There was a small eruption of earth and stone as the hound came alive,
fighting to reach its tormentors. The resulting din was deafening.
Shann, avoiding by a hand's breadth a snap of jaws with power to crush
his leg into bone powder and mangled flesh, cuffed Togi across her nose
and buried his hands in the fur about Taggi's throat as he heaved the
male wolverine back from the struggling monster. He shouted orders, and
to his surprise Togi did obey, leaving him free to yank Taggi away.
Perhaps neither wolverine had expected the full fury of the hound.
Though he suffered a slash across the back of one hand, delivered by the
over-excited Taggi, in the end Shann was able to get both animals away
from the hole, now corked so effectively by the slavering thing.
Thorvald was actually laughing as he watched his younger companion in
action.
"This ought to slow up the beetles! If they haul their little doggie
back, it's apt to take out some of its rage on them, and I'd like to see
them dig around it."
Considering that the monstrous head was swinging from side to side in a
collar of what seemed to be immovable rocks, Shann thought Thorvald
right. He went down on his knees beside the wolverines, soothing them
with hand and voice, trying to get them to obey his orders willingly.
"Ha!" Thorvald brought his mud-stained hands together with a clap, the
sharp sound attracting the attention of both animals.
Shann scrambled up, swung out his bleeding hand in the simple motion
which meant to hunt, being careful to signal down the valley westward.
Taggi gave a last reluctant growl at the hound, to be answered by one of
its ear-torturing howls, and then trotted off, Togi tagging behind.
Thorvald caught Shann's slashed hand, inspecting the bleeding cut. From
the aid packet at his belt he brought out powder and a strip of
protecting plasta-flesh to cleanse and bind the wound.
"You'll do," he commented. "But we'd better get out of here before full
dark."
The small paradise of the valley was no safe campsite. It could not be
so long as that monstrosity on the hillside behind them roared and
howled its rage to the darkening sky. Trailing the wolverines, the men
caught up with the animals drinking from a small spring and thankfully
shared that water. Then they pushed on, not able to forget that
somewhere in the peaks about must lurk the Throg flyer ready to attack
on sight.
Only darkness could not be held off by the will of men. Here in the open
there was no chance to use the torch. As long as they were within the
valley boundaries the phosphorescent bushes marked a path. But by the
coming of complete darkness they were once more out in a region of bare
rock.
The wolverines had killed a brace of skitterers, consuming hide and soft
bones as well as the meager flesh which was not enough to satisfy their
hunger. However, to Shann's relief, they did not wander too far ahead.
And as the men stopped at last on a ledge where a fall of rock gave them
some limited shelter both animals crowded in against the humans, adding
the heat of their bodies to the slight comfort of that cramped resting
place.
From time to time Shann was startled out of a troubled half sleep by the
howl of the hound. Luckily that sound never seemed any louder. If the
Throgs had caught up with their hunter, and certainly they must have
done so by now, they either could not, or would not free it from the
trap. Shann dozed again, untroubled by any dreams, to awake hearing the
shrieks of clak-claks. But when he studied the sky he was able to sight
none of the cliff-dwelling Warlockian bats.
"More likely they are paying attention to our friend back in the
valley," Thorvald said dryly, rightly reading Shann's glance to the
clouds overhead. "Ought to keep them busy."
Clak-claks were meat eaters, only they preferred their chosen prey weak
and easy to attack. The imprisoned hound would certainly attract their
kind. And those shrill cries now belling through the mountain heights
ought to draw everyone of their species within miles.
"There it is!" Thorvald, pulling himself to his feet by a rock handhold,
gazed westward, his gaunt face eager.
Shann, expecting no less than a cruising Throg ship, searched for cover
on their perch. Perhaps if they flattened themselves behind the fall of
stones, they might be able to escape attention. Yet Thorvald made no
move into hiding. And so Shann followed the line of the other's fixed
stare.
Before and below them lay a maze of heights and valleys, sharp drops,
and saw-toothed rises. But on the far rim of that section of badlands
shone the green of a Warlockian sea rippling on to the only dimly seen
horizon. They were now within sight of their goal.
Had they had one of the exploration sky-flitters from the overrun camp,
they could have walked its beach sands within the hour. Instead, they
fought their way through a Devil-designed country for the next two days.
Twice they had narrow escapes from the Throg ship--or ships--which
continued to sweep across the rugged line of the coast, and only a quick
dive to cover, wasting precious time cowering like trapped animals,
saved them from discovery. But at least the hound did not bay again on
the tangled trail they left, and they hoped that the trap and the
clak-claks had put that monster permanently out of service.
On the third day they came down to one of those fiords which tongued
inland, fringing the coast. There had been no lack of hunting in the
narrow valleys through which they had threaded, so both men and
wolverines were well fed. Though animal fur wore better than the now
tattered uniforms of the men.
"Now where?" Shann asked.
Would he now learn the purpose driving Thorvald on to this coastland?
Certainly such broken country afforded good hiding, but no better
concealment than the mountains of the interior.
The Survey officer turned slowly around on the shingle, studying the
heights behind them as well as the angle of the inlet where the wavelets
lapped almost at their battered boot tips. Opening his treasured map
case, he began a patient checking of landmarks against several of the
strips he carried. "We'll have to get on down to the true coast."
Shann leaned against the trunk of a conical branched mountain tree,
pulling absently at the shreds of wine-colored bark being shed in
seasonal change. The chill they had known in the upper valleys was
succeeded here by a humid warmth. Spring was becoming a summer such as
this northern continent knew. Even the fresh wind, blowing in from the
outer sea, had already lost some of the bite they had felt two days
before when its salt-laden mistiness had first struck them.
