by Andre Norton
Something pushed against his forearm persistently. He roused enough to shove it away, to discover that it was the water container he had left with Ku-La. Furtig pulled it to him, opened it, and allowed himself two reviving mouthfuls.
Revive him those did. But now hunger awakened in turn. He hunched up as well as he could in those cramped quarters to get at his supply pouch. In turn he was heartened when Ku-La accepted some of the dried meat he pressed into his hand. If the other could eat, perhaps he was not as badly off as Furtig had earlier feared. If Ku-La could move on, help himself somewhat, their return did not seem such an insurmountable problem as Furtig had thought it.
But he did not suggest that move as yet. Having eaten sparingly and drunk even more sparingly, Furtig settled himself full length, pushing aside the welter of tape cases to stretch out in what small measure of comfort he could achieve, and took the rest he knew he could no longer do without.
How long he dozed he did not know. But he awoke, aroused by a clicking near to hand. His body tensed, his hand crept to the butt of the Demon weapon. The tapes!
“You wake?” Ku-La spoke. “I count our find—”
Furtig realized that the other must be piling the cases into some sort of order. For when he put out his hand he discovered that those he had shoved aside were gone. But—“our find”? Did Ku-La think to claim that which Furtig by his own efforts had brought out of danger? When Furtig had succeeded where the other had failed?
Save that this was no time for quarreling. Neither one would have any chance to claim anything if they did not get out of here. He was sure, in spite of the partial recovery Ku-La appeared to have made, that the other could not retrace Furtig's way in. Which meant either that Furtig must leave him here—with the majority of the tapes—or find another way out for them both.
They lay in this wider space, the junction of three ducts. Two would lead them nowhere they could go, which left the third. It was the left-hand way, which might or might not carry them deeper into Ratton territory. He said as much.
“Your way in—” began Ku-La.
“There would be a hard climb back. It was difficult to descend and I had use of both hands.”
“While those gray stinkers have left me the good of only one!” Ku-La interrupted. “But you can return—”
“With a chance that the Rattons have already marked the route?” Furtig countered. “I cannot carry you—or more than a few of the tapes. Should I leave all easy prey for them?”
“The tapes being the more important. Is that not so, warrior?” Ku-La asked quietly. “Tell me, why did you risk so much to free me from the Rattons? You could not have known then that I had information about the tapes. And I am no clansman or litter brother of yours; we have shared no hunting trail. This is not the custom of your tribe, any more than it is of mine, or so I would guess.”
Furtig told him the truth. “I do not know, save I could not leave any of the People, clansman or stranger, to the Rattons. Or perhaps I have listened to the Ancestor—”
“Ah, yes, your Ancestor. I have heard of his strange thoughts—that all the People, clan upon clan, must draw together in a long truce. One of his messengers spoke so to our Elders. But we could not see the wisdom in that—not then.”
“There has been a change in your thinking?” Furtig was interested. Did Gammage indeed have a strong enough message to convert those with whom he had no kin tie? When his own clan would not listen to him?
“In my thinking, though I am no Elder. You did not leave me to die under Ratton fangs. Though earlier I left you and your kin brother so. And you took the knowledge I had given you and returned with what you found. Yes, one begins to see the worth in your Ancestor's suggestion. Together we have done something that neither might have succeeded in alone.”
“Save that we have not yet succeeded,” Furtig pointed out. “Nor shall we until we are safely back in that portion of the lairs held by the People. And with what we have found. Now we must do just that.”
In the end Furtig made a blind selection from the tapes, knotting as many as he could into the bag. The rest he stacked around the duct walls. This hollow of a three-way meeting was as good a place as any to store them. Having done this, he tried his powers of concentration for the last time, tried to contact Foskatt.
There was no way of knowing whether he got through. In fact the farther he was in space and time from his contact, the more he doubted the worth of their communication. With Ku-La he ate and drank again. There was very little water left now—he was not sure it would last long enough to carry them both to some source for more. But he would not worry about that until it became a matter of real concern. Rather he must keep his mind on what lay directly before him.
Again crawling with Ku-La's one hand hooked into his belt, Furtig worked into the left-hand passage. If they moved now behind the walls of separate rooms there was no way of telling it, for there were no gratings. And distance in the dark and under such circumstances was as hard to measure as time. The duct ran straight, with no turns or side cuttings. Furtig could not help but believe they must be heading back toward the lairs used by his own kind.
He tried to tap that directional sense which had guided him so surely before. But whether he had exhausted his talent, if he had any special talent in message sending, he did not know. One thing only was certain: He had no strong urge in any direction and could only crawl unguided through the dark.
Far ahead there was a glimmer of light. Another grating? He did not greatly care, he merely wanted to reach it, the need for light as much an ache within him as hunger or thirst. As he advanced, Furtig was sure it was stronger than the weak glimmers of the other gratings.
They reached the opening, which seemed, to eyes accustomed to the black of the ducts, a blaze of light. It was a grating, but one giving on the open, even though they must be many levels into the earth. Rain was falling without, and the dampness blew through the grating to bead their fur.
