by Dale Olausen
Sarah discovered that she was.
“Good. I believe that our lesson will be an easy one. Look very carefully into the woods. What do you see?”
She found that what the greencat was asking of her was not at all difficult. This non-physical sense of sight was, apparently, much more versatile than ordinary eyesight. Not only could she use it to see in the dark, but she could also focus on objects that were much too far away for normal vision.
She looked into the little forest, seeing, at first, only the individual trees that composed it. Then, there were tall white shadows moving among them, silently advancing towards the edge of the wood. There were hundreds of them.
“The white ones! A horde of them!”
“Yes! It won’t take long for them to cross the open space between the trees and the ship!”
“Get down there, girl! Into your body! Get everybody immediately into the ship!”
The cat must have given her a mental push, for Sarah felt herself spin and suddenly she was no longer on the cliff, but looking down upon the three human figures beside the spaceship. The blanketed body on the turf both attracted and repelled her; she looked at it uncertainly, not knowing what she should do. Mercifully, its face was in shadows and she did not have to look at it. But she had to get inside the body, become it, be it! How else could she warn the two men who were guarding it, of the danger that threatened them all? How else could she keep the three of them from falling into the hands of humanoids who were searching for a sacrifice to offer to their gods?
She had no time to spend thinking, hesitating! She had to do it; she had to take the final step! She had to re-join her body! Even if doing so meant looking into that blank, lifeless face, accepting that it was truly alive and that it was her own!
She moved closer, hovering right above the blanket-wrapped body, but still unable to bring herself to stare into the face that the shadows hid. Desperately she steeled herself, determined to do just that, when unexpectedly she felt something beneath the blanket tug at her being. It was not the body, she understood immediately – the pull was golden and green and very powerful. A Witches’ Stone! It was the very Stone that she had chosen for herself inside the white ones’ cavern. It hung around the body’s neck and the texture of the power was familiar – the Stone was drawing her to itself –
There was no vacant face, no repulsion. Only a Stone of power drawing her inexorably closer – she allowed it to pull her inside itself –
Abruptly she was struggling to free herself from a blanket that was tightly wrapped around her. She thrashed to free her arms and hands – there was a green and gold jewel burning warmly against her skin and she wanted to grasp it in her hands! But she must find her voice; she had come here to shout a warning!
“Sarah, you’re back!”
Hands helped her with the blanket and at last she found her tongue.
“Into the ship – fast!”
“What do you mean?”
She was fighting the stiffness in her muscles, trying to rise up onto shaky legs which were responding to her brain’s commands much too slowly!
“We have to get inside the ship!” she shouted. “Oh, hurry, hurry, danger! They’re almost upon us!”
The men glanced at one another. Coryn thought of a post-coma hallucination, but her urgency was compelling. Steph shrugged and started to climb the steps, while Coryn offered her his arm as she stumbled shipwards.
As she threw herself at the stairs, she could hear the whistling begin; it was loud and triumphant. She cried out and the man behind her swore; she tried to hurry up the steps but she could only crawl. There was a sudden, muffled exclamation right behind her and the hand that had been on her shoulder was gone! Sobbing and frantic, she turned to see that the white ones had hold of the man who had been following her up the stairs!
At the top of the stairs the other man cursed sharply and roughly dragged her up and out of the danger. He began to shoot at the humanoids with his stunner while Sarah tried to catch her breath. She was on her knees beside him and realized as her eyes took in the situation, that the shooting was futile. There were too many of the white creatures for one person – or two for that matter – to handle with stunners!
“The lights!” she cried, starting to struggle up from her knees. The greencat had told her long ago that the white ones could not stand bright light! “The floodlights!”
The man beside her was shooting, not listening. But she was a ship mechanic – surely she could find the light switches herself. If only her legs would obey her! She gained her feet and tried to rush to the controls, frantic because she could only stumble along agonizingly slowly, grabbing on to anything for support.
At last she reached the control panels only to stare at them with dismay! Their arrangement was totally unfamiliar to her. It was absurd – she was a top-notch mechanic, she had done her homework, she was at least superficially familiar with every type of spaceship that there was. How could it be that she was facing something entirely strange? But never mind, she could still find the light switches!
Her eyes swept across the panels and her brain groped through her memories, correlating what she saw with what she knew. Ah! Over there! The newest scoutship blueprints she had seen, had moved them behind the pilot’s head…she lunged for the panel and with a single, sweeping gesture turned them all on, inside and outside.
“What the hell?”
Blinded, Sarah ignored the question while she clung to the edge of the panel so as to remain standing.
When at last she could see out of watering eyes, she stumbled back to the hatch where the thin, dark-haired young man was dividing his attention between her and the amazing sight outside the ship. The lights had turned the meadow surrounding the ship into an oasis of cold brilliance in which a horde of humanoids had gone mad. They thrashed about, they whistled, they stomped their feet and they scratched themselves everywhere their long arms could reach. They fell onto the ground, or atop one another and writhed in pain. Farther away, others crawled along the turf towards the shadows in the forest.
“It’s the light,” Sarah explained to the man. “They can’t stand bright light.”
