“Magic?” Jellico’s voice, as controlled as ever, broke the silence.
“Mass hallucination,” Tau corrected him. “Very strong.”
“How!” Asaki swallowed and began again. “How was it done?”
The medic shook his head. “Not by the usual methods, that is certain. And it worked on us—on me—when we weren’t conditioned. I don’t understand that!”
Dane could hardly believe it yet. He watched Jellico stride to where the tangle of struggling beasts had rolled, saw him examine bare ground on which no trace of the fight remained. They must accept Tau’s explanation; it was the only sane one.
Asaki’s features were suddenly convulsed with a rage so stark that Dane realized how much a veneer was the painfully built civilization of Khatka.
“Lumbrilo!” The Chief Ranger made of that name a curse. Then with a visible effort he controlled his emotions and came to Tau, looming over the slighter medic almost menacingly.
“How?” he demanded for the second time.
“I don’t know.”
“He will try again?”
“Not the same perhaps—”
But Asaki had already grasped the situation, was looking ahead.
“We shall not know,” he breathed, “what is real, what is not.”
“There is also this,” Tau warned. “The unreal can kill the believer just as quickly as the real!”
“That I know also. It has happened too many times lately. If we could only find out how! Here are no drums, no singing—none of the tricks to tangle a man’s mind that he usually uses to summon his demons. So without Lumbrilo, without his witch tools, how does he make us see what is not?”
“That we must discover and speedily, sir. Or else we shall be lost among the unreal and the real.”
“You also have the power. You can save us!” Asaki protested.
Tau drew his arm across his face. Very little of the normal color had returned to his thin, mobile features. He still leaned against Dane’s supporting arm.
“A man can do only so much, sir. To battle Lumbrilo on his own ground is exhausting and I can not fight so very often.”
“But will he not also be exhausted?”
“I wonder.…” Tau gazed beyond the Khatkan to the barren ground where leopard and rock ape had ceased to be. “This magic is a tricky thing, sir. It builds and feeds upon a man’s own imagination and inner fears. Lumbrilo, having triggered ours, need not strive at all, but let us ourselves raise that which will attack us.”
“Drugs?” demanded Jellico.
Tau gave a start sufficient to take him out of Dane’s loose hold. His hand went to the packet of aid supplies which was his own care, his eyes round with wonder and then shrewdly alert.
“Captain, we disinfected those thorn punctures of yours. Thorson, your foot salve.… But, no, I didn’t use anything—”
“You forget, Craig, we all had scratches after that fight with the apes.”
Tau sat down on the ground. With feverish haste he unsealed his medical supplies, laid out some containers. Then delicately he opened each, examined its contents closely by eye, by smell, and two by taste. When he was done he shook his head.
“If these have been in any way meddled with, I would need laboratory analysis to detect it. And I don’t believe that Lumbrilo could hide traces of his work so cleverly. Or has he been off-planet? Had much to do with off-worlders?” he asked the Chief Ranger.
“By the nature of his position he is forbidden to space voyage, to have any close relationship with any off-worlder. I do not think, medic, he would choose your healing substances for his mischief. There would only be chance to aid him then in producing the effects he wants. Though there is often call for first aid in travel, he could not be certain you would use any of your drugs on this trip to the preserve.”
“And Lumbrilo was certain. He threatened something such as this,” Jellico reminded them.
“So it would be something which we would all use, which we had to depend upon.…”
“The water!” Dane had been holding his own canteen ready to drink. But as that possible explanation dawned in his mind, he smelled instead of tasted the liquid sloshing inside. There was no odor he could detect. But he remembered Tau commenting on the powdered purifier pills at their first camp.
“That’s it!” Tau dug further into his kit, brought out the vial of white powder with its grainy lumps. Pouring a little into the palm of his hand he smelled it, touched it with the tip of his tongue. “Purifier and something else,” he reported. “It could be one of half a dozen drugs, or some native stuff from here which we’ve never classified.”
