“Okay.”
“We know one thing that might be helpful. Bellamy’s got a disintegrator.”
“He does?”
“The holes in the Argos. You didn’t see them, did you?”
“No. You think he might have dug himself a hideout?”
“Yah. Bellamy isn’t the type to let a tool like that go to waste. If he’s got a Slaver disintegrator, he’ll use it. It’s a fine digging-tool. A big roomy cave would take you an hour, and even the dust would be blown hundreds of miles. Disintegrator dust is nearly monatomic.”
“How are you planning to find this cave?”
“Let’s see if the car has a deep-radar attachment.”
It didn’t. Rent-a-cars usually do, on worlds where there are swampy areas. So now we knew Gummidgy wasn’t swampy. Everything on the dash had its uses, and not one of them was sonar.
“We’ll have to make a sight search,” said Emil. “How close are we to Bellamy’s camp?”
“About thirty miles.”
“Well, there’s a chance they won’t see us.” Emil sat forward in his chair, hands gripping his knees. His smile was thin and tight. Obviously he had something. “Take us up to ten miles. Don’t cross sonic speed until we’ve got lots of room.”
“What can we see from ten miles up?”
“Assume I’m a genius.”
That served me right. I took the car up without quibbling.
Ten miles down was the wandering line of the forest border, sharply demarcated from the veldt. At this height all the magnificent colors of Gummidgy vegetation blurred into a rich brown.
“Do you see it?”
“No.”
“Look for two nearly parallel lines,” said Emil. “A little lighter than the rest of the forest.”
“I still don’t see it.”
“It shows on the veldt, too.”
“Nope. Hah! Got it.” Crossing the rich brown of the forest was a strip of faintly lighter, faintly more-uniform brown. “Hard to see, though. What is it?”
“Dust. Blown for hundreds of miles, just like you said. Some of it settled on the tops of the trees.”
So dim was the path that it kept flickering in and out of the visible. But it was straight, with edges that slowly converged. It crossed the veldt, too, in a strip of faintly dimmed blue-green. Before its edges met, the path faded out, but one could extend those edges in the mind’s eye.
I let the car fall.
Unless we were building dream-castles, Lloobee’s cave must be at the intersection.
When we got too low, the dust path disappeared in the colors of forest and veldt. Bellamy’s hypothetical cave was half a mile into the forest. I couldn’t land there for reasons involving too many big plants and too many pirates. I dropped the car in a curve of the forest.
Emil had been fumbling in the back. Now he pressed something into my hand and said, “Here, take this.” To my amazement I found myself holding a sonic stunner.
“That’s illegal!” I whispered furiously.
“Why are you whispering? Kidnaping kdatlyno is illegal too. We may be glad we’ve got these before we’re finished.”
“But where did you get police stunners?”
“Let’s say some criminal slipped them into my luggage. And if you’ll look at the butts, you’ll see they aren’t police stunners.”
They’d started life as police stunners, but they weren’t anymore. The butts were hand-carved from big cultured emeralds. Expensive. Dueling pistols?
Sure, dueling pistols. Lose a duel with one of these and you’d lose nothing but face. I hear most Jinxians would rather lose an arm, permanently. They were not illegal—on Jinx.
“Remember,” said Emil, “they only knock a man out for ten minutes.”
“I can run a long way in ten minutes.”
Emil looked me over rather carefully. “You’ve changed. You could have driven me straight back to base, and I’d never have been the wiser.”
“I never thought of that.”
“Bah.”
“Would you believe I’ve decided to be an epic hero? Whatever that is.”
Emil shrugged and moved into the forest. I followed.
I wasn’t about to explain my motives to Emil. He’d put me in an unpleasant situation, and if he wanted to worry about my backing out, let him worry.
Back out? I couldn’t. It was too late.
There had been a time when I knew nothing about Lloobee’s kidnapers. I might suspect Margo, but I had no evidence.
Later, I could suspect Bellamy. But I had no proof.
