Donovan laid him gently down in the shelter of the boulder. He wondered whether this would be the beginning of the end. Under fire from both sides, the little fortress could not hold out for long. A puff of vapor on the hillside told him why the fire was not being returned. The damned cylinders had no range. That was why the enemy was using bullets—air guns, or whatever the things were. All the more reason why he should save his skin while the saving was good. He ducked behind the rock, then straightened up and streaked for the shelter of the trees.
Bullets sang around him and glanced whistling from the rocks. One whipped the sleeve that hung loose at his side and another grooved the leather of his high-top boots. All came from behind—from the hill above the camp—and as he gained the safety of the forest he turned and saw the foe for the first time.
They were deployed in a long line across the top of the ridge behind the camp. They had weapons like fat-barreled rifles, with some bulky contraption at the breach. As he watched they rose and came stalking down the hillside, firing as they came.
They were black, but without the heavy features of a Negro. Their hair was as yellow as corn, and they wore shorts and tunics of copper-colored material. Donovan saw that they were maneuvering toward a spur from which they could fire down into the little fortress and pick off its defenders one by one. With the man at the barricade gone, they would be coming after him. If he started now, he might make his way through the jungle to a point where he could cut back across the hills and reach the Egg. He had a fifty-fifty chance of making it. Only—there was the woman. It was murder to leave her, and suicide to stay.
Fate answered for him. From the barricade he heard the roar of his rifle and saw one of the blacks spin and fall in a heap. The others stood startled, then raced for cover. Before they reached it, two more were down, and Donovan saw the woman’s sleek black head thrust above the top of the rocky wall with the rifle butt tucked in the hollow of her shoulder.
That settled it. No one with her gumption was going to say that Terry Donovan had run out on her. Cautiously, he stuck his head out of the undergrowth and looked to left and right. A hundred feet from him one of the blacks lay half in and half out of the forest. One of the outlandish-looking rifles was beside him. Donovan pulled his head back and began to pry his way through the thick undergrowth.
The Donovan luck is famous. The gun was intact, and with it was a belt case crammed with little metal cubes that had the look of ammunition. He poked the heavy barrel into the air and pushed the button that was set in the butt. There was a crackling whisper, barely audible, and a slug went tearing through the fronds above him. He tried again, and an empty cube popped out into his palm. He examined it carefully. There was a sliding cover that had to be removed before the mechanism of the gun could get at the bullets it contained. He slipped in one of the loaded cubes and tried again. A second shot went whistling into space. Then, tucking the gun under his arm, he set out on a flanking trip of his own.
He knew the range of the weapon he was carrying, if not its nature and he knew how to use it. He knew that if he could swing far around to the east, along the sea, he might come up on the ridge behind the blacks and catch them by surprise. Then, if the gang in the fort would lend a hand, the war was as good as over.
It was easier said than done. A man with one mangled arm strapped to his side, and a twenty-pound rifle in his good hand, is not the world’s best mountaineer. He worked his way through the jungle into the lee of the dunes that lay between the cliffs and the beach, then ran like blue blazes until he was out of sight of the whole fracas, cut back inland, took his lip in his teeth and began to climb.
There were places where he balanced on spires the size and sharpness of a needle, or so he said. There were places where he prayed hard and trod on thin air. Somehow he made it and stuck his head out from behind a crimson crag to look down on a very pretty scene.
The ten remaining blacks were holed upon the crest of the ridge. They were within range of the camp, but they didn’t dare get up and shoot because of whoever was using the rifle. That “whoever”—the woman, as Donovan had suspected—was out of sight and stalking them from the north just as he was doing from the south. The fighting blood of his Irish ancestors sizzled in his veins. He slid the misshapen muzzle of his weapon out over the top of the rock and settled its butt in the crook of his good arm. He swiveled it around until it pointed in the direction of two of the blacks who were sheltering under the same shallow ledge. Then he jammed down the button and held on.
The thing worked like a machine gun and kicked like one. Before it lashed itself out of his grip one of the foe-men was dead, two were flopping about like fish out of water, and the rest were in full flight. As they sprang to their feet the woman blazed away at them with the elephant gun. Then the men from the barricade were swarming over the rock wall, cylinders in hand, and mowing the survivors down in a succession of tiny puffs of blue smoke. In a moment it was over.
Donovan made his way slowly down the hillside. The woman was coming to meet him. She was younger than he had thought—a lot younger—but her youth did not soften her. He thought that she might still be a better man than he, if it came to a test. She greeted him in her soft tongue, and held out the rifle. He took it, and as he touched the cold metal a terrific jolt of static electricity knocked him from his feet.
He scrambled up ruefully. The woman had not fallen, but her eyes blazed with fury. Then she saw that he had not acted intentionally, and smiled. Donovan saw now why the blacks wore metal suits. Their weapons built up a static charge with each shot, and unless the gunner was well grounded it would accumulate until it jumped to the nearest conductor. His rubber-soled shoes had insulated him, and the charge built up on him until he touched the barrel of the rifle, whereupon it grounded through the steel and the woman’s silvery gown.
