It might have been the mirror image of the one that had led them into the fliers' cave. At once apparent was that the floor of the new tunnel led up ever so gently. Shallow gutters conducted the damp trickle from the walls, and once again the central walkway was dry.
"Where in Hell does this water end up?" Slater mused. "It has to go somewhere."
"There are striated layers of frozen water in much of the deepest subsoil," Feng said didactically. "It comes down here as melt, I presume. That cave we were in, who knows how large it really was? There could have been a most sizable lake in it or even below it. And no doubt there are many other caves of equal magnitude elsewhere. I am beginning to suspect that the builders of these tunnels led water down to permanent basins."
They marched for four more hours and always the upward slope of the floor continued. Twice they passed tunnel mouths opening into theirs at right angles and once they came to a fork. Grabbit's antenna led them straight to the lefthand one of the two and they had no choice but to follow. They were no longer so depressed, but the monotony of the dark, the echoing damp walls, and the featureless surroundings were wearisome. Yet all were disciplined veterans and no one grumbled.
They halted for half an hour, fed themselves and watered and fed the bulgotes. They were tired, but no one argued when Muller gave the word to go on. The dark and the perpetual silence, broken only by their movements and occasional voices, were so dispiriting that they were all prepared to march until they dropped if it meant getting out of the caves. And Muller never forgot for a moment why they had come. His driving anxiety to make up time infected them all, and they tramped on in his and Danna's path, even though all were weary and suppressing the ache of overtaxed muscles and nerves.
Eventually even Muller had to call another long rest period. They had reached another widening of the tunnel, and again there was a fork. This time it lay behind them, since they had emerged from one entrance to discover another alongside and only one path before.
Slater had the first watch with the colonel this time, and found the latter willing to talk.
"I think that beast of yours will get us out, Slater," he said. "Plus our Wise Woman, of course. But I'm worried about Thau Lang. The map I had made no reference to any danger, nothing about that thing with the tentacles, nothing about the fliers or that vast cavern. Yet it was a Rucker map and he may be following us on it. Also, now that we're relying on the snapper, we may come out nowhere near where I had planned to meet him. This means we may end up nowhere near either JayBee or the U-Men, and/or the new clan from the bad country." He fell silent for a moment. "I can't think what I could have done, besides losing the map, that I haven't."
"We'd all have been dead a dozen times over, Colonel, if you hadn't been with us." Slater was abashed that the legendary Muller could even have a second of self doubt. "Really, sir—"
"I'm not apologizing, young man." His sharp eyes glinted and he looked hard at his young subordinate. "But I am human, you know; I eat, breathe, and relieve myself, just like the rest of you. I even have feelings. Now, get over to the other side. I want to think. And one more thing, boy. Don't hurt Danna. I'm rather fond of her." He turned and left Slater wondering at his last words.
At the end of the rest period, they set out once more. For two hours the trail led on. Side tunnels had ceased, and only the gradually increasing gradient of their own brought any hope. They were silent, all desire to talk having been lost.
Then Danna halted them. "I can smell something. Life is ahead, life that sees the sun!"
Muller quickly arranged them in battle order, Danna leading the two gotes again, and this time put Nakamura up front with the two young warmen and himself. Slater was happy to have the rear. He had come to feel that his Wise Woman was the only thing worth protecting, and he wanted to be the closest to her.
They had advanced cautiously for another kilometer, when a spitting screech, a sound they all knew well, echoed down the tunnel from up ahead.
"Ferkat!" the girl hissed, "Maybe we are coming to a den."
The thought was sobering. The savage feral wildcats of Mars could grow to the size of a leopard.
Light! They all saw it at the same time, as they rounded a gentle bend in the tunnel. A diffused, dim-gray light, but it was coming from some external source. It made them blink, gentle as it was. They halted, switched off beamlights, and waited for their eyes to adjust. After a pause they moved forward. The light grew stronger, but there was no further sound, beyond distant insect noises.
"I can smell the cat," Milla said. "I hear nothing and there must have been only one."
