Masters of Everon

  Jef looked about the little area of torn up moss-grass and brush where the eland had thrashed about in dying. However, there was no sign he could find of any obvious poison. He carefully examined the bushes and the ground. There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them; and the moss-grass was the typical mixture of the low form of the vegetation with tender stems half as high as those in the open, topped with tiny yellow seeds, like young oats. Jef was suddenly tempted to investigate the stomach contents of the dead animal and see what he could learn. But at that moment a call from Jarji reminded him of the firewood he was supposed to be gathering.

  He gathered it, and brought it back. They ate, packed and moved out.

  It was still early morning when they started. They traveled just inside the shade of the trees at the edge of the forest area, for the sake of shade. Under the strong, Everon sunlight, the open grasslands were indeed hot—in spite of the fact that these were the upper latitudes of the planet's northernmost continent and summer was almost over. The route McDermott had marked out for them followed the forest edge in a northwesterly direction away from the greater width of the prairie country leading down to Spaceport City.

  They hid from only one aircraft that first day. An outburst of the clock-birds, a tintinnabulation greater than any Jef had yet heard from these Everon creatures, was followed by the distant, singing buzz of the approaching craft's ducted fans. He, Jarji and Mikey headed out into the open grassland at a run and dived in among the stalks, crawling some little distance until the feathery tops closed over them.

  Looking up through the tops of the moss-grass stems, they saw the craft approach, flying low over the trees, but well inside the edge of the forest, obviously looking for them there. For a moment its fan noise filled their ears and it passed between them and the golden sun, its wings looking black, momentarily, except for a grey circle in each one, where a ducted fan whirled at high speed inside its housing.

  Then the craft passed on, its sound faded and was gone. They got to their feet, moved back into the forest edge and once more took up their trek.

  During the next few days they had to hide frequently. Jef was astonished that the Constable either could or would put so many vehicles in the air to search for them; but Jarji pointed out that one aircraft could cover a single day's foot-marching distance in a matter of minutes; and that probably what they had seen was the same one, passing and repassing.

  Daily, on their way, they ran across more poisoned and dead elands. Always these were at the very edge of the woods where the trees met the grasslands and the young stems of the moss-grass began to take over from the forest vegetation. If the eland were recently dead, Mikey struggled to feed on them; and Jef, after several instances in which Mikey ate and survived with no apparent harm, gave up and let him stuff himself as much as the maolot wanted. After all, Jef thought, all the rations in his packsack together would barely make a snack for Mikey's present appetite.

  By the third day Mikey was stopping to gorge himself whenever they came across a dead eland that was still in edible condition. For the first time in Jef's experience, the maolot was beginning to refuse to come when ordered—until he had finished eating as much as he could hold. He crouched on the ground when Jef shouted angrily at him; he made apologetic noises; but he would not go on until his sides were drum-tight with meat.

  Jef was frankly baffled. Mikey had always been a large eater; but this was beyond reason, even beyond nature. But Mikey's sudden growth was equally beyond reason. He now stood a good meter and a half high at the shoulder.

  It was Jarji who finally brought this matter out into the open conversation, somewhere along in the afternoon on the fourth day.

  "Your beast's growing," she said, "at this rate he'll be adult-size in a couple of weeks."

  Jef grunted. He could not deny what she said. Mikey's head had used to butt against his own lower ribs. Now it was almost on a level with Jef's head. In two more weeks at this rate, Mikey would be looking down at him.

  "In just a few days?" Jef said. "It isn't possible!"

  Since it was not only possible but an obvious fact, Jarji apparently decided to let that remark go by without comment. She strode on, while Jef took time out to fend off Mikey, who, finding himself the center of attention, had stopped in Jef's path and was trying to nuzzle Jef's face. It took some little effort to dissuade him.

  "Anyway," said Jef, when he had successfully got them all moving again, "I'm glad he's doing something with that food he's been taking in. I was afraid he'd explode on us, one of these days."