But Emil had pressured me into confronting Bellamy, and Bellamy had been pressured into putting on an act. If I quit now, Bellamy would continue to think I was a fool.
And when Bellamy confronted Margo, Margo would continue to think I was a fool. That would hurt. To have Margo and Bellamy both thinking that I had been twice an idiot…
It wasn’t Bellamy’s fault, except that he had voluntarily kidnaped a valuable kdatlyno sculptor. It was partly my fault, and mostly Emil’s. I might be able to leave Margo out of this. But Bellamy would have to pay for my mistakes.
And why shouldn’t he? It was his antisocial act.
The vegetation was incredibly lush, infinitely varied. Its chemistry was not that of terrain life, but the chemical it used for photosynthesis was similar to chlorophyll. For billions of years the plants of Gummidgy had had oversupplies of ultraviolet light. The result was life in plenty, a profusion of fungi and animals and parasites. On every branch of the magenta trees was an orchid-thing, a sessile beast waiting for its dinner to fly by. The air was full of life: birdforms, insectforms, and a constant rain of dust and spores and feathery seeds and bits of leaf and bird dung. The soil was dry and spongy and rich, and the air was rich with oxygen and alien smells. Somewhere in the spectrum of odors were valuable undiscovered perfumes.
Once we saw a flower-thing like the one in Warren’s photo. I found a dry branch and stuck it down the thing’s blossom, and pulled back half a branch.
Again, four feet of snake flew by. Emil stunned it. It had two small fins near the head end, and its hind end was a huge, leathery delta wing. Its mouth was two-thirds back along the body.
With typical abruptness, the flowering magenta trees gave way to a field of scarlet tubing. No branches, no leaves; just interlocking cables, three feet thick, moving restlessly over each other like too many snakes in a pit. They were four or five deep. Maybe they were all one single plant or animal; we never did see a head or a tail. And we’d never have kept our footing if we’d tried to cross.
We circled the area, staying in the magenta trees because we were getting too close to where the hypothetical cave ought to be. That brought us to a small round hill surmounted by a tree that was mostly wandering roots. We started around the hill, and Emil gripped my arm.
I saw it. A cave mouth, small and round, in the base of the hill. And leaning against the dirt slope of the hill, a woman with a mercy-gun.
“All right!” I whispered. “Come on, let’s get out of here!” I pulled at Emil’s arm and turned toward freedom.
It was like trying to stop a warship from taking off. Emil was gone, running silently toward the cave with his gun held ready, leaving me with numb fingers and a deep appreciation of Finagle’s First Law. I swallowed a groan and started after him.
On flat ground I can beat any Jinxian who ever ran the short sprint. My legs were twice the length of Emil’s. But Emil moved like a wraith through the alien vegetation, while I kept getting tangled up. My long legs and arms stuck out too much, and I couldn’t catch him.
It was such a crying pity. Because we had it! We had it all, or all we were going to get. The guarded cave was our proof. Bellamy and his hunter friends were the kidnapers. That knowledge would be a powerful bargaining point in our negotiations for the return of Lloobee, despite what I’d told Emil. All we had to do now was get back to base and tell somebody.
But I couldn’t catch Emi
l!
I couldn’t even keep up with him.
A bare area fronted the cave, a triangular patch of ground bounded by two thick, sprawling roots belonging to the treelike thing on the hill. I’d lost sight of Emil; when I saw him again, he was running for the cave at full speed, and the woman with the gun was face up in the dirt. Emil reached the darkness at the mouth of the cave and disappeared within.
And as he vanished into the dark, he was unmistakably falling.
Well, now they had Emil. With blazing lasers…! Proof wasn’t enough. He’d decided to bring back Lloobee himself. Now we’d have to negotiate for the two of them.
Would we? Bellamy was back at the hunting camp. When he found out his men had Emil, he’d know I was somewhere around. But whoever was in the cave might think Emil was alone. In which case they might kill him, right now.
I settled my back against the tree. As a kind of afterthought I focused the dueling pistol on the woman and fired. I’d have to do that every ten minutes to keep her quiet.
