"And what's that?"
"If you had been willing to be bribed," Jill Trelawney said, "I should
have asked the Troopers to shoot you."
* * * * *
There was a lady, Dowland was thinking a few minutes later, who was
likely to be something of a problem to any man. However, she wouldn't
be his problem for a considerable number of hours now. She had
swallowed the sleep tablet he had given her without any trouble. After
the drug wore off, the tablet would keep her quiet till around dawn.
He stood looking about the wind-swept darkened slopes of the ranch
area. Clouds were moving past in the sky, but there would be
intermittent moonlight. The conditions weren't too bad for the search
he had in mind. There had to be a concealed storeroom about the place
somewhere, in which the Trelawneys would keep assorted stuff connected
with their secret work which they didn't want to have cluttering up the
lab. Including, very likely, any spare keys to the lab. At a guess,
neither of the brothers would have wanted Jill at Lion Mesa during this
crucial and dangerous stage of the project. But they probably were
used to letting their beautiful and headstrong niece do as she wanted.
But they needn't have mentioned things like the storeroom to her. If
he could keep his mind slightly off the fact that within a hundred
yards or so of him there were sixty-eight kilograms of Ym-400--with
an unspecified amount of it at present in its horrendous radioactive
state--he should stand a fairly good chance of finding the storeroom.
And in that case, the half-inch atomic key Jill Trelawney had showed
him, and which was at the moment weighing down his coat pocket,
probably would turn out to be exactly what he needed to get into it.
He located the place just under an hour later. It was a matter partly
of observation, partly of remembering a remark Jill had made. The
building which housed the giant hogs adjoined a corral three times its
size. Corral and building were divided into two sections, the larger
one harboring six sows. The single boar was in the other. A spider
web of gangways led about above the huge stalls. It was the wall
between building and corral which had drawn Dowland's attention by the
fact that a little calculating indicated it was something like a yard
thicker than was necessary.
He brought a dozen campfire sticks over from the grid-car and spaced
them down the central gangway of the building, then deferred further
inspection long enough to locate and trip the automatic feeding
mechanisms. The hungry animal thunder which had greeted him at his
entry ebbed away as they ate furiously and he studied them. They
weren't the grotesque monstrosities he had expected but massive,
sculptured giants with the quick, freewheeling agility of a rhinoceros,
sand-colored, with wickedly intelligent eyes. There wasn't much
question they'd make exciting game for anyone who enjoyed a touch of
personal danger in the hunt.
The danger was more obviously there in the boar. The brute's eight
hundred or so pounds of weight above that of the average of his
prospective harem would not be significant when pitted against an
opponent as physically inferior as a human being. His attitude might.
The sows filed out into the corral after they had eaten what the
feeding machine had thrown into them. The boar remained, watching
Dowland on the gangway above him from the corner of one eye. The eye
reflected no gratitude for the feeding. It was red-rimmed and angry.
The jaw worked with a continuous chewing motion. There was a fringe of
foam along the mouth.
Jill Trelawney had mentioned that no one but Miguel could come near the
boar.
Dowland could believe it. A small steel ladder led down from the
gangway into the brute's stall. Dowland reached into his pocket and
brought out the IPA gun. No sportsman would have considered using it
against an animal. But this wasn't sport. He started down the ladder.
* * * * *
The boar stood motionless, watching him. Dowland stopped at the foot of
the ladder. After a moment, he took a step forward. The boar pivoted
and came thundering across the floor of the stall, head low. The gun
made its soft, heavy sound, and Dowland leaped aside. The huge body
that slammed into the far wall behind him was dead before it struck,
nearly headless. He went on to the thick dividing wall between stall
and yard.
The lock to the storeroom door was on the inner side of the wall,
concealed by the planking but not too difficult to find. Dowland
inserted the key, twisted it into position, felt a slight click, and
stepped back as the door began to swing out toward him.
The storeroom contained the general kind of paraphernalia he had
expected to find, including three antiradiation suits. It took Dowland
twenty minutes to convince himself that the one thing it definitely
did not contain in any obvious manner was a key to the laboratory.
Appropriate detection instruments might have disclosed it somewhere,
but he didn't have them.
The fact was dismaying because it ended his hopes of finding the key.
It would take most of the night to make a thorough search of the
various ranch buildings, and at best there would be an even chance
of discovering the key in the process. Wherever it was, it must be
carefully concealed. If Miguel regained consciousness, the information
could be forced from him, but it wasn't too likely that the older
Trelawney ever would wake up again.