They went down the hillside together. Donovan had given the woman the gun he had salvaged, and she was examining it carefully. She called out to the men, who stood waiting for them and they began to search the bodies of the blacks for ammunition. Half an hour later they were standing on the beach in the shadow of the great rocket. The men had carried their equipment from the camp and stowed it away, while Donovan and the woman stood outside bossing the job. That is, she bossed while he watched. Then he recalled who and where he was. Helping these people out in their little feud was one thing, but going off with them, Heaven knew where, was another. He reached down and took the woman’s hand.
“I’ve got to be going,” he said.
Of course, she didn’t understand a word he said. She frowned and asked some question in her own tongue. He grinned. He was no better at languages than she. He pointed to himself, then up the beach to the east where the Egg should be. He saluted cheerfully and started to walk away. She cried out sharply and in an instant all four men were on him.
He brought up the rifle in a one-handed swing that dropped the first man in his tracks. The gun went spinning out of his hand but before the others could reach him he had vaulted the man’s body and caught the woman to him in a savage, one-armed hug that made her gasp for breath. The men stopped, their ray guns drawn. One second more and he would have been a haze of exploded atoms but none of them dared fire with the woman in the way. Over the top of her sleek head he stared into their cold, hard eyes. Human they might be, but there was blessed little of the milk of human kindness in the way they looked at him.
“Drop those guns,” he ordered, “or I’ll break her damned neck!” None of them moved. “You hear me!” he barked. “Drop ‘em!”
They understood his tone. Three tapering cylinders thudded on the sand. He thrust the woman forward with the full weight of his body and trod them into the sand.
“Get back,” he commanded. “Go on. Scram!”
They went. Releasing the woman, he leaped back and snatched up the weapon she had dropped. He poked its muzzle at her slender waist and fitted his fingers cozi
ly about the stock. He jerked his head back, away from the ship.
“You’re coming with me,” he said.
She stared inscrutably at him for a moment, then, without a word, walked past him and set off up the beach. Donovan followed her. A moment later the dunes had hidden the ship and the three men who stood beside it.
5
Then began a journey every step of which was a puzzle. The girl—for she was really little more—made no attempt to escape. After the first mile Donovan thrust the ray gun into his belt and caught up with her. Hours passed, and still they were slogging wearily along under the escarpment. In spite of the almost miraculous speed with which it was healing, the strain and activity of the past few hours had started his arm throbbing like a toothache. It made him grumpy, and he had fallen behind when a drumming roar made him look up.
It was the rocket ship. It was flying high, but as he looked at it, it swooped down on them with incredible speed. A thousand feet above it leveled off and a shaft of violet light stabbed down, missing the girl by a scant ten feet. Where it hit the sand was a molten pool, and she was running for her life, zigzagging down like a frightened rabbit, streaking for the shelter of the cliffs. With a shout Donovan raced after her.
A mile ahead the ship zoomed and came roaring back at him. A black hole opened in the face of the cliff. The girl vanished in its shadows, and as the thunder of the rocket sounded unbearably loud in his ears, Donovan dived after her. The ray slashed across the rock above his head and droplets of molten magma seared his back. The girl was crouching against the wall of the cave. When she saw him she plunged into the blackness beyond.
He had had enough of hide and seek. He wanted a showdown and he wanted it now. With a shout, he leaped after the girl’s receding figure and caught her by the shoulder, spinning her around.
Instantly he felt like an utter fool. He could say nothing that she could understand. The whole damned affair was beyond understanding. He had strongarmed her into coming with him—and her own men had tried to burn her down. Her—not him. Somehow, by something he had done, he had put her in danger of her life from the only people in the entire universe who had anything in common with her. He couldn’t leave her alone in a wilderness full of hungry dinosaurs, with a gang of gunmen on her trail, and he couldn’t take her with him. The Egg would barely hold one. He was on a spot, and there was nothing he could do about it.
There was the sound of footsteps on the gravel behind them. In the dim light he saw the girl’s eyes go wide. He wheeled. Two men were silhoutted against the mouth of the cave. One of them held a ray gun. He raised it slowly.
Donovan’s shoulder flung the girl against the wall. His hand flicked past his waist and held the gun. Twice it blazed and the men were gone in a puff of sparkling smoke. But in that instant, before they were swept out of existence, their guns had exploded in a misdirected burst of energy that brought the roof crashing down in a thundering avalanche, sealing the cave from wall to wall.
The shock flung Donovan to the ground. His wounded arm smashed brutally into the wall and a wave of agony left him white and faint. The echoes of that stupendous crash died away slowly in the black recesses of the cave. Then there was utter silence.
Something stirred beside him. A small soft hand touched his face, found his shoulder, his hand. The girl’s voice murmured, pleading. There was something she wanted—something he must do. He got painfully to his feet and awaited her next move. She gently detached the ray gun from his fingers, and before he knew it he was being hustled through utter darkness into the depths of the cave.
He did a lot of thinking on that journey through blackness. He put two and two together and got five or six different answers. Some of them hung together to make sense out of a nightmare.
First, the girl herself. The rocket, and Donovan’s faith in a science that he was proving fallible, told him that she must have come from another planet. Her unusual strength might mean that she was from some larger planet, or even some star. At any rate, she was human and she was somebody of importance.
