"But you believe such an effort hopeless?"
"You know the red-tape merchants. You'll have to move fast if you want
to beat Ruthven. He's probably on a straight line now to Stanton,
Reese, and Margate. This is what he has been waiting for!"
"There are the news syndicates; public opinion would back us----"
"You don't mean that, of course." Kelgarries was suddenly coldly remote.
Ashe flushed under the heavy brown which overlay his regular features.
To threaten a silence break was near blasphemy here. He ran both hands
down the fabric covering his thighs as if to rub away some soil on his
palms.
"No," he replied heavily, his voice dull. "I guess I don't. I'll contact
Hough and hope for the best."
"Meanwhile," Kelgarries spoke briskly, "we'll do what we can to speed up
the program as it now stands. I suggest you take off for New York within
the hour----"
"Me? Why?" Ashe asked with a trace of suspicion.
"Because I can't leave without acting directly against orders, and that
would put us wrong immediately. You see Hough and talk to him
personally--put it to him straight. He'll have to have all the facts if
he's going to counter any move from Stanton before the council. You know
every argument we can use and all the proof on our side, and you're
authority enough to make it count."
"If I can do all that, I will." Ashe was alert and eager. The colonel,
seeing his change of expression, felt easier.
But Kelgarries stood a moment watching Ashe as he hurried down a side
corridor, before he moved on slowly to his own box of office. Once
inside he sat for a long unhappy time staring at the wall and seeing
nothing but the pictures produced by his thoughts. Then he pressed a
button and read off the symbols which flashed on a small visa-screen
set in his desk. Another button pushed, and he picked up a hand mike to
relay an order which might postpone trouble for a while. Ashe was far
too valuable a man to lose, and his emotions could boil him straight
into disaster over this.
"Bidwell--reschedule Team A. They are to go to the Hypno-Lab instead of
the reserve in ten minutes."
Releasing the mike, he again stared at the wall. No one dared interrupt
a hypno-training period, and this one would last three hours. Ashe could
not possibly see the trainees before he left for New York. And that
would remove one temptation from his path--he would not talk at the
wrong time.
Kelgarries' mouth twisted sourly. He had no pride in what he was doing.
And he was perfectly certain that Ruthven would win and that Ashe's
fears of Redax were well founded. It all came back to the old basic
tenet of the service: the end justified the means. They must use every
method and man under their control to make sure that Topaz would remain
a western possession, even though that strange planet now swung far
beyond the sky which covered both the western and eastern alliances on
Terra. Time had run out too fast; they were being forced to play what
cards they held, even though those might be very low ones. Ashe would be
back, but not, Kelgarries hoped, until this had been decided one way or
another. Not until this was finished.
Finished! Kelgarries blinked at the wall. Perhaps _they_ were finished,
too. No one would know until the transport ship landed on that other
world which appeared on the direction tape symbolized by a jewellike
disk of gold-brown which had given it the code name of Topaz.
2
There were an even dozen of the air-borne guardians, each following the
swing of its own orbital path just within the atmospheric envelope of
the planet which glowed as a great bronze-golden gem in the four-world
system of a yellow star. The globes had been launched to form a web of
protection around Topaz six months earlier, and the highest skill had
gone into their production. Just as contact mines sown in a harbor could
close that landfall to ships not knowing the secret channel, so was this
world supposedly closed to any spaceship not equipped with the signal to
ward off the sphere missiles.
That was the theory of the new off-world settlers whose protection they
were to be, already tested as well as possible, but as yet not put to
the ultimate proof. The small bright globes spun undisturbed across a
two-mooned sky at night and made reassuring blips on an installation
screen by day.
Then a thirteenth object winked into being, began the encircling,
closing spiral of descent. A sphere resembling the warden-globes, it was
a hundred times their size, and its orbit was purposefully controlled
by instruments under the eye and hand of a human pilot.
