“No way they’d leave just one to clean us up,” Cleery objected. “There’ve got to be more.”
Joel was scanning with the Glass, back and forth, up and down. He could see bright flickers where insects’ tiny lives speckled the meadow and the rock behind them. But there was nothing larger there.
He looked up at the two. “I think she’s right. I got out there, and you both came back here, but nothing shot at us, nothing moved, nothing showed a bit of interest. Think, Cleery. Do we expect cattle or poultry to outsmart us? Sure as hell, we don’t. They’re meat animals, nothing else. If one does seem to out-think us, once in a while, we just put it down to accident and go on as usual.”
Cleery grunted skeptically.
“Well, you just consider that. We outsmarted them once, but they must have thought it was a fluke. They put out bait, the way we used to spray pheromones to trap insects. Why should they leave more than one of their valuable personnel to operate the spray-gun?”
There was a long time of silence. Joel rethought his logic, and it still made sense to him. One Knacker to handle one problem with the enemy—who had it been, back on Old Earth, who had such a rule? Somebody tough, he seemed to recall.
Cleery spat. “Looks as if you might be right. And if so, once the shadow gets clean to the river we just might be able to dash across the flat and make it to the Rift. Then we could climb down to the water. We got up and down those cliffs, so we ought to be able to handle the Rift, don’t you think?”
“I do. And once we make it to the water, there ought to be a reasonably good way to travel downstream without either getting caught or drowning. Or both,” said Joel. “You game?” He glanced at Helen, who was sitting with both hands clasped around her knees, the tattered blanket pulled about her closely.
“I am game for anything whatsoever,” she said, very clearly. “I prefer drowning to what I saw them doing to people, as they took me out of that Knacker factory. Shoot me if they catch us. Promise me that.”
Joel, in his turn, grunted. “We’ll all shoot each other,” he said. “I don’t care to die the death they’d give us. And I sure as hell don’t intend to make an entrée for some fancy Knacker meal.”
He sagged against a boulder, watching the moonlit space grow narrower and narrower, the shadows of the mountains encroach upon the edge of the Rift. It looked as if, just maybe, they might make it out of this mess yet.
CHAPTER TEN
They made it to the Rift before dawn, working their way with painful care across the valley, using every scrap of cover, every rock, every ridge or rut that broke the contour of the land. When Joel found himself staring down the drop to the river, he wondered for a stunned instant if it had all been a terrible waste. He had seen this world from space, and the distance had seemed not much greater than this titanic declivity.
The second moon was overhead, and the sky was already paling. That allowed him to see much farther down into the Rift than he liked. The stone of the wall was granite, grooved by the rains of runoff from the valley at his back. The river below was a silver thread. If anyone fell—he sighed, thinking of that terrible drop. Then he thought of the Knackers and realized it would be a kinder death than any alternative they could hope for.
When Cleery and Helen joined him at the edge, he heard their twin gasps. “Here we use a rope,” he said. “I hope you still have some in your pack, Corp.”
Cleery opened his worn pack and rummaged for a length of the tough line issued to the troops. “’Bout a thousand meters here,” he said. He glanced down again, shuddered, and said, “Maybe more, but it’s hard to tell in this light.”
“We’d better wait for full daylight before we try,” Karsh said. “Nobody is going to look for us down there, I think. We can’t risk missing a hold because it’s too dark to see.”
Cleery grunted agreement. Joel reached into his pocket and felt the furry body of a fursnake. “You want to risk that drop?” he asked the slender shape as he drew the animal out into the growing dawnlight. “If you don’t, I think you can make it on that cliff. There’s probably some of your kin down there. It looks like your sort of place.”
Helen, beside him, stared at the creature, her eyes wide. “What on earth is that?”
“It’s not on Earth. I call it a fursnake, and we have several of them with us, in pockets and down backs. They’re warm at night, and they hate Knackers. Hiss like teakettles when they sense any within whatever their range may be. Handy little buggers to have around.”
She reached a timid finger and smoothed the ruffled fur. The snake seemed to coil upward against the touch, something like a cat rubbing against your ankle, Joel thought.
“I’m going to take out all mine and lay them on the edge. When we start down, if they want to come they can. If not, they can stay here. They’ve saved our lives a couple of times already, and I’m not about to risk theirs on this venture.” He put the fursnake on the stone and felt about for the rest.
By the time he and Cleery had cleared their clothing of the creatures, they had nine, curling together in some fursnake family reunion on the chilly rock. The sun began to rise behind the farther horizon, and when the light was good enough, Joel hitched a rope harness about his shoulders and started down the cliff. Before he was out of reach, two of the fursnakes slithered down the rope and crawled into his pockets again. He found himself relieved. With two to warn them of the approach of Knackers, they would be in better shape than he had expected.
He resolutely refused to look down past his seeking toes. This Rift was old, it became evident from the weathering of the granite. That was good, because it meant buckling and heaving and other natural upheavals had cracked the stone, weathered out grooves, and given a very poor, almost sheer, but remotely possible route down to the water.
He slipped on his third step downward. The thin rope cut into his back and shoulder, but the two above anchored him until he could find another hold. This was not going to be easy, and if they got down without losing one (maybe all) of his group he was going to be mightily surprised.