“True. There are drugs we have found here.” Asaki scowled down at the green mat of jungle. “So our water is poisoned?”
“Do you always purify it?” Tau asked the Chief Ranger. “Surely during the centuries since your ancestors landed on Khatka you must have adapted to native water. You couldn’t have lived otherwise. We must use the purifier, but must you?”
“There is water and water.” Asaki shook his own canteen, his scowl growing fiercer as the gurgle from its depths was heard. “From springs on the other side of the mountains we drink—yes. But over here, this close to the Mygra swamps, we have not done so. We may have to chance it.”
“Do you think we are literally poisoned?” Jellico bored directly to the heart of their private fears.
“None of us have been drinking too heavily,” Tau observed thoughtfully. “And I don’t believe Lumbrilo had outright killing in mind. How long the effect will last I have no way of telling.”
“If we saw one rock ape,” Dane wondered, “why didn’t we see others? And why here and now?”
“That!” Tau pointed ahead on the trail Asaki had picked for their ascent. For a long moment Dane could see nothing of any interest there and then he located it—a finger of rock. It did not point directly skyward this time, in fact it slanted so that its tip indicated their back trail. Yet in outline the spire was very similar to that outcrop from which the real rock ape had charged them the day before.
Asaki exclaimed in his own tongue and slapped his hand hard against the stock of the needler.
“We saw that and so again we saw an ape also! Had earlier we been charged by graz or jumped by a lion in such a place, then again we would have been faced by graz or lion here!”
Captain Jellico gave a bark of laughter colored only by the most sardonic humor. “Clever enough. He merely leaves it to us to select our own ghost and then repeat the performance in the next proper setting. I wonder how many rocks shaped like that one there are in these mountains? And how long will a rock ape continue to pop out from behind each one we do find?”
“Who knows? But as long as we drink this water we’re going to continue to have trouble; I feel safe in promising that,” Tau replied. He put the vial of doctored purifier into a separate pocket of his medical kit. “It may be a problem of how long we can go without water.”
“Perhaps,” Asaki said softly. “Only not all the water on Khatka comes running in streams.”
“Fruit?” Tau asked.
“No, trees. Lumbrilo is not a hunter, nor could he be certain when and where his magic would go to work. Unless the flitter was deliberately sabotaged, he was planning for us to use our canteens in the preserve. That is lion country and there are long distances between springs. This is jungle below us and there is a source there I think we can safely tap. But first I must find Nymani and prove to him that this is truly deviltry of a sort, but not demon inspired.”
He was gone, running lightly down-slope in the direction his hunter had taken, and Dane spoke to Captain Jellico.
“What’s this about water in trees, sir?”
“There is a species of tree here, not too common, with a thickened trunk. It stores water during the rainy season to live on in the
hot months. Since we are in the transition period between rains, we could tap it—if we locate one of the trees. How about that, Tau? Dare we drink that without a purifier?”
“Probably a choice of two evils, sir. But we have had our preventive shots. Personally, I’d rather battle disease than take a chance on a mind-twisting drug. You can go without water just so long.…”
“I’d like to have a little talk with Lumbrilo,” remarked Jellico, the mildness in his voice very deceptive.
“I’m going to have a little talk with Lumbrilo, if and when we see him again!” promised Tau.
“What are our chances, sir?” Dane asked. He screwed the cap back on his canteen, his mouth feeling twice as dry since he knew he dared not drink.
“Well, we’ve faced gambles before.” Tau sealed the medical kit. “I’d like to see one of those trees before sundown. And I don’t want to face another pointed rock today!”
“Why the leopard?” asked Jellico reflectively. “Another case of using flame to fight fire? But Lumbrilo wasn’t among those present to be impressed.”
Tau rubbed his hand across his forehead. “I don’t really know, sir. Maybe I could have made the ape vanish without a counter projection, but I don’t think so. With these hallucinations it is better to battle one vision against another for the benefit of those involved. And I can’t even tell you why I selected a leopard—it just flashed into mind as about the fastest and most deadly animal fighter I could recall at that moment.”