Four men were strapped down on cushioned sling-seats in the control
cabin of the Western Alliance ship, two hanging where their fingers
might reach buttons and levers, the others merely passengers, their own
labor waiting for the time when they would set down on the alien soil of
Topaz. The planet hung there in their visa-screen, richly beautiful in
its amber gold, growing larger, nearer, so that they could pick out
features of seas, continents, mountain ranges, which had been studied on
tape until they were familiar, yet now were strangely unfamiliar too.
One of the warden-globes alerted, oscillated in its set path, whirled
faster as its delicate interior mechanisms responded to the awakening
spark which would send it on its mission of destruction. A relay
clicked, but for the smallest fraction of a millimeter failed to set the
proper course. On the instrument, far below, which checked the globe's
new course the mistake was not noted.
The screen of the ship spiraling toward Topaz registered a path which
would bring it into violent contact with the globe. They were still some
hundreds of miles apart when the alarm rang. The pilot's hand clawed out
at the bank of controls; under the almost intolerable pressure of their
descent, there was so little he could do. His crooked fingers fell back
powerlessly from the buttons and levers; his mouth was a twisted grimace
of bleak acceptance as the beat of the signal increased.
One of the passengers forced his head around on the padded rest, fought
to form words, to speak to his companion. The other was staring ahead at
the screen, his thick lips wide and flat against his teeth in a snarl
of rage.
"They ... are ... here...."
Ruthven paid no attention to the obvious as stated by his fellow
scientist. His fury was a red, pulsing thing inside him, fed by his own
helplessness. To be pinned here so near his goal, fastened up as a
target for an inanimate but cunningly fashioned weapon, ate into him
like a stream of deadly acid. His big gamble would puff out in a blast
of fire to light up Topaz's sky, with nothing left--nothing. On the
armrest of his sling-seat his nails scratched deep.
The four men in the control cabin could only sit and watch, waiting for
the rendezvous which would blot them out. Ruthven's flaming anger was a
futile blaze. His companion in the passenger seat had closed his eyes,
his lips moving soundlessly in an expression of his own scattered
thoughts. The pilot and his assistant divided their attention between
the screen, with its appalling message, and the controls they could not
effectively use, feverishly seeking a way out in these last moments.
Below them in the bowl of the ship were those who would not know the end
consciously--save in one compartment. In a padded cage a prick-eared
head stirred where it rested on forepaws, slitted eyes blinked, aware
not only of familiar surroundings, but also of the tension and fear
generated by human minds and emotions levels above. A pointed nose
raised, and there was a growling deep in a throat covered with thick
buff-gray hair.
The growl aroused another similar captive. Knowing yellow eyes met
yellow eyes. An intelligence, which was certainly not that of the animal
body which contained it, fought down instinct raging to send both those
bodies hurtling at the fastenings of the twin cages. Curiosity and the
ability to adapt had been bred into both from time immemorial. Then
something else had been added to sly and cunning brains. A step up had
been taken--to weld intelligence to cunning, connect thought to
instinct.
More than a generation earlier mankind had chosen barren desert--the
"white sands" of New Mexico--as a testing ground for atomic experiments.
Humankind could be barred, warded out of the radiation limits; the
natural desert dwellers, four-footed and winged, could not be so
controlled.
For thousands of years, since the first southward roving Amerindian
tribes had met with their kind, there had been a hunter of the open
country, a smaller cousin of the wolf, whose natural abilities had made
an undeniable impression on the human mind. He was in countless Indian
legends as the Shaper or the Trickster, sometimes friend, sometimes
enemy. Godling for some tribes, father of all evil for others. In the
wealth of tales the coyote, above all other animals, had a firm place.
Driven by the press of civilization into the badlands and deserts,
fought with poison, gun, and trap, the coyote had survived, adapting to
new ways with all his legendary cunning. Those who had reviled him as
vermin had unwillingly added to the folklore which surrounded him,
telling their own tales of robbed traps, skillful escapes. He continued
to be a trickster, laughing on moonlit nights from the tops of ridges at
those who would hunt him down.
