Eventually, the means was tracked down from a clue in one of the oldest
books. It was not found, but its existence deduced and proved to the
satisfaction of the searchers. Somewhere, hidden in a forgotten corner
of the solar system, was the missing tool.
This fact settled, it became necessary to locate and use the missing
tool.
It was a pitifully small generation. Only seven bright-eyed and
high-hearted young men. But that night they broke out of their
prescribed boundaries. They went off reservation, and separated in
seven directions. Each had a theory, and a hope to be explored.
Without their ident-armbands of platinum with the old Greek letter
deeply incised, they resembled any other seven youths picked at random
from the teeming multitudes. They could mingle unquestioned, and their
studies had prepared them for various tasks to which their forged
papers entitled them. But adaptation was not easy.
A single incautious moment could betray them. Even a routine brain wave
check would be sufficient to identify the fugitives, for in subtle
ways, the gamma-men were different.
Seven young men with a noble purpose, and fanatical hopes in their
hearts.
And now there were two. Five of them had made fatal slips, and had been
hunted down to hideous deaths.
Ferris was one of the two survivors.
* * * * *
Four people stood paralyzed while the hammering resounded at the gate.
This was no human fist demanding attention, but an odd, robot-like
clanking, as if a mechanical beast nosed in determined rooting against
the metal leaves of the gate.
It was just such a beast. A burring whine rose into notes of shrill
frustration. Metallic and electronic frustration, for the tracker was
a bloodhound of vacuum tubes and relays and switches and batteries and
transformers. Unerring and inexorable, its robot senses sorted a single
frequency from all other brain wave patterns, and it clung to the trail
with chilling efficiency. Something about its unhuman lusting numbed
most quarry before the pursuers in charge of the monster could check
its demonic eagerness for prey.
Now, like a metallic carnivore scenting blood, the robot tracker
nuzzled the gate and rebounded to nuzzle again.
All four of the humans inside the compound imagined the scene outside.
Pencil beams of hand radilumes glinted here and there, the questing
soldiers and police squads, the glittering serpentine body of the
tracker, with its scurrying treads churning clouds of dust as it
whined and rooted at the gate.
Bat Ferris shot a glance of uneasy calculation at his three companions.
The girl was an unknown quantity. Angel, momentarily shocked, was
predictable enough within limits. Pao Chung was openly an opportunist,
willing to turn any situation to personal profit. Unarmed, Ferris could
not even deal with them, let alone with the police outside. He frowned
angrily.
Teucrete's stare held on him for a moment, as if puzzled. Her eyes
moved on, focusing on Angel, then Pao Chung. Presently, they came back
to Ferris, amused and faintly mocking.
"What is a gamma-man doing here?" she asked.
"An interesting question," said Pao Chung ironically. "But not of prime
importance at the moment."
Ferris watched a smile writhe on the girl's lips and felt a quick
relief. She might help, if only to thwart Pao Chung's idea of throwing
him to the human wolves outside.
A harsh voice clamored for admittance.
The animals were growing restive again. An earthy bellow boomed out
against a counterpoint of birdlike trills. The sand leopards coughed
guttural warnings. Somewhere a pygmy elephant trumpeted, and the giant
insects burst into deafening clatters.
Teucrete motioned for silence, then drew the bolts and held the gate
ajar on its short chain.
"Who's there?" she demanded roughly.
"Police," several voices explained. "Open the gate, or we'll break it
down."
"Have you a warrant?"
"It's a security matter," someone explained hopefully.
"Tell that to the animals," she stormed. "It's as much as your life's
worth to come in here tonight. They're upset already, and I can't
control them if you keep up this noise. Go away."
An authoritative voice blustered. "This is an important matter. Let me
talk to your father."
Teucrete shrugged. "He will be back by noon tomorrow. Come then, and
bring a warrant to search. Or--"
She followed the speech with some insulting suggestions, not in the
best of taste. The authoritative voice turned into a gargle addressing
a slammed gate. Profanity did not disturb the tracker, which continued
to root noisily at the metal.
[Illustration: _Bogus Angel watched protectively from the wall top as
the mechanical bloodhound inched toward Teucrete while she talked with
the police._]
Teucrete shoved bolts into sockets and stood back. She sighed, and
beckoned the three men to follow her.
They moved amid a nightmarish cacophony of sounds. In memory roused
by the various elements of the uproar, Bat Ferris revisited the far
planets. Fortunately the light was too dim to see all the sources of
sound, but Ferris mentally identified many of the caged dwellers by ear
or by nose.
Wrigglers from the mercury mines of Callisto. Venusian swamp slugs, and
grull-cats from the Tihar Forest. Morbau-spawn from the honeycombed
caverns of Triton. Wireflies and needle-flies, known by their eerie
humming and buzzing. Seven-limbed bat-noses from the twilight zone of
Mercury. Iceworms from Neptune and Pluto, and the deadly windharps from
Mars. Amiably imbecilic moondogs from the satellites of Saturn pressed
blank flat faces against the walls of their insulated glass tanks.
Monsters out of nightmare. A madman's miscellany.
There was more, an incredible infinity of animal horizons. But
imagination reels back, and description falters. What words can catalog
the fringes of morphology!
* * * * *
Ferris focused his interest on the girl. Teucrete. A strange name, and
as strange a being as these she lived among. He wondered idly about her
racial background. Her father's origin was a mystery, and who could
say what mate he had found on fecund Venus? Was his daughter one of
those half-human mutants, or was she just what she seemed, a willful
and badly raised human girl? Ferris could only guess, and await further
evidence of her intentions toward him.
But he liked the way she walked. Tall, straight, slender as a spear,
and as poised. Pride was in her, and a hint of warped character in
her frigid disdain of weakness or fear. Physically--but Ferris was no
authority on feminine beauty. On the reservation women had been scarce,
most of them neurotic virgins, or old. He had known women since,
but mostly the hard, cynical opportunists of the planetary frontier
boom-towns. None to share a life with.
Vast perspectives of cages and tanks and pressure vats went off in all
directions. He would not have imagined so much area covered by the
establishment. It seemed limitless, and all its dimensions were oddly
confusing. Intentionally so, since it was laid out in labyrinthine
fashion. Unguided, a stranger could lose himself in a matter of
minutes. It defied belief that a zoo of such colossal proportions could
exist within the precincts of a city, even such a sprawling megalopolis
as Castarona. But at last they were through the cage areas, which lined
the periphery of the compound, and Teucrete led the men into a building
of dazzling white stone.
"My father's laboratory," she explained. "Here we synthesize foods for
the animals, and try with all our ingenuity to provide an approximate
environment for them."
Her voice brought Ferris back to the present. "It won't work," he said.
"Security squads will never wait for a warrant. Even if they do, what
good is half an hour? They'll break down your gate and swarm through
here like hunting bees."