“I can move. I seem able to hold off some of the effects. If I don’t slow you down too much.”
“Let’s try it out,” Nile said. “They shouldn’t be after us immediately. Let me know if it gets too difficult.”
Her bundle was in the niche of floatwood where she’d left it. She opened it hastily. Ticos stood behind her, clinging to the vegetation, bent over and gasping for breath. Nile was winded enough herself. They’d scrambled straight up from the roof of the blockhouse into the forest, cut across south of the sea-haval rookery, clambered down again towards the lagoon. It hadn’t been a lightweight dance along the branches for her this time. Her muscles knew they’d been working. Even so, Ticos, supported by the climb-belt, had been pushed very hard to keep up with her. He wasn’t equipped with dark-lenses, wasn’t sufficiently skilled in the use of the belt; and at intervals the nerve-gun charge he’d absorbed set off spasms of uncontrollable jerking and shaking. There were antidotes for the last, and no doubt the Parahuans had them. But there was nothing available here. He’d have to work it out. Another five or ten minutes of climbing might do it, Nile thought. It had better do it—she knew now Ticos had lost half his reserves of physical energy since she’d seen him last. If the effects of the alien weapon corresponded at all closely to those of its humanly produced counterparts, a more central charge should have killed him quickly. The load he’d stopped might still do it, though that seemed much less likely now.
She fished the pack of dark-lens gel from the pouch, handed it to him. “Better put on your night eyes.”
“Huh? Oh! Thanks.”
A series of shrill whistles rose from the lagoon. Ticos’ head turned quickly.
“Sounded almost like one of your otters!”
“It was. Sweeting.” Nile had heard intermittent whistling for the past several minutes, hadn’t mentioned it. The wind still drowned out most other sounds. She pried the end of the buti stem open with her knife. “Got the lenses in place?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s see how fast you can put on a coat of buti. We might have a problem here rather soon.”
Ticos took the stem, began rubbing sap hurriedly over his clothes. “Parahuans?” he asked.
“Perhaps. Something seems to be coming this way along the lagoon. That was Sweeting’s warning signal. Did you know your friends had a tarm here?”
“I’ve seen it.” Ticos’ tone held shock, but he didn’t stop working. “You think that’s what’s—”
“It’s more likely to be the tarm than Parahuans.”
“What can we do, Nile?”
“Buti seems to be good cover if it doesn’t see us. The thing got close to me once before. If it comes this far, it probably will find our trail. I’ll go see what Sweeting has to tell. You finish up with the buti. But don’t smear the stuff on your shoe soles yet.”
“Why not?”
“I think we can lose the tarm here. It may not be too healthy by now anyway.”
He looked up briefly, made a sound that was almost a laugh.
“More Tuvela work?”
“This Tuvela has little helpers . . .” Nile switched on the otter-caller, moved quickly towards the lagoon. At the edge of the water she stood glancing about, listening. Nothing significant to be seen. The blurred snarling of engines came for a moment from the general direction of the blockhouse. Then Sweeting broke the surface below her.
“Nile, you watch out! Tarm coming!”
Nile rejoined Ticos moments later. The tarm was approaching through the floatwood above water level. It might be casting about for their trail, or might be on the move simply because it was beginning to feel the effects of the wild otters’ weed poison. They’d succeeded in planting a considerable number of the thorns in it under the blockhouse. Sweeting reported its motions seemed sluggish. But for a while it could still be dangerous enough.
She postponed further explanations, and Ticos didn’t press for any. They hurried down to the lagoon together. If the tarm didn’t turn aside, it should come across their human trail. Then the lagoon must be where the trail seemed to end. If it began searching for them in the water, the otters would try to finish it off. Evidently the tarm didn’t realize that the small elusive creatures might be dangerous to it. After it found it couldn’t catch them, it hadn’t paid them much attention.