Then, close to the end of the twentieth century, when myths were
scoffed at, the stories of the coyote's slyness began once more on a
fantastic scale. And finally scientists were sufficiently intrigued to
seek out this creature that seemed to display in truth all the abilities
credited to his immortal namesake by pre-Columbian tribes.
What they discovered was indeed shattering to certain closed minds. For
the coyote had not only adapted to the country of the white sands; he
had evolved into something which could not be dismissed as an animal,
clever and cunning, but limited to beast range. Six cubs had been
brought back on the first expedition, coyote in body, their developing
minds different. The grandchildren of those cubs were now in the ship's
cages, their mutated senses alert, ready for the slightest chance of
escape. Sent to Topaz as eyes and ears for less keenly endowed humans,
they were not completely under the domination of man. The range of their
mental powers was still uncomprehended by those who had bred, trained,
and worked with them from the days their eyes had opened and they had
taken their first wobbly steps away from their dams.
The male growled again, his lips wrinkling back in a snarl as the
emanations of fear from the men he could not see reached panic peak. He
still crouched, belly flat, on the protecting pads of his cage; but he
strove now to wriggle closer to the door, just as his mate made the same
effort.
Between the animals and those in the control cabin lay the others--forty
of them. Their bodies were cushioned and protected with every ingenious
device known to those who had placed them there so many weeks earlier.
Their minds were free of the ship, roving into places where men had not
trod before, a territory potentially more dangerous than any solid earth
could ever be.
Operation Retrograde had returned men bodily into the past, sending
agents to hunt mammoths, follow the roads of the Bronze Age traders,
ride with Attila and Genghis Khan, pull bows among the archers of
ancient Egypt. But Redax returned men in mind to the paths of their
ancestors, or this was the theory. And those who slept here and now in
their narrow boxes, lay under its government, while the men who had
arbitrarily set them so could only assume they were actually reliving
the lives of Apache nomads in the wide southwestern wastes of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Above, the pilot's hand pushed out again, fighting the pressure to reach
one particular button. That, too, had been a last-minute addition, an
experiment which had only had partial testing. To use it was the final
move he could make, and he was already half convinced of its
uselessness.
With no faith and only a very wan hope, he sent that round of metal
flush with the board. What followed no one ever lived to explain.
On the planet the installation which tracked the missiles flashed on a
screen bright enough to blind momentarily the duty man on watch, and its
tracker was shaken off course. When it jiggled back into line it was no
longer the efficient eye-in-the-sky it had been, though its tenders were
not to realize that for an important minute or two.
While the ship, now out of control, sped in dizzy whirls toward Topaz,
engines fought blindly to stabilize, to re-establish their functions.
Some succeeded, some wobbled in and out of the danger zone, two failed.
And in the control cabin three dead men spun in prisoning seats.
Dr. James Ruthven, blood bubbling from his lips with every shallow
breath he could draw, fought the stealthy tide of blackness which crept
up his brain, his stubborn will holding to rags of consciousness,
refusing to acknowledge the pain of his fatally injured body.
The orbiting ship was on an erratic path. Slowly the machines were
correcting, relays clicking, striving to bring it to a landing under
auto-pilot. All the ingenuity built into a mechanical brain was now
centered in landing the globe.
It was not a good landing, in fact a very bad one, for the sphere
touched a mountain side, scraped down rocks, shearing away a portion of
its outer bulk. But the mountain barrier was now between it and the base
from which the missiles had been launched, and the crash had not been
recorded on that tracking instrument. So far as the watchers several
hundred miles away knew, the warden in the sky had performed as
promised. Their first line of defense had proven satisfactory, and there
had been no unauthorized landing on Topaz.