Donovan mulled over that for a while. Two races, from the same or different planets, were thirsting for each other’s blood. It might be politics that egged them on, or it might be racial trouble or religion. Nothing else would account for the fury with which they were exterminating each other. The girl had apparently taken refuge with her bodyguard on this empty planet. Possession of her was important. She might be a deposed queen or princess—and the blacks were on her trail. They found her and laid siege—whereupon Terry Donovan came barging into the picture.
That was where the complications began. The girl, reconnoitering had saved him from the dinosaur which was eating him. Anyone would have done as much. She lugged him back to camp. Donovan flushed at the thought of the undignified appearance he must have made—and they patched him up with the miraculous green ointment. Then the scrap began, and he did his part to bring them out on top. Did it damn well, if any one was asking. Donovan didn’t belong to their gang and didn’t want to, so when they started for home he did likewise. Only it didn’t work out that way.
She had ordered her men to jump him. She wanted to hang on to him, whether for romantic reasons, which was doubtful, or because she needed another fighting man. They didn’t get very far with their attempt to gang up on him.
That was where the worst of the trouble began.
Grabbing her as he had had been a mistake. Somehow that act of touching her—of doing physical violence to her person—made a difference. It was as though she were a goddess who lost divinity through his violence, or a priestess who was contaminated by his touch. She recognized that fact. She knew then that she would have short shrift at the hands of her own men if she stayed with them. So she came along. Strangely enough, the men did not follow for some time. It was not until they returned to the rocket, until they received orders from whoever was in that rocket, that they tried to kill her.
Whoever was in the rocket! The thought opened new possibilities. A priest, enforcing the taboos of his god. A politician, playing party policy. A traitor, serving the interests of the blacks. None of these did much to explain the girl’s own attitude, nor the reason why this assumed potentate, if he was in the rocket during the battle, had done nothing to bring one side or the other to victory. It didn’t explain why hours had passed before the pursuit began. And nothing told him what he was going to do with her when they reached the Egg, if they ever did.
The cave floor had been rising for some time when Donovan saw a gleam of light ahead. At once the girl’s pace quickened, and she dropped his arm. How, he wondered, had she been able to traverse that pitch-black labyrinth so surely and quickly? Could she see in the dark, or judge her way with some strange sixth sense? It added one more puzzle to the mysteries surrounding her.
He could have danced for joy when they came out into the light. They had passed under the ridge and come out at the foot of the cliffs which he had climbed hours before. The whole landscape was familiar; the gullies in the barren plain, the fringe of swamp and jungle, and the reefs over which the oily sea was breaking. There, a few miles to the north, the Egg was hidden. There was safety—home—for one.
She seemed to know what he was thinking. She laid a reassuring hand on his arm and smiled up at him. This was his party from now on. Then she saw the pain in his eyes. His arm had taken more punishment than most men could have stood and stayed alive. Her nimble fingers peeled away the dressing and gently probed the wound to test the position of the broken bones. Evidently everything was to her liking, for she smiled reassuringly and opened a pouch at her waist, from which she took a little jar of bright-green ointment and smeared it liberally on the wound.
It burned like fire, then a sensuous sort of glow crept through his arm and side, deadening the pain. She wadded the dirty bandages into a ball and threw them away. Then, before Donovan knew what was happening, she had ripped a length of
the metallic-looking fabric from her skirt and was binding the arm tightly to his side.
Stepping back, she regarded him with satisfaction, then turned her attention to the gun she had taken from him. A lip of the firing button and an empty cartridge cube popped out into her palm. She looked at him and he at her. It was all the weapon they had, and it was empty. Donovan shrugged. Nothing much mattered anyway. With an answering grimace she sent it spinning away among the rocks. Side by side, they set off toward the coast and the Egg.
It was the sky that Donovan feared now. Dinosaurs they could outwit or outrun. He thought he could even fight one of the little ones, with her to cheer him on. But heat rays shot at them from the sky, with no cover within miles, was something else again. Strangely enough, the girl seemed to be enjoying herself. Her voice was a joy to hear, even if it didn’t make sense, and Donovan thought that he got the drift of her comments on some of the ungainly monstrosities that blemished the Cretaceous landscape.
Donovan had no desire to be in the jungle at night, so they took their time. He had matches, which she examined with curiosity, and they slept, back to back, beside a fire of grass and twigs in the lee of a big boulder. There was nothing to eat, but it didn’t seem to matter. A sort of silent partnership had been arrived at, and Donovan, at least, was basking in its friendly atmosphere.
6
Every road has its ending. Noon found them standing beside the leaden hulk of the Egg, face to face with reality. One of them and only one could make the journey back. The Egg would not hold two, nor was there power enough in its accumulators to carry more than one back through the barrier between time coils. If the girl were to go, she would find herself alone in a world unutterably remote from her own, friendless and unable to understand or to make herself understood. If Donovan returned, he must leave her alone in the Cretaceous jungle, with no food, no means of protection from man or beast, and no knowledge of what might be happening sixty million years later which would seal her fate for good.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 19