Dowland picked up two of the three AR suits, folded them over his
arm, stood, still hesitant, glancing up and down the long, narrow
space of the storeroom, half aware that he was hoping now some magical
intuition might point out the location of the key to him at the last
second. If he could get into the laboratory, he was reasonably sure
he could puzzle out the mechanisms that directed the shift of YM into
radioactivity, and shut them down. A machine was a machine, after
all. Then, with the YM interference eliminated, grid-power should be
available again, and....
Dowland glanced at his watch again, shook his head. No point in
considering it--he couldn't get into the laboratory. An hour and a
half had gone to no purpose. Hunting for the key had looked like a
good gamble, the quickest and therefore least dangerous method of
solving the whole awesome problem. But it hadn't worked out; and what
was left was to work down the side of Lion Mesa, and start hiking
out across the desert. With luck, he'd find the communicator start
picking up grid-power again around dawn--if the YM didn't cut loose
with further unpredictable and much more disastrous "phenomena" before
then. Unsatisfactorily vague as the available information had been,
it implied that what had happened around here was still, so far, on a
very mild level. The Trelawneys, in spite of their confidence that the
Overgovernment was bluffing, that YM was harmless if properly handled,
might have had the good sense to work with only the most minute
quantities to begin with.
* * * * *
He left the storeroom door open, turned off the whitely glowing
campfire sticks, and took them, with the AR suits, back to the house
with him. The living room had become almost completely dark. Uncle and
niece were where he had left them. Dowland worked for a minute or two
to release the automatic shutters over the single wide window; they
came down into position then with a sudden thud which shook the room
but failed to arouse the Trelawneys. Dowland relit one of the sticks
and dropped it into the fireplace. The room filled with clear light.
He stacked the other sticks against the wall, laid the AR suits over
the back of a chair. He had considered getting the Trelawneys into them
as a safety measure against whatever might happen before the matter
was over, but had dropped the idea again. It would be questionable
protection. The antiradiation field was maintained automatically
while a suit was worn, and it impeded breathing just enough to have
occasionally suffocated an unconscious wearer. Jill would discover the
suits when she woke up and could use her own judgment about them.
Dowland was coming back from the grid-car with his mountaineering
harness and portable communicator when the hogs began to scream again.
He stopped, startled. There was an odd and disturbing quality to the
racket this time--even more piercing than before--and, unless he was
mistaken, the huge animals were in a sudden panic about something.
Next, he heard them slamming against the sides of the corral,
apparently trying to break out of it. His heart started to pound with
instinctive alarms. Should he go down and investigate? Then, before he
could decide, he heard through the din of the hogs, swelling gradually
to almost match those incredible shrieks in volume, another sound.
For a moment, something seemed to shut off Dowland's listening to the
rumble and roar of a rushing, turbulent mass of water--and his ears
told him it was passing by beneath him.
* * * * *
It might have been almost two minutes later before Dowland began
to think clearly again. He had reached the house at a dead run--a
senseless flight reaction under the circumstances, not far from
complete panic. In the darkness outside, the mesa had seemed to sway
and tilt, treacherous footing over the eerie booming of a river which
had rolled through a long-dead past. In those seconds Dowland hadn't
thought to question Jill Trelawney's story about a machine that brought
about shifts in time. His senses seemed to have as much evidence to
support it as anyone could demand.
Back in the house, though the thundering disturbance continued, that
conviction rapidly faded. He could close his eyes and immediately have
the feeling of being on an unstable bridge above the swirls of some
giant current. He could open them again and tell himself that YM-400
had a reputation for freakish effects--and that this specific effect,
at any rate, should not be very harmful since Jill had reported it
as having occurred on three separate occasions during the preceding
day. To speak of such a commotion as being only the sound of a
"river flowing under the house" seemed to approach the outrageous in
understatement; but Jill Trelawney had turned out to be an unusual
young person all around.
She and her uncle hadn't stirred, but Dowland knew that their presence
in the room steadied him. He knew, too, that, whatever happened next,
he couldn't allow himself to be rattled into blind fright again. The
situation was dangerous enough. If he let his nerves stampede him, he
would find himself unable to take any effective action.
He went over deliberately to the mountaineering harness he had dropped
when he entered the lighted room, and began to check through the
equipment. He intended to carry, in addition, only the communicator,
the IPA gun, a canteen of water, and a small flashlight; and he would
abandon the harness and its items at the foot of the mesa. There were
two hunting rifles in the car, with a vastly better range than the
handgun; but a rifle would slow him down and would make very little
real difference if he had the bad luck to run into Carter's Troopers in
the desert.