In the wreckage of the control cabin Ruthven pawed at the fastenings of
his sling-chair. He no longer tried to suppress the moans every effort
tore out of him. Time held the whip, drove him. He rolled from his seat
to the floor, lay there gasping, as again he fought doggedly to remain
above the waves--those frightening, fast-coming waves of dark faintness.
Somehow he was crawling, crawling along a tilted surface until he gained
the well where the ladder to the lower section hung, now at an acute
angle. It was that angle which helped him to the next level.
He was too dazed to realize the meaning of the crumpled bulkheads. There
was a spur of bare rock under his hands as he edged over and around
twisted metal. The moans were now a gobbling, burbling, almost
continuous cry as he reached his goal--a small cabin still intact.
For long moments of anguish he paused by the chair there, afraid that he
could not make the last effort, raise his almost inert bulk up to the
point where he could reach the Redax release. For a second of unusual
clarity he wondered if there was any reason for this supreme ordeal,
whether any of the sleepers could be aroused. This might now be a ship
of the dead.
His right hand, his arm, and finally his bulk over the seat, he braced
himself and brought his left hand up. He could not use any of the
fingers; it was like lifting numb, heavy weights. But he lurched
forward, swept the unfeeling lump of cold flesh down against the release
in a gesture which he knew must be his final move. And, as he fell back
to the floor, Dr. Ruthven could not be certain whether he had succeeded
or failed. He tried to screw his head around, to focus his eyes upward
at that switch. Was it down or still stubbornly up, locking the sleepers
into confinement? But there was a fog between; he could not see it--or
anything.
The light in the cabin flickered, was gone as another circuit in the
broken ship failed. It was dark, too, in the small cubby below which
housed the two cages. Chance, which had snuffed out nineteen lives in
the space globe, had missed ripping open that cabin on the mountain
side. Five yards down the corridor the outside fabric of the ship was
split wide open, the crisp air native to Topaz entering, sending a
message to two keen noses through the combination of odors now pervading
the wreckage.
And the male coyote went into action. Days ago he had managed to work
loose the lower end of the mesh which fronted his cage, but his mind had
told him that a sortie inside the ship was valueless. The odd rapport
he'd had with the human brains, unknown to them, had operated to keep
him to the old role of cunning deception, which in the past had saved
countless of his species from sudden and violent death. Now with teeth
and paws he went diligently to work, urged on by the whines of his mate,
that tantalizing smell of an outside world tickling their nostrils--a
wild world, lacking the taint of man-places.
He slipped under the loosened mesh and stood up to paw at the front of
the female's cage. One forepaw caught in the latch and pressed it down,
and the weight of the door swung against him. Together they were free
now to reach the corridor and see ahead the subdued light of a strange
moon beckoning them on into the open.
The female, always more cautious than her mate, lingered behind as he
trotted forward, his ears a-prick with curiosity. Their training had
been the same since cubhood--to range and explore, but always in the
company and at the order of man. This was not according to the pattern
she knew, and she was suspicious. But to her sensitive nose the smell of
the ship was an offense, and the puffs of breeze from without enticing.
Her mate had already slipped through the break; now he barked with
excitement and wonder, and she trotted on to join him.
Above, the Redax, which had never been intended to stand rough usage,
proved to be a better survivor of the crash than most of the other
installations. Power purred along a network of lines, activated beams,
turned off and on a series of fixtures in those coffin-beds. For five of
the sleepers--nothing. The cabin which had held them was a flattened
smear against the mountain side. Three more half aroused, choked, fought
for life and breath in a darkness which was a mercifully short
nightmare, and succumbed.
But in the cabin nearest the rent through which the coyotes had escaped,
a young man sat up abruptly, looking into the dark with wide-open,
terror-haunted eyes. He clawed for purchase against the smooth edge of
the box in which he had lain, somehow got to his knees, weaving weakly
back and forth, and half fell, half pushed to the floor where he could
stand only by keeping his hold on the box.