They rubbed buti sap into the soles of their shoes, waves lapping a few feet below. Nile thought the last coating she’d given herself should be adequate otherwise. Her stock of the sap was running out; she might need some later and didn’t know whether she could find another stand. By the time they finished, otter whistling had begun again, not far off. She led the way back into the forest, moving upward. Ticos crowded behind her, tarm fear overriding his fatigue. Perhaps a hundred feet on, Nile suddenly checked.
“Down, Ticos! Flatten out!”
She dropped beside him on the bough along which they had been moving. There was a disturbance in the forest below that wasn’t caused by the wind. Vegetation thrashed heavily. The noise stopped for some seconds, then resumed. It seemed to be approaching the area they’d left. They watched, heads raised, motionless.
Then Nile saw the tarm for the third time. Ticos stiffened beside her. He’d detected it too.
Even with the dark-lenses she couldn’t make out many details. There was growth between them. The great thing moving among the boles of the forest looked like a fat gliding worm. Its nearness had an almost numbing effect on her again. She stared at it in fixed fascination; and it was some moments then before she realized it had stopped—about at the point where they had gone down to the water, where the human scent lay and where it should end, blotted out by the buti.
They both started at an abrupt series of loud sucking noises. The pale mass seemed to swell, then flattened. It had turned, was flowing up into the forest.
“It—” Ticos began.
“Going back the way we came. It isn’t following us.”
He sighed with relief. They watched the tarm move out of sight. Long seconds passed. Finally Ticos looked over at Nile. She shook her head. Better not stir just yet.
And then the tarm reappeared, following the line of their trail back to the water’s edge. Now it slid unhesitatingly down into the lagoon and sank below the surface. Otter whistles gave it greeting.
They got to their feet at once, hurried on. The wind noises had become allies, covering the sounds of their retreat. Nile selected the easiest routes—broad boughs, slanted trunks. Ticos simply wasn’t up to much more; he stumbled, slipped, breathed in wheezing gasps. At last she stopped to let him rest.
“Huh?” he asked. “What’s the delay?”
“We don’t have to kill you at this stage,” Nile told him. “They may not even know yet that we aren’t lying dead in the laboratory. They’ve probably sealed the doors to keep half their fort from becoming contaminated.”
He grunted. “If they haven’t searched the lab yet, they soon will! They can get protective equipment there in a hurry. And someone should have thought of that window by now.”
Nile shrugged. The tarm could chill her, but she was no longer too concerned about Parahuan trackers. “We have a good head start,” she said. “If they trail us to the lagoon, they won’t know where to look next. We could be anywhere on the island.” She hesitated. “If they have any sense left, they won’t waste any more time with us at all. They’ll just get their strike against the mainland rolling. That’s what I’m afraid they’ll do.”
Ticos made a giggling sound. “That’s the one thing they can’t do now! Not for a while.”
“Why not?”
“It’s the way their minds work. The only justification the Voice of Action had for what it’s done was the fact that it could deliver your head. Proof of the argument—Tuvelas can be destroyed! They’ve lost the proof and they’ll be debating for hours again before they’re up to making another move. Except, of course, to look for you. They’ll be doing that, and doing it intensively. We’d bette
r not wait around. They might get lucky. How far is it still to the incubator?”
Nile calculated. “Not much more than four hundred yards. But it includes some pretty stiff scrambling.”
“Let’s scramble,” Ticos said. “I’ll last that far.”
VIII
The incubator was a loosely organized colony-animal which looked like a globular deformity of the floatwood bough about which it grew. The outer surface of the globe was a spiky hedge. Inside was a rounded hollow thirty feet in diameter, containing seed pods and other vital parts, sketchily interconnected. The hedge’s spikes varied from finger-long spines to three-foot daggers, mounted on individually mobile branches. Only two creatures big and powerful enough to be a potential threat to the incubator’s internal sections were known to have found a way of penetrating the hedge. One of them was man. The other was no enemy. It was a flying kester, a bony animal with a sixteen-foot wingspread, at home among the ice floes of the south, which maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the incubator organism. Periodically it flew northwards to meet floatwood islands coming along the Meral, sought out the incubators installed on them, left one of its leathery eggs in a seed pod on each, finally returned to its cold skies. In the process it had distributed the incubators’ fertilizing pollen among the colonies, thereby carrying out its part of the instinctual bargain. When the young kester hatched, the seed pod produced a sap to nourish the future pollinator until it left its foster parent and took to the air.