Somewhat to his surprise, the underground tumult appeared to be growing
fainter before he had concluded his inspection. Dowland paused to
listen, and within a few seconds there was no more doubt about it.
Jill had said it had gone on for half an hour on each of the previous
occasions; but Dowland's watch confirmed that the present disturbance
was subsiding rapidly after less than ten minutes. By the time he stood
up, snapped on the harness and shrugged it into position, it had become
almost inaudible.
Which might be a good sign, or a bad one, or without particular
significance of any kind. He couldn't know, and he'd probably be better
off if he didn't start thinking too much about it. He turned for a
last survey of the room before setting out, and discovered that Miguel
Trelawney had opened his eyes and was looking at him.
* * * * *
Dowland stood stockstill for a moment, hardly daring to believe it.
Then, quietly, he unbuckled the harness again, and let it down to
the floor. The eyes of the big man on the couch seemed to follow the
motion, then shifted slowly up toward the ceiling of the room, and
closed again.
"Trelawney," Dowland said softly, without moving.
Miguel Trelawney made a deep, sighing sound, turned on his side and
lay quiet, his back now to Dowland. A few seconds later, Dowland was
looking down at him from the other side of the couch.
It might have been only a momentary thing, a brief advantage medic had
gained in its invisible struggle with a process which would still end
in death. But he couldn't be sure. The eyes remained closed, the pulse
was weak and unsteady. Dowland thought of injecting a stimulant into
Trelawney, and discarded the idea immediately. Medic manufactured its
own stimulants as required, counter-acted any others. Even the effects
of the quiz-drug would be reduced by it, but not enough to keep Dowland
from getting any answer he wanted--provided Trelawney's mind cleared
for only three or four minutes of lucidity.
There was no way of knowing when such a period of lucidity might
develop. But now that the man had appeared to awaken, the possibility
that it would happen within the next hour or two became a very definite
one.
Dowland stood briefly in scowling indecision. The next hour or two
could also see him nearly down the side of the mesa, depending on the
difficulties of the descent ... but there was no real choice. It was a
gamble either way again; if Trelawney didn't awaken, the other gamble
remained.... How long, at most, could he afford to delay?
Leaving YM out of the calculation, since it couldn't be calculated,
he had only the arrival of the Freeholder Troopers to consider. There
was no apparent possibility that any sizable party could appear before
daybreak, but there was an even chance they would be there around that
time. When they came, he must either be in communication with the Solar
Police Authority or far enough away from Lion Mesa to be able to avoid
detection....
Four hours should be enough to give him a reasonable safety margin. He
had till midnight, or a little later.
Dowland pulled a chair up to the side of the couch and sat down. The
night wasn't quiet. The hogs squalled occasionally, and the wind
still seemed to be rising. In spite of his efforts to avoid unsettling
lines of thought, the nightmarish quality of the situation on the mesa
kept returning to his mind and wasn't easily dismissed. The past--the
past of over half a million years ago--had moved close too the present
tonight.... That was the stubborn, illogical feeling--and fear--which
he couldn't entirely shake off.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, Miguel Trelawney began breathing uneasily,
then stirred about, but lapsed again within seconds into immobile
unconsciousness.
Dowland resumed his waiting.
His watch had just told him it was shortly before eleven-thirty when he
heard the shots. They were three shots--clear, closely spaced cracks of
sound, coming from a considerable distance away. Dowland was out of his
chair with the second one, halfway down the dark entry hall as he heard
the third. He opened the door at the end of the hall just wide enough
to slip through, moved out quickly, and closed the door behind him to
keep the glow of light from the living room from showing outside.
As the door snapped shut, there were three more shots. A hunting
rifle. Perhaps two miles to the north....
* * * * *
Dowland stood staring up toward the wind-tossed line of the forest
above the ranch area. Who was up there on the mesa--and why the
shooting? Had the Troopers managed to get some men in by air? What
would they be firing at?
Signal shots, he thought then. And a signal to the ranch, in that
case.... Signaling what?
With that, another thought came, so abruptly and convincingly that it
sent a chill through him.
Doctor Paul Trelawney....
Paul Trelawney, not in the laboratory building--as Jill had surmised.
Gone elsewhere, now returned. And, like his brother, returned to a
point other than the one from which he had left.
A man exhausted and not sure of where he was on the big table-land, an
injured man--or perhaps one weakened by radiation sickness--such a man
would fire a gun in the night to draw attention to himself. To get help.
Minutes later, Dowland was headed in the direction from which the shots
had come, carrying one of his own rifles, along with the police gun.
