by Andre Norton
“I wonder,” he speculated, “whether this hole couldn’t run on through the mountain. This might not have been one of the regular Sealed Caves but a passage from one valley to the next. You say you got into this valley through a tunnel—well, couldn’t this one be the way out?”
But Storm eyed the dark hole in which the beam of the torch was so quickly lost with no favor at all. The air was dead the farther one moved in from the entrance, and he had a feeling that to go into that unknown region would be merely to walk to one’s death. Unless he were driven to it he would have no part of such exploration.
“Queer air—” Logan limped on, one supporting hand against the wall. “Seems to be dead—light plays tricks here too.”
And Storm noticed that the horses were huddling together in the middle of the expanse, showing no desire to push into the tunnel—that Surra avoided the dark mouth of the place and Hing, whose curiosity had led her in the past to the most reckless venturing, did not patter along at Logan’s heels, but sat on her haunches, rocking from side to side, her pointed nose high, making snuffling noises of suspicion.
With Gorgol, the Terran set about building up the front of the cave, obliterating hoofprints as far back as the edge of the water. Then they loaded to the brim the three canteens and Gorgol’s water carrier of lizard skin. From the edge of the still shrinking lake Storm saw those dots of light along the cliffs. If the Xiks had discovered the body of the guard, they might well be more cautious about advancing in the dark.
It was the middle of the night when the fugitives stopped their work of disguising the cave and crawled into hiding. It seemed to Storm, as he settled down to get what sleep he could, that the inert atmosphere of the place was expelling the fresh air that came in through a small opening they had left. And, when he closed his eyes and could no longer sight that scrap of sky, his imagination presented a picture of his being fastened in some box he could not batter open.
“Sealed Caves”—he had always thought that that name had been given because they were actually walled up. But now he could believe that that which sealed them was inherent in the caves themselves. Reason told Storm that they were doing the best thing now, that if they could stay undercover until he and Gorgol, scouting the hills, found a path out, they would have better than a fifty-fifty chance. But his body was tense, every nerve in him resisted holing up here.
Morning came and the three in hiding discovered that the cave had one good property besides offering concealment—it was cool, while the sun in the valley was a bright glare generating dank heat. Logan wriggled up to share Storm’s lookout.
“Big dry’s comin’ early this year,” he remarked. “Sometimes works that way when the storms in the mountains are too heavy early in the season. We’ve more than one reason for gettin’ out of here on the gallop.”
“The Survey party crossed a river coming in,” Storm replied. “High with rainfall, of course, but would it dry up entirely?”
“The Staffa, no. But that runs pretty far south of this region, rises in the East Peak country. I don’t know about this other one you mention. To try to make the Staffa and trail it out would just about double your ridin’ time and you’d be in the edge of the Nitra raidin’ country—”
“Then we had better make our break soon—” Storm stopped almost in mid-word as the fan-shaped piece of valley he could sight from his vantage point was suddenly peopled. Through his lenses those distant figures leaped into clear detail. They were wearing Norbie corselets and boot leggings, but they had not taken the trouble to continue the deception farther than their clothing. That pale greenish skin, the lank, bleached hair hanging in curled rats’ tails down to their shoulders in the back, marked two of the riders as Xiks, while their three companions were plainly of the settler race. Two of the latter had bows, but the former were armed with off-world weapons. And one of them bore across his saddle a tube of a dead white color.
Storm had accepted the presence of slicers, the blaster he now half lay upon, the force beam he had seen at its deadly work in the other valley. But still he jibbed at the white tube and what it meant. There were few enough of them, a development produced so close to the end of the war that it had never been in wide use. And certainly the last place the Terran would expect to see it carried casually on horseback was here in the wastes of a frontier planet. Two, captured in outposts so quickly overrun by Confed forces that the defenders had not been able to blow them up and so avoid surrender, had been tested on barren asteroids. And, witnessing the result, the Confed command had ordered that all others found were to be destroyed at once.
The tubes could be used, yes—and the results would be disastrous to the enemy before their sights—only there was in addition an unpredictable backlash of energy, though it might not affect the Xiks as adversely as it did the Confed force that tested the weapons. Built on a principle not unlike that of the disrupters, used to dispose of inanimate material, the tubes were far more powerful than any Confed disrupter of three times their size and range.
“More trouble?” Logan asked.
Storm held out the lenses, steadying them for the other.
“See that tube on the second horse—that’s the worst trouble I know.” The Terran added what he had heard about that weapon.
“Goin’ to make sure of somebody—or somebodies,” commented the Arzoran dryly. “I don’t particularly care for Nitra warriors. We’ve had our differences, and until you have a Nitra double-barbed arrow cut out of you, fella, you don’t know just how much you can sweat over a litde knife work. No—I’ve never felt kindly toward Nitras. But any disputes we’ve had have been on a more or less even basis. Usin’ that tube against Norbies’s more like puttin’ up a grass hen against your Surra and tyin’ the hen’s feet into the bargain.”
Storm made signs for Gorgol, repeating as well as he could the information about the Xik weapon. The Norbie nodded that he understood and watched the riders round the lake, to be hidden by a series of mounds linked together by a brush wall.