Man’s energy weapons could get him undamaged through the hedge. The simpler way was to pretend to be a polar kester.
“It’s right behind these bushes,” Nile said. She indicated a section of the guard hedge curving away above the shrubbery before them. “Don’t get much closer to it.”
“I don’t intend to!” Ticos assured her. Their approach had set off a furious rattling as of many dry bones being beaten together. The incubator was agitating its armament in warning. He stood back watching as Nile finished trimming a ten-foot springy stalk she’d selected to gain them passage through the hedge. Another trick learned in childhood—the shallows settlers considered incubator seeds and polar kester eggs gourmet items. Spiky fronds at the tip of the stalk were a reasonable facsimile of the spines on the kester’s bony wing-elbow. Confronted by an incubator’s challenge, the kester would brush its elbow back and forth, along one of the waving hedge branches. A number of such strokes identified the visitor and admitted it to the globe’s interior.
Nile moved up to the shrubs standing across their path on the floatwood bough, parted them cautiously. The rattling grew louder and something slashed heavily at the far side of the shrubs. She thrust out the stalk, touched the fronds to an incubator branch, stroked it lightly. After some seconds the branch stiffened into immobility. Moments later, so did the branches immediately about it. The rattling gradually died away. Nile continued the stroking motion. Suddenly the branches opposite her folded back, leaving an opening some five feet high and three wide.
They slipped through, close together. Nile turned, tapped the interior of the hedge with the stalk. The opening closed again.
Unaided human eyes would have recorded blackness here. The dark-lenses still showed them as much as they needed to see. “Over there,” Nile said, nodding.
The interior of the colony-animal was compartmentalized by sheets of oily tissue, crisscrossed by webbings of fibrous cables. In a compartment on their left were seven of the big gourd-shaped seed pods. The caps of all but two stood tilted upwards, indicating they contained neither fertilized seeds nor an infant kester.
“We settle down in those?” It was Ticos’ first experience inside an incubator.
“You do,” Nile said. “They’re clean and comfortable if you don’t mind being dusted with pollen a bit. The whole incubator has built-in small-vermin repellents. We could camp here indefinitely.”
“It doesn’t object to being tramped around in?”
“If it’s aware of being tramped around in, it presumably thinks there’s a kester present. Go ahead!” He grunted, gripped one of the cables, stepped off the bough to another cable and swayed over to the nearest pod. Nile came behind, waited while he scrambled up the pod, twisted about, let himself down inside and found footing. “Roomy enough,” he acknowledged, looking over the edge at her. He wiped sweat from his face, sighed. “Here, let me give you back your belt.”
“Thanks.” Nile fastened the climb-belt about her. “Where’s yours, by the way?”
“Hid it out in my quarters when I saw the raiding party come up. Thought I might have use for it later. But I never got an opportunity to pick it up again. It’s probably still there.”
“How do you feel now?”
Ticos shrugged. “I’ve stopped twitching. Otherwise—physically exhausted, mentally alert. Uncomfortably alert, as a matter of fact. I gather you’ve had experience with nerve guns?”
“Our kinds,” said Nile. “The Parahuan items seem to produce the same general pattern of effects.”
“Including mental hyperstimulation?”
“Frequently. If it’s a light charge, a grazing shot—which is what you caught—the stimulation should shift to drowsiness suddenly. When it does, don’t fight it. Just settle down in the pod, curl up and go to sleep. That’s the best medicine for you at present.”