It was very unlikely he could get close enough to Trelawney--if it was
Trelawney--to be heard approaching; but once he reached the general
area of the shots, he would fire the rifle, and wait for a response.
In the forest, the wind was wild and noisy, and the going was as rough
as he had suspected it would be. Moonlight flowed into the open rocky
stretches occasionally, and faded again as clouds moved on overhead.
Among the trees he could barely see his way and had to advance more
slowly.
He came presently to a wide, smooth hump of rock shouldering up through
the timber, and stopped to check the time. Twenty-five minutes had
passed since he left the area of the house. If he had calculated
correctly, the shots should have come from approximately this point. He
moved somewhat cautiously into the open--a man waiting for help would
think of selecting a place where he could be easily seen; and this
could be the spot Paul Trelawney had chosen. And Trelawney, armed with
a gun, might react rather abruptly if he saw a stranger approach.
But the ridge lay empty under the moon, stretching out for over a
hundred yards to right and left. Dowland reached its top, moved on
among the trees on the north side, and there paused again.
A feeling came, gradually and uneasily, of something wrong around here.
He stood listening, unable to define exactly what was disturbing him;
then a fresh gust of wind whipped through the branches about him, and
the wrongness was on the wind--a mingled odor, not an unfamiliar one,
but out of place in the evergreen forest, on this rocky shelf. A breath
of warm darkness, of rotting, soft vegetation--of swamp or river-bed.
Dowland found his breathing quickening.
Then the scent faded from the air again. It might, he was thinking
seconds later, have been a personal hallucination, a false message from
nerves over-excited by the events of the night. But if Paul Trelawney
_had_ returned to this point from a distant time, the route by
which he had come might still be open. And the opening not far from
here. It was a very unpleasant notion. Dowland began to move on again,
but in a slow and hesitant manner now.
Another five minutes, he thought. At the end of that time, he certainly
must have covered the distance over which the wind had carried the bark
of a rifle--and should, in fact, be a little to the north of Trelawney
on the mesa. If there were no further developments by then, he would
fire a shot himself.
The five minutes took him to another section of open ground, more
limited than the previous one. Again an outcropping of weathered
rock had thrust back the trees, and Dowland worked his way up the
steep side to the top, and stood looking about. After some seconds,
the understanding came suddenly that he was delaying firing the rifle
because of a reluctance to reveal his presence in these woods. With an
abrupt, angry motion he brought up the barrel, pointing it across the
trees to the north, and pulled the trigger.
* * * * *
The familiar whiplash of sound seemed startling loud. An instant later,
there was a series of unnerving crashing noises in the forest ahead.
Apparently some large animal had been alarmed by the shot. He heard
it blundering off for a few hundred yards; then there was silence,
as if it had stopped to listen. And then there was another sound, a
deep, long cry that sent a shiver through his flesh. It ended; and the
next thing that caught his attention was a glimpse of something moving
near the edge of his vision to the left, just above the forest. His
head and eyes shifted quickly toward it, and he found himself staring
after a great shadowy thing flapping and gliding away over the tops of
the trees. It disappeared almost immediately behind the next rise of
ground.
Dowland still stared after it, his mind seeming to move sluggishly as
if unwilling to admit what he had seen was no creature he had ever
heard about. Then it occurred to him suddenly that Trelawney had not
yet responded to the signal shot; and almost with the thought, he grew
aware of a renewed disturbance in the forest before him.
This one was much less loud than the other had been. For a moment,
Dowland thought it was being caused by the wind. But the noises
continued; and in a few more seconds it became obvious that
something--something that seemed to be very large indeed--was moving
among the trees and approaching the open area. By that time, it wasn't
very far away.
Dowland turned, his mouth working silently, and slipped down the south
side of the big rock hump, making no more noise than he could help.
Already the trees were shaking on the other side of the rock. He
ducked, crouched, into a thick mass of juniper branches, pushed through
them, and made his way quickly and quietly deeper among the trees. This
new thing, whatever it was, must also have heard the shot. It might
check when it reached the open area and, when it discovered nothing to
arouse its further curiosity, move off again.
But it didn't. Glancing back through the trees, Dowland had an
indistinct glimpse of something very tall coming swiftly around the
shoulder of rock. He turned, scuttled on under the branches, and a
moment later, there was a tremendous crashing at the point where he had
left the open ground. The thing was following him down into the woods.
Dowland turned again, gasping, dropped the rifle, and pulled the IPA
gun from his pocket. The thickets splintered; a towering shape came
through them. He drove three shots at it, had the approximate sensation
of being struck across the head with an iron bar, and felt himself fall
forward. He lost consciousness before he hit the earth.