Even Slater caught the ammonia reek of the den, and soon they saw piles of litter, dead leaves and sticks that the animal had dragged in for a bed. They rounded another shoulder of rock, all at once rough and broken, and saw they were in a low cave. Light glared in through a jagged crack at the far end, and once more they had to stop and blink until their eyes could adjust. The floor of the den was covered with rubble, and through it they cautiously picked their way.
"Must have been a land slip at this end," Muller said. "The tunnel builders never ended their work this way."
A dense thorn vine grew over the entrance and they hacked it aside, trying to make as little noise as possible. The hole grew and soon they had a passage large enough for the gotes to follow. Muller went first and then the others. Eventually the entire party was standing on a broad shelf, and the view opened up before them. It was dawn and the growing light showed a strange landscape.
Before them unrolled a scene of unparalleled beauty. They were looking down from one wall of a mighty and fantastic gorge. Clouds of mist swirled about them and hid the depths far beneath. Matted vegetation clung to every vantage, save where a few bare rock pinnacles had resisted any growth. Many of the plants were familiar, such as the massive twisted cedars and deodars, but many were alien and new, such as a barrel-shaped monster like a giant, red, up-ended, pine cone, which towered many meters tall on their right near a spine of shrouded basalt. At their very feet, great ferns sprouted head high. All the Earth plants were far larger than any they had ever seen.
The far side of the gorge was out of sight, and they could not tell whether they were on the side of a vast crater or of a giant canyon. Strange hooting calls echoed out of the mist far below, and once a shrill scream reminded them of the ferkat they had dispossessed. Insects buzzed all about them.
Muller sat down and beckoned the others to join him. "Any thoughts on where we might be?"
The Ruckers shook their heads. "We have never seen a place like this," Danna said. "Most of these Marsplants are new to us."
Captain Feng's voice broke the ensuing silence. "Are we not on target, as it were, Colonel? I see no other explanation."
"I agree, Feng. We've come through the wilds by going under them. This can only be one place. I'm damned if I can escape the feeling that Slater's little pet knew we wanted to come here, somehow. This is the bad country. And we have got here right in the middle of it."
Chapter Ten – The Abyss of Cimmerium
FAR AWAY, in the buried central control room at Orcus Prime, the military commander of Mars turned to his executive, a man grown as gray in the UN service as himself. "It's not like Muller to have failed to report somehow, even if by a Rucker message shot into a fort with an arrow. I don't like this at all. We can't wait too much longer, Bob."
General Robert Vivian Campbell Scott, otherwise his Grace the Duke of Buccleugh, smiled at his superior. It had always seemed amusing and appropriate to him that centuries of service had brought his family, through accident, skill, and brains, once more into the service of a king. He looked at his friend's broad, swart face, the crisp white curls, and reflected that even stripped of any ancient powers, Philip Mutesa, the last Kabaka of what was once Buganda, had proved by his rise through sheer merit to UN Marshal that royal blood might still have its uses.
"Our people are rounding up the network of copters and their
bases that Medawar had set up, sir. JayBee is quickly going to find himself a little short of supplies and reinforcements. And Earth Command and I-Corps are closing in on United Minerals at home and their hidden bases in the belt, pinching them off at both ends. They were behind JayBee, we now know. This has cooled things a little, you'll agree?"
"Agreed. But what about the U-Men? If they aren't part of this, who are they? And JayBee still has the Ruck, and he knows a hell of a lot more about it this time. Suppose he gets together with them?"
"If Muller's anywhere near that Cimmerium area, Marshal—and he's supposed to be—the spy-eyes are going to pick up very little. The canyons and craters are immense and deep. We've never penetrated that region on foot or even with jet choppers. And we've tried. Atmospherics are terrible, while the fogs are heavy and seldom lift. The planet forces are on full alert. What more can one do, Phil? Except wait, that is. Satellites tell us nothing about those deeper rifts, or almost."
"You're right, as usual," the marshal grumbled. "I just wish I were out there doing something, not stuck in this office with a lot of old fogeys like you who couldn't march three feet without a cane and a cold beer."