“Not at present!” Ticos said decidedly. “Now that we’ve hit a lull in the action, you can start answering some questions. That ship you may have contacted—”
“A sledman racer. It was waiting for a message from me.”
“Why? How did it happen to be there?”
Nile told him as concisely as possible. When she finished, he said, “So nobody out there has really begun to suspect what’s going on . . .
“With the possible exception of Tuvelas,” Nile said dryly.
“Yes, the Tuvelas. Gave you quite an act to handle there, didn’t I?”
“You did. But it kept me from being clobbered in the air. The Parahuans have been creating the recent communication disturbances?”
“They’ve been adding to the natural ones. Part of the Great Plan. They’re familiar with the comm systems in use here. They worked out the same general systems on their own water worlds centuries ago. So they know how to go about disrupting them.”
“What’s the purpose?”
“Testing their interference capability. Conditioning the humans to the disturbances. Just before they strike, they intend to blank out the planet. No outgoing messages. Knock off spaceships attempting to leave or coming in. Before anyone outside the system gets too concerned about the silence, they intend to be in control.”
Nile looked at him, chilled. “That might work, mightn’t it?”
“Up to that point it might. I’m no trained strategist—but I believe the local defenses aren’t too impressive.”
“They aren’t designed to deal with major invasions.”
“Then if the Voice of Action can maintain the previous organization—coordinate the attack, execute it in planned detail—I should think they could take Nandy-Cline. Even hold it a while. The situation might still be very much touch and go in that respect. Of course the probability is that they killed too many dissenting Palachs tonight to leave their military apparatus in good working condition. And in the long run the Great Plan is idiotic. Porad Anz and its allies don’t have a reasonable chance against the Hub.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I am. Take their own calculations. They’ve studied us. They’ve obtained all the information they could, in every way they could, and they’ve analyzed it in exhaustive detail. So they wound up with the Tuvela Theory. A secretly maintained strain of superstrategists . . .”
“I don’t see how they ever got to the theory,” Nile said. “There isn’t really a shred of evidence for it.”
“From the Palachs’ point of view there’s plenty of evidence. It was a logical conclusion when you consider that with very few exceptions t
hey’re inherently incapable of accepting the real explanation—that on the level of galactic competition their species is now inferior to ours. They’ve frozen their structure of civilization into what they consider a pattern of perfection. When they meet conditions with which the pattern doesn’t cope, they can’t change it. To attempt to change perfection would be unthinkable. They met such conditions in their first attempt to conquer Hub worlds. They failed then. They’d meet the same conditions now. So they’d fail again.”
“They’ve acquired allies,” Nile said.
“Very wobbly ones. Porad Anz could never get established well enough to draw them into the action. And they’re showing sense. Various alien civilizations tried to grab off chunks of the Hub while the humans were busy battling one another during the war centuries. All accounts indicate the intruders got horribly mangled. How do you account for it?”
Nile shrugged. “Easily enough. They got in the way of a family fight—and the family had been conditioned to instant wholesale slaughter for generations. It isn’t surprising they didn’t do well. Frankly I have begun to wonder just how prepared we’d be generally to handle that kind of situation now. The nearest thing to a war the Hub’s known for a long time is when some subgovernment decides it’s big enough for autonomy and tries to take on the Federation. And they’re always squelched so quickly you can hardly call it a fight.”
“So they are,” Ticos agreed. “What do you think of the Federation’s Overgovernment?”
She hesitated. One of the least desirable aftereffects of a nerve gun charge that failed to kill could be gradually developing mental incoherence. If it wasn’t given prompt attention, it could result in permanent derangement. She suspected Ticos might be now on the verge of rambling. If so, she’d better keep him talking about realities of one kind or another until he was worked safely past that point. She said, “That’s a rather general question, isn’t it? I’d say I simply don’t think about the Overgovernment much.”
“Why not?”
“Well, why should I? It doesn’t bother me and it seems able to do its job—as witness those squelched rebellious subgovernments.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 192