Here a well had been cored through the lairs, large enough so that with the haze of the rain they could hardly see the far side. What they could make out of the walls showed them smooth, unbroken by more than gratings. Only in one place the smooth wall was blackened, broken with a hole of jagged edges.
Furtig thought of lightning and how it could rend even rocks if it struck true. Also of the lightning of the Demon weapon. Perhaps that could not have caused that hole. But suppose the Demons had similar but greater weapons, ones of such force as to knock holes through stone walls? Like giant rumblers? The old legends of how the Demons had turned upon each other in the end, rending, killing—this might mark such a battle.
On the other hand, that hole could well give them entrance into the very parts of the lairs they wanted to gain. Furtig was heartily tired of crawling through the ducts. There was something about being pent in these narrow spaces which seemed to darken his mind so that he could not think clearly any more. He wanted out, and the fresh air beyond was a restorative moving him to action.
“But this place I know!” Ku-La cried. “I have seen it—not from here, but from above—” He crowded against Furtig, pushing the other away from the grating, trying to turn his head at some impossible angle to see straight up. “No, I cannot mark it from here. But there are places above from which one can see into this hole.”
Furtig was not sure he wanted Ku-La to recognize their whereabouts. It would have been far better had they found a place he knew. But he did not say that. Instead he pushed Ku-La away in turn to see more clearly; he wanted another look at the wall break. Yes, it was not too far above the floor of the well. He was sure they could reach it. And he set to work on the grating.
As he levered and pulled, he made his suggestion about going through the break.
“A good door for us,” Ku-La agreed.
The grating loosened, and he wriggled through into the open. He was glad for once to have the rain wet his fur, though normally that would have been a discomfort he would have
tried to avoid. He dropped easily, and water splashed about his feet. That gathered and ran in thin streams to drain through openings in the base of the walls.
Furtig signaled for Ku-La, turning his head from side to side watchfully. Above, as the other had said, there were rows of windows. And he could see, higher still, one of those bridges crossing from the wall against which he stood to a point directly opposite. Or had once crossed, for only two-thirds of it were still in existence, and those were anchored to the buildings. The middle of the span was gone.
There were no signs of life. Rain deadened scent. However, they would have to take their chances. Furtig tugged the cord which he had made fast above for the second time. Ku-La descended by its aid, the rain washing the crust of dried blood from his matted fur as he came.
Those windows bothered Furtig. He had the feeling which was so often with him in the lairs, that he was being watched. And he hated to be in the open even for so short a time. But Ku-La could not make that crossing in a couple of leaps. He hobbled, and Furtig had to set hand under his shoulder to support him or he would not have been able to make the journey at all. It seemed long, far too long, before they reached the break and somehow scrambled up and into that hole.
10
Ayana lay pent in the web, staring up at the small visa-screen on the cabin bulkhead. So she had lain through many practice landings. But this was different—this was real, not in a mock-up of the ship while safely based on Elhorn II, where one always knew it was a game, even if every pressure and possible danger would be enacted during that training.
Now that difference was a cold lump within her, a lump which had grown with every moment of time since they had snapped out of hyper to enter this system. Were the old calculations really to be trusted? Was this the home planet from which her species had lifted into space at the beginning of man's climb to the stars?
When one watched the histro-tapes, listened to the various pieced-together records, one could believe. But to actually take off into the unknown and seek that which had become a legend—
Yet she had been wildly excited when her name had appeared with the chosen. She had gone through all the months of testing, training of mental conditioning, in order to lie here and watch a strange solar system spread on the visa-screen in a cramped cabin—know that they would flame down, if all went well, on a world which had not been visited for centuries of planet time.
She saw the shift in the protect web hung above hers. Tan must be restlessly trying to change position again, though the webs gave little room for such play. Even their rigorous training had not schooled that restlessness out of Tan. From childhood he had always been of the explorer breed, needing to see what lay beyond, but never satisfied with the beyond when he reached it, already looking once more to the horizon. That was what had made life with Tan exciting—on Elhorn; what had drawn her after him into the project. But what can be a virtue can also be a danger. She knew of old that Tan must sometimes be curbed, by someone close enough for him to respond to.
Ayana studied the bulging webbing—Tan safe, but for how long? His nature had been channeled, he had been educated as a First-in Scout. Once they had landed, he would take off in the flitter—unless there were direct orders against that. Now Ayana hoped that there would be. She could not understand the deepening depression which gathered as a fog about her. It had begun as they had come out of hyper, growing as she watched the visa-screen. As if those winking points of light which were the world awaiting them marked instead the fingers of a great dark hand stretching forth to gather them in. Ayana shivered. Imagination, that was her weak point, as she had been told in the final sifting when she had almost been turned down for the crew. It was only because she was an apt balance for Tan, she sometimes thought unhappily, that she had been selected at all.