* * * * *
When he opened his eyes, his first thought was that he should be
feeling a king-sized headache. He wasn't. He was lying face down on
moist forest mold. There was a very dim pre-dawn light about. So
several hours must have gone by since....
Dowland stiffened a moment, then turned his head very slowly, peering
about. After a moment, he pushed himself quietly up on hands and
knees. The trees before him shifted uneasily in the wind. Farther on,
he could make out part of the hump of rock on which he had stood and
fired a shot to draw Trelawney's attention. Between, the ground looked
as if a tank had come plowing into the forest. But there was no giant
shape lying there.
So his three shots hadn't brought it down. But it had gone away--after
doing what to him?
Dowland saw the IPA gun lying beside him, picked it up, and got slowly
to his feet. He ran a hand experimentally over his head. No lumps, not
even a feeling of tenderness ... He would have sworn that the crack
he'd felt had opened his skull. He looked about for the rifle, saw
it, picked it up, and went over to the area where the trees had been
tossed about.
There was a trail there--a very improbable trail. He studied it,
puzzled and frowning. Not the tracks of an animal. If it had been more
regular, such a track conceivably might have been laid by a machine
moving along on a very wide smooth roller. There were no indications
of any kind of a tread. As it was, about all he could say now was that
something very ponderous had crushed a path--a path varying between
approximately eight and fourteen feet in width--through the woods to
this point, and had then withdrawn again along a line roughly parallel
to its approach.... And he could say one other thing about it, Dowland
added mentally. The same ponderous entity could knock out a man for
hours, without apparently injuring him, or leaving any sign of how he
had been struck down.
The last sounded more like a machine again; a machine which was armed
in some mysterious manner. When his shot had flushed up the big flying
creature during the night, he'd almost been convinced that some monster
out of Terra's distant past was there on the mesa. Those two things
just didn't jibe.
Dowland shook his head. He could think about that when he had more
time. He'd lost--he looked at his watch--a little less than four hours.
In four hours, a large number of things might have happened in the
ranch area, with only the one partly attractive possibility among them
that somebody had managed to get into the laboratory and shut off the
YM flow.
* * * * *
He started back at a cautious trot. Downhill and with the light
strengthening gradually, covering ground was considerably less of a
problem than it had been during the night. The wind hadn't let up; it
still came in wild, intermittent gusts that bent the trees. Now and
then a cloud of dust whipped past, suggesting that the air over the
desert was also violently disturbed. And it might very well be, Dowland
thought, that YM could upset atmospheric conditions in an area where it
was active. Otherwise, if there was anything abnormal going on in the
forest about him, there were no detectable indications of it.
He came out presently on a ridge from where the ranch area was in view.
It lay now approximately a third of a mile ahead. In the dim light,
everything seemed quiet. Dowland slowed to a walk.
He might be heading into an ambush down there. Jill Trelawney could,
at most, be beginning to wake up from her drugged sleep and for another
hour or so she would be too confused and groggy to present a problem.
But others might be at the ranch by now; Paul Trelawney or a group of
Carter's Troopers. And whether Jill was able to give them a coherent
report or not, any of the Freeholder conspirators would discover very
quickly that somebody who was not a member of their group had been
there before them; they would anticipate his return, be on the watch
for it. Dowland left the direct line he had been following, and headed
east, moving with constantly increasing caution. On that side, the
forest grew closest to the ranch buildings, and he remembered noticing
a hedge-like thicket of evergreens just north of the cleared land. He
could make a preliminary check of the area from there.
He was within a hundred and fifty feet of the point when he discovered
just how healthy the notion of a preliminary check had been. A man was
lying in the cover of the evergreens Dowland had been thinking about,
head up, studying the ranch grounds. He wore an antiradiation suit of
the type Dowland had found in the storeroom; a heavy rifle lay beside
him. His face was in profile. It was smeared now with the sweat and
dirt the AR field had held in, but Dowland recognized the bold, bony
features instantly.
He had finally found Doctor Paul Trelawney.
* * * * *
It took Dowland over eight minutes to cover the remaining distance
between them. But the stalk had eminently satisfactory results. He was
within a yard of Trelawney before the Freeholder became aware of his
presence. The IPA gun prodded the man's spine an instant later.
"No noise, please," Dowland said softly. "I'd sooner not kill you. I
might have to."
Paul Trelawney was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was
raw with shock. "Who the devil are you?"
"Solar Police Authority," Dowland said. "You know why I'm here."