  He checked, sobering.

  "On the other hand," he said, "I hope he isn't growing too fast."

  "How can he grow too fast?" Jarji retorted.

  "I was thinking—in case we meet another adult male maolot," Jef said. He told her about the encounter he and Mikey had had with the large male on their way to Post Fifty, after she had left them.

  "And you think the big one let you go when he saw Mikey wasn't full-grown yet?" Jarji asked, when Jef was through.

  "You told me that yourself—that the adult males wouldn't bother young ones—remember?" Jef replied. "Actually, that was something I already knew—that adult males don't attack any but other adult males. If the one we ran into had been ready to attack, when he saw Mikey he changed his mind. So he let Mikey go, and me with him."

  "Never any telling what a maolot'll do," she said. Something in the tone of her voice made him glance at her. She was striding along with a look of abstraction that he had never seen her wear before.

  They kept moving without further talk. Jef's thoughts drifted back to the questions that clustered about Beau leCourboisier. Armage had called him the worst of the upcountry outlaws. But Jarji had mentioned something about Beau's eland being driven off and poisoned so that some wisent rancher could get the legal right to clear that part of the forest land for grazing. If that was true, matters had reached a point of open violence between the two groups sometime back. And anyone caught up in that violence...

  On the other hand, it was a little hard to believe that such things could happen on a world settled so recently that it was still subject to Ecolog Corps inspection. An individual or two might be misguided enough to drive off someone else's herd animals— poisoning? With a small shock Jef remembered that he had been seeing supposedly poisoned eland himself—Mikey had been eating them. But where would plains ranchers get poison in the quantities necessary to be effective against individual animals that each ranged over a number of square miles of territory, and in fact were scattered pretty thinly? Also how could they go about spreading that much poison without getting caught in the act by the game ranchers, sooner or later?

  "The next poisoned eland we come across," Jef said to Jarji, "I'm going to have a look at its stomach contents and see if I can find out what it was eating when it was poisoned."

  She did not answer. She was marching along with that same thoughtful look on her face. It was as if she had not heard him.

  Later on that day Mikey suddenly dashed off from the two humans and did not return. Jef slowed his steps, waiting for the maolot to catch up, but Mikey stayed invisible. Jef stopped and turned around.

  "I'm going back to look for Mikey," he said.

  "Found himself another meal, that's what," said Jarji. She sat down with her back to the trunk of a willy-tree, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. "Wake me when he's ready to move again. Otherwise, let me be. I feel like a nap."

  Looking down at her, Jef was sure it was not so much a nap as some further privacy for thinking that was on her mind. But it made no difference to him why she wanted to be left alone. He turned and began to retrace his steps, looking about him as he went. But though Mikey was only some twenty meters off the route when Jef found him, a good half hour had gone by and Mikey was already done eating.

  "Well," said Jef to the maolot, looking with some distaste at what was left on the carcass, "you found me a dissection subject, all right."
r />   It was a clumsy job, performed with only a belt knife and with no stream nearby to wash up in afterward. Jef ended by scrubbing his hands and arms with bunches of young moss-grass to get himself more or less clean afterward. But he was able to identify the stomach contents of the eland—they were the same half-grown stems in which the animal lay, and which he had used to cleanse his hands—the little golden seeds at the stem tips looking lightly tarnished but otherwise as if they could be planted with success in the next moment.

  "So here you are," said Jarji's voice dryly, behind him. "What've you been up to?"

  Jef finished putting the stems and seeds he had recovered into a plastic bag he was holding that had formerly held some freeze-dried meat.

  "I thought I'd get some evidence of what these eland had been eating when they died," he said. "This Beau leCourboisier isn't likely to have someone around his camp who can do a chemical analysis, I suppose, but somewhere I ought to get to a place where these grass stems can be checked for poison—"

  The sack was suddenly ripped out of his hand.

  "Hey!" he said and took a step toward Jarji to get it back—then stopped at the feel of a painful pricking just below his breastbone. Looking down he discovered that his chest was touching the point of a knife she was holding between them.