Dazed, sick, weak, he swayed there, aware only of himself and his own
sensations. There were small sounds in the dark, a stilled moan, a
gasping sigh. But that meant nothing. Within him grew a compulsion to be
out of this place, his terror making him lurch forward.
His flailing hand rapped painfully against an upright surface which his
questing fingers identified hazily as an exit. Unconsciously he fumbled
along the surface of the door until it gave under that weak pressure.
Then he was out, his head swimming, drawn by the light behind the wall
rent.
He progressed toward that in a scrambling crawl, making his way over the
splintered skin of the globe. Then he dropped with a jarring thud onto
the mound of earth the ship had pushed before it during its downward
slide. Limply he tumbled on in a small cascade of clods and sand,
hitting against a less movable rock with force enough to roll him over
on his back and stun him again.
The second and smaller moon of Topaz swung brightly through the sky, its
weird green rays making the blood-streaked face of the explorer an alien
mask. It had passed well on to the horizon, and its large yellow
companion had risen when a yapping broke the small sounds of the night.
As the _yipp, yipp, yipp_ arose in a crescendo, the man stirred, putting
one hand to his head. His eyes opened, he looked vaguely about him and
sat up. Behind him was the torn and ripped ship, but he did not look
back at it.
Instead, he got to his feet and staggered out into the direct path of
the moonlight. Inside his brain there was a whirl of thoughts, memories,
emotions. Perhaps Ruthven or one of his assistants could have explained
that chaotic mixture for what it was. But for all practical purposes
Travis Fox--Amerindian Time Agent, member of Team A, Operation
Cochise--was far less of a thinking animal now than the two coyotes
paying their ritual addresses to a moon which was not the one of their
vanished homeland.
Travis wavered on, drawn somehow by that howling. It was familiar, a
thread of something real through all the broken clutter in his head. He
stumbled, fell, crawled up again, but he kept on.
Above, the female coyote lowered her head, drew a test sniff of a new
scent. She recognized that as part of the proper way of life. She yapped
once at her mate, but he was absorbed in his night song, his muzzle
pointed moonward as he voiced a fine wailing.
Travis tripped, pitched forward on his hands and knees, and felt the jar
of such a landing shoot up his stiffened forearms. He tried to get up,
but his body only twisted, so he landed on his back and lay looking up
at the moon.
A strong, familiar odor ... then a shadow looming above him. Hot breath
against his cheek, and the swift sweep of an animal tongue on his face.
He flung up his hand, gripped thick fur, and held on as if he had found
one anchor of sanity in a world gone completely mad.
3
Travis, one knee braced against the red earth, blinked as he parted a
screen of tall rust-brown grass with cautious fingers to look out into a
valley where golden mist clouded most of the landscape. His head ached
with dull persistence, the pain fostered in some way by his own
bewilderment. To study the land ahead was like trying to see through one
picture interposed over another and far different one. He knew what
ought to be there, but what was before him was very dissimilar.
A buff-gray shape flitted through the tall cover grass, and Travis
tensed. _Mba'a_--coyote? Or were these companions of his actually
_ga-n_, spirits who could choose their shape at will and had, oddly,
this time assumed the bodies of man's tricky enemy? Were they
_ndendai_--enemies--or _dalaanbiyat'i_, allies? In this mad world he did
not know.
_Ei'dik'e?_ His mind formed a word he did not speak: Friend?
Yellow eyes met his directly. Dimly he had been aware, ever since
awaking in this strange wilderness with the coming of morning light,
that the four-footed ones trotting with him as he walked aimlessly had
unbeastlike traits. Not only did they face him eye-to-eye, but in some
ways they appeared able to read his thoughts.
He had longed for water to ease the burning in his throat, the
ever-present pain in his head, and the creatures had nudged him in
another direction, bringing him to a pool where he had mouthed liquid
with a strange sweet, but not unpleasant taste.
Now he had given them names, names which had come out of the welter of
dreams which shadowed his stumbling journey across this weird country.
