The Game of Stars and Comets

  Half carrying, half dragging him so we retraced our way just as the first waters of the rising stream licked across the forepart of the wagon. It might be injurious to move him, but now that was the lesser of evils. Lowered from the wagon end and still immobilized on the board, we transported him on through the brush to the lip of the gully, though twice we had to lay down our burden so I could knife-hack a passage for us.

  When we reached the torn earth of the edge over which the wagon had plunged I was so beat by weariness that I had only strength enough to see our burden over and lying face up in the matted, water-soaked grass under the clearing sky. I longed to throw myself down beside him, but there was that which must be saved from the wagon lest the water sweep away what might come to be our future means of life.

  Three times I made the journey down and up, each time spurring myself to the descent and climb. Up there now was Illo's precious pack which she had already opened as she worked over my father, food, damp blankets, our stunners and tanglers, two night torches, a com which might or might not work after the way it had been bounced about during our wild journey, and anything else I chanced upon which would serve us.

  It was plain that without the gars there was no hope of pulling free the wagon. At least none that I could see. There was always the chance that the com might have range enough to reach Dengungha—of that I could not be sure. The miners had a flitter, and, though I had little idea now of where we were in connection with their settlement, on this plain there should be some way of raising a signal for help which would guide air borne rescue to us.

  The heavy pelt of the rain was luckily over, but it had left the grass in which we made now an uncomfortable camp site soaked and flattened by the burden of water which had fallen. I had the emergency heat unit from the wagon, though its active life was so limited we could not hope for it to last long.

  Illo asked my aid in strapping my father's ribs with bands cut from one of the blankets. She had also bandaged his head. Now, wrapped in near all the coverings I had managed to pull free from the water rising so steadily in the fore part of the wagon, he lay beside that single unsteady flame. His face was grey rather than pale beneath the weathered brown, and I could not bear to look at him often. At each time I did a fear I would not allow myself yet to face arose in me like some choking illness.

  I set up a lean-to of planks torn from the inner fittings of the wagon, thatched as well as I could manage with the brush I slashed free. The clouds had scudded south to allow a watery emergence of the sun. I climbed to the highest of the small rolling hills which lay beneath the blanket of grass and turned the distance glasses on the land around, hoping against hope to pick up sight of the gars.

  There was nothing, save a bird or two wheeling and dipping back and forth across the sky. We were left with only the chance that the com might summon aid, and I trudged back to the lean-to and got it out.

  Such off-world artifacts were always prized and kept in the best repair possible. These were too costly when shipped by Spacers for the average Voorsman to own. Though I knew how to repair one, there were certain materials which could not be substituted by anything known on Voor. The men of the holdings worked well with their hands—in wood and stone. There was some primitive and experimental work done with metal—the forging of large tools and the like. But small precision objects which were the result of centuries of technological know-how could not be duplicated.

  It was with the greatest of suspense that I opened the com carrying case to inspect how its contents had fared. The round of metal, with the mike disc lying upon it, had been packed as best we knew, so I had to pull out wads of grass-cotton to free the disc and dial. I could see no breakage as I worked the thing carefully out of its soft nest. Then I pried loose the back of the inner case. Wires, works, I traced what I could see without taking the unit apart. My spirits arose a little as I could detect no fracture. Now it depended upon the range.

  Where the wind had driven us I could not tell, though when I had used the distance glasses I had been sure that the ominous smudge which marked the Tangle was far more visible. Perhaps we had been blown on to cover more distance than we could have covered in several days at the usual trek pace.

  Illo had been tending a small pan to which she had fitted a long handle so she could hold it well over the flame of our heat without scorching her fingers. She seemed entirely intent upon her task and did not even look up as I readied the com and raised the mike, repeating into it the call letters which had been assigned us in Portcity and which must be on record at Dengungha. Three times I uttered those and waited for a reply. What came back to me was a crackle so loud and disturbing that I had to lay the mike down upon the box; that outburst of sound was enough to hurt ears already assaulted by the storm's long roar.

  Patiently I went through the same procedure twice more, with no better result. If there was not any fault in the com, then there must be some freakish effect left by the storm itself which interfered with reception. Regretfully I had to fit the com back into its case.

  Illo appeared satisfied with the bubbling contents of her pan for she set that aside until she hunted out a bag of small grass-cotton puffs. Wetting one of those in the pan's contents, she sponged my father's lips, gently forcing his mouth open so she could squeeze her improvised sponge and so get some of the liquid into him.

  He no longer moaned. The very inert limpness of his body frightened me, though I determined not to let her know that. What liquid she had managed to get into his mouth was dribbling out again at one corner. Now she did look up at me.