The look he threw at her was frankly curious, but there was no time for questions. They climbed down the stairs towards the milling insanity, the man in the lead, his stunner firmly in his hand. Sarah noted that her legs had begun to feel better and work better – a happy circumstance as she was going to have to pick her way carefully among the bodies of the humanoids.
They made their way slowly, occasionally using the stunner when one of the white humanoids gave trouble. Eventually they reached a flailing, shirted arm, which signalled a human being among the squirming white forms. They had to drag the fair-haired man out of a group of white bodies – judicious use of the stunner was necessary to retrieve him from the humanoids, as they still seemed remarkably keen to keep him for themselves. Once on his feet, however, he was able to walk unaided. Sarah was glad of the opportunity to hurry on ahead, back to the ship. She did not want to witness the agony and pain around them, even though the sufferers had meant to sacrifice her to their gods not long ago.
*****
It was not until they were all back inside the spacecraft that she took a good look at the man that they had almost lost to the humanoids. His face was bruised and dirty and his shirt was torn. Her mouth fell open as she recognized him.
“You’re Coryn Leigh from RES,” she whispered, her eyes wandering over his slightly damaged, but still handsome features and form.
He grinned, and she could see that his face hurt, and that he was tired. But there was satisfaction in those blue eyes – and something else that she could not read – as he looked back at her.
“Yes, Sarah,” he answered gently, “I am Coryn Leigh from RES.”
He turned to the other man and said, “You better get us out of here, Steph.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“So you were familiar with our uninvi
ted guests?”
The Camin was now well clear of the meadow and first aid had been applied to Coryn’s cuts and bruises. Sarah was attacking the first real meal in what seemed like a long time. Coryn sat in a chair across from her and pushed a mug of coffee across the table. She accepted it with a nod of thanks.
“Yes, you might say I had already made their acquaintance,” she replied drily, before carefully sipping the hot drink.
“Did they come out of the mountain?”
She looked at him and smiled. In spite of the marks left from the struggle, he was still as handsome as he had seemed on RES. Now he was speaking to her as an equal, and not as a child who knew nothing about life. A dangerous adventure might be frightening, nerve-wracking, and boring by turns, but as a status enhancer it apparently had no rival. Talking with the alyen-Agent from this new perspective was an unexpected pleasure.
“Yes,” she said. “They mostly live inside the tunnel and cavern network and only come out at night. To hunt, I suppose. We must be a sort of prey.”
“I’d like to hear you tell the whole story, from beginning to end.” He added quickly: “That is, if you feel up to it. I don’t want to keep you from sleep if you’re tired.”
She shrugged. “My body has had quite enough rest during the past little while. As for my mind, well, I think it wants to spend some more time in the flesh and blood world. I don’t mind talking if you don’t mind listening. It’s a long story.”
“We have time.”
After all those hours of seeing Sarah’s face blank and lifeless, Coryn took delight in seeing it alive and animated. Her dark eyes sparkled. Suddenly, however, as she prepared to begin the tale, they clouded over.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what Roger Delmen told the Beth’s crew about my disappearance?” she asked.
The Agent’s eyebrows shot up.
“All he would say was that you just walked into the forest and never came back,” he replied.
“Well, I didn’t think that he would have volunteered the truth.”
She sighed. He watched quietly while she toyed with the coffee mug in front of her, and groped for words. Abruptly, she let the mug alone, and raised her eyes to stare directly into his.
“I didn’t walk into the forest,” she said. “I ran.”
With many hesitations and pauses she told the story of what had happened in the glade that fateful afternoon. Coryn helped to draw it out by asking pertinent questions whenever she seemed to have difficulty finding the right words. It appeared to be especially hard for her to speak of those moments when she and the biologist had stood face to face under the tree, he making demands that she did not want to meet, and she realizing with horror that he had turned into a predator.
“I know that I’m making a serious accusation against him,” she said half-apologetically, as if afraid that he was doubting her words. “How I’ll get Ginette and Dav to believe me, I have no idea. But I think he was on some kind of drug. I saw his eyes – they weren’t normal.”
Coryn was inclined to believe her. He had talked to the Malloran and had suspected something wasn’t right. For years he had lived on RES, mingling with the idle rich of the galaxy. He knew there were powerful drugs that could be procured on the stations and the inner planets. He also knew that Confederation law was strict on the subject – mood altering drugs were too dangerous to be allowed on the planets under exploration or development. Sarah’s story was more evidence of that, as if more evidence was needed.
“I don’t think of myself as a coward,” Sarah continued, “but there was nothing else I could do but run. If I had stayed, he probably would have raped me, and then killed me. He would have had to make sure that I wouldn’t talk.”
“’Tiger dust’ is what they call the stuff in the inner galaxy,” said Coryn. “It’s known to make sane people dangerously psychotic for short periods of time. I can’t think of anything I’d rather stay away from, than someone high on the stuff.” He thought for a moment and smiled. “Well, other than those humanoids we tangled with. Or The Organization Hounds.”