"Then what do we do there?" Shann persisted.
Thorvald brought over the map, his black-rimmed nail tracing a route
down one of the fiords, slanting out to indicate a lace of islands
extending in a beaded line across the sea.
"We head for these."
To Shann that made no sense at all. Those islands ... why, they would
offer less chance of establishing a safe base than the broken land in
which they now stood. Even the survey scouts had given those spots of
sea-encircled earth the most cursory examination from the air.
"Why?" he asked bluntly. So far he had followed orders because they had
for the most part made sense. But he was not giving obedience to
Thorvald as a matter of rank alone.
"Because there is something out there, something which may make all the
difference now. Warlock isn't an empty world."
Shann jerked free a long thong of loose bark, rolling it between his
fingers. Had Thorvald cracked? He knew that the officer had disagreed
with the findings of the team and had been an unconvinced minority of
one who had refused to subscribe to the report that Warlock had no
native intelligent life and therefore was ready and waiting for human
settlement because it was technically an empty world. But to continue to
cling to that belief without a single concrete proof was certainly a
sign of mental imbalance.
And Thorvald was regarding him now with frowning impatience. You were
supposed to humor delusions, weren't you? Only, could you surrender and
humor a wild idea which might mean your death? If Thorvald wanted to go
island-hopping in chance of discovering what never had existed, Shann
need not accompany him. And if the officer tried to use force, well,
Shann was armed with a stunner, and had, he believed, more control over
the wolverines. Perhaps if he merely gave lip agreement to this
project.... Only he didn't believe, noting the light deep in those gray
eyes holding on him, that anybody could talk Thorvald out of this
particular obsession.
"You don't believe me, do you?" The impatience arose hotly in that
demand.
"Why shouldn't I?" Shann tried to temporize. "You've had a lot of
exploration experience; you should know about such things. I don't
pretend to be any authority."
Thorvald refolded the map and placed it in the case. Then he pulled at
the sealing of his blouse, groping in an inner secret pocket. He
uncurled his fingers to display his treasure.
On his palm lay a coin-shaped medallion, bone-white but possessing an
odd luster which bone would not normally show. And it was carved. Shann
put out a finger, though he had a strange reluctance to touch the
object. When he did he experienced a sensation close to the tingle of a
mild electric shock. And once he had made that contact, he was also
impelled to pick up that disk and examine it more closely.
The carved pattern was very intricate and had been done with great
delicacy and skill, though the whorls, oddly shaped knobs, ribbon
tracings, made no connected design he could determine. After a moment or
two of study, Shann became aware that his eyes, following those twists
and twirls, were "fixed," that it required a distinct effort to look
away from the thing. Feeling some of that same alarm as he had known
when he first heard the wailing of the Throg hound, he let the disk fall
back into Thorvald's hold, even more disturbed when he discovered that
to relinquish his grasp required some exercise of will.
"What is it?"
Thorvald restored the coin to his hiding place.
"You tell me. I can say this much, there is no listing for anything even
remotely akin to this in the Archives."
Shann's eyes widened. He absently rubbed the fingers which had held the
bone coin--if it was a coin--back and forth across the torn front of his
blouse. That tingle ... did he still feel it? Or was his imagination at
work again? But an object not listed in the exhaustive Survey Archives
would mean some totally new civilization, a new stellar race.
"It is definitely a created article," the Survey officer continued. "And
it was found on the beach of one of those sea islands."
"Throg?" But Shann already knew the answer to that.
"Throg work--_this_?" Thorvald was openly scornful. "Throgs have no
conception of such art. You must have seen their metal plates--those are
the beetle-heads' idea of beauty. Have those the slightest resemblance
to this?"
"Then who made it?"
"Either Warlock has--or once had--a native race advanced enough in a
well-established form of civilization to develop such a sophisticated
type of art, or there have been other visitors from space here before us
and the Throgs. And the latter possibility I don't believe----"
"Why?"
"Because this was carved of bone or an allied substance. We haven't been
quite able to identify it in the labs, but it is basically organic
material. It was found exposed to the weather and yet it is in perfect
condition, could have been carved any time within the past five years.
It has been handled, yes, but not roughly. And we have come across
evidences of no other star-cruising races or species save ourselves and
the Throgs. No, I say this was made here on Warlock, not too long ago,
and by intelligent beings of a very high grade of civilization."
"But they would have cities," protested Shann. "We've been here for
months, explored all over this continent. We would have seen them or
some traces of them."
"An old race, maybe," Thorvald mused, "a very old race, perhaps in
decline, reduced to a remnant in numbers with good reason to retire into
hiding. No, we've discovered no cities, no evidence of a native culture
past or present. But this--" he touched the front of his blouse--"was
found on the shore of an island. We may have been looking in the wrong
place for our natives."
"The sea...." Shann glanced with new interest at the green water surging
in wavelets along the edge of the fiord.
"Just so, the sea!"
"But scouts have been here for more than a year, one team or another.
And nobody saw anything or found any traces."
"All four of our base camps were set inland, our explorations along the
coast were mainly carried out by flitter, except for one party--the one
which found this. And there may be excellent local reasons why any
native never showed himself to us. For that matter, they may not be able
to exist on land at all, any more than we could live without artificial
aids in the sea."
"Now----?"
"Now we must make a real attempt to find them if they do exist anywhere
near here. A friendly native race could make all the difference in the
world in any struggle with the Throgs."
"Then you did have more than the dreams to back you when you argued with
Fenniston!" Shann cut in.