He came presently to a wide, smooth hump of rock shouldering up through the timber, and stopped to check the time. Twenty-five minutes had passed since he left the area of the house. If he had calculated correctly, the shots should have come from approximately this point. He moved somewhat cautiously into the open—a man waiting for help would think of selecting a place where he could be easily seen; and this could be the spot Paul Trelawney had chosen. And Trelawney, armed with a gun, might react rather abruptly if he saw a stranger approach.
But the ridge lay empty under the moon, stretching out for over a hundred yards to right and left. Dowland reached its top, moved on among the trees on the north side, and there paused again.
A feeling came, gradually and uneasily, of something wrong around here. He stood listening, unable to define exactly what was disturbing him; then a fresh gust of wind whipped through the branches about him, and the wrongness was on the wind—a mingled odor, not an unfamiliar one, but out of place in the evergreen forest, on this rocky shelf. A breath of warm darkness, of rotting, soft vegetation—of swamp or river-bed. Dowland found his breathing quickening.
Then the scent faded from the air again. It might, he was thinking seconds later, have been a personal hallucination, a false message from nerves overexcited by the events of the night. But if Paul Trelawney had returned to this point from a distant time, the route by which he had come might still be open. And the opening not far from here. It was a very unpleasant notion. Dowland began to move on again, but in a slow and hesitant manner now.
Another five minutes, he thought. At the end of that time, he certainly must have covered the distance over which the wind had carried the bark of a rifle—and should, in fact, be a little to the north of Trelawney on the mesa. If there were no further developments by then, he would fire a shot himself.
The five minutes took him to another section of open ground, more limited than the previous one. Again an outcropping of weathered rock had thrust back the trees, and Dowland worked his way up the steep side to the top, and stood looking about. After some seconds, the understanding came suddenly that he was delaying firing the rifle because of a reluctance to reveal his presence in these woods. With an abrupt, angry motion he brought up the barrel, pointing it across the trees to the north, and pulled the trigger.
The familiar whiplash of sound seemed startling loud. An instant later, there was a series of unnerving crashing noises in the forest ahead. Apparently some large animal had been alarmed by the shot. He heard it blundering off for a few hundred yards; then there was silence, as if it had stopped to listen. And then there was another sound, a deep, long cry that sent a shiver through his flesh. It ended; and the next thing that caught his attention was a glimpse of something moving near the edge of his vision to the left, just above the forest. His head and eyes shifted quickly toward it, and he found himself staring after a great shadowy thing flapping and gliding away over the tops of the trees. It disappeared almost immediately behind the next rise of ground.
Dowland still stared after it, his mind seeming to move sluggishly as if unwilling to admit what he had seen was no creature he had ever heard about. Then it occurred to him suddenly that Trelawney had not yet responded to the signal shot; and almost with the thought, he grew aware of a renewed disturbance in the forest before him.
This one was much less loud than the other had been. For a moment, Dowland thought it was being caused by the wind. But the noises continued; and in a few more seconds it became obvious that something—something that seemed to be very large indeed—was moving among the trees and approaching the open area. By that time, it wasn’t very far away.
Dowland turned, his mouth working silently, and slipped down the south side of the big rock hump, making no more noise than he could help. Already the trees were shaking on the other side of the rock. He ducked, crouched, into a thick mass of juniper branches, pushed through them, and made his way quickly and quietly deeper among the trees. This new thing, whatever it was, must also have heard the shot. It might check when it reached the open area and, when it discovered nothing to arouse its further curiosity, move off again.
But it didn’t. Glancing back through the trees, Dowland had an indistinct glimpse of something very tall coming swiftly around the shoulder of rock. He turned, scuttled on under the branches, and a moment later, there was a tremendous crashing at the point where he had left the open ground. The thing was following him down into the woods.
Dowland turned again, gasping, dropped the rifle, and pulled the IPA gun from his pocket. The thickets splintered; a towering shape came through them. He drove three shots at it, had the approximate sensation of being struck across the head with an iron bar, and felt himself fall forward. He lost consciousness before he hit the earth.
* * *
WHEN he opened his eyes, his first thought was that he should be feeling a king-sized headache. He wasn’t. He was lying face down on moist forest mold. There was a very dim predawn light about. So several hours must have gone by since . . .
Dowland stiffened a moment, then turned his head very slowly, peering about. After a moment, he pushed himself quietly up on hands and knees. The trees before him shifted uneasily in the wind. Farther on, he could make out part of the hump of rock on which he had stood and fired a shot to draw Trelawney’s attention. Between, the ground looked as if a tank had come plowing into the forest. But there was no giant shape lying there.
So his three shots hadn’t brought it down. But it had gone away—after doing what to him?
Dowland saw the IPA gun lying beside him, picked it up, and got slowly to his feet. He ran a hand experimentally over his head. No Jumps, not even a feeling of tenderness . . . He would have sworn that the crack he’d felt had opened his skull. He looked about for the rifle, saw it, picked it up, and went over to the area where the trees had been tossed about.
