A hill lifted out of the meadowland. On its grassy lower sloper the other vehicle had landed, in order to observe the herd at a respectful distance. Not that terasaur were quick to attack. Except for bulls in rut, they had no need to be aggressive. But neither had they reason to be careful of pygmies who stood in their way.
“What’s happening?” Eva breathed. “They never act like this—in summer, anyhow.”
“They’re doing it, though.” Dan’s words were as jerky as hers.
The car from Anchor was not totally beyond recognition. Tough alloys and synthetics went into any machine built for Rustum. But nothing in the crumpled, smashed, shattered, and scattered ruin was worth salvage. Fuel still oozed from one tank not altogether beaten apart. The liquid added darkness to a ground that huge feet had trampled into mud. Now and then a beast would cross that slipperiness, fall, rise besmeared and roaring to fling itself still more violently into the chaos.
The hillcrest around which the herd ramped was naked stone, thrusting several meters up like a gray cockscomb. There the three humans had scrambled for refuge. The berserk animals couldn’t follow them, though often a bull would try, thunder-bawling as he flung himself at the steeps, craned his great wattled neck and snapped his jaws loud enough for Dan to hear through all the distance and tumult. Otherwise the terasaur milled about, bellowed, fought each other with tushes, forelegs, battering tails, lurched away exhausted and bleeding till strength came back to seek a fresh enemy. Several lay dead, or dying with dreadful red slowness, in clouds of carrion bugs.
Females seemed less crazed. They hung about on the fringes of the rioting giants and from time to time galloped clamoring in circles. Terrified and forgotten, the calves huddled by the pool.
High overhead, light seeping through clouds burnished the wings of two spearfowl that waited for their own chance to feast.
“I’d guess—well, this has got to be the way it was,” Dan said. “Bill set down where you see. The herd, or some individual members, wandered close. That seemed interesting, no cause for alarm. Probably all three were well away from the car, looking for a good camera angle. Then suddenly came the charge. It was a complete surprise; and you know what speed a terasaur can put on when it wants. They had no time to reach the car and get airborne. They were lucky to make it up onto the rock, where they’ve been trapped ever since.”
“How are they, do you think?” Eva asked.
“Alive, at least. What a nightmare, clinging to those little handholds in darkness, hearing the roars and screams, feeling the rock shiver underneath them! And no air helmets. I wonder why that.”
“I daresay they figured they could dispense with apparatus for the short time they planned to be here.”
“Still, they’d’ve had the nuisance of cycling through pressure change.” Dan spoke absently, nearly his whole attention on the scene that filled the lenses. At the back of his mind flickered the thought that, if this had gone on for as many hours as evidently was the case, the herd would have wiped itself out by now had it not been handicapped by darkness.
“Well,” Eva was saying, “Ralph told me more than once how he longed to really experience the lowlands, if only for a few breaths.” Her fist struck the control panel, a soft repeated thud. “Oh, God, the barrier between us!”
“Yes. Mary remarked the same to me. Except I always had too much else to show her and try to make her see the beauty of——”
Bill Svoboda was on his feet, waving. The glasses were powerful; Dan saw how haggard, grimed, and unkempt the man was. Mary looked better. But then, he thought, she would forever. She must in fact be worse off, that bright head whirling and ready to split with pain, that breast a kettle of fire … together with hunger, thirst, weariness, terror. She kept seated on her perch, sometimes feebly waving an arm. Her brother stayed sprawled.
“Ralph’s the sickest, seems like,” Dan went on. “He must be the one most liable to pressure intoxication.”
“Let me see!” Eva ripped the binoculars from him.
“Ouch,” he said. “Can I have my fingers back, please?”
“This is no time for jokes, Dan Coffin.”
“No. I guess not. Although——” He gusted a sigh. “They are alive. No permanent harm done, I’m sure.” Relief went through him in such a wave of weakness that he must sit down.
“There will be, if we don’t get them to a proper atmosphere in … how long? A few hours?” Eva lowered the binoculars. “Well, doubtless a vehicle can arrive from High America before then, if we radio and somebody there acts promptly.”
