by Andre Norton
In the next—No! Storm’s hands twisted tightly on the bar. He had been shaken when he had unrolled the package Na-Ta-Hay had sent him. But not as much as now. That small stretch of good clean green grass, the pine a little beyond—not a spizer, nor a candlestick gum, nor a Langful, but a true Terran pine!
“Pine!” He could make a song of that word, a song that would have power enough to pull the Faraway Gods across the void of space. His hands battered at the grill gate and then strove to find the release of its lock—let him through—out to stand beneath that pine!
“Storm—bar—other side—”
Somehow those words penetrated his excitement. There was a bar on the other side of the grid, the mechanism of its lock, as far as he could see through the holes, strange. But there was some way of opening it, there had to be!
The Terran worked his arm through one of the grill openings, pounded with his fist along the bar. His impatience built to a rage with the stubborn thing that kept them prisoners in the tunnel when all that fresh world lay beyond. Then his self-control began to assert itself once more. He withdrew his arm and unsheathed his belt knife.
Half-crouched, Storm flattened his body against the grill once more and picked with the knife point at every possible opening in and around that circle of metal that apparently locked the bar into place. Logan and Gorgol kept back the crowding animals while he worked. The sweat made his hand slippery, until at last he dropped the knife out of reach on the other side of the still-locked barrier. Gorgol’s belt knife was too long and Logan’s had been taken from him on his capture. There was no use in trying the blaster against the alien material of the portal.
Storm had gone back to the futile pounding when a sudden squeak from ground level—ground level on the opposite side of that obdurate door—startled him into sane thinking again. The squares of the grill might have kept out the rest of them, but Hing had squeezed through and was now watching him with expectancy.
Hing! Storm went down on his knees and schooled patience back into his voice as he chirruped to her. A Beast Master could only control and direct his charges when he was in full control of himself. He had forgotten the first rule of his training and the realization of that frightened him almost as much as the sight of the Xik weapon—more so because this fault lay within him, and it was the first time he had erred since his earliest days in the service.
The Terran forced himself to breathe more slowly and put aside his fear of not being able to master the alien lock. Hing was the important one now—Hing and her curiosity, her claws, the jobs she had been trained to do in the past. Storm blanked his mind, narrowed all his power of projection to one thing—and sent that thought along the path as he had called Baku out of the morning sky to help them clear the pass.
Hing sat up, her long clawed paws dangling in front of her lighter belly fur. Then she dropped to four feet once more, came to the door and climbed it agilely until she was perched on the bar itself, her pointed nose only inches away from Storm’s face. Again she waited and chirruped inquiringly.
He could not direct her, send those claws to the right places as he had in the past when she had destroyed buried installations, uncovered and rendered useless delicate machinery. Then the Terran had had models of the necessary kind to practice with, had been able to show Hing and her mate just what they must do. Now he did not even know the type of lock that baffled them. He could only use Hing’s own curiosity as a tool, urge the meerkat to solve the mystery. And since she did not have the quick and reaching intelligence of Surra, nor the falcon brain of Baku, implanting the proper impulse was a longer process and a doubtful one.
Storm put all his force into that one beam of will. He did not know that he showed the face of a man strained close to the limit of endurance. And that the two who watched him, without understanding how or why he fought, were held silent by the strain and effort he displayed.
Hing walked a tightrope along the bar. Now she balanced on her hind feet, patting that circle of the lock with her paws. And if Storm did not actually hear the click of her investigating claws on the substance, he sensed them throughout his tense body as he poured out his will.
She raked the disc impatiently and shrilled a protest—perhaps at the stubborn lock, perhaps at his soundless command. But she did not retreat. Bending her head she tried her teeth on the thing, hissed almost as angrily as Surra had done, and went back to picking with her claws. Whether she did puzzle out the pattern, or whether it was only lucky chance, Storm was never to know. But there was a tiny flash of light. Hing squealed and leaped from the bar just as it dropped.
The grill swung open, dragging the Terran with it into the place of growing things. He was too weak from his efforts to get to his feet and was only barely conscious of Gorgol pulling him back out of the path of the horses. Then he was lying on his back, partially supported by the Norbie’s arm, gazing up dazedly into a vast space filled with wisps of floating mist.
“What kind of a place—” Logan’s voice sounded subdued, with more than a touch of awe.
The air was fresh, not only fresh but filled with scents—spicy, perfumed, provocative odors, as if someone had emptied all the aromatic growing things of a dozen worlds into one limited space and kept them at the peak of production.
And that was just what someone or something had done, as they discovered. Storm, with Gorgol to steady him, got to his feet. He saw Surra squatting on her haunches before a round puffball of a thing studded with cups of purple blooms, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy as she sniffed the delicate but tantalizing fragrance those flowers spread. And the horses had cantered on, stopping to graze on the bank of cool, green grass that had certainly once been rooted on the planet of Storm’s birth.