There was a trail there—a very improbable trail. He studied it, puzzled and frowning. Not the tracks of an animal. If it had been more regular, such a track conceivably might have been laid by a machine moving along on a very wide smooth roller. There were no indications of any kind of a tread. As it was, about all he could say now was that something very ponderous had crushed a path—a path varying between approximately eight and fourteen feet in width—through the woods to this point, and had then withdrawn again along a line roughly parallel to its approach . . . And he could say one other thing about it, Dowland added mentally. The same ponderous entity could knock out a man for hours, without apparently injuring him, or leaving any sign of how he had been struck down.
The last sounded more like a machine again; a machine which was armed in some mysterious manner. When his shot had flushed up the big flying creature during the night, he’d almost been convinced that some monster out of Terra’s distant past was there on the mesa. Those two things just didn’t jibe.
Dowland shook his head. He could think about that when he had more time. He’d lost—he looked at his watch—a little less than four hours. In four hours, a large number of things might have happened in the ranch area, with only the one partly attractive possibility among them that somebody had managed to get into the laboratory and shut off the YM flow.
HE started back at a cautious trot. Downhill and with the light strengthening gradually, covering ground was considerably less of a problem than it had been during the night. The wind hadn’t let up; it still came in wild, intermittent gusts that bent the trees. Now and then a cloud of dust whipped past, suggesting that the air over the desert was also violently disturbed. And it might very well be, Dowland thought, that YM could upset atmospheric conditions in an area where it was active. Otherwise, if there was anything abnormal going on in the forest about him, there were no detectable indications of it.
He came out presently on a ridge from where the ranch area was in view. It lay now approximately a third of a mile ahead. In the dim light, everything seemed quiet. Dowland slowed to a walk.
He might
be heading into an ambush down there. Jill Trelawney could, at most, be beginning to wake up from her drugged sleep and for another hour or so she would be too confused and groggy to present a problem. But others might be at the ranch by now; Paul Trelawney or a group of Carter’s Troopers. And whether Jill was able to give them a coherent report or not, any of the Freeholder conspirators would discover very quickly that somebody who was not a member of their group had been there before them; they would anticipate his return, be on the watch for it. Dowland left the direct line he had been following, and headed east, moving with constantly increasing caution. On that side, the forest grew closest to the ranch buildings, and he remembered noticing a hedgelike thicket of evergreens just north of the cleared land. He could make a preliminary check of the area from there.
He was within a hundred and fifty feet of the point when he discovered just how healthy the notion of a preliminary check had been. A man was lying in the cover of the evergreens Dowland had been thinking about, head up, studying the ranch grounds. He wore an antiradiation suit of the type Dowland had found in the storeroom; a heavy rifle lay beside him. His face was in profile. It was smeared now with the sweat and dirt the AR field had held in, but Dowland recognized the bold, bony features instantly.
He had finally found Doctor Paul Trelawney.
* * *
IT took Dowland over eight minutes to cover the remaining distance between them. But the stalk had eminently satisfactory results. He was within a yard of Trelawney before the Freeholder became aware of his presence. The IPA gun prodded the man’s spine an instant later.
“No noise, please,” Dowland said softly. “I’d sooner not kill you. I might have to.”
Paul Trelawney was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was raw with shock. “Who the devil are you?”
“Solar Police Authority,” Dowland said. “You know why I’m here.”
Trelawney grunted. Dowland went on, “Why are you hiding out?”
“Why do you think?” Trelawney asked irritably. “Before showing myself, I was trying to determine the whereabouts of the man who fired a rifle within half a mile of me during the night.”
So they had been stalking each other. Dowland said, “Why couldn’t that person have been your brother or niece?”
“Because I know the sound of our rifles.”
“My mistake . . . Do you have a gun or other weapon on you?”
“A knife.”
“Let’s have it.”
Trelawney reached under his chest, brought out a sheathed knife and handed it back to Dowland. Dowland lobbed it into the bushes a few yards away, moved back a little.
“Get up on your hands and knees now,” he said, “and we’ll make sure that’s all.”
He was careful about the search. Trelawney appeared passive enough at the moment, but he was not a man too take chances with. The AR suit turned out to be concealing a tailored-in two-way communicator along with as many testing and checking devices as an asteroid miner’s outfit, but no weapons. In a sealed pocket, obviously designed for it, was a five-inch atomic key. Dowland slid the heavy disk out with fingers that suddenly were shaking a little.
“Does this open your laboratory here?”
“Yes.”
Dowland detached the communicator’s transmission unit, and dropped it with the laboratory key into his pocket. “All right,” he said, “turn around and sit down.” He waited until Trelawney was facing him, then went on. “How long have you been watching the ranch?”
“About an hour.”
“Seen anyone—or anything?”
Trelawney regarded him quizzically, shook his head. “Not a thing.”
“I won’t waste time with too many questions just now,” Dowland said. “The laboratory is locked, and the machine you started in there apparently is still in operation. Your brother was found outside the laboratory yesterday morning, and may be dead or dying of internal radiation burns. He was alive and didn’t seem to be doing too badly when I left him and Miss Trelawney in the house last night to go looking for you. I had to drug Miss Trelawney—she isn’t a very cooperative person. She should still be asleep.
“Now, if I hadn’t showed up here just now, what did you intend to do?”