Eventually someone would be coming out to see why she hadn’t stopped Emil.
I didn’t dare try to enter the cave. Be it man or booby trap, whatever had stopped Emil would stop me.
Too bad the dueling pistols didn’t have more power. The craftsmen who had carved their emerald butts had scaled them down; because, after all, they would be used only to prove a point. It would take a shopful of tools to readjust them, because readjusting them to their former power would violate Jinxian law. Real police stunners will knock a man out for twelve hours or more.
I was sitting there waiting for someone to come out when I felt the prickly numbness of a stunner.
The sensations came separately. First, a pull in my ankles. Then, in the calves of my legs. Then, something rough and crumbly sliding under me. Separate sensations, just above the threshold of consciousness, penetrating the numbness. A sliding Bump! Bump! against the back of my head. Gritty sensation in the backs of my hands, arms trailing above and behind my head.
Conclusion, arrived at after long thought: I was being dragged.
I was limp as a noodle and nearly as numb. It was all over. Nobody had walked innocently out of the cave. Instead, the man in there with Lloobee had looked out with a heat sensor, then used his sonic on anything that might possibly be the temperature of a man.
Things turned dark. I thought I was unconscious, but no, I’d been dragged into the cave.
“That’s a relief,” said Bellamy. Unmistakably, Bellamy.
“Bastard,” said a woman’s voice. It seemed familiar: rich and fruity, with a flatlander accent that was not quite true. Misplaced in time, probably. A dialect doesn’t stay the same forever.
My eyes fell open.
Bellamy stood over me, looking down with no expression. Tanya Wilson sat some distance away, looking sullenly in my direction. The man named Warren, standing behind her, carefully did something to her scalp, and she winced.
“There,” said Warren, “you go back to the camp. If anyone asks—”
“I was scratched by a flower-bird,” said Tanya. “The rest of you are out hunting. Will you please assume I’ve got a mind?”
“Don’t be so damn touchy. Larch, you’d better tie them up, hadn’t you?”
“You do it if you like. It’s not necessary. They’ll be out for hours.”
Oh, really?
Tanya Wilson got up and went to the cave mouth. Before leaving, she pulled a cord hanging at the side. Warren, who had followed her, pulled it again after she was gone.
The cord was attached to what looked like a police stunner, the same model as Emil’s guns. The stunner was mounted on a board, and the board was fixed in place over the mouth of the cave, aimed downward. A booby trap. So easy.
The numbness was gone. My problem was the opposite: It was all I could do to keep from moving. I was stretched full-length on a rocky floor, with my heels a foot higher than my nose and my arms straight above my head. If I so much as clenched a fist…
“I wonder,” Bellamy said, “what made him turn against me.”
“Who? Shaeffer?”
I could see four in the cave. Bellamy was standing over me; Warren was nearer the cave mouth. The two others were near the back, near a line of plastic crates. One was a man I’d never seen. The other—huge and frightening in the semidark, a monster from Man’s dimmest past, when demons and supernatural beings walked the home world—was Lloobee. They sat silently facing each other, as if each were waiting for something.
“Yes,” said Bellamy. “Beowulf Shaeffer. He seemed such a nice guy. Why would he go to so much effort to get me in trouble?”
“You forget, Larch.” Warren spoke with patient understanding. “They are the good guys; we are the bad guys. A simple sense of law and order—”
“Too much law and order around, Warren. There are no more frontiers. We sit in our one small area of the universe called known space, sixty light-years across, and we rot. Too much security. Everyone wants security.”
“That’s Shaeffer’s motive. He was backing up law and order.”
“I don’t think so. Bey’s not the type.”
“What type is he?”
“Lazy. A survival type, but lazy. He doesn’t start to use his brain until he’s in obvious, overt trouble. But he’s got pride.”
“Could the other one have talked him into it?”
“I suppose so.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“Well,” said Warren, “it’s too bad. What’ll we do with them?”