“You’d better work out a good list of such fighters.” Jellico’s grim humor showed again. “I can supply a few if you need them. Not that I don’t share your hope we won’t see any more trigger rocks. Here comes Asaki with his wandering boy.”
The Chief Ranger was half-leading, half-supporting his hunter, and Nymani seemed only half-conscious. Tau got to his feet and hurried to meet them. It would appear that their search for the water tree would be delayed.
VI
THEY WITHDREW TO A SPOT hacked from the edge of the jungle, leaving a screen of green between them and the traitorous up-slope. But within the few hours of daylight left them, it was proven that Asaki had been overly optimistic in his hopes of discovering a water tree. They were now in a narrow tongue of land between the range and the swamps, and this territory was limited. Nymani, still shaken, was of little help, and the spacemen did not dare to strike out into unexplored land alone.
So they mouthed dry concentrates and dared not drink. Dane was tempted to pour out the liquid in his canteen. Water so close to hand was a continual torment. And, now that they were away from the heights and the possibility of more finger-shaped rocks, surely the threat in that moisture was small in comparison to the needs of his body. Only that caution which was drilled into every Free Trader supplied a brake to his thirst.
Jellico drew the back of his hand across cracked lips. “Suppose we should draw lots—some of us drink, one or two not. Could we manage that way until we were over the mountains?”
“I wouldn’t want to chance it, unless we are left with no other choice. There is no way of telling how long the drug works. Frankly, right now I’m not even sure I could detect a hallucination for very long under these conditions,” was Tau’s discouraging verdict.
If any of them slept that night, they did so only in snatches. The apprehension which had come with the previous night was back, intensified, and that lurking, indefinable fear rode them hard.
They were shaken out of their private terrors shortly after dawn. There were always sounds to be heard in the jungle: the cries of unseen birds, the crash of some tree eaten alive by parasitic sapping. But what broke now was no bird call, no isolated tree falling. A trumpeting roar, the crackling smash of vegetation, heralded a real menace. Asaki spun to face northward, though there was nothing to be seen there except the unshaken wall of the jungle.
“Graz! Graz on stampede!” Nymani joined his superior.
Jellico arose swiftly and Dane read on the captain’s face the seriousness of this. The off-worlder turned to his own men with a sharp order. “On your feet! We may have to move on the double. Up-mountain?” he demanded of the Chief Ranger.
The other was still listening, not only with his ears but with the whole of his tense body. Three of the deer-like creatures they had hunted for food broke out of the green wall, fled past the men as if the latter was invisible. And behind them, the hunted now and not the hunter, came a lion, its strikingly marked black-and-white hide dramatic in the light of the morning. It showed fangs in a snarl and then was gone in one huge bound. More deer things, scurrying of other small creatures, moving too fast for clear identification, and behind them the fury of destruction which marked the headlong advance of Khatka’s largest mammals slamming through the jungle.
They had started up-slope when Nymani cried out. A white bulk, hard to distinguish in that light against the gray of the earth, headed after them. Dane had a fleeting glimpse of curled tusks, of an open mouth, raw-red and wide enough to engulf his whole head, of shaggy legs driving at an unbelievable pace. Asaki snapped a beam from the needler. The white monster roared and came on. They dived for the scant cover offered as the graz bull died, not two yards away from the Chief Ranger, its heavy body skidding along the earth with the force of its speed as it went down.
“That did it!” Jellico sighted coolly with his blaster as a second bull, fighting mad, tore from the jungle and pounded at them. Behind it a third tusked head thrust out of the brush, large eyes searched for an enemy. Dane studied the dead bull, but the animal did not come to life this time. These were not hallucinations. And the malignancy of the rock apes, the cunning of the native Khatkan lion, were pallid things compared to a graz herd on the rampage.
