by Andre Norton
That came just when Charis was almost convinced there was no hope for her, it came—weak, so weak that the distance must be great. But she had a direct beam on it and so could increase receptive volume. Somewhere to the northeast, another off-world com was beaming.
Charis's fingers flew, centering her sweep, adding to its intensity. The visa-plate before her clouded, began to clear again. She was picking up an answer! Charis reacted more quickly than she had thought possible as some instinct sent her dodging to one side, away from the direct line of the plate and so out of sight—or at least out of focus—for a return cast.
The figure which emerged from the clearing mist was no government man, though he was a man or at least humanoid in appearance. He wore the same dingy coveralls as the traders used; belted at his thick waist was not the legal stunner but a highly illegal blaster. Charis's hand shot out and thumbed the lever which broke connection just as the expression of open surprise on his face turned to one of searching inquiry.
Breathing fast, the girl crept back to her place before the screen. Another post—somewhere to the north. But the blaster? Such a weapon was strictly forbidden to anyone except a member of the Patrol or Defense forces. She hesitated. Dare she put the sweep to work again? Try it south? She had not recognized the man pictured on the plate as one of the ship's crew, but still he could be one of Jagan's men. And so the captain's actions here could be more outside the law than she had guessed.
Standing well to one side of the screen, Charis triggered the sweep again. Moments later she had a pick-up to the south. However, what flashed on the screen this time was no armed space man but a very familiar standby pattern—the insignia of Survey surmounted by a small Embassy seal, signifying an alien contact mission manned by Survey personnel. There was no operator on duty; the standby pattern clarified that. But they would have a pick-up tape ready to record. She could send a message and know that it would be read within hours. Charis began to click out the proper code words.
V
A soft swish of sound, a light touch on her body.
Charis looked about her with an acceptance which was in itself part of the strangeness of this experience. She had been huddled in the seat before the com, beating out on its keys her call for attention. Then—she was here, back somehow in the dream.
But, she knew a second or so later after the dawn of that realization, this was not quite the same dream after all. She wore the coverall she had pulled on before she began her night's prowling of the deserted post. Her bare feet sent small messages of pain along nerves and she glanced down at them. They were bruised and there was a scrape along one instep which oozed drops of blood. Instead of that feeling of oneness and satisfaction she had had before, now she was tired and confused.
There, as it had before, rolled the sea under the light of morning. And about her were rocky cliffs, while her sore feet sank into loose and powdery sand. She was on the shore—there was no doubting that, but this could not be a dream.
Charis turned, expecting to see the post on its narrow tongue of water, but behind her was a cliff wall. She could sight a line of depressions in the sand, ending at the point where she now stood, marking her trail, and those led back out of sight. Where she was and how she had come here she did not know.
Her heart picked up the beat of fear, her breath came faster in shallow gasps. She could not remember. No forcing of thought could bring back memory.
Back? Maybe she could trace her way back along her trail. But even as she turned to try that, Charis found she could not. There was a barrier somehow, a sensation almost as keen as physical pain, which kept her from retracing. Literally she could not take the first step back. Shaking, Charis faced around and tried again to move. And the energy she expended nearly sent her sprawling on her face. If she could not return, there was nothing to prevent her going forward.
She tried to equate the points of the compass. Had she strayed north or south from the post? She thought south. South—the government base lay to the south. If she kept on, she had a chance of reaching that.
How small that chance might be Charis dared not consider. Without supplies, without even shoes, how long could she keep going? Some wild thoughts troubled her. Had she brought this upon herself because she had striven to contact the base by com? She cupped her hands over her eyes and stood, trying to understand, trying to trace the compulsion which must have led her to this place. Had her conscious mind blanked out? Her need for escape, for reaching the government base, had that then taken over? It made sense of a sort, but it had also led her into trouble.
Charis limped down to the sea and sat on a rock to inspect her feet. They were bruised, and there was another cut on the tip of a toe. She lowered them into the water and bit her lip against the sting of the liquid in her wounds.
This might be a world without life, Charis thought. The golden-amber sky held floating clouds, but no birds or winged things cut across its serenity. The sand and rocks about her were bare of any hint of growing things, and there was no break on the smooth surface of the beach save the hollows of her own footprints.
Charis pulled open the seal of her coverall and took off her undershirt. It was a struggle to tear that, but at the cost of a broken nail she at last had a series of strips which she bound about her feet. They would be some protection since she could not remain where she was forever.
Some hundred feet or so to the south, the cliff pointed out to meet the sea with no strip of easily traveled beach at its foot. She would have to climb there. But Charis sat where she was for a while, marking the hand- and foot-holds to use, when she had to.
She was hungry—as hungry as she had been back on the mountain on Demeter, and there was not even a hunk of bread for her this time. Hungry and thirsty—although the water washed before her mockingly. To go on into a bare wilderness was sheer folly, yet there was that invisible barrier on the back trail. Now, even to turn her head and retrace by eye the hollow sand prints required growing effort.
Grimly she rose on her bandaged feet and limped to the cliff. She could not stay there, growing weaker with hunger. There could be hope that beyond the cliff there was more than just sand and rock.
