by Andre Norton
Gorgol climbed to the top of the rocky pile hiding the cave entrance, studying a southern route. His fingers moved.
“For me the way is not hard; for you it may be impossible. The choice is yours.”
“What about it?” Hosteen asked Najar. “They’ll have to hole up during the day. But they’ll be moving on. And they have scouts out in this territory or you wouldn’t have picked up that beam. And once they enter the big valley, there’ll be a fight for sure—one that Dean will win under the present circumstances and that will begin his war.”
“What will you do?” Najar counterquestioned.
“Try to reach them before night when they’ll move on—”
Perhaps that was the wrong decision; perhaps his place was here, pursuing Dean through the interior burrows. But even if some miracle of luck would put the renegade tech into his hands, there would still be war when the off-world force crossed the line into the Blue.
“You’ll never find them unless you follow the beam.” Najar rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I have Baku and Surra,” Hosteen replied, though in one way Najar was right. With the Recon scout they could take the quickest and easiest route to that camp, following the broadcast.
Najar hitched the cord of a canteen around his bony shoulder. “We’d better blast if we’re going.” He circled the rocks and started on.
Hosteen waved a hand at Gorgol, and the Norbie slid down the other side of the rock pile, heading into the valley to find the clansmen who might listen to him if they were not provoked by an invasion.
It was still early enough so that the heat was no more than that of midmorning in the milder season. Hosteen, eying the sun’s angle, thought they might squeeze in two or two and a half hours of travel before they would have to lay up. Then they might have another hour—if they were lucky—in the early evening. But the best way was to think only of what lay immediately ahead—first of the next ridge or crevice, then, as the sun burnt higher and patches of shade were few, of the next ten steps, five steps, ahead.
Surra, ranging wider than the men, disappeared, only keeping mental contact with Hosteen. The time came when he asked of her the location of a hiding hole, for the time between their rests grew shorter and the land beyond was as barren and sun-seared as that he had seen through the “window” in the sealed valley wall.
Najar took a quick step farther right.
“The beam—it has doubled its strength! We’re either practically on top of them or there’s an emergency recall.” From their careful, slow plod he broke into a trot, topping a small ravine and dropping into it in a cascade of rocks and earth. At the same time Surra’s alert came—she had sighted the camp.
The ravine fed them into a larger break, and there they came upon a halt station such as Norbies and hunters used in the Peaks—a collection of stones heaped over a pit in the earth—in which men could rest during the day in a livable atmosphere. Surra prowled about its circumference and raised her voice in a growl of feline exasperation.
Hosteen hurried on and clawed at the frawn-skin robe wet down with seal seam to close the entrance. A moment later the head and shoulders of a man pushed that aside—Kelson!
“Storm! We knew you were on the way—Baku came in a few minutes ago. Come in, man, come in. And you, Logan—” Then the Peace Officer took a closer look at Hosteen’s companion.
“That isn’t Logan—”
“No.” Hosteen shoved Najar ahead of him through the hole as Kelson retreated to give them passage. Then Surra and finally he dropped in. He stood there allowing his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The quarters had been chosen well, the scooped out pit leading back into a cave of sorts. Only Hosteen had little time to assess his surroundings, for he was facing Brad Quade.
“Logan—?”
The question Hosteen had been asking himself for what seemed now to be days of time was put into words—and by the one he most dreaded hearing it from. All he had beside the bare fact of their parting on that strange transport device of the caves was Najar’s story of the other man who had taken that route but had not come to the installation hall. If Logan were still alive, he was lost somewhere in the tunnels.
“I don’t know—”
“You were with him?”
“Yes—for a while—”
“Storm”—Kelson’s hand on his shoulder brought him partly around to face the other—“we picked up that com cast from in there, the one you sent.”
All Hosteen’s frustration, fears, and fatigue boiled over into rage.
“Then why in the name of the Dang Devil are you heading in? Take one step into that valley and the rocket goes up for sure!” He was shaking. The anger in him, against this country, against the odds of ever pulling down Dean, against the tricks of the cave passages he could not hope to master, was eating at him until he wanted to scream out as loudly as Surra did upon occasion. And now the cat snarled from the shadows and Baku voiced a cry, both of them sensitive to his loss of control.
Two hands on his shoulders now forced him down, steadily but gently. He tried to twist out of that grip and discovered that his tired body would not obey him. Then there was a cup at his cracked lips, and he drank thirstily until it was removed.
“Listen, boy, no one is trying to run this through blind. We’ve scouts in the heights, but they have orders not to go into that Valley. Can you give us some idea of what is going on?” Quade spoke quietly as he settled Hosteen on the floor of their sunhide, moistened a cloth in a milky liquid he had poured from a small container, and with it patted Hosteen’s face, throat, and chest. The aromatic scent of the stuff brought with it soothing if fleeting memories of relaxing at the day’s end back at the holding.
The younger man was as sobered as if in the heat of his anger he had plunged into an icy stream. And in terse sentences he told them what little he knew, then waved Najar forward to add his part of the tale.