Dan glanced up at her. Sweat glistened on her face, she breathed hard, and he had rarely seen her this pale. But her jaw was firm and she spoke on a rising note of joy.
“Huh?” he said. “What kind of vehicle would that be?”
“We’d better take a minute to think about it.” She jackknifed herself into the chair beside his. Her smile was bleak. “Ironic, hm? This colony’s had no problems of war or crime—and now, what I’d give for a fighter jet!”
“I don’t understand—No, wait. You mean to kill the terasaur?”
“What else? A laser cannon fired from above … Aw, no use daydreaming about military apparatus that doesn’t exist on Rustum. What do you think about dropping a lot of fulgurite sticks? Bill’s dad can supply them from his iron mine.” She grimaced and lifted a hand. “I know. A cruel method of slaughter. Most of the beasts’ll be disabled only. Well, though, suppose as soon as our friends have been taken off, suppose a couple of agile men go afoot and put the creatures out of their misery with some such tool as a shaped-charge drill gun.”
Shocked, he exclaimed: “You’d destroy the entire herd?”
“I’m afraid we must,” she sighed. “After all, it’s gone crazy.”
“Why has it? We’ve got to find that out, Eva. Otherwise somebody else’ll get caught by the same thing, and might not survive.”
She nodded.
“I doubt if we can learn the cause from a lot of mangled dead meat,” he told her.
“We can arrange experiments on other herds, later.”
“To what effect? Look at the damage here. We could wipe out the terasaur in this entire region. They aren’t common; nothing so big can be. But it appears they’re mighty damn important to the ecology. Have you seen Joe de Smet’s paper on how they control firebrush? That’s a single item. It’d be strange if there aren’t more that we haven’t discovered yet.” Dan gulped. “Besides, they’re, oh, wonderful,” he said through the tumult below. “I’ve seen them pass by in dawn mists, more silent than sunrise. …”
Eva regarded him unbelievingly, until she whispered: “Are you serious? Would you risk Mary Lochaber’s life, and two more, to save a few animals?”
“Oh, no. Of course not.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We carry field gear, including a winch and plenty of rope. Lower a line, make them fast, and we’ll crank them right up into this car.”
She sat for an instant, examining his idea with a fair-mindedness he well knew, before the red head shook. “No,” she said. “We can’t hover close, or our jet turbulence may knock them right off that precarious perch. Then we’d have to drop the line from our present altitude. This is a windy day; the hill’s causing updrafts. I don’t expect the end of a rope could come anywhere near—unless we weight it. But then we’ve made a pendulum for the wind to toss around, and very possibly to brain someone or knock him loose. See what tiny slanty spaces they’ve got to cling to, and think how weakened they are by now.”
“Right,” he answered, “except for one factor. That weight isn’t going to be any unmanageable lump. It’s going to be me.”
She nearly screamed. One hand flew to her opened mouth. “Dan, no! Please!”
Lowland air need not move fast to have a mighty thrust. And the topography here made for more flaws, gusts, and whirlings than was common. To control the winch, Eva had to leave the car on autopilot
, which meant it lurched about worse than when hovering under her skilled hands. Dan swung, spun, was yanked savagely up and let drop again, scythed through dizzy arcs, like the clapper of a bell tolled by a lunatic.
The winds thundered and shrilled. Through his skull beat the brawl of jets aimed to slant past him, groundward. Below him the terasaur bellowed and trampled a drumfire out of the earth. Knotted around his waist, the line wouldn’t let him fall, but with every motion it dug bruisingly into his belly muscles. He grasped it above his head, to exert some control, and the shivers along it tore at his palms and thrummed in his shoulders. An animal rankness boiled up from the herd, into his nostrils and lungs. He didn’t know if that or the gyring made him giddy.
Here came the rock!