The climb taxed her strength, scraped her palms and fingers almost as badly as her feet. She pulled out on the pitted surface of the crest and lay with her hands tight against her breast, sobbing a little. Then she raised her head to look about.
She had reached the lip of another foliage-choked, narrow valley such as the one which held the trading post. But here were no buildings, nothing but trees and brush. However, not too far away a thread of water splashed down to make a stream flowing seaward. Charis licked dry lips and started for that. Within seconds she crouched on blue earth, her hands tingling in the chill of the spring water as she drank from cupped palms, not caring whether her immunization shots, intended for any lurking danger on Demeter, would hold on Warlock.
If the sea beach had been empty of life, the same was not true of this valley. Her thirst assuaged, Charis squatted back on her heels and noticed a gauzy-winged flying thing skim across the water. It rose again, a white thread-like creature writhing in the hold of its two pincer-equipped forelegs, and was gone with its victim between a bush and the cliff wall.
Then, from over her head, burst a clap of sound as if someone had brought two pieces of bone sharply together. Another flyer, a great deal more substantial and a hundred times larger than the insect hunter, shot out of a hole in the cliff and darted back and forth over her. The thing had leathery skin-wings, its body naked of any feathers or fur, the hide wrinkled and seamed. The head was very large in proportion and split halfway down its length most of the time as an enormous fang-set mouth uttered "clak-clak" noises.
A second flyer joined the first, then a third, and the racket of their cries was deafening. They swooped lower and lower and Charis's first curiosity turned to real alarm. One alone would have been no threat, but a flock of the things, plainly set upon her as a targ
et for their dives, could mean real trouble. She looked about for cover and plunged in under the matted branches of the stunted-tree grove.
Apparently her passage was not hidden from the clakers even though they could not reach her, for she could hear their cries following her as she moved toward the sea. Something leaped up from just before her and squealed as it ran for the deeper shadows.
Now she hesitated, unsure of what else might lie in this wood—waiting. The smell of growing things—some pleasant, some disagreeable to her off-world senses—was strong here. Her foot came down on a soft object which burst before she could shift her weight and she saw a mashed fruit. More of these hung from the branches of the tree under which she stood and lay on the ground where the squealing creature had been feeding.
Charis plucked one and held it to her nose, sniffing an unfamiliar odor which she could not decide was pleasant or the reverse. It was food, but whether she could eat it was another question. Still holding the fruit, Charis pushed on seaward.
The clamor of the clakers had not stilled but kept pace with her progress, yet the open water tugged at her with a strange promise of safety. She came to the last screen of brush from which the vegetation straggled on to vanish in a choke of gray sand.
There was a smudge on the horizon which was more, Charis believed, than a low-flying cloud bank. An island? She was so intent upon that that she did not, at first, note the new activity of the clakers.
They were no longer circling about her but had changed course, flying out to sea where they wheeled and wove aerial patterns over the waves. And there was a disturbance in those same waves, marking action below their surface. Something was coming inshore, heading directly toward her.
Charis unconsciously squeezed the fruit until its squashed pulp oozed between her fingers. Judging by the traces, the swimmer—who or what that might be—was large.
But she did not expect nightmare to splash out of the surf and face her across so narrow a strip of beach. Armor plate in the form of scales, greened by clinging seaweed laced over the brown serrations, a head which was also armed with hornlike extensions projecting above each wide eye, a snout to gape in a fang-filled mouth . . .
The creature clawed its way up out of the wash of the waves. Its legs ended in web-jointed talons. Then it whipped up a tail, forked into two spike-tipped equal lengths, spattering water over and ahead. The clakers set up a din and scattered, soaring up, but they did not abandon the field to the sea monster. But the creature paid them no attention in return.
At first Charis was afraid it had seen her, and when it did not advance she was temporarily relieved. A few more wadding steps brought it out of the water, and then it flattened its body on the sand with a plainly audible grunt.
The head swung back and forth and then settled, snout resting outstretched on the scaled forelegs. It had all the appearance of desiring a nap in the warmth of the sun. Charis hesitated. Since the clakers had directed their attention to the fork-tail they might have forgotten her. It was the time to withdraw.
Her inner desire was to run, to crash back into the brush and so win out of the valley, which had taken on the semblance of a trap. But wisdom said she was to creep rather than race. Still facing the beast on the shingle, Charis retreated. For some precious seconds she thought her hope was succeeding. Then . . .
The screech overhead was loud, summoning. A claker spied her. And its fellows screamed in to join it. Then Charis heard that other sound, a whistling, pitched high to hurt her ears. She did not need to hear those big feet pounding on the shingle or the crackle of broken brush to know that the fork-tail thing was aroused and coming.
Her only chance now was the narrow upper end of the valley where the cliff wall might give her handholds to rise. Bushes raked and tore at her clothing and skin as she thrust through any thin spot she could sight. Past the spring and its draining brook she staggered to a glade where lavender grass grew thickly, twisted about her feet, whipped blood from her with sharp leaf edges.