“You’re right,” Kelson commented when they were done. “Dean is the answer. An unstable tech with a genius-level brain turned loose in a Sealed Cave storehouse—Lord, that could finish Arzor just as quickly as a continental Tri-X bomb!”
“You’ve called the Patrol in?” Hosteen asked.
“Not officially yet. We’ve borrowed some trained personnel. Maybe now”—he stood up in the dugout, his hands on his hips, his face flushed with more than the heat of their shelter—“the Council will listen to a little common sense. This country should have been adequately patrolled five, ten years ago.”
“Intrusion of treaty rights,” Quade reminded.
“Treaty rights! Nobody’s suggesting we curtail Norbie treaty rights—at least I’m not, though you’d have a different answer from some of those in the Peaks. No! I want—just as I have always wanted—a local force of Norbie-cum-settler to police the outback. That’s what we needed from the first—could have had it last year if you taxpayers had pushed for it. Such a corps would have routed out that Xik gang before they dug in—and they could have stopped this before it even started. You say now this Ukurti is against Dean’s war talk and he can carry his clan Chief with him. Well, we could get the good will of natives of that type and their backing. That’s not breaking any treaty rights I know of—but no, that’s too simple for those soft-sitting Galwadi pets. Now it may be too late. If we are forced to call in the Patrol to handle Dean—”
He did not have to continue. They all knew what that would mean—a loss of settler and Norbie independence, a setting up of off-world control for an indefinite period, the end to native growth, which was their hope for the future.
“How long do we have before the authorities will move?” Hosteen asked.
“How long will Dean hold off on his raids?” Kelson barked. “If our scouts report any parties of warriors leaving the Blue and we don’t have the power to stop them—”
“Power,” repeated Hosteen softly. “Dean’s control in there rests on the fact the natives believe it’s true
medicine. I think there was a residue of some alien knowledge among the Norbies of the Blue—some of those machines must have been left running. There is certainly weather control in the village valley and the smaller one where Najar hid out. Perhaps the Norbies were able to make use of other devices—we saw the village Drummer pull a trick that certainly never originated on Arzor—without understanding them. Then Dean has activated more, so he’s a part of the medicine, which makes him taboo and a man of power—”
“And the answer is—remove Dean?” Kelson spectulated.
“Not remove him,” Quade cut in, and Hosteen nodded agreement. “That would merely add to the medicine—were he to disappear. And if he is removed bodily and that action discovered, it would be a declaration of war. He has to be removed by those who set him up.”
“No chance of that that I can see,” Kelson exploded.
“Ukurti’s attitude is in our favor,” Quade pointed out. “And Dean is unstable. We have to get at him on a ground he believes is safe—”
Hosteen stirred. “In the mountain!”
“That’s right—in the mountain.”
“It’s a tangle of passages. To find him in there, when he knows those interdimension transports and we don’t—” Hosteen could see the futility of such a chase, and yet that was their only chance. If they could actually capture Dean, hold him prisoner in the taboo mountain where his native allies would not venture, they would have time to work out a method of unmasking him.
“Najar.” Quade spoke to the castaway. “You can find that installation hall?”
“I can try. But as Storm says, that’s a mighty big mountain or mountains, and there’re a lot of passages. It’s easy to get lost—”
“We can take off as soon as it cools this evening,” Kelson began briskly.
“We take off—you stay here and contact the rest of the force,” Quade corrected. “No, don’t try to finger me down over this, Jon. You’re official, and you can swing weight with those rocket boys back in the lowlands. How much do you think they’d listen to me? I’m just another rider scrabbling up a frawn herd as far as they’re concerned. Najar,” he asked, “are you willing to give us a trail leading back in there?”
The castaway looked down at the ground. As well as if he had said it aloud, Hosteen could guess what the other wanted to reply, that he had finally won free of the nightmare in which he had been encased since the crash landing in the Blue. Najar had a good chance now of completing that interrupted voyage, of getting home. But he was Terran—for him, too, no home world was waiting. Was it that loss that tipped the scales in their favor?
“All right.” He wiped his hands across the tatters that served him as a shirt. “Only I make no promises about finding your man.”
“That’s understood. Anyway—we can fit you out.”
Kelson energetically tackled the packs stored at the back of the sunhide, rummaging through supplies meant to equip a scout post. There were arms to be had, stunners, belt knives, fresh clothing, supplies of energy tablets.
Hosteen slept away most of that day. Since his initial inquiry, Quade had not spoken of Logan, but the thought of him was there, and Logan himself walked through Hosteen’s troubled dreams. At nightfull he awoke sweating, from a vivid return to the transport wedge in the valley—from which, in that nightmare, he had seen Logan vanish, knowing that he had no way of following after, the reversal of what had actually happened. And now the Amerindian could not understand his earlier action. When he had had that compulsion to walk the spiral, why had he not called Logan, made the other do likewise? Why had he been so buried in concentrated effort that he had ignored his half-brother? He could find no excuse—none at all.
Baku was left with Kelson, with orders to keep liaison between the scout post and the mountainside. The eagle hated the tunnels, and her particular gifts were useless there. But Surra sped with the party, backtracking the route that had brought them there that morning.