He pulled loose from the Norbie’s hold and staggered to the pine, his hands fondling its bark. The scent of the needles, or the resin, was stronger in his nostrils than the more exotic odors about him. It was true this was a pine, standing at the apex of a triangle of mixed Terran vegetation. And with the bole of the tree to steady him, Storm looked ahead, to see the brilliance of roses in full bloom, tassels of lilacs, familiar, unfamiliar, all aflower, all scented, in an unbelievable mixed array.
“What is it?” Logan joined the Terran, his bruised face turned toward the mass of flowers and green as if he too felt some healing quality in it.
“From Earth!” Storm used the old word, sweeping his arms wide. “These are all from my world! But how did they come here?”
“And where and what is here?” Logan added. “Those surely aren’t Terran too—” His hand fell on Storm’s arm and he drew the other part way around to face, across a narrow path of the alien black stuff, another mixed garden. And the Arzoran was very right. The oddly shaped—to Terran eyes—bushes with their bluish, twisted leaves, the striped flowers (if those flat plates were flowers) were not Terran—not from any world Storm knew.
Gorgol came across the open glade where the horses were. His fingers moved to express his own wonder—
“Many growing things—all different—”
Storm turned again, still putting one hand to the pine as an anchor, not only because of his tired body, but also because the wonder of its being here still made this all part of a strangely satisfying dream.
There were two more gardens or garden plots wedging out from the section directly before the gate grill, and each of them was widely different in the life it supported, save that odd and weird as the growing things appeared, they shared two attributes, none were truly ugly and all were sweet scented.
Logan rubbed his forehead with his bandaged hands and blinked.
“There is something about all this—” He swung about slowly as Storm had done. A flight of brilliant patches that the Terran had thought firmly attached to a bush of ivory white stalks floated free, moved double wings, and skimmed to new perches. Birds? Insects? They could be either.
“They have places on some worlds,” Logan pursued his own explanation, “where the
y keep wild animals—call ’em zoos. It looks to me as if this place were meant to keep specimens of vegetation from a lot of different planets. One, two, three, four,” he counted the separate plots about them. “And these are just about as different from each other as you can get.”
He was right, Storm could agree to that. Gorgol put out a hand and touched with gentle hesitation one of the ivory stems that had supported the flying flowers. He withdrew his fingers and sniffed at them with some of the same pleasure Surra had shown when she drank in the perfume of the purple cups.
Surra? Storm glanced around, seeking the cat. But she was gone, vanished somewhere into this scented wilderness. He sat down at the foot of the pine, leaning his back against its trunk, his hands flat against the earth that felt like home earth, moist, but firm under his flesh. He could close his eyes now to the riot of those other gardens and their weird beauty, or look up into the tent of green over him and be back again—
Gorgol and Logan drifted away. Storm was glad to be alone. Slowly he slid down the length of the pine bole until he was curled on a mat of needles and he slept, dreamlessly, completely relaxed, though the semblance of day about him never changed to evening.
“—biggest mixture you ever saw.” Logan lay on his back, sharing the bed under the pine, while Gorgol dug his fingers back and forth through the same needle padding, shifting the brown harvest of years. It was still day by the light, though they must have been many hours in the cavern.
“I’d say,” the Arzoran settler continued, “that a whole mountain was hollowed out to hold this. We counted about sixty different gardens—including two which are mostly water. And then there are the fruit orchards and vines—” He gestured at the remains of their recent meal, a small collection of pits and rinds. “I tell you—this is fabulous!”
“No animal life—?”
“Birds, insects—no animals, except that cat of yours. We caught her rolling in a big patch of gray mossy stuff and acting as if she were wild. Ran away from us as if we were Xiks stalkin’ her with one of those pop guns of theirs.”
“But how could all this keep growing without any attention for years, maybe centuries?” marveled Storm. “You are right, it is, it must have been intended as a botanical garden of specimens gathered from all over the galaxy. This”—he pulled a curl of flame-orange rind between his fingers—“was an Astran ‘golden apple.’ And the black and white berries were from Sirius Three. But you’d think the place would have grown into a wilderness when it was left. Something continued to control it, kept the growth right, nourished everything properly—”
“Maybe the light is part of it,” Logan suggested. “Or the atmosphere. I’ve noticed one thing.” He held out his hand. The bandages were gone and the wounds and burns Storm had tended were not only closed, they were almost healed.
“Show him your arm,” Logan signed to Gorgol and the Norbie presented his wounded forearm for inspection. The arrow tear was only a reddish mark, and the native used the limb freely with no sign of discomfort.
“How do you feel?” Logan demanded of Storm.
The Terran stretched. He had not really noticed before but, now that Logan had drawn the matter to his attention, he was aware that the weight of exhaustion that had ridden him into this Eden was gone. In fact Storm had not awakened so contented with life for a long time—for years. Like Surra he wanted to roll on the ground and purr his pleasure aloud.
“See?” Logan did not seem to expect an articulate answer. “It’s in the air here, all around us. Growth—making us feel alive and vigorous, healed of our hurts, too. Perhaps this place was designed for other uses besides just botanical display.”
“Does it also have a door out?”
“We found three doors,” Logan returned. “Two are grills, but the third looks the most promisin’.”
“Why?”