Two meters above, he swept through a quarter circle. “Lower away!” he cried futilely. His partner understood, however, and let out some extra rope. His boots reached for solidity. All at once the car stumbled in an air pocket. He fell, snapped to a halt, and saw the cliff face rush toward him. He was about to be dashed against it.
He heaved himself around the cord till he stretched horizontally outward. The curve of his passage whistled him centimeters above bone-shattering impact. He caught a glimpse of Bill Svoboda, wildly staring, and folded his legs in bare time to keep from striking the man.
Then he was past, and swarming up the rope. On the return arc, the soles of his boots made contact with the stone. He let them brake by friction. It rattled his teeth, but it practically stopped his swinging. The next touch, on the next sway of the pendulum bob—which was himself—came slow and easy. He got his footing and stood among his friends.
Immediately, Eva released more rope. Hanging loosely now, it couldn’t haul him back if the car should suddenly rise. He sank to the rock and spent a minute sweating, panting, and shuddering.
He noticed Bill crouched at his side. “Are you all right?” the other man babbled. “Lord, what a thing! You might’ve been killed! Why’d you do it? We could’ve held out till—”
“You’re okay?” Dan croaked.
“Y-yes. That is, the Lochabers are sick, but they ought to recover fast.”
Dan crawled on hands and knees to Mary. “I came for you,” he said, and held her close. Dazed, she responded only with a mumble. He let her go, rose, and conferred with Bill.
Taking in still more line, they secured bights around bodies at five-meter intervals. Bill would go first, he being in condition to help Eva; next came Ralph; then Mary (as he made her fast, Dan thought what an odd and deep intimacy this was); finally Dan himself, who could best endure the maximum oscillation.
The remnant of the task proved simple. Eva raised the car, at the lowest possible rate, until one by one the four on the rope dangled free in the sky. She continued to rise till they were in calm air. Thereafter she left the vehicle again at hover and winched them in.
Though reduction helmets were always on hand, she depressurized the cabin on the way back to Moondance. The Lochabers sat half asleep, half in a faint. Eva called the station medic. He said the highlanders should stay in the guesthouse till they had regained enough strength for a flight home; but on the basis of Bill’s account, he didn’t think that would take long, nor that treatment need consist of more than bed rest and nourishment.
Dan spoke little. He was sunk in thought. Directly after landing, he prepared to take off again.
When he had cycled through the lock, he found Eva on hand. The quarters were a dormitory with kitchenette and mini-bath—cramped, austere, and relieved only by windows that gave on a view of lake and forest, but they could never be opened to the breeze that sang outside. Eva had drawn a chair into the narrow aisle between rows of bunks. Ralph lay at her left, Mary at her right. The siblings were in pajamas, propped up on pillows. Nearby stood a vase of triskele that the visitor must have brought. The room had grown vivid with the goldenness of the blossoms, pungent with their summery odor.
Dan halted. Eva had been crying! She’d washed her face afterward, but even though she seldom wept, he knew the traces of it upon her.
“Why hello, stranger,” Ralph greeted. His tone was a little mechanical. Both the Lochabers already seemed well on their way back to health—and less than happy. “How did your expedition go?”
“Successful, I think.” Dan’s gaze went to Mary and would not let itself be hauled away. Her hair was molten amber across the pillows and her eyes like the heavens about High America. She smiled at him; but the smile was uncertain, even timid.
“How are you doing?” he said, 99 percent to her.
“We’re coming along fine.” She spoke so low that he had to strain to hear her in this thin air. “Thanks to you.”
“Oh, that wasn’t much.” Curiously, he didn’t blush. Rather, he felt the ghost of a chill.
“It was plenty.” Ralph’s words came firm. He, too, was a leader. “Damn few men could have done what you did, or would have dared to risk their necks like that.”
“I did try to talk him out of it,” Eva said in a dulled voice.
“A heroic action,” Ralph went on. “You saved us several extra hours of suffering. Please don’t think we’re ungrateful. Still, we can’t help wondering. Why?”
“Your lives,” Dan answered. “Or, maybe, worse, brain damage.”