  "When I do thus," once more she held the sponge ball above his mouth, "you rub his throat—gently—downward. We must get him to swallow some of this. It is strengthening, a barrier against the shock and chill which follows bad wounds."

  I followed her orders. My father's flesh was indeed cold under my touch. Resolutely we worked, I under her orders, until he did swallow and she was able, by patient concentration, to get perhaps a third of the contents of the small pan into him.

  "We shall let him rest now." Her own hand rested for a long, measuring moment on his forehead below the bandage.

  "He—how is he?" For the first time I asked, dreading even as I did what she might answer.

  Slowly she shook her head. "These are bad hurts. I think that one of the broken ribs may have entered into a lung. As for the crack in the skull—we know so little of what may happen after such as that. However, he lives, and, as long as he holds to life, then we can also hold to hope. I wish we could get him to some cover better than this—"

  I got up, frustration and anger at what had happened building up in me, so I must keep a sharp rein on my tongue and swallow the words I wanted to say. It was none of her doing, or his, or mine, that this thing had happened. Still something in me wanted to make me lash out and scream with rage that it was this way. Once more I left our sorry camp and tramped back to my small hillock which certainly raised me very little above the rest of the plain.

  In the gully the water washed high now, hiding the fore of the wagon, which shook now and then as the current tried to break or bear away this barrier against its even flow. I turned my glasses along the path of the gully itself. It was truly a flow from the north. Perhaps it even traced its beginning back to the mountains beyond the Tangle where Survey ships had flown to map from the sky, but, to my knowledge, no one of my race had ever gone. They were stark, those mountains, sharp, jagged peaks, showing like teeth between the gaping jaws of some monster. Dire, and dark, and not for humankind.

  There was, as I watched the flow of water in the gully, storm wrack coming with it now. Brush such as grew along the banks, uprooted when the waters gnawed the soil from about their roots, bounced and wavered along. Some of the stuff came to rest uneasily against the wagon, building up more tightly the damming barrier that had begun.

  Now there was other movement in the water. My hand flew to stunner butt and I had that out of my holster when I saw, and kne
w it was no vision, an ugly, armored head rise above the surface, round, unblinking, but dead white eyes, regard the brush and the wagon.

  This was certainly like no creature I had seen before, not of the grass plains. I took a running leap from the hill, was down at the gully's rim as a webbed and taloned paw, larger than my own hand, slopped up from the water, drew arching claws down the wagon's body, seeking some hold.

  That it found. A second paw now wavered aloft hunting similar anchorage. I pushed right to the edge of the drop, my weapon ready. The thing had already opened jaws wide enough to near split its head in two and those were tooth ringed—I could be well sure it was a flesh eater.

  The monster did not move clumsily in spite of the bulk of its body, for beneath the longish neck the rest of it was wide, out of proportion with the head, while the legs appeared much too slender to support it. This thing, I thought, must spend much time in the water. Now it hauled itself to the top of the wagon, and, lifting higher that ugly head, gave voice to an ear-rasping grunting.

  "What is it?" Illo came up beside me.

  "I don't know. But—"

  The head shot around, made a dart in our direction. The eyes looked blind, white balls only, without even the faintest slit to suggest a pupil. Yet it was evident that the thing saw us, judged us either enemy or prey. Still grunting it drew itself wholly out of the water, showing other hook-clawed legs, and started to climb along the upward slant of the wagon.

  I centered the stunner on its head, set the charge on full, and fired. I might as well have flipped a twig for it did not even shake its head as if momentarily dizzy. Yet a gar, a sand cat, a jaz would have been plunged into instant unconsciousness.

  The clawed forefeet were already raking into the brush from which I had hacked our escape path. Perhaps on land we could hope to outrun it, or dodge, but not with the unconscious man lying beside the fire. I might have fired too soon, my aim a fraction off—

  This time I made myself concentrate only on that weaving ugly head. There was a point directly between the white eyes—I settled on that for my target. Then Illo's voice broke through my strained concentration.

  "Aim for the neck, where it joins the back!"

  What did she know about it? She by her own words had never seen this thing before.

  "Aim there!" her voice had the crack of an order. "Its brain—I cannot sense a brain at all!"

  Her words did not mean much. But a straightforward shot had not brought it down. I had once seen a gar paralyzed when a stunner merely clipped its backbone. Could that trick work here?

  Though every instinct told me that I might be wrong, I changed, in that last instant, the angle of my ray shot. I did aim where that weaving neck sank into the foul, scaled and flabby bag of body.

  Full strength, and I held it past the first shot, refusing to let myself remember I could so exhaust the whole charge completely.

  The neck snapped straight up into the air as if, instead of a ray, I had laid across it the lash of a whip to torment the flesh. Then it looped forward, falling limply, so that the head dragged along the brush as the body itself, the taloned paws relaxing their hold, slid down and down, slipping at last from the wagon into the stream, where it sank beneath water now brown with silt.