The second bull yelped with an almost canine complaint as Jellico’s blaster caught it head-on. Blinded, the beast blundered ahead, climbing the mountain side. The third met a ray from Nymani’s needler. But the Chief Ranger leaped from behind his sheltering rock to the one where the captain had taken refuge and pulled him into the open.
“They must not corner us here!”
Jellico agreed to that. “Come on!” he barked to Tau and Dane.
They fled along a rough way, trying to gain altitude, but finding a rising cliff wall which could not be easily climbed. Two more graz went down, one badly wounded, one safely dead. Behind them more white heads came from the brush. What original cause had started the stampede the fugitives could not guess, but now the fear and anger of the animals were centering upon them.
And, in spite of their efforts, the party was being herded into a pocket between the jungle below, where the main body of graz crashed along, and a steep wall. Given time to find the necessary finger and toe holds, a man might climb that wall, but they could not attempt it now. The portion of ledge on which they ran, stopped to fire, and then ran on again, angled to the southeast. And so they came to its end quickly, a drop ending in a plain of yellow-gray mud studded with clumps of bleached vegetation which led, like steppingstones, toward a tangle of matted, sickly looking plants and reeds.
“All right,” Tau faced around, “what do we do now? Space lift? And using what for wings or jets?”
As if the graz could sense that they now had their victims safely cornered, what must have been a goodly segment of the herd hooked their way from the jungle and started up. Puffing, digging in those sturdy legs which had to take the massive weight of their barrel-shaped bodies, they made their way determinedly up-grade. One might almost believe that they had intelligently planned this end for their drive.
“We go down!” Asaki yelled, and used his needler on the leader of that climbing platoon.
“The brush islands,” Nymani amended. “I show you!” He thrust his needler at Jellico and was over the edge of the ledge, hanging by his hands and swinging his weight back and forth like a pendulum. At the up-swing of his body to the right, he let go and plunged
out, landing half across one of the reed islets. The Khatkan clawed his way to his knees, gained his feet, and leaped for the next bit of solid ground.
“You, Thorson!” Jellico jerked his head at Dane and the younger spaceman holstered his fire ray, slipped gingerly over the drop and prepared to repeat Nymani’s feat as best he could.
He was not quite as successful with his sidewise swing, landing with only his forearms across the islet, the rest of his body being swiftly embedded in what was ooze covered only with a thin crust of dried matter. The stench of the stuff was sickening, but the fear of being entrapped in it gave him the necessary impetus to push forward, though what was meant to be a swift half-dive was more of a worm’s progress. He grabbed frantically at brittle stems, at coarse grass which cut like knives at his hands. But some of the material held and he lay face down on a lump which did not give under his weight.
There was no time to linger; he had to get to the next patch, to free this dubious landing place for the men embattled on the rise above. Stumbling up, Dane judged the distance with a space-trained eye and jumped to a knob Nymani had already quitted. The Khatkan was more than halfway along toward that promise of solid ground which the tangled mass of leprous vegetation led to, zigzagging expertly from islet to islet.
There was a crash and a roar behind. Dane balanced on the third of the minute islands to look back. He saw the lash of blaster fire on the top of the cliff, Tau on his knees on the first of their chain of steppingstones, and a graz sprawled head and forequarters in the sucking muck where it had dived past the two defenders above. Needler and blaster fired together again, and then Jellico swung over the cliff rim. Tau waved vigorously and Dane took off for the next islet, just making it by lucky chance.
The rest of the journey he took in a rush, trying not to think of anything but the necessity of landing on some spot of firm ground. His last leap of all was too short, so that he went knee deep in a particularly evil-smelling pool where yellow scum spattered his breeches and he experienced the insidious pull of the bottomless stuff. A stout branch whipped across his shoulder and he caught it. With Nymani’s wiry strength on the other end, Dane worked free and sat, white-faced and shivering, on a mat of brush, while the Khatkan hunter turned his attention to the safety of Tau, the next arrival.
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