Mary shook her head. “That wasn’t at stake, dear, once you’d located us,” she said gently. “We could have waited awhile more.”
“I couldn’t be sure of that,” he said, with a slight upstirring of anger that she should be thus withdrawn. “I didn’t know how long you’d been marooned, and you just might have been among those people whose pressure tolerance is abnormally low.” As low as mine is high.
“We aren’t,” Ralph said. “But anyway, it was quite an exploit, and we owe you our sincerest thanks.” He paused. “And then you flew back at once, not even stopping to rest. I stand in awe.” He chuckled, though his heart wasn’t in it. “Or, I will stand in awe as soon as the doctor lets me out of bed.”
Dan was glad to shift the subject. “My job, after all.” He drew up a chair to face Eva and them. It was good to sit. Hour upon hour had drained him. (The flight from here to the valley again, through air that in places had gotten heavily turbulent; the hovering above the rampage; the squinting and studying, while the agony of the herd tore in him almost as if it had been his own; the final thing he did; and not even his triumph able to lift the weariness off his bones, during the long flight back.) Maybe he should have caught some sleep after his return, before coming here.
“Was it the terasaur you were concerned about?” Mary asked. “Eva told us you were going back to them, but she didn’t know more than that herself.”
He nodded. “Uh-huh. They’re an important part of the environment. I couldn’t pass up this chance to learn more about them, and try to save what was left.”
Eva half rose. Something of the woe behind her eyes disappeared. “Did you?” she cried.
“I think so.” A measure of joy woke likewise in him. “Frankly, I feel more like bragging about that than about a bit of athletics at a rope’s end.”
“What happened? What’d you do?” Eva reached toward him.
He grinned. The tide of his pleasure continued to flow. “Well, you see, terasaur do go rather wild in rutting season. The cause must be a change in body chemistry, whether hormonal or pheromonal we don’t know—but we do know how micro amounts of such substances will affect animal behavior, humans included. Now, this herd wasn’t mating and its antics were crazy even for that time of year. However, there were certain basic similarities. I wondered what new factor might have triggered the madness.”
He stopped for breath. “Go on!” Eva urged.
Dan sought Ralph’s gaze. “Petroleum is complicated stuff,” he said. “Besides long-chain hydrocarbons, it contains all sorts of aromatics and the chemists alone know what else. In addition, your jet fuel probably has polymers or whatever, produced in the course of refining. My ide
a was that in among those molecules is one, or a set, that happens to resemble the terasaurian sex agent.” Mary drew a gasp. “Not your fault,” Dan added hastily. “Nobody could have known. But it does underline the necessity of learning everything we can about this planet, doesn’t it?”
The blond young man scowled. “You mean … wait a minute,” he said. “A few bulls drifted near our car, probably just curious. They got a whiff of unburned fuel dissipating in the exhaust; we’d left the motor idling as a precaution—what we thought was a precaution. That whiff was enough to make them charge, cutting us off from the car. Then, when the first tank was ruptured and fuel spilled out by the hundreds of liters, it drove the entire herd into a frenzy. Is that what you mean?”
Dan nodded again. “Correct. Though of course the total situation was wrong, unbalanced, for the poor beasts. The molecules involved must have similarities but no doubt aren’t identical with their natural gonad stimulator. Besides, it’s the wrong time of year and so forth. No wonder they ran amok. Suppose someone injected you with an overdose of any important hormone!”
“It’s an interesting guess. Are you certain, though?”
“The biochemists will have to check out the details. But, yes, I am certain in a general way. You see, I flitted back to the site, where they were still rampaging. I ignited the spilled fuel with a thermite bomb. It went up fast, in this atmosphere. Almost immediately, the herd started to calm down. By the time I left, the survivors had returned to their calves.”
“M-m-m—”
“I know why you’re glum, Ralph. Your family business is getting set to produce oil-fired motors. And now it’ll have to do a lot more research first. What’s at stake isn’t merely the terasaur, you realize. It’s every related species, maybe the entire lowland ecology.”
Orbit Unlimited Page 22