Once again within the cave, Hosteen put his arm about the cat. In his hold he could feel the play of her powerful shoulder muscles. Just as she had known his frustrated anger back in the hide-up, so did she now react to the job ahead. They had a mission and one in which time itself was drawing the war arrow against them.
“Find—find!” He projected a mental picture of Dean, urged it upon Surra with all the clarity and force he could muster.
Hosteen felt as well as heard the deep growl that vibrated through her as might the purr of a more contented moment. He did not know whether her feline hunting sense would bring them any nearer their quarry. Luck—or “medicine”—could still play a part in this blind hunt. Over Surra’s body he looked to Najar in an appeal that was also part order.
“Can you guide us to any main passage from here?”
“Most of ’em are main passages as far as I know.” The other did not sound optimistic, but he took the lead, and they started on into the heart of the mountain.
Here Surra showed no desire to roam ahead; instead, she matched her pace to Hosteen’s as well as four feet could match two. He was alert to her always, relying more upon the cat than upon Najar’s ability to bring them into a section where they might hope to encounter Dean, so he knew instantly when the cat paused, even before she swung half across his path to half him.
Quade, knowing of old how Surra operated, stopped, and Najar looked around, puzzled, and then impatient.
“What’s the—?” He had out only half the question when Hosteen signaled him to silence.
Surra’s actions were the same as the time when Dean had vanished in that other tunnel. And the Amerindian was certain that this must be another of the mysterious transfer points.
The cat’s head was cocked slightly to one side, and her whole stance pictured the act of listening—listening to something their dull human ears could not pick up. Without moving more than his hands, Hosteen switched his torch on to full beam, played that bank of light in a careful sweep over the floor under them and the right wall. But there were no spiral markings such as he had more than half hoped to sight. The beam went to his left and again revealed unmarked surface.
Yet Surra was still listening. Then the cat arose on her hind feet, her muzzle pointed up—as if she scented what she had heard.
Overhead! Not under foot as it had been in the valley, but overhead! Hosteen flashed his torch straight up. But how could that pattern he had come to know be followed upside down?
“That it?” Quade asked.
“Yes. Only I don’t see—” Hosteen began, and then suddenly he did. Just as he had been pushed by a compulsion he did not understand to walk the spiral in the valley wedge, so here an order outside of his consciousness brought his hand up over his head to touch the open end of the spiral. Only this time he fought that pull, fought it enough to keep his awareness of those with him.
“I think—” It was hard to speak, to be able to keep his mind off the tracing of that pattern with his finger tips. The urgency to do so was like pain, racing from finger tips to flood his whole body. “We must do this,” he said at last.
A furred body pressed against his. Surra! Surra who had no hand to trace for her. To go would be deserting Surra. His other hand groped along that furred back after he passed the torch to Quade. He could no longer turn his eyes away from that pattern, which glowed in his mind as well as on the stone overhead.
Hosteen thought of the pattern and took a grip on the loose skin at the back of the cat’s neck, beginning to walk around and around with the fingers of his other hand tracing the roof spiral he had to go on tiptoe to touch. Surra was following his pull without complaint, around—around—Now! His finger tip was on the dot—
Dark—and the terror of that journey through the dark, the red spark that was Surra and a white-yellow one that was Hosteen Storm in company still—
Light around him. Hosteen put out a hand to steady his body and felt the sleek chill of metal. He was back on the dais of the hall platform while Surra pulled
free of his hold and faced down the nearest aisle, her mouth wrinkled in a soundless snarl of menace.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
H
osteen drew his stunner. From the cat came knowledge that his less acute human senses could not supply. Down those rows of machines there was a hunt in progress, and the hunted was friend, not enemy. Gorgol—successful in obtaining allies—penetrating to this center of taboo territory? Or—the Terran’s grip on the stunner tightened—Logan at last?
Surra leaped from the platform in a distance-covering bound. Then she glided into cover between two installations as Hosteen followed.
Above the hum of the encased machinery Hosteen thought he heard something else—a ticking, more metallic than the drumbeats of the Norbie tambours. He caught up with Surra where she crouched low, intent upon what lay around a corner. The hair along the big cat’s spine was roughened; her big ears were folded against her skull. She spat, and one paw arose as if to slash out.
The thing she stalked was unnatural—not alive by her definition of life. Shadow thing—? No! Hosteen caught sound of that scuttle. Something flashed with super speed, very close to the ground, from one machine base to the next! No—no shadows this time.
He edged past the cat and then side-stepped just in time to avoid the headlong rush of someone alive—alive and human.
“Logan!” Housteen caught at the other, and an unkempt head turned. Lips were pressed tight to teeth in a snarl akin to Surra’s.
A spark of recognition broke in the depths of those too bright eyes, a hand pawed at Housteen’s, and Logan swayed forward, for a moment resting his body against his brother’s, his heavy breathing close to a sob. Only for a moment, then his head lifted, his eyes widened, and he gasped:
“Hosteen! Behind you!”
Surra squalled, struck out at the thing whipping across the pavement, and recoiled as if flung back. It was a glittering silver ribbon with an almost intelligent aura of malignancy about it, from which a tapering end rose and pointed at the men.
