by Dean Koontz
"Early evening,'' Banalog said. "And it was because he had forgotten his appointment for this afternoon. Or so he said. I contacted him to get him in after hours. He was reluctant even then. Tried to make excuses. I wouldn't have any of it." He looked at Zenolan to see what effect the story was having.
The big man seemed to believe it. "Go on," he said.
"Then, when he was here, he tried to outwit the machines. Which is impossible, of course."
"Of course."
"When I found his secret, that he was harboring a boy —well, he overpowered me, smashed my head against the floor, knocked me out before I thought to use my Phaser contact. When I woke, he had me tied and drugged."
"You're sure it was not any earlier than last evening?"
Banalog looked perplexed. "If it had been, the sweet-drugs would have worn off. I would have contacted you sooner."
"That's what I mean."
"Are you suggesting—"
"No," Zenolan said, shaking his huge head. "Forget it. I'm just upset."
Banalog snorted to show his contempt. He knew better than to get too irate. Too much anger would make them suspect he really did have something to cover. He was pondering his next move when his desk phone buzzed. He wondered what private message he was receiving that could not be sent over the Phasersystem. He picked up the receiver and said hello.
"You will come to see me in ten minutes," the smooth, cold voice on the other end said. "I will want your full story."
It was the Hunter Docanil . . .
The Hunter Relemar stepped out of the thousand-gallon storage tank in the foundry yards in the city that had been Atlanta. He opened his Phasersystem contact and informed the military officials who assigned his missions (and, incidentally, everyone else linked to the Atlanta area system and the Fourth Division system) that he had completed his assignment. Then he broke contact.
He did not look back at what had been Sara Laramie.
He stuffed his clawed hands into the pockets of his greatcoat and walked across the yards toward the exit gate.
There was only a slight chill in the air, yet he could not go without clothes, as other naoli could.
He was a Hunter.
He was different.
Elsewhere at that time:
Fiala finished the necessary tapeforms for application for director of her archaeological team. The job that should have been hers in the first place. There was no problem now. She could not help but get it. Hulann had cracked without her help. She felt terribly pleased with things.
David watched the dawn from the viewglass of the engineer's room in front of the plummeting Bluebolt as it streaked down a two-mile incline toward a flat plain where speed could be safely raised. It was one of the nicest dawns he had seen in some time. When it was over and day had insinuated itself on the world, he planned to go back to the sleeping car for a nap.
The body of the dead naoli guard who had fallen under Hulann's shuttlecraft was annointed with sweet-drugs, wrapped in a purple shroud, and burned . . .
The edges of the conversion cannister crater near the Great Lakes continued to crawl forward, hissing and spitting green light . . .
Chapter Seven
Attention: it struck Hulann with the force of a piledriver, mentally and emotionally, not physically. He stood very still, receiving the alert until there was nothing more to be heard except official messages and directions which could do him little or no good now.
"What is it?" the boy asked.
"They have discovered my absence and know its reason."
"How?"
"They found the traumatist I tied and gagged. And the woman from whom I stole the shuttle."
"But how do you know this?"
"The Phasersystem."
Leo looked perplexed, screwed his face up until his eyes and mouth seemed to be sucked in towards his nose. "What's that?"
"You—you haven't such a thing. We do. A means of talking together without talking. For intercommunication."
"Mind reading?"
"Sort of. Only it's all mechanical. A little thing they implant in your skull when you've just grown big enough to come out of the brood hole."
"Brood hole?"
"Every house has a brood hole near its warren where—" Hulann paused, blinked his big eyes. "Forget it. For now, anyway. It just gets more complicated to explain."
Leo shrugged. "You want the heat?"
"You keep it a while. We have to get moving."
Before he could start, a second interruption drew his attention. There was loud crash from somewhere near at hand, the sound of metal striking metal, and the hollow ring of an echo.
"What's that?" he asked the boy.
"It came from over there." He gestured to their left.