He got to the end of his length of rope, found a belaying point, and called up to Helen, “Now you can start down. I’ve tried to make enough marks to show you where to set your fingers. You sure you can do this?”
Her voice came down clearly. “Motivation is the key. Compared to staying in the Knackers’ cannery, this is no trouble at all. I’ll bet I could walk across a ceiling, holding on with my fingernails.”
Even in his precarious position, Joel grinned. She was right. It was the only thing that had allowed him and Cleery to survive so far.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He felt the rope jerk and twitch as she made her cautious way toward him. He set his fingers solidly into a good crevice beside the knob of stone and prepared to hold on if she slipped, but she made it within a couple of yards before she lost her footing. He was ready, and Cleery, above them, had a good grip on his end of the rope.
Already Joel was sweating, though the morning was still very cool. The fursnakes had thrust their heads out of his pockets and were watching intently as their alien host held Helen’s weight and waited while she found another toehold. When she was set again, Joel went down another few yards, found another solid knob of rock around which to belay the rope, and yelled up to Cleery, “You can start down now, Corp. I have you.”
One by one, bit by bit, the three worked their way down the cliff, angling first to one side and then the other to find protrusions capable of bearing the weight of anyone who fell. Slipping and catching, sweating and praying, Joel felt his knees aching with stress. His fingers, already bruised and cut and mangled, tried to go numb, but he kept them alive by pure will power.
When they came to the end of the relatively easier part of the descent, they were still some four or five hundred feet above the water. Below that, the rock was slick and smooth, hardly an unevenness marrin
g its face. Joel located a ledge (earlier in his life he wouldn’t have considered that narrow strip of stone to be even a wrinkle in the cliff wall), and the other two settled onto it beside him while they considered how to proceed.
“We have a lot of rope, don’t we, if we untie ourselves? More than enough to reach the water?” Helen asked. “Why don’t we find someplace to tie off an end and then slide down it, one by one, to the river? Then we could cut off what we couldn’t reach and keep the rest in case we need it again.”
Joel looked across her tangled mop of hair at Cleery, who grinned. “We’re going to have to recruit you, girl, before we’re done,” the Corp said.
Joel was already edging farther along, searching for some protrusion solid enough to hold their weights in succession, as they went down. Forty yards to his left he found a place where a runnel from above had worn away layers of softer rock from the main body of granite, leaving a needle-like spur as thick as his leg and some meter and a half long.
He caught it with his right hand and shook it hard. It didn’t budge. He moved farther aside and pushed at it vigorously. It was part of the cliff, as solid as the unweathered stone on either side. With a sigh of relief, he made a double loop of the rope and tied it off with his very best set of knots.
“Found it,” he called to the others. “I’m going to move farther along, and you come, Helen. We’ll untie you and you can take the first ride. Then Cleery can follow you, and I’ll come last. I want to push the rope away from the ledge with my toe to keep it from fraying.”
Helen crept toward him, her fingers white against the ridges she gripped, her feet moving with incredible care along the two-inch ledge. When she reached him, Joel pulled the now-freed rope toward him, measured out his best guess at the distance to the water, and tied a solid loop at that point.
“Catch the rope with both hands. Wrap a turn around your right wrist—that way—and hold it under your arm. Now, when you step off the cliff, keep pushing yourself away with both feet, letting yourself down slowly enough not to burn your hands. When you get to the loop, catch onto it and look down. If it isn’t too far, just drop into the water. Even if it is fairly shallow, it will break your fall, and if it is deep you’ll go under and bob right up again. All right?”
Her eyes were wide in her pale face, but she nodded. “I saw people rappel down cliffs on holovee. That way?”
“It isn’t as easy as it looks, but given our motivation I think we’ll all do just fine. Now go.” He watched her step off backward, give a gasp, and drop out of sight. Her feet thudded against rock, there was silence, and then they thudded again. “Good girl!” he called.
There was no way to lean out and watch her, and he listened with painful intensity until he heard a distant splash. When he tweaked the rope, it came up easily. She was down, for better or for worse.
Cleery edged toward him, trying to grin but not succeeding very well. “I got a couple of fursnakes too,” he said as he caught the rope and prepared to step off. “You know, Karsh, they might be real good help to the military, if we could get a few back to headquarters. But I don’t want the officers to think they’re nothing but animals and abuse ’em.”
Joel guided him off the ledge, keeping the rope clear with his boot toe. “I agree, Corp. We’ll think of something. You just get down there safely and see how Helen is doing.”
Then he, too, was gone, and only the regular thud of his feet against the cliff told Joel he was going down correctly. There came another splash at last, and the rope hung free in his hands. He tested the spire of rock for one last time and gripped the strand.
It wasn’t easy—he’d been right in that department, he learned quickly. The rope was thinner than any he had ever used for rappelling, and the pain in his hands was considerable before he reached the loop. When he looked down he was still quite a distance above the water, but he could see two heads bobbing beside a rock in midstream. Two hands came up and waved him down.