“Nitra there—last night. Maybeso not so now. Nitra do not wait like bug one sets foot upon! This evil thing—better we take it—”
“Not so,” Storm returned regretfully. “Made only to be used by evil men—we touch—we killed!” He used the most emphatic of the death signs.
The rider with the tube appeared on the far side of the end mound. He dismounted, with none of the easy grace of a settler or the litheness of a Norbie, but in a scrambling way that informed Storm that to the alien the animal he had bestridden was merely a means of transportation and no more. Seeing that, the Terran could understand better how the Xiks had been able to cut down the frightened animals in the other valley undisturbed by the brutality of the act.
Having shouldered the tube, the invader climbed to the top of the mound and set about the business of putting together the rubble there to form a base for it. He moved expertly but with no hurry. Yet Storm did not miss that flash through the air, was able to pick out with the aid of the lenses the arrow, head down and still quivering, planted in the soil just a foot short of its target. But that must have been a specially lucky shot as no more arrows hit the mound.
“The Nitra are shooting.” Storm passed the lenses again to Logan.
“Poor devils,” the other commented, “they must be cornered—they wouldn’t take such a chance unless they were.”
The other riders burst into sight, with the outlaws well to the fore, urging their mounts in a retreat that held panic as part of its haste.
“Drawing them on—” Storm speculated aloud. “Those idiots are really planning to use that thing!”
He squirmed around on the bank of earth and stone, jabbing a fist at Gorgol’s shoulder to urge him down. Another sweep of Storm’s arm sent the blaster skidding to the cave floor ahead of him, as he took a grip on Logan’s belt and jerked the younger man down with him. Surra? The cat was on the floor—Baku—Baku!
The eagle had gone foraging an hour ago. Storm beam
ed as best he could a message to keep up—up and safe in the high heavens.
“Get those horses back! All the way back into the tunnel mouth!”
“What’s the matter? They set up that thing about a mile from here and facin’ the other way—” Logan protested, but he was limping toward Rain, flapping his arms at the mares.
Together they forced the horses back into the mouth of the tunnel. Storm glanced back despairingly at that window on the outer world. But there was no time to close it.
“Get down!” He set the example, throwing himself flat on the floor, and saw Gorgol and Logan obey. “Your eyes! Cover your eyes!” He shouted that to Logan, signed it to the Norbie. Then he lay waiting, his face buried in the crook of his arm.
The heartlessness of the aliens was never more plain than in this move. They would wipe out the pocket of Nitras right enough—but they would also doom most of the living things in this valley into the bargain. The Terran grinned without mirth as he remembered those outlaws riding for their lives. If he knew Xiks they would hardly delay long enough to give their colleagues a good start to safety. The chance for those riders to survive was so slender as to be practically nonexistent.
Surra had flattened herself beside Storm, and Hing was endeavoring to dig her way under him, scraping fruitlessly at the rock floor and whimpering, until he reached out an arm and gathered her in between him and the cat. He heard the horses stamp, but they did not venture out of the tunnel mouth where Logan had driven them. It was as if they were as alert to the warning in Storm’s mind as the other animals.
He had nothing to guide him except those army reports. But those, using the terse language of such communications, had been circulated widely among all Commando outfits where the men or beast and man teams engaged in mopping-up activities might chance upon the new and horrific weapon. And service reports were not prone to exaggerate.
Why were the effects of the thing so much worse on non-Xiks? How long now before it would blow? Storm tried counting off seconds in the dark and was not aware he was doing it aloud until he heard a sound that could only be a chuckle coming from Logan’s direction.
“I hope you’re not makin’ us pull this burrow trick for nothin’,” the other remarked. “How long before the world comes apart?”
His words might have been a cue. For their world, dark and stuffy as it was, did come apart then. Storm could never later describe what happened to him in that space of time lifted out of the ordinary stream of seconds, minutes, hours. The experience was like being caught up in a giant’s hand, rolled into a conveniently sized ball, and tossed up in the air to be caught again. There was no thinking—no feeling—nothing but emptiness, with himself blown through it—on and on—and on—
And it was not wholly physical, that assault upon the stable foundations of his small portion of the planet. One part of Storm clung to the solid cave floor as an anchor for the part that whirled and flew. And inside he was torn because he so clung.
How long did it last? Was he unconscious toward the end of that weird struggle between substance and nonsubstance? Did the rocks about them keep them safe by turning the worst of the unknown radiation? He only knew that they did endure the backlash and lived.
Again he felt the warmth coming from Surra through the icy chill that blanketed the cave. He shrank from the scratching of Hing’s claws as she squirmed and kicked.
For a long moment he lay still, as an insect might cower beneath a rock if it could foresee that in a moment that shelter would be lifted and it would be exposed to unforeseeable danger. Then, in the midst of his blinding, unreasoning panic, a spark of resolution sprouted. The Terran lifted his head from his arm and for a terrified minute thought he was blind. For there was no more small slit of sky—nothing but thick darkness—a chill darkness filled with the dead air native to this place.