The noise came a second time. Not as loud, but definitely metal against metal. Big pieces of metal, too.
Hulann forced down his terrors. The Hunter could not have come this far in only moments. He would not have received the alert any sooner than Hulann had. They still had many hours of grace. He turned and walked in the direction of the clanging noise, Leo close behind.
They had not gone forty feet before the faint outlines of the pylons began to be visible through the snow. And the swinging, squarish bulk of the car. "An aerial cable-way," he said as much to himself as to Leo. He was astonished. He had heard of the things, had heard that earth-men had built them in places where they considered elevators impractical. But to see one . . .
"It must go somewhere," Leo said. "Perhaps there is a town above. That would give us shelter."
"Perhaps," Hulann said distantly as he watched the yellow cablecar swinging in the wind. If he drew his lids down, it seemed as if the car were a great, yellow bee dancing above the storm.
"You said we should hurry."
Hulann looked at the boy, then back to the swaying yellow car dangling from the nearly invisible filament of the aerial cable. "Perhaps we could ride up," he said, "It would save us walking."
"We'd have to go to the bottom to get on the thing," Leo said. "It would be easier to go up."
The wind seemed to increase in fury. Snow whipped them like buckshot pellets, exploding by, whining through the trees, gone.
Hulann watched the car. "It's farther up the mountain than I led you to believe."
"You lied?"
"Something like that."
Leo grinned. "Or are you lying now—so you can get to ride the cableway?" When Hulann made the sign of naoli shame, the boy pushed by him and trudged off toward the nearest pylon. "Come on, then. It might not work anymore, but you won't be satisfied until we find out."
A few moments later, they drew up next to the ice-crusted pylon, looked up at the hobbling yellow bee that waited overhead. They involuntarily ducked as it slammed into the pylon again. The sound of crashing metal echoed painfully in their ears.
"There," Leo said, pointing down the mountainside. "We don't have to go clear to the bottom after all."
Two hundred yards down, there was a boarding station on the middle of the mountain. Stairs wound around a pylon, then jutted out near the top on a support beam, stopped at a platform which served as a boarding and debarking station. It was all quite ghostly seen through the waves of snow, like the ruined tower of a long dead civilization.
Leo was forty feet away, kicking up clouds of white as he stomped down the steep slope, huddled against the wind, cradling the heat source against his chest. Hulann shook off his reverie and followed. At the base of the stairs up to the platform, Leo was waiting, staring up the steel rungs, licking his lips, squinting as if wrestling with a difficult problem.
"Ice," he said to Hulann.
"What?"
"Ice on the stairs. No maintenance since the war. It's not going to be easy to climb up there."
"There's only thirty steps."
The boy laughed. "I wasn't suggesting we give up. Come on." He grabbed the single hand railing and started climbing.
Before they
were even halfway up, Leo slipped twice, banging his knees on the icy steel, and fell backwards once. If Hulann had not been close behind to stop him, the boy would have rolled to the bottom, banging his head on riser after riser, scrabbling uselessly at the purchaseless ice. When they realized that the reason Hulann was having no trouble was because his hard toe claws shredded the ice under him, the alien went first, making the glossy stuff into runneled treads which the boy could manage.
At the top, they found the controls were frozen solid, jammed with drifted snow. They used the smooth gray heat source to melt this, freeing the levers. They studied the board until they were relatively certain of what they were doing; then Hulann depressed what appeared to be the proper device. There was a grumbling somewhat louder than the storm, a deep, angry sound like gods are said to make. Slowly, it grew louder. Louder still. Until it was the sustained cough of an avalanche bearing down on them.
Then the yellow bee car rolled into view, and they saw the source of the artificial thunder: the cables were sheathed in ice from disuse, and the advancing car was cracking this away as it pressed toward its summoners. Long, translucent chunks fell down toward the white earth. The bee pulled next to the boarding platform, stopped slightly beyond it, swaying in the wind, the door only half aligned with the platform.