  "That's Everon business!" she snapped. Her face was white with anger around her eyes. "Hunt that grave of your brother's if you want, Robini, but stay out of our affairs. Hear me?"

  Before he could answer, she stretched out the arm that held the plastic bag, thumbed it open, and strewed the laboriously recovered stems and seeds among the ground cover, where they were immediately lost.

  "Don't try that again!" she said. "Now, get your maolot moving. We're going to travel."

  "No," he said. She had finally pushed him over the line and he could feel the sad bitterness building inside him, for all his voice kept its usual calmness. "You do what you like, but Mikey and I are going our own way from now on. Mikey, come on!"

  He turned and walked off. A second later Mikey's muzzle poked apologetically into his side and back. He went on without a word, Mikey beside him, until he rejoined the route they had been taking earlier, then turned in the direction they had been headed and strode on.

  For perhaps a quarter of an hour he was oblivious to his surroundings, completely lost in his own feelings. But gradually he cooled down enough to notice that, after all, they were not alone. Seven or ten meters off to his right, glimpsed occasionally through the intervening bushes and tree limbs, Jarji Hillegas was paralleling his path with silent ease.

  He swore; but she had been right in what she had said earlier. There was nothing he could do about her accompanying him if she wanted to. On this frontier world the advantages were all hers.

  Chapter Eleven

  jef walked for some distance, staying some fifteen meters inside the edge of the woods country, before it began to dawn on him that in stalking off from Jarji he had overlooked one small item. Even after this occurred to him, he still kept on walking, taking his course from the glimpses of grassland he could see occasionally through the trees, and hoping to come up with some solution other than the obvious one. Finally, his feelings, as slow to cool as they were to kindle, got down to a temperature of reasonableness and he found himself at last ready to admit that he would be making himself more ridiculous by keeping on like this than he would be by admitting he had gone off half-cocked in the first place. At the same time there was still enough sense in him of having been mishandled so that he found it difficult to make the first move.

  He halted finally in a convenient open space with a boulder to sit down on, sat down, took off his pack and began to unseal some food for himself and Mikey. After a bit Jarji's voice sounded behind him.

  "Forgot I had the mapcase, didn't you?" she said. "Yes," he answered.

  She came around in front of him and sat down cross-legged on the ground, frowning at him. "You ready to get back on route, then?"

  "That's right."

  She continued to frown at him.

  "It's not your fault," she said. "I don't mean to say it is. It's just that you don't know a thing about what you're mixing in."

  He grinned at her, unexpectedly. Now that they were talking again, it was amazing how much easier he found it to be undisturbed by her way of saying things.

  "I take it that's your version of an apology?" he asked.

  "Apology?" She started as if to spring from the ground. "Save your damn life and you want an apology—"

  She broke off and settled back down, staring hard at him.

  "All right," she said. "I suppose you can't help it. Listen to me, Robini—and try to understand what I'm telling you. This isn't your territory. It's nobody's territory but ours, us who live here and know our way around. Now, something's working for you. I don't know what it is. At first I thought it was all the maolot and you were just riding along on him; but it's something more than that. You and this upcountry are somehow taking to each other more than you ought to be able to do, by rights. But—"

  She leaned forward and jabbed a forefinger at him.

  "That's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about now. God knows why I should worry my head about you. But there's some hard people on both sides of any question you run into up here; and there's some questions—there's one question in particular—anybody'd be wise to step around. You've got plenty to do with your maolot and finding that grave, if that's what you really want. Just you forget to worry about whether elands get poisoned, or how it happens, or anything at all of that sort. You reach Beau's camp, you ask him about your brother, listen politely to what he has to tell you, then clear out. Don't look back and don't ask any other questions. Do you understand me?"

  "No," said Jef.

  She drew an exasperated breath.

  "What d'you want to do—this research of yours, or get mixed Up in our local wars?"

  "Research, of course."