“Well—there they are!” There was no note of depression in Tan's voice. “So far the route equations have proved out.”
Why could she not share his triumph? For it was a triumph. They had had so little to guide them in this search. The First Ship people had deliberately destroyed their past. A search of more than a hundred years had produced only a few points of reference, which the computer had woven into the information for this voyage.
Five hundred planet years had passed since the First Ships—there had been two—had landed on Elhorn. What mystery had made those in them deliberately destroy not only all references to the world from which they had lifted but some of the instruments to make those ships spaceworthy? The colonists had suffered a slow decline into a primitive existence, which they had actually welcomed, resisting with vigorous fanaticism any attempt by the next generation to discover what lay behind their migration.
There were two—three such stagnated generations. Then, with all those of the first generation gone, their stifling influence removed, again inquiry. Explorers had found a closed compartment in one ship with its learning tapes intact; though those were spotty, sometimes seemingly censored.
After that came rebuilding, rediscovery, the need to know now almost an inborn trait of the following generations. There had been a search lasting close to a hundred years, until at last nearly all the resources of Elhorn had been turned to that quest alone. Not without opposition. There had been those in each generation who had insisted that their ancestors must have had good reason to suppress the past, that to seek the source of their kind was to court new disaster. And those had been gaining followers, too. They might have prevented the present voyage had it not been for the Cloud.
Ayana's face suddenly mirrored years of parched living when she thought of the Cloud. It had been such a little thing in the beginning. Scientists had wished to get at the rare ores their detectors had located on the impenetrable South Island of Iskar, where volcanic action produced unpredictable outbursts of lethal gases. From the old records, they had created robos like those the First Ship people had used, and these had been dropped on Iskar to do the mining. But the gases apparently had eaten away the delicate robo “brains,” in spite of all attempts to shield those against infiltration. Then the scientists had turned to chemical countermeasures. To their own undoing. For the equipment the “dying” robos had installed in the mines had malfunctioned. And the result was the birth and continuing growth of the Cloud.
That did not rise far in the air; it crept, horribly, with a slow relentlessness which made it seem a sentient thing and not just a mass of vapor. So it covered Iskar, where there was little to die, but later it had headed out over the sea.
The water itself had been poisoned by the passing touch of that loathsome mist. Sea life died, but died fleeing. And those refugees contaminated others well beyond. Those died also, though more slowly.
At last those who had resisted the hunt for the home world capitulated. With their limited knowledge, lacking as it was in those portions the First Ship people had destroyed, they could not deal with the monster from Iskar. And they must either find a way to strike it a death blow, or else transport all their people elsewhere.
Even as the Pathfinder had lifted, the rest of the labor force (which now meant all the able-bodied dwellers on Elhorn) had been at work rehabilitating the two colony ships. Whether those could ever be put in condition to take to space again no man knew. The Pathfinder had been constructed from a smaller scout which had been in company with the colony ships.
There were only four of them on board the Pathfinder, each a specialist in his or her field, and able to double in another. Ayana was both medic and historian; Tan, a scout and defense man; Jacel, the captain, was their com expert and navigator; Massa, the pilot and techneer. Four against the whole solar system from which the First Ships had fled in such fear that they had destroyed all references to their past.
Had there been a Cloud on the ancestral planet, too? Or worse still (if there could be worse), had men hunted other men to the death? For that, too, had happened in the past, the tapes revealed. At least on Elhorn, they had not resorted to arms to settle differ
ences in belief.
The closer the Pathfinder came to their goal, the more Ayana feared what they might find.
For days of ship's time their flight within the ancestral solar system continued. By common consent they chose their target—the third planet from the sun. From the computer reports, that seemed to be the planet best suited to support life as they knew it.
All this time Jacel tried to raise some response to their ship's broadcast, but none came. That silence was sinister. Yet the mere lack of a reply signal could not turn them back now. So they went into a braking orbit about the world.
That it was not bare of life was apparent. Or at least it had not lacked intelligent life at one time. Vast splotches of cities spread far over the land masses. They could be picked up by viewers in daylight, and their glow at night (though sections were ominously dark) provided beacons. Still there was no answer to their signals.
“This I do not understand.” Jacel sat before his instruments, but his voice came to Ayana and Tan through the cabin com. “There is evidence of a high civilization. Yet not only do they not answer our signals, but there is no communication on the planet either.”
“But those lights—in the night!” Massa half-protested.
Ayana wanted to echo her. It was better to see those lights flashing out as day turned to night below, than to remark upon the glow which did not appear—the scars of darkness. Yet one looked more and more for those.
“Have you thought,” Tan asked, “that the lights may be automatic, that they come on because of the dark, and not because anyone presses a button or pulls a switch? And that where they are now dark some installation has failed?”
He put openly what was in all their minds. And that was the best explanation. But Ayana did not like to hear it. If they now raced through the skies above a dead world with only that vast sprawl of structures its abiding monument for a vanished people, then what had killed them, or driven them into space? And did that menace still lurk below?