They were forced to chip at the ice sealing the seam of the sliding portal. When that broke away, they opened the cablecar, jumped from the platform into the shiny interior. Hulann was fascinated with the dozen passenger seats, all bright black plastic leather studded with chrome —though surely the interior of a naoli spacecraft was quite a deal more spectacular than this simple cabin.
Leo called from the far end of the cabin—fifteen feet away. He was standing by a console, much like the one on the platform outside. Hulann went to him, looked down.
"We're in luck," the boy said, pointing to the topmost toggle on the board. Beside the toggle was a label telling where the cab would take you if you chose to flip this one. THE FRENCH ALPINE, it announced.
"What's that?"
"A hotel," Leo said. "I've heard of it. I didn't know we were close to it, though. It'll be a good place to rest."
Hulann reached forward and set the toggle.
The bee jolted and began humming as it moved back the cable toward the top of the mountain.
They looked through the window in front of them, holding onto the safety bar that ran around all sides of the cabin, except where there were seats. The snow spat at them, coursed around them as they moved into the heart of it, gaining speed. It was very strange to be plummeting up, to be speedballing without the touch of wind. Hulann held tight to the safety bar, inspecting the magnificent view, seeing:
—the gray snake of the cable stretching into the snow haze;
—the rimed land stretching to all sides, losing its contour under the coverlet of winter, losing character and sex, like a sleeping giant concealed by cotton;
—the great dark pines that bristled like whiskers out of the cold foam;
—an onrushing pylon, steel arms spread to receive them, then jolting past them, making them sway so all these other things danced delightfully beneath them;
—a flock of dark birds, moving by the mountain, flying level with them, knifing the storm with soft feathers;
—his and Leo's breath fogging the glass so that the boy had to reach out a hand and clear the port . . .
Hulann's tail snapped, then wound around his left thigh, tight.
"What's the matter?" the boy asked.
"Nothing."
"You look upset."
Hulann grimaced, his reptilian features taking on a pained look. "We're awfully high," he said in a thin voice.
"High? But it's only a hundred feet down!"
Hulann looked mournfully at the cable sliding past above them. "A hundred feet is enough if that should break."
"You've been in a shuttlecraft without even a cable."
"The highest they go is fifteen feet."
"Your starships, then. You can't get any higher than that."
"And you can't fall, either. There's no gravity out there."
Leo was laughing now, bending over the waist-high safety bar and giggling deep down in his throat. When he looked up again, his small face was red, and his eyes were watery. "This is something else!" he said. "You're afraid of heights. Naoli aren't supposed to be afraid of anything. Do you know that? Naoli are vicious fighters, hard, ruthless opponents. Nowhere does it say they are permitted to fear anything."
"Well—" Hulann said weakly.
"We're almost there," Leo said. "Just steel yourself for another minute or two, and it'll all be over."
Indeed, the bulk of the receiving station loomed out of the storm ahead. It was a gaily painted Swiss-styled header with a scalloped shelter roof over the entrance trough and large windows divided into dozens of small panes by criss-crossing spines of polished pine. As they glided up the cable, it seemed as if the header was moving to meet them, as if they were the stationary object.
A dozen feet from the header station, the yellow bee jolted, leaped up and down on its connections, bouncing the two occupants severely. There was a crunching sound, much like that the ice had been making on the last few hundred feet of unbroken trail—though this noise was nastier and somehow frightening. The car seemed to stop, then lurch ahead. Then, very definitely, it slipped back. There was a second jolt, worse than the first, which knocked Hulann's feet out from under him and made him fall in against the wall and the safety bar to which he still clung.
"What is it?" he asked the boy.
"I don't know."
The car tried to move ahead toward the looming header station, thumped again, slipped back, began swaying wildly. It was a combination of ferris wheel, roller coaster, out-of-control shuttlecraft, a dizzying, horrifying explosion of movement, sound and swirling light. Hulann felt his second stomach reject its refined contents, tasted the product of his first stomach in his throat. It required all the effort he could muster to avoid vomiting.