  "Then do what I tell you."

  There was, thought Jef, a good deal of sense of what she was saying. He did not, in fact, have any desire to get mixed up in local antagonisms. Hadn't he congratulated himself on leaving Armage's place, that he had managed to get away unentangled in whatever was going on with the Constable, Martin and others? "All right," he said. "You're right."

  "Damn right I am!" She continued to stare hard at him for a few seconds longer as if to be sure she had really convinced him. Then her face relaxed. "Well, are you going to sit there stuffing yourself for the rest of the day?"

  "Be done in a minute," he said.

  He was. He stood up, brushing his hands, and slipped his arms once more through his packstraps. As they moved off again, together, she turned abruptly and shoved the mapcase into his hands.

  "Here. Take it! I don't need it, anyway."

  "Thanks," he said.

  He clipped the case back to his belt.

  She led them off at an angle, now, away from the forest edge. The angle was a sharp one. Jef had not thought that he had traveled so far since trying to part from her that he'd gotten that much off the map route. But when he pulled the mapcase from his belt and looked at it, the black line that was their actual line of march had angled off from the red line of their proper route some distance back. So far back, in fact, that it was hard to believe they had not strayed sometime before Mikey had found this last eland.

  However, the little dogleg at the end of the moving black line now showed them headed back to rejoin the red one that was already there. They should reach Beau's camp, Jef estimated, in about three hours—not much later than mid-afternoon of the Everon day.

  Actually, it took them closer to four hours; and during the last hour and a half they moved through forest that began to show a difference in character from that they had traversed earlier. Little by little, as they mounted to higher altitudes, the Earth variform species of vegetation became rarer and the native species more numerous; until, as they began to get close to
their destination, they were finally in an area where there were no Earth-native plants at all to be seen; and among the native species Jef had identified earlier, there were a number of other Everon plants that he could not even name.

  While this change had been making itself apparent, the topography of the area had also been changing. Gradually it had become more open and more rocky, with more the look of a northern upland. In fact, though they were plainly walking uphill most of the time—Jef's leg muscles testified to that fact—the change was more than the grade of slope seemed to indicate. It was almost as if they had gotten into mountain country without realizing it. Even the air seemed cooler and thinner.

  There was one more difference, which to Jef was somewhat ominous. By mid-afternoon they had begun to hear the occasional distant call of mature maolots. These all sounded a good distance off, and Jarji ignored them. But to Jef's uneasiness, Mikey did not. Instead of pushing up against Jef, now, when a distant call would sound, Mikey was stopping and lifting his blind head in the direction from which it had come, as if at any moment he might call back. In fact, the thought that he might answer worried Jef to the point where he finally spoke to the maolot.

  "Now, don't go doing anything foolish," he said, when a call closer than the others broke out and Mikey's head came up. "You're bigger than you used to be, but those out there'll be a lot bigger than you."

  "Leave him be," said Jarji. "He's got more sense than you have."

  "You forget," said Jef, glancing at her, "I know him a lot better than you do."

  "Want to bet?" she retorted.

  He ignored the challenge. There was no point, he told himself, in wasting breath on a ridiculous argument.

  But as they went on, the calls became more frequent even if they sounded no closer than the one that had touched off the warning from Jef to the maolot. Mikey became more restive with each one. At length he was breaking away from Jef's side to run several steps in the direction from which a call had come; and he did this even when Jef spoke sharply and caught hold of him to try—futilely—to hold him back. The unconscious ease with which he broke loose from Jef's grip sent a small shiver down between Jef's shoulder blades. Even back on Earth before they had come to Everon Mikey had been unusually powerful for his size. But here and now that he was almost full-grown, his strength had become awesome. Worried, Jef spoke sharply to him. Mikey apologized each time he returned to Jef's side, butting his head against Jef's shoulder and almost knocking Jef off his feet, but there was now something absent-minded and almost cursory about this familiar gesture—as if the maolot's mind was elsewhere.