"I trimmed your ass in the last squash match without drawing breath," his subordinate said equably. "But the beer sounds good. Let's go have one and I'll show you the latest additions to my Tridee collection, just in from Earth. There's one with five girls and four guys, imitating a frieze from the Black Temple at Konarak. The girls are painted gold, the guys silver. Fantastic!"
"I thought Scots were supposed to be Puritans," the marshal said. But he allowed himself to be led off, still muttering. His fine-honed mind knew that he had done all he could. There was nothing to do but wait. And pray for Louis Muller. Where was the man, goddamnit!
THE SEVEN had eaten and were relaxing and observing the landscape of the great rift that spread out before them, pointing out new sights to one another as the mists swirled and thinned, each time revealing new scenes. The three Ruckers were as excited as the four UN men, for this was a part of their own world, hitherto unexplored and wrapped in strange legends. Behind them the two bulgotes, their blindfolds off at last, fed eagerly on any and all of the vegetation that curled about the broad ledge, their snorts of satisfaction punctuating the conversation.
"We'll have to do some cutting," Muller said, "but the slope here doesn't look too bad so far. We may hit a sheer face lower down and have to come back though."
"It's certainly hopeless above," Feng added. "I've prowled the edge and it's all naked rock that way, with pronounced overhangs. We can go down or sideways, but not up."
"Listen!" Danna called from the edge a little distance away. They all fell silent. High above came a sound they all knew well, the whine of a turbo-jet at low speed, rising and falling as it circled and came back again.
"That's a Greenie," the usually silent Milla Breen said. "I guess they are friends, no?"
The doubt in the young warman's voice made them all laugh, including Arta Burg. "For once we don't duck, Milla, or shoot at it. Maybe later, eh, but for now they are helping."
Muller was already hammering the butt of his big Rucker bush knife on a convenient rock. As the cap broke, he peeled away the shreds and revealed two tiny bulbs set in an impervium base. One glowed red in the morning light, but the other, a yellow bulb, was dim and lifeless. While they watched quietly, he stared alternately at the bulbs and the thick clouds that hid them from their ally far above.
"This be damned," he finally said in disgust. "The red means the homer is going out. But the yellow should light up too, which means the signal is being received by that ship up there. It isn't, that's all. Something is blanketing the signal, as if there were a dead zone encapsulating this place." He opened a belt pouch and removed a sealed lump of plasticene. In a few seconds he had molded a replacement cap for the knife and the stuff was setting solidly.
"It may, of course, be something natural that's doing this. We've always encountered atmospheric trouble in certain areas of Mars, and on Earth too, for that matter. But somehow, I don't think so in this case. I wish Thau Lang were here. He's explored closer in to some of these dead spots than anyone else on the planet."
"Haven't any of our people ever tried to find out about these unknown areas, sir?" Nakamura asked. "After all, we've been here quite a while."
It was Captain Feng who answered. "It's in the I-Corps files, Lieutenant. But I suppose you are entitled to the information. Especially since my exsubordinate, Miss Dutt, had full access to them. In the last fifty years, there have been three attempts, by scientists who had received full combat and ranger training. Two groups were sent by copter to a similar area, not this one. They landed below the mist and there was ... silence. Nothing ever came back, no messages, no anything. The third group tried this very area, five years ago. It was the best-equipped and trained of the three, and each of the six men had three months bush training in the Ruck. Contact, bad but still contact, was maintained for about one-half hour. The team leader spoke of mysterious structures and said the team had detected signs of large life-forms though they had seen nothing. Their pack radar was functioning very badly, it seems. They had the feeling they were being observed, he said. Then he left his speaker, saying he would be right back. Nothing was heard but the hum of the speaker, according to the men in the command copter overhead. This lasted for about ten minutes, and came to an abrupt end with a sound. The sound, and I quote from the report, 'resembled more than anything else that of a small child's crying; that was cut off by a crunching noise, as if the set itself had been crushed.' " In the silence that followed his recital, he added, "The set had a self-destruct mechanism, as did all their technical and heavy equipment. None of it appears to have activated."