“Because it has been walled up. The legends of the Sealed Caves suggest it might be an outlet to the outside—”
Storm supposed he should get up and go to inspect that doorway. But for the first time in years a kind of languorous laziness held him in its grip. Just to lie here under the pine, to watch Rain and the other horses at their ease, Logan and Gorgol beside him as relaxed as himself, none of them driven by a need for immediate action—it was wonderful, perfect! He and the others had found a small section of Paradise, why be in a hurry to leave it?
Gorgol sat up, brushed the pine needles from the fringes of his belt. He turned his head, gazing about him with a slow measurement and within Storm a faint, very faint apprehension awoke.
The native’s yellow-red fingers moved in short sweeps, with pauses between, as if the importance of what he had to say was making the Norbie doubly careful of his choice of signs.
“This—trap—big trap.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T
rap?” repeated Logan without much interest. But the languor that held Storm was pierced by a fast-growing doubt. Perhaps because he had known a variety of traps—and very ingenious ones—in the past, the Terran did not only listen but was receptive to such a warning.
“What manner of trap?” he signed.
“You like here—happy—” Gorgol was plainly groping for signs to convey a complicated idea. “No go—want to stay—”
Storm sat up. “You no want to stay?” he asked.
Gorgol looked about him again. “Good—” He touched the remains of the fruit. “Good!” He drew an exaggeratedly deep breath of the perfume-laden air. “Feel good!” He gave an all embracing twirl of his fingers. “But—not mine—” He ran those fingers through the pine needles. “Not mine—” He flicked the fingers to include the other gardens about them. “No Gorgol place here—not hold Gorgol—” Again he was trying to make limited signs explain more abstract thought. “Your place—hold you—”
The Norbie had something! That alerting signal far inside Storm was clamoring more loudly. What better bait for a trap than a slice of a man’s home planet served up just when he believed that world lost forever? Even if a trap were not intended, it was here just the same. He got to his feet, tramped determinedly away from the pine.
“Where’s that built-up door of yours?” he demanded harshly over his shoulder, refusing to look back at that wedge of temptation set in familiar green.
“You think Gorgol’s right?”
“You don’t think about things such as that,” Storm answered out of the depths of experience, “you feel! Maybe those who built this place didn’t intend it for a trap—” He slapped Rain’s flank, making the stallion move from the grass to the roadway that separated the small piece of Terra from its neighbor.
“Surrraaaaa—” Storm shouted that aloud, an imperative summons that he had only had to use once or twice in their close comradeship. And his voice awoke echoes above and around the gardens, while birds flew and flower-colored insects floated, disturbed, to settle again.
Leading Rain by the head-stall, the Terran started down the path. The sooner he was away from that bit of his native earth the better. Already a new bitterness was beginning to fester in him and he turned it against the enemy outside. So the Xiks thought they had finished Terra? Perhaps—but they had not finished Terrans!
He hurried, deliberately twisting and turning from path to path, trying to muddle his own trail, so that he could not easily find his way back to that pine-roofed spot. Twice more he called the dune cat. Hing pattered along behind him, stopping now and then to sniff inquisitively or dig, but perfectly willing to move, while the other horses followed Rain. They threaded the narrow roadways between gardens—such gardens. Twice Storm saw foliage he recognized, and both times they were samples from widely separated worlds.
“Left through here”—Logan came up beside him—“around the end of this water place, then behind the one with the scarlet feather trees. I wonder what kind of a world those are from? See—now you’re facing it.”
Storm followed his directions. The scarlet plumes of the trees
arched high against the duller red of the stone wall of the mountain interior. And the black path led directly to an archway that had been carefully bricked up with blocks about a foot square. The Terran could see none of the black sealing material, unless it was used as mortar to set those bricks. Under his hands the wall was immovable, and he examined it carefully, wondering what tool there was among their supplies that could best be used to attack it.
Would the points of their belt knives make any impression on those cracks? He could turn on the blaster, but he was loathe to use up the charge in the most potent weapon they had. Best try knives first.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, his hands slippery with sweat, his control over his temper hard pressed, Storm admitted that knives were not the answer. That left the blaster. It was not a disrupter, of course. But set to highest power it should act upon the blocks, if not upon the stuff that held them together.
Sending the rest of the party back, Storm lay on the path, resting the barrel of the Xik weapon on several stones so that its sights were aligned with a point in the middle of the wall, directly below the highest rise of the arch. He pressed the release button and fought the answering kick of the weapon, holding it steady as Xik-made lightning struck full on the blocks.
For seconds, perhaps a full minute, there was a flareback that beat at Storm with a wave of blast heat. Then a core of yellow showed at the center point of the beam, the yellow spreading outward in a circle. The color deepened. Harsh fumes spreading from that contact point made Storm cough, his eyes stream. But he held the blaster steady for another long moment before he started to depress the barrel slowly, drawing the yellow mark down in a line toward the floor.
As the light began to pulse, he knew that the charge was nearing exhaustion. What if he had guessed wrong and thrown away the blaster without achieving their freedom? Storm held the weapon tensely while those pulsations grew more ragged, until the pressure of his finger on the firing button brought no response.