Storm sat up, feeling Surra rise with him. She growled and spat. And then, out of the dark, Logan spoke with determined lightness:
“I think somebody just slammed the door!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
S
torm used the torch, aiming it at the mouth of the cave. His mind refused to accept what his eyes reported—there was no longer any opening there. It had been closed once by the landslip—but that had been a different matter, an affair of earth and stone. This was a black oozing over that same earth and stone, a thick stuff in drips and runnels forming a complete curtain across.
“What in the—?”
The Terran heard Logan’s amazed demand as he walked closer to that strange wall, focusing the torch on the widest of the black streaks. Storm could recognize the stuff now. It was the substance of that wedge rail the Survey party had trailed into the valley, the stuff that had walled the tunnel of the entrance gorge. Yet now it had been melted as tar might have softened and run from the breath of a blaster. Though he had not noticed it earlier, the building material of the long-ago aliens must have rimmed this cave, to be released by the backlash of the Xik weapon!
Storm handed the torch to Gorgol with a gesture to keep it trained on the widest of the surface streams. He rammed the stock of the blaster against that black runnel with all the strength he could put into a swinging blow. The light alloy of the butt gave off a metallic ring, rebounded with force enough to jar Storm back a step or two, yet the black stream showed no dent or mark.
The Terran reversed the weapon, set its dial to maximum and pressed the trigger. A point of vivid, eye-searing flame bored into the black stain for an instant, until Storm flicked the control. Again there was no impression on the alien coating.
“Nothing happened?” Logan limped around Gorgol to examine the wall for himself. “What is that anyway?”
Storm explained almost absently. He had taken the torch back from Gorgol and was pacing along the front of the cave. Some trick of chance—or could it be that the ancient owners had prepared a booby trap for the unwary?—had cemented the barrier all the way across. Those black streams had run in just the places where they could best weld together rocks and earth. Perhaps Hing might be able to dig her way to freedom, but no effort could clear a large enough space to release the rest of them.
Which left—the tunnel.
Storm traversed the new wall for a second time, hoping against the evidence of his eyes to find some break they could enlarge. He met Logan face to face as he turned back.
“I still don’t see what happened—or why!” The Arzoran studied the wall beside him. “If they had turned that little machine of theirs on us, yes. But the tube was facin’ the other way—and a mile off at that!”
“The Confed Lab men after the first experiment said the results were a matter of vibration. And this stuff has been molded like plasta-flesh. Must have turned every bit of it in this valley fluid for a time—”
“I hope,” Logan stood away from the wall, “that it caught every one of those devils stickin’ in it tight! No chance of breakin’ through this?”
Storm shook his head. “The blaster was our best hope. And you saw what happened when I tried that.”
“All right. Then we’ll have to go explorin’. And I would suggest we move now. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, but there’s been a change in our air.”
That quality of staleness that Storm had met on his first imprisonment here was indeed very noticeable. And using the blaster had not helped to clear the atmosphere any. They would have to try the tunnel or face a very unpleasant death where they were.
Packing their supplies on the horses, with Surra padding in the lead beside Storm, they moved reluctantly into the tunnel. The Terran kept his torch on the lowest unit of its force. No use exhausting its charge when he had only one spare cartridge. And by its light they saw that they were out of the natural roughness of the cave into a cutting, which, if it had not been bored by intelligent beings, had been surfaced by them, for the walls changed abruptly from the red stone of the natural rock to the black of the alien material.
“Goo
d thing your vibrations didn’t reach this far,” Logan commented and then coughed. “If this had been melted we would have been finished.”
Just as the period of the Xik attack had been lifted out of normal time for Storm, so did now this journey appear to take on the properties of a march through a nightmare. They must have been progressing at the rate of a normal walking pace, yet to the Terran the sensation of wading through some vast delaying flood persisted. Perhaps it was the inert quality of the air that affected his reactions, slowed his mind. Had it been minutes—or hours—since they had left the cave to enter this long tube where the flat black of walls, floor, roof sucked the air from a man’s lungs and the light from the torch?
Then Surra left his side. She was a tawny streak in the torch light, leaping ahead, to be absorbed utterly by the gloom. He called after her and was nearly sent sprawling as Rain nudged against him. The horses were as eager as the cat to hurry ahead.
“Air!”
Storm caught that hint of breeze also. And it was more than just fresh air to battle the deadness of the passage; that puff of wind carried with it its own freshness and scents—strange perhaps, but pleasant. Storm stumbled on at a half-run, hearing the others pounding after him.
There was a turn in the corridor, the first they had found. Then light shone ahead, squares of light. Storm snapped off the torch and headed for that goal. He squeezed past Rain, urged one of the mares aside and nearly stumbled over Surra, who was standing on her hind legs, her paws resting on a crossbar of a grill-like closing, her head blotting out one of its squares.
Storm steadied himself with a grip on the bars, looked ahead.
But not into the open day as he thought he would. Instead he was surveying a section of what might be a garden. Yet there was not one of the plants sprawling there that he could name, not among those in the first bed, at any rate.