Sarah smiled in turn. “Yeah, those are quite the choices.” She was relieved that he seemed to accept her story so matter-of-factly.
“I think my big mistake was to not have an emergency kit on my person,” she sighed. “That was inexcusable.”
“What Roger did was inexcusable. Criminal. But that’s all over, now.” The Agent’s voice was distant.
Dav had said that Roger Delmen hadn’t made it through the tangle Beth had had with The Organization Hounds. It was up to the Beth’s Captain to explain those circumstances to Sarah, Coryn figured. Steph had sent a message to Beth about Sarah’s recovery, so the Explorers were going to return to the planet of the amartos for a bit—as soon as the Rangers arrived.
“Don’t worry about convincing Dav and Ginette. They may not believe you, but the word of a sophisticate from a decadent inner space station ought to sway them. Your story fits the known facts of ‘tiger dust’ psychosis.”
Sarah returned to the narrative, talking now in a more relaxed manner. The hours that she had spent listening to Kary’s stories of the Explorers had been a learning experience, which she now put to good use, fashioning out of her predicaments, shocks, and fears, a lively tale. She had her attentive listeners chuckling occasionally, but at other times she could not effectively mask the emotions that she relived as she spoke. Once or twice Coryn suppressed an impulse to reach a hand across the table and grasp hers reassuringly.
He did not interfere with the flow of words, however, until she came to the part of her story about the pebbles that turned out to be Witches’ Stones. She briefly related the keying incident, intending to move on to her attempts to obtain help, when he interrupted.
“What was on your mind when you found yourself keying the Stones?”
Looking slightly embarrassed, Sarah laughed.
“I was scared shitless,” she answered. “I was more afraid than I had ever been in my life – even more so than when Roger made his advances. I didn’t want to die in that cavern. I was desperate for a way out.”
“So it might have been your fear that triggered the Stones into coming to life. A Kordean Witch suggested to me that stress might awaken the abilities of a latent sensitive.”
Sarah pondered this for a few moments.
“No,” she replied at last, and shook her head firmly. “Not the fear. I think what may have done it was what rose up inside me to oppose the fear. It was my determination to escape from there. I wasn’t going to die there, and that was that.”
“Well, the Witch Marlyss did say that you were awfully stubborn. I think that she had a hard time dealing with you because of that – I suppose she has a hard time with most Terrans because of that.” Coryn grinned. “You’re a special case, though. She called you stubborn - I prefer to think of it as having an indomitable spirit.
“After the Stones had fired up, did you say that you found yourself travelling somehow?”
Sarah shook her head. She had intended to skip through this part of the story quickly, humourlessly and without much detail. Some of the things that happened seemed so incredible – how could she expect anyone to believe that they had actually taken place? Yet the Agent appeared to be taking it all very seriously, as if he listened to stories like hers every day.
“First of all, I just went out-of-body. I was in the cavern, but up in the air; I could see myself – my body – lying on the platform below.” She grimaced, remembering how pitiful she had looked.
“I tried to contact the mind of one of the white creatures, thinking that maybe I could force it to untie me. But,” – she shuddered – “I couldn’t do it. Its mind was too alien for me to do anything more than touch it. I couldn’t communicate with it.
“After that I thought of the ship and it occurred to me that I might be able to mindtravel there. I was able to do that, but it didn’t do me any good. I couldn’t reach any of the crew – I tried them all
. Not Roger, of course.”
“I think I know why that didn’t work,” Coryn interjected. “To begin with, none of them is the least bit amarto-sensitive. And before they took on this mission, the Witches put blocks around their minds to ensure that nobody could interfere with them via Stone-power. It was meant to be a safeguard against The Organization, in case something went wrong.”
Sarah laughed.
“Well, something went wrong, all right. But I must say that the blocks worked very well. Even with all those Stones behind me…” She shook her head.
“After I had failed to reach the Explorers I felt very desperate. That was when I came across the greencat’s mind – or rather, it came across mine. It told me that I was making a spectacle of myself and that I had better put out the Stone blaze before I landed myself in even more trouble.” She grinned a little ruefully. “At the time I couldn’t see how I could get into more trouble than I was already in. But it also promised to come down to the cavern and help me get out.”
“So it was the cat who told you about damping down the Stones? Cutting the blaze down, I mean. The Witches told me that you couldn’t have possibly known about that on your own.”
“They were right. I couldn’t have. The cat also told me that there were two groups of minds something like my own that were after me. One of the two was definitely up to no good. I suppose that was The Organization Hounds. The Stone fire, ablaze as it was, was bound to lead them straight to me. So I damped down the blaze as soon as I could.”
He let her go on with the story – the humanoids’ festivities, her astonishment at discovering that her rescuer was an animal instead of a human being, the arduous trip through the tunnels. He questioned her about how she had been able to see in the dark, with the greencat’s vision.
“I can’t explain how the transfer of images took place. Out there on the cliff, just before I came back to my body, the cat told me that although I had learned some things since I first met it, I still didn’t know anything.” She laughed. “I believe that’s right. All I know for sure is that I seem to have a talent, and maybe I could develop it further.”