He loosed the loop and dropped, still holding the rope between sleeve and chest. He hit cleanly, going deep. The water was cold and swift. Only the handy rock had kept his companions from being swept downstream. He cut desperately at the rope, as soon as he bobbed to the surface.
He swam toward his companions, and once in the lee of the boulder he found that he could tread water in the comparative calm there. Cleery reached out and bumped his shoulder with a wet fist. “Worked, Karsh. Worked damn good. Now what do we do?”
Joel looked at Helen, who was goose-pimply, her face almost blue. “You all right?”
“F-f-freezing to death,” she said between chattering teeth.
“Then we’d better get onto dry land and build a fire.” He looked across the stream to the gradual slope of the eastern shore. It was studded with rocks of all sizes, which promised footholds if they could cross to it.
“I’ll go,” said Cleery. “I swim pretty good.” He caught one end of the rope from Joel’s hand and set off at once, angling downstream with the force of the current but steadied by Joel’s grip on the other end of the line. When he reached the other side he waded out, sat suddenly, and waved.
“You next,” Joel said to Helen. “Here, hold onto the line between the two of us. It’ll help you keep from being taken off downstream.”
When his turn came, he was cold, stiff, and aching in every joint and muscle. The solid ground felt wonderful, but they had no time to enjoy it. They had taken much of the day in their descent. Now the shadow of the cliff darkened the eastern shore; soon night would fall again. Third moon was just rising over the plain beyond the river.
“We’ve got to find fuel. Those bushes beyond the waterline should do; then we can find someplace sheltered from the wind. There are certainly enough boulders farther along to make me believe it.”
Cleery shook himself like a dog, his Combats doing their usual excellent job of shedding water and holding in warmth. Helen, on the other hand, was still draped in his blanket and her scraps of Knacker clothing.
“We’ll go get wood,” he told her. “You take off everything and shake that blanket hard. It’s made to repel water, so it should shake dry. Then wrap yourself up until we can get a fire going. If you feel like it, you might investigate that pile of rocks upstream.” He handed her his fursnakes and Cleery contributed his. “Let these wrap around you. They’ll help warm you up.”
Before he had gone six paces he heard the unmistakable sound of a blanket being shaken, and he nodded. Once they were warm, they could eat some of the concentrates from his and Cleery’s packs. Then they’d move again, away from their fire. There was no need to give the Knackers any advantage they didn’t already have.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Before third moon was overhead, the three were dry, fed, and located a mile or more downstream from their point of descent. The scrubby bushes on the eastern shore promised quick cover, if Knackers should fly overhead or come along the river. By the time Helen was unable to travel any longer, both Karsh and Cleery were wearier than they liked to admit, and the group sank into a sort of grotto composed of water-carved stone on three sides and bushes on the fourth.
There, with third moon in optimum position for communication, Cleary unpacked the Com unit and keyed in the erratic bursts of Morse that gave their position, told of the release of the prisoner in order to try to capture them, and put into careful terms the presence of the fursnakes.
Joel thought for a while before giving Cleery the words:
FOUND FRIENDLY NATIVE SPECIES HOSTILE TO KNACKERS. EXHIBIT ABILITY TO WARN APPROACH OF ENEMY FROM SIGNIFICANT DISTANCE.
Once the transmission was completed, they settled together into a huddle, with fursnakes twined around necks and shoulders. In the night a swishing sound roused Karsh, who opened his eyes and saw, against the mist of stars, the dark shape of a Knacker shuttle moving from west to east at an angle to the river.
He clamped his jaw and waited. If they were scanning for life-signs, they would surely pick up his little group. Unless—he stroked the furry creature around his neck—unless the fursnake life-sign confused the reading enough to mislead the seekers. It had, he thought, done that before. Evidently it did it again, for he drifted off to sleep without any further disturbance.
It was a long time before the Com unit burbled its quiet twitter and woke him. Headquarters must have had more information than they could analyze, he thought as he shook Cleery.
When they decoded the message, it gave Joel sudden hope.
CONTINUE ALONG STREAM. PICKUP POINT ONE KLICK PAST FOUR-POINT PEAK. CONTACT WHEN ON SITE. BRING NATIVE SPECIES. WELL DONE.
The last two words shook Joel. Headquarters simply did not pass out compliments, no matter what the troops on the ground might accomplish. What did they want from him? he wondered.
Cleery was thinking along the same lines. “I don’t trust those knotheads,” he said as he packed away the unit. “They want to do something nasty with the fursnakes, I’d bet on it. We got to do something to save ’em, Karsh. They’re good little fellows and don’t deserve what HQ might do.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As they repacked their supplies and headed out into the dimness of pre-dawn, Joel was thinking about that, as well as other, more immediate matters. The farther they moved along the stream, the stranger the scent of the air became. At first fresh and clean, the odor became acrid, with a hint of mold or rot or something even less pleasing.
The sun rose slowly as they traveled, and they edged away from the water into the scrub, keeping as close to cover as possible. When the fursnakes began to hiss, Joel started to run into the overgrown flats beside them, but the little creatures convulsed with protest. Taking the hint, Joel moved back into the rocks, but the fursnakes kept looking upstream and inland, as if some concentration of Knackers might lurk there.
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