Always above, the clakers screamed, whirled, dived to get at her, never quite touching her head but coming so close that she ducked and turned until she realized that she was losing ground in her efforts to evade their harassing. She threw herself into the cover on the other side of that open space, using her arm as a shield to protect her face as she beat her way in by the weight of her body.
Then she was at her goal, the rock wall which rimmed the valley. But would the clakers let her climb? Charis flattened herself against the stone to look up at the flock of leather-wings from under the protection of her crooked arm. She glanced back where shaking foliage marked the sea beast moving in.
They were all coming down at her! Charis screamed, beat out with both arms.
Cries . . .
She flailed out defensively, wildly, before she saw what was happening. The flight of the clakers had brought them to a line which crossed the more leisurely advance of the fork-tail. And so they had run into trouble. For, as storm lightning might strike, the forked tail swept up and lashed at the flyers, hurling bodies on and out to smash against the cliff wall.
Twice that tail struck, catching the avid first wave of attackers, and then some of the second wave who were too intent upon their target or too slow to change course. Perhaps five screeched their way up into the air to circle and clak, but not to venture down again.
Charis spun around and feeling for hand- and foot-holds, began to climb. The fork-tail was now between her and the remaining clakers. Until she had reached a higher point, she might not have to fear a second attack. She centered all her energy upon reaching a ledge where some vines dropped ragged loops not too far from her groping fingers.
She pushed up and into the tangle of vine growth which squashed under her squirming body, rolling over as fast as she could to look back at the enemy. The clakers were in a frenzy, rising as if wishing to skim down at her, while below, Charis cringed back.
The fork-tail was at the foot of the cliff, its webbed talons clawing at the rock. Twice it managed to gain a small hold and was able to pull up a little, only to crash back again. Either the holds were not deep enough to sustain its weight or some clumsiness hindered its climb. For it moved awkwardly, as if on land its bulk were a liability.
But its determination to follow her was plain in those continued efforts to find talon-holds on the stone. Charis sidled along the vine-grown ledge with care lest one of those loops of tough vegetation trip her. She stopped once to tear loose a small length of the stuff, using it to lash out at a claker which had gathered resolution enough to dive at her head. The whip of vine did not touch the flyer, but it did send it soaring away in haste.
She could use that defense as long as she traveled the ledge, but when she turned to climb once more, she could not so arm herself. And she was approaching a point where the shelf was too narrow to afford foot room.
The fork-tail still raised on hind feet below, clawing at the cliff wall with single-minded tenacity. A slip on her part would topple her into its reach. And she dared not climb with the clakers darting at her head and shoulders. Now she could keep them off with the lashing vine, but they were growing bolder, their attacks coming closer together, so that her arm was already tired of wielding the improvised whip.
Charis leaned against the cliff wall. So far it looked as if the reptilian attacker could not reach her. But the clakers' harassment continued unabated, and she was tired, so tired that she was beginning to fear that even if they did withdraw, she would not have the strength left to finish the pull up to the top of the cliff.
She rubbed her hand across her eyes and tried to think, though the continuing din of the attackers made her feel stupid, as if her brain was befuddled and cocooned in the noise. It was the cessation of that clamor which brought her to full consciousness again.
Overhead the ugly creatures had ceased to wheel. Instead they turned almost as one and winged across the valley, to snap into the holes in the rock from which they had earlier
emerged. Bewildered, the girl could only stare after them. Then, that sound from below— Steadying her body with one hand on the rock wall, Charis looked down.
The fork-tail had turned and, on four feet once again, was making a ponderous way back through the smashed and crushed growth, heading seaward without a backward glance to the ledge where she stood. It was almost as if the clakers and the sea beast had been ordered away from her . . .
What made her put that interpretation on their movements? Charis absently rubbed the rest of the sticky fruit pulp from her hand on a fibrous vine leaf. Silence—nothing stirring. The whole valley as she could now see it, save for the waving foliage where the fork-tail retreated, could have been empty of life. She must make the most of this oddly granted breathing spell.
Doggedly she set about reaching the top of the rise, expecting any moment to have the clakers burst at her. But the silence held. She stood up on the crest, looked beyond for cover.
This was a plateau much like the one Jagan had used as a landing space. Only this showed no rocket scarring. South, it stretched on as might the surface of a wall well above the sea, open to air and sun with no cover. But Charis doubted if she could descend again. So she turned south, limping on her tender feet, always listening for the clak-clak of the enemy.
A splotch of color, vivid against the dull, black-veined, deep red of the rocks. Odd that she had not seen that earlier when she first surveyed this height. It was so brightly visible now that it drew her as might a promise of food.
Food . . . Her hand came up over her eyes and fell again as she strove to make sure that this was not a hallucination but that it did exist outside of her craving hunger.
But if part of a hallucination, would not the so-pictured foods have been familiar—viands she had known on Demeter or other worlds where she had lived? This was no pile of emergency rations, no setting out of known breads, fruits, meats. On the strip of green were several round balls of a deeper green, a shining white basin filled with a yellow lumpy substance, a pile of flat rounds which were a light blue. A tablecloth spread with a meal! It had to be a hallucination! It could not have been there earlier or she would have seen it at once.