  Chapter 4

  There was a brief swirl of water against the pull of the current and then nothing at all. If the thing was indeed a water dweller it could lie hidden there, so covered now was the surface with floating debris of the flood and a film of mud, only to emerge once again to attack. We must move away. But to do that—

  When I spoke my fear aloud Illo nodded. "This thing—I have never even heard of its like before," she said slowly as she stood still gazing at the flow of water as if she expected any moment to see that hideous head rise again. "At least in the south. It might be a dweller in those swamp lands perhaps—but where—"

  I was facing north-west. During my travels as loper I had seen many strange creatures. In fact it had been one of my father's concerns to record any new living thing, were it flyer, crawler, or growing plant, which we came across. So detailed had been this work of his that it had first led me to wonder if he had not, in that unknown past which he never shared with me, been connected with Survey.

  Not that he shared officially any of his knowledge with the authorities at Portcity as far as I knew. It was as if he was driven by some need of his own to learn all which it was possible to gather about Voor. However, like Illo, we had never heard of nor seen anything like the monster of the flood.

  As for a swamp—there were some in the south, yes. Still none so large a spread of country to give living space to this size creature. While to the north—

  I had raised my head now, gazed beyond the swiftly flowing, ever rising waters which were now rocking the wagon even more dangerously, so that it canted to the right and might well be shortly engulfed. The stream, though born of the fury of the storm, lay in a bed which water had already carved, and it came from the north-west—that same direction in which the Tangle made its stain across the healthy plains.

  Was that mass of entwined vegetation a cover for a swamp? It could well be, though so thick a growth seldom was a part of any swampland I knew. And the beast we had fought off was of a size unsuited to the density of that maze men had not been able to force any path through as long as planet record existed.

  Yet so sinister was the reputation of that massed growth I could well accept that it might give living room to any number of monsters. Not that that had any meaning for us now. We must concentrate on getting ourselves and my father to some civilized shelter. If we could not raise the mines with the com, then we must somehow trek south, back to the holding where we had been only days earlier.

  I set about once more securing from the wagon such materials which might be of use. Spare of frame as my father was, we could not carry him between us and achieve any great distance, except at less than a usual walking pace. I believed that we had no time for that. Still there were other ways which we could attempt, and I salvaged gear, venturing gingerly time and again into the rocking, tilting wagon.

  Water already washed into the front compartment and the wagon was near on its side as the stream gnawed steadily at the bank in which the back wheels were embedded. I had given Illo the second stunner and she had stationed herself to watch for any more water-dwellers.

  The clouds had finally all gone and the sun made a dim showing, but it was already far down the horizon. I had so little time. Also I was so tired that my hands shook as I strove to unfasten lashings, bundle up all I could, perhaps bringing a lot which I had no need for in my desire not to miss anything which would be of value.

  There was no lifting out the cargo. That, unless we could contact the mines and gain aid there, must be written off as a total loss. But the small stuff I bundled out hit and miss, passing up the awkward armloads I gathered to the girl who piled them about her sentry post.

  I worked until the wagon gave a warning lurch so that I leaped clear just as it went over on its side while water boiled up and in. Somehow I won back up the slope and fell, gasping for breath with a band of permasteel seemingly fastened about my middle, drawing always inward as might the jaws of a slowly closing trap.

  Illo had already carried some of the goods back to our improvised camp. Much I knew I could not deal with now. It was all I could do to stagger towards that flare which had now become a beacon, there to collapse again, my body one ache from head to foot.

  I remember drinking from a pan Illo handed me, thinking dimly that we must set a guard for the night. Most of the grass plains had few predators, and all of those, as lopers knew, were not only night hunters but afraid of fire. However, there was still the water—and what could come out of it. Only I could not make any effort to so much as reach for the stunner which was thrust into my belt, even keep my eyes open. Instead fatigue settled on me in a smothering blanket, drew me in and covered me, as might the Tangle itself.

  I awoke
—The stars were brilliant overhead; the orange-red of Voor's moon was a ball hanging near directly over me. It was one of those instant awakenings which come to those who live always on the edge of the unknown, whose instincts and inner warning systems have become trained to signal alerts as potent as any a starship might possess.

  There was the light on the ground—Three of our salvaged camp lamps had been filled, trimmed, and set out, burning sturdily. Beyond them lay an unsorted mound of all I had pulled from the wagon. After I had given out, the girl must have brought much of it here. The girl—!

  She sat hunkered down beside the plank which served my father as a bed. The lamps gave her face a deceptive ruddiness. Her eyes were closed, but the hand lying beside her held grip on the other stunner.