Leo lost his hold on the safety bar, went rolling across the front of the cabin, slammed hard against the far wall. Hulann thought he heard the boy squeal in pain, but the rattling of the bee and the singing of the tortured cable drowned it out.
The car moved forward again, leaped again, was tossed backwards a few feet on the cable.
The cabin swung like a pendulum. Leo rolled away, arms and legs akimbo, came up sharply against the edge of the guidance console, only a few feet from Hulann.
The alien could see the bright blood trickling from the broken corner of the boy's mouth. Leo reached for something which might give him a handhold, scrabbled ungloved fingers over smooth, cold metal. The car swung violently, ripping him back across the bottom of the bee.
The arcs of the pendulum were high and distant now, the swings so long and wild that they made Hulann feel giddy like a child on an amusement ride. But he was not amused.
Leo pulled himself into a tight ball to protect his more vulnerable regions, rebounded from the far wall without much damage, bounced back and came up against the housing of the guidance system again. There was a bruise along his left jaw, already brown-blue and growing darker.
Hulann held to the safety railing with one hand, reached out and clutched the boy's coat with the other, slid his six claws into the layers of fabric to hook it securely. The cabin tilted again, but Leo did not go rolling back. Painstakingly, Hulann began to use his great but not well-cared-for muscles to reel the boy in. When he had brought him against his own heaving chest, he pulled himself erect with one hand, then drew Leo up with the claws that were hooked in the boy's clothing. Leo seized the rail once more, held it so tightly that his ungloved knuckles were bleached white.
"We have to stop it!" he shouted to Hulann. His small face was lined like the weathered visage of an old man. "It'll jump the cable any minute now!"
Hulann nodded. They were facing the window again, and he could not tak
e his eyes off the view, like a man hypnotized by the wild lion stalking him. The Swiss header station whirled dizzyingly back and forth. Again, it seemed as if it were the building that moved while the bright cablecar remained still. Yet, if that were the case, then the pines below were also moving, performing an eerie ritual dance. And the sky was coming closer, then receding, the great masses of blue-gray clouds scuddying forward, then reversing their direction.
"Shut it off!" Leo insisted. He was afraid to let go with either of his small hands, for he knew he would be torn free, sent stumbling, crashing across the room again.
Hulann reached out to the console.
The car moved forward, jolted against whatever was halting it, reeled backwards, setting up an even more torturous arc.
He shut down the systems. The car ceased to challenge the obstruction, settled to a halt on the cable. Gradually, the swaying began to settle until it was no more severe than it had been before the trouble started. The wind kidded it into a gende rocking, nothing more.
"What now?" Hulann asked, obviously quite shaken,
Leo released the safety rail, looked at it as if he expected it to be bent where he had grasped it. He flexed his hands, trying to take the numbness out of them. "There's something wrong with the cable. We'll have to see what."
"How?"
Leo examined the ceiling. "There's the access door."
Halfway back the room, against the right wall, rungs led up to a trap door in the ceiling.
"You'll have to be the one," Leo said. "I'd get blown away out there."
Hulann shook his long head in agreement. His tail was still wrapped tightly around his thigh.
Chapter Eight
Banalog sat stiffly in the heavy green chair in the dimly lit chambers of the Hunter Docanil. If he had been a scientist of any lesser form of knowledge, he would not have been able to withstand the probing interrogation of the Hunter. He would have made an error in detail, would have betrayed himself with a stutter or a flicker of fear across his wide features. But a traumatist was a man with total knowledge of the mind, its physical functions and the more refined thought processes of the overmind. He knew how to control his own emotions to a degree that no other naoli—aside from a Hunter—could manage. He repressed his fear, sheltered his deceit, and amplified a projected image of sincerety, honesty, and professional concern. He thought Docanil was fooled. He could not be certain, of course; no one could ever really know what a Hunter thought. But it did seem as if he were pulling this off quite well.