraction off and you had a frenzied stampede or a panic that could send half your animals to their deaths, completely insane.
“Still working—but it didn’t kill us,” Logan commented.
“Tuned in for a different life form,” Hosteen pointed out. “Might not kill them either—just stun. But I don’t want another dose of that.”
Their experience of crossing the barrier had wrung the last of their drug-supported strength from them. They slept, roused to swallow tablets and drink from the canteens they had filled at one of the pen springs, and drifted off to sleep again. How long had lethargy lasted they could not afterwards decide. But they awoke at last, clear-headed and with a measure of their normal energy.
Logan studied two sustenance tablets lying on his palm. “I’d like me some real chewin’ meat again,” he announced. “These things don’t help a man forget he’s empty—”
“They’ll keep us going—”
“Goin’ where?”
“There must be some way out of here. We’ll just have to find it.”
They had explored the building. If the keepers of the pens had left in such a hurry that they had not had time to care for the future of their captive specimens, still they had taken the contents of the rooms with them. No clues remained among those bare walls as to the men or creatures who had once lived here. That the building had been a habitation was proved by a washing place they found in one room and something built into another that Hosteen was sure was a cook unit. But all else was gone, though holes and scars suggested installations ripped free in a hurry.
When they reached the top floor of the building, they found a way out onto the flat roof, and from that vantage point they studied what they could see of the surrounding cavern.
At the back of the structure there were no pens. A smooth stretch of ground led directly to a passage-opening in the cave wall—a very large one.
“That’s the front door,” Logan observed. “Straight ahead—”
“Straight ahead—but with something in between.” Hosteen pivoted, surveying the surrounding terrain. He was right; the posts marking the sonic barrier made a tight, complete circle about the building. To reach the tempting “front door” meant recrossing that unseen barrier. And to do that—
Also, why did he keep thinking that there was a menace lurking out there? The only living thing they had seen in any of these burrows was the feefraw that had someho
w found its way into this deserted world. The bones of the creature that had once been penned here were old enough to crumble. Yet whenever he faced those walled squares, his flesh crawled, his instincts warned. There was some danger here, something they had not yet sighted.
“Look!” Logan’s hand on his shoulder pulled him around. He was now facing the entrance to the big passage. “There,” his half-brother directed, “by that side pillar.”
The sides of the passage opening had been squared into pillars, joined to the parent rock. And Logan was right; here was a dark bundle on the ground at the foot of one. Hosteen focused the distance lenses. The half light was deceiving but not enough to conceal the nature of what lay there—that could only be a man.
“Widders?” Logan asked.
“Might be.” Had that crumpled figure stirred, tried to raise a hand? If that were Widders and he had crossed the sonic barrier, he could have been knocked out only temporarily.
“Come on,” Hosteen called, already on his way from the roof.
“Make it quick,” Logan answered.
That could be their best defense—a running leap with impetus enough to tear a man through the beam. Hosteen knew of no other way to cross without the shields they did not possess. Having tested the straps of their equipment, they toed the mark just beside the outer wall, then sprinted for the pole line.
Hosteen launched himself, felt the tearing of the sonic waves as he shot through them, landed beyond, to roll helplessly, battling unconsciousness. Logan spiraled over him with flailing arms and legs and lay now beyond.
Somehow the Terran fought to his knees. It seemed to him the shock this time was less. He crawled to Logan, who was now striving to sit up, his mouth drawn crooked in his effort to control his whisper.
“We made it—”
They crouched together, shoulder touching shoulder, until their heads cleared and they were able to stand. Then they headed for the man by the pillar.