"How did they land in the first place?" asked Slater.
"The first two teams, in the other area, by parachute. This last one, the one here, by an armored copter. No malfunction of the vehicle was noted, and it was able to land with apparent ease."
Nakamura whistled. "So there is more than just old Marsrat tales to the Old Martians." He turned to Colonel Muller as he spoke. "Why so secret? I would have thought the Parliament of Man's appropriations for Mars would have been doubled if that had been aired, I mean."
"Probably you're right, Nakamura," Muller said. "But let's consider a few other possibilities, which we have in our laps as of right now, by the way. If there are strange devices of unknown power down here, whose hands do you want them to fall into? Would the inevitable rash of lunatics, adventurers, treasure hunters, and whatnot help? If the original owners still control these areas, what are their purposes and, above all, their powers? Assuming they exist, are they capable of losing their tempers? And what happens to this planet if they do? No, son, there are far too many imponderables, including the effect of this knowledge on our friends here." He smiled at the three young Ruckers, who were listening intently. "Thau Lang and I don't want them or any of the True People involved with these unknowns. And they have been, we now know, by means of the mysterious new 'clan',—the giants who come out of this region with their talk of sweeping all non-Ruckers off the planet. And, as if this were not enough, we have JayBee and Company stirred into the soup."
He used his monocular to survey the gorge for a moment and then lowered it and turned back to his audience. "This is what I see, as of now. We are almost certainly ahead of JayBee and possibly the 'new clan' party that preceded him. We are coming down on foot—a method I argued for in vain when the last expedition tried this area. I hope we will be under or inside the blanketing force, whatever it is, that shrouds this place. I hope to look around, get an idea of what goes on here, and, if possible, prepare a reception for JayBee that he won't be expecting. Since we have been out about three days, the cave journey has saved us more time than I dared hope for. I don't see how the others could make it in less than five or maybe a full week. We're cut off from Thau Lang and whatever help he might bring with him, but that's t
he worst of it, aside from not having any contact with our own forces. But the latter, as I just pointed out, may mean we are actually inside the enemy's defenses, if they are defenses and there is any enemy besides the planet itself. Is that clear?"
At the nods of the others, he continued, "So ... we leave a message on this ledge for Thau Lang, should he be following on our tracks. And we load up and go down, right now. Any questions?"
Muller wrote a short note on a piece of cloth and anchored it with one section sticking out, under a prominent rock.
The others were ready to leave when he had finished, and with Milla leading, they began to cut away the tangled growth at the right end of the ledge. Here they had help, for the well-worn though narrow track of the ferkat gave them a guide to follow. It was hard work even so, and the path had to be made wide enough for the two gotes. They came placidly down, however, still snatching bites from every plant within reach.
Danna was ecstatic about the new things they found and she kept pointing them out to Slater, who stayed close to her. There was a tiny version of the giant red pine cone, which had a tentacle and caught buzzing midges with it. Captain Feng noticed this too and looked thoughtful. Another thing no one could remember seeing before was a snakelike thing—whether plant or animal, they could not tell—but black and shiny. It had no visible head, but many minute stumpy legs, and was over two meters long. As they watched, it slid into the tangle of growth and vanished. The Earth plants made Slater homesick. Some of the cedars were as tall as any on the home planet, though their needles had taken on a bluish tint. Once the group rested under the shade of a willow that blanketed a vast area of the slope like a huge tent. Evidently a combination of rich soil and freedom from the terrible storms that swept the less sheltered reaches of the planet had caused the plant life to grow in ways it could never have done over most of the rest of Mars. Insects, some of them huge, buzzed and occasionally bit. Most were recognizable as mutants adapted from the original seed rockets, but some were clearly not, especially a conical object with two leathery wings and four grasping legs, which appeared at intervals and hovered over them. They watched one catch a large moth and carry it off with ease, though the moth was the size of an Earth crow, if a lot lighter.
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