“I intended to stop the machine, of course,” Trelawney said. His expression hadn’t changed while Dowland was talking. “Preferably without involving the Solar Police Authority in our activities. But since you’ve now involved yourself, I urgently suggest that we go to the laboratory immediately and take care of the matter together.”
DOWLAND nodded. “That’s what I had in mind, Trelawney. Technically you’re under arrest, of course, and you’ll do whatever has to be done in there at gun point. Are we likely to run into any difficulties in the operation?”
“We very probably will,” Trelawney said thoughtfully, “and it’s just as probable that we won’t know what they are before we encounter them.”
Dowland stood up. “All right,” he said, “let’s go. We’ll stop off at the house on the way. I want to be sure that Miss Trelawney isn’t in a position to do something thoughtless.”
He emptied the magazine of Trelawney’s rifle before giving it to him. They started down to the house, Trelawney in the lead, the IPA gun in Dowland’s hand.
The house door was closed. Trelawney glanced back questioningly. Dowland said in a low voice, “It isn’t locked. Open it, go on in, and stop two steps inside the hallway. I’ll be behind you. They’re both in the living room.”
He followed Trelawney in, reaching back to draw the door shut again. There was a whisper of sound. Dowland half turned, incredulously felt something hard jab painfully against his backbone. He stood still.
“Drop your gun, Dowland,” Jill Trelawney said behind him. Her voice was as clear and unslurred as if she had been awake for hours. Dowland cursed himself silently. She must have come around the corner of the house the instant they went in.
“My gun’s pointing at your uncle’s back,” he said. “Don’t do anything that might make me nervous, Miss Trelawney.”
“Don’t try to bluff Jill, friend,” Paul Trelawney advised him without turning his head. There was dry amusement in the man’s voice. “No one’s ever been able to do it. And she’s quite capable of concluding that trading an uncle for an SPA spy would still leave Terra ahead at this stage. But that shouldn’t be necessary. Jill?”
“Yes, Paul?”
“Give our policeman a moment to collect his wits. This does put him in a very embarrassing position, after all. And I can use his help in the lab.”
“I’ll give you exactly three seconds, Dowland,” Jill said. “And you’d better believe that is not a bluff. One . . .”
Dowland dropped his gun.
* * *
THE two Trelawneys held a brief, whispered conversation in the living room. Dowland, across the room from them, and under cover of two guns now, couldn’t catch much of it. Jill was in one of the radiation suits he’d brought in from the storeroom. Miguel was dead. He had still been unconscious when she woke up, and had stopped breathing minutes afterwards. Medic had done what it could; in this case it simply hadn’t been enough. Jill, however, had found another use for it. Dowland thought the possibility mightn’t have occurred to anyone else in similar circumstances; but he still should have thought of it when he left the house. As she began to struggle up from sleep, she remembered what Dowland had told her about medic, and somehow she had managed to inject a full ampule of it into her arm. It had brought her completely awake within minutes.
The murmured talk ended. The girl looked rather white and frightened now. Paul Trelawney’s face was expressionless as he came over to Dowland. Jill shoved the gun she had put on Dowland into her belt, picked up Paul’s hunting rifle, held it in her hands, and stood waiting.
“Here’s the procedure, Dowland,” Trelawney said. “Jill will go over to the lab with us, but stay outside on guard. She’ll watch . . .”
“Did y
ou tell her,” Dowland interrupted, “to keep an eye out for something that stands twice as high as this house?”
Trelawney looked at him a moment. “So you ran into it,” he said. “I was wondering. It’s very curious that . . . well, one thing at a time. I cautioned her about it, as it happens. Now come over to the table.”
Dowland remained standing beside the table, while across from him Trelawney rapidly sketched out two diagrams on a piece of paper. The IPA gun lay on the table near Trelawney’s right hand. There might have been an outside chance of reaching it if one could have discounted Jill’s watchfulness. Which, Dowland decided, one couldn’t. And he’d seen her reload the rifle she was holding. He stayed where he was.
Trelawney shoved the paper across to him.
“Both diagrams represent our machine,” he said, “and they should give you a general idea of what you’ll see. This wheel here is at the far side of the console when we come in the door. The wheel is the flow regulator—the thing you have to keep in mind. There are scale markings on it. The major markings have the numbers one to five. Yesterday morning the regulator was set at five—full flow. Spin the wheel back to one, and the Ym-400 that’s been producing the flow goes inert. Is that clear?”
Dowland nodded. “Clear enough.”
“After that,” Trelawney remarked, “we may be able to take things a little easier.”
“What’s the quantity you’re using in there?”
“No real reason I should tell you that, is there? But I will. The sixty-eight kilograms the Overgovernment’s been grieving about are under the machine platform. We’re using all of it.” He grinned briefly, perhaps at Dowland’s expression. “The type of job we had in mind required quantities in that class. Now, about yourself. We’re not murderers. Jill tells me you can’t be bribed—all right. What will happen, when this thing’s settled, is that you’ll have an attack of amnesia. Several months of your life will be permanently lost from your memory, including, of course, everything connected with this operation. Otherwise you won’t be harmed. Understand?”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 124