Bellamy looked unhappily down at me. He couldn’t see my eyes behind the goggles, not in the dim cave light. “They could be found half-eaten. By one of those big hopping things, say. The ones that prey on the gray plains herbivores.”
“The carnivore that did it would be poisoned. It would have to be found nearby.”
“Right.” Bellamy pondered. “It’s vital that there be no evidence against us. If we tried to square a murder rap in the contract, they’d chivvy our price down to nothing. You were bright to use the sonic. A mercy-needle would have left chemicals.”
A small, sharp rock was pressing against the side of my neck. It itched. If I was planning to leap to my feet from this ridiculous position, I couldn’t delay too long. Sooner or later I’d reach to scratch. Sooner or later Bellamy or Warren would notice the butts of Emil’s altered police stunners and know them for what they were.
“First we need a plains carnivore,” said Warren. “Do you think we can starve it into—”
Lloobee leapt.
He was five yards from the man who was guarding him at the back of the cave. The man fired instantly, and then he screamed and tried to dodge. The kdatlyno slammed into him and knocked him sliding across the floor.
I didn’t see any more. I was running. I heard panicky shouting and then Bellamy’s roar: “Relax, you idiot. He was unconscious before he left the ground.” And Warren’s, “Relax, hell! Where’s Shaeffer?”
I barely remembered to pull the trigger cord on Bellamy’s booby trap. The cave entrance was long and low, sloping upward. I took it at a crouching run. Behind me was more confusion. Could the first man through have pulled the trigger cord again? That would give me time I needed.
Outside the cave I turned sharp right. The winding, half-exposed roof was almost Emil’s height. I went over it like a spider monkey, and then under it, hiding under its protective bulk.
CY Aquarii was directly behind me, minutes from sunset. Its white light threw a sharp black shadow along the side of the root.
I started crawling uphill, staying in the shadow. Two sets of pelting footsteps followed me from the other side of the root.
Voices came from below, barely audible. They didn’t sound like a search in progress. Why not? I looked back and saw no pursuit. Halfway up the hill I slid out of my blue falling jumper, tucked it as far under the root as it would go, and went on, thinking kindly thoughts about tannin pills. Now I’d be all but invisib
le if I stayed in the shadows. All but my white hair.
Why had Lloobee made that grandstand play? It was as if he’d read my mind. He must have known there was no chance of escape for him. But I’d have had no chance without his diversion. Had he known I was conscious?
Could kdatlyno read minds?
At the top of the hill I stopped in a cleft between two huge roots. The magenta tree seemed much too small to need all that root area; but the sunlight was rich, and maybe the soil was poor. And the roots would hide me.
But where were my pursuers?
I knew they needed me. They couldn’t dispose of Emil until they had me. Granted that they could find me as soon as it got dark; I’d stand out like a beacon on a heat sensor. But suppose I reached the car first?
The car!
Sure, that was it. While I was crouching somewhere or taking a tangled trail that would keep me hidden at all times, Bellamy or one of his men was taking the shortest, straightest route to my car. To move it before I could reach it.
I pounded my head to get it working. No use. I was stymied. The cave? I’d find guns in there, hunting guns. The anesthetic slivers probably wouldn’t work on human beings, but they might be poisonous—and they would certainly hurt. But no, I couldn’t attack the cave. There’d be no way around the booby trap.
But there’d be someone in there to turn the booby trap on and off and to guard Lloobee. Another on the way to the car, that made two.
The third would have found some high point, chosen days previously for its view of the surroundings. He’d be waiting now for a glimpse of my snow-white hair. I couldn’t break and run for the car.
Maybe.
And maybe the third man had been the first to come charging after me. And maybe he’d snatched at the trigger cord as he passed to turn off a police stunner that was already off. And maybe he’d run through the beam.
Maybe.
But if anyone reached the car, I was cooked.
I spun it over and over while handfuls of needed seconds passed me by. There was no other way to figure it. Tanya was back at camp. A second man was in the cave; a third was on the way to the car. The fourth either was waiting for me to show myself or he wasn’t. I had to risk it.