Nalik'ideyu (Maiden-Who-Walks-Ridges) was the female who continued to
shepherd him along, never venturing too far from his side. Naginlta
(He-Who-Scouts-Ahead) was the male who did just that, disappearing at
long intervals and then returning to face the man and his mate as if
conveying some report necessary to their journey.
It was Nalik'ideyu who sought out Travis now, her red tongue lolling
from her mouth as she panted. Not from exertion, he was certain of that.
No, she was excited and eager ... on the hunt! That was it--a hunt!
Travis' own tongue ran across his lips as an impression hit him with
feral force. There was meat--rich, fresh--just ahead. Meat that lived,
waiting to be killed. Inside him his own avid hunger roused, shaking him
farther out of the crusting dream.
His hands went to his waist, but the groping fingers did not find what
vague memory told him should be there--a belt, heavy with knife in
sheath.
He examined his own body with attention to find he was adequately
covered by breeches of a smooth, dull brown material which blended well
with the vegetation about him. He wore a loose shirt, belted in at the
narrow waist by a folded strip of cloth, the ends of which fluttered
free. On his feet were tall moccasins, the leg pieces extending some
distance up his calves, the toes turned up in rounded points.
Some of this he found familiar, but these were fragments of memory;
again his mind fitted one picture above another. One thing he did know
for sure--he had no weapons. And that realization struck home with a
thrust of real and terrible fear which tore away more of the
bewilderment cloaking his mind.
Nalik'ideyu was impatient. Having advanced a step or two, she now looked
back at him over her shoulder, yellow eyes slitted, her demand on him as
instant and real as if she had voiced understandable words. Meat was
waiting, and she was hungry. Also she expected Travis to aid in the
hunt--at once.
Though he could not match her fluid grace in moving through the grass,
Travis followed her, keeping to cover. He shook his head vigorously, in
spite of the stab of pain the motion cost him, and paid more attention
to his surroundings. It was apparent that the earth under him, the grass
around, the valley of the golden haze, were all real, not part of a
dream. Therefore that other countryside which he kept seeing in a
ghostly fashion was a hallucination.
Even the air which he drew into his lungs and expelled again, had a
strange smell, or was it taste? He could not be sure which. He knew that
hypno-training could produce queer side effects, but ... this....
Travis paused, staring unseeingly before him at the grass still waving
from the coyote's passage. Hypno-training! What was that? Now three
pictures fought to focus in his mind: the two landscapes which did not
match and a shadowy third. He shook his head again, his hands to his
temples. This--this only was real: the ground, the grass, the valley,
the hunger in him, the hunt waiting....
He forced himself to concentrate on the immediate present and the
portion of world he could see, feel, scent, which lay here and now about
him.
The grass grew shorter as he proceeded in Nalik'ideyu's wake. But the
haze was not thinning. It seemed to hang in patches, and when he
ventured through the edge of a patch it was like creeping through a fog
of golden, dancing motes with here and there a glittering speck whirling
and darting like a living thing. Masked by the stuff, Travis reached a
line of brush and sniffed.
It was a warm scent, a heavy odor he could not identify and yet one he
associated with a living creature. Flat to earth, he pushed head and
shoulders under the low limbs of the bush to look ahead.
Here was a space where the fog did not hold, a pocket of earth clear
under the morning sun. And grazing there were three animals. Again shock
cleared a portion of Travis' bemused brain.
They were about the size, he thought, of antelopes, and they had a
general resemblance to those beasts in that they had four slender legs,
a rounded body, and a head. But they had alien features, so alien as to
hold him in open-mouthed amazement.
The bodies had bare spots here and there, and patches of creamy--fur? Or
was it hair which hung in strips, as if the creatures had been partially
plucked in a careless fashion? The necks were long and moved about in a
serpentine motion, as though their spines were as limber as reptiles'.
On the end of those long and twisting necks were heads which also
appeared more suitable to another species--broad, rather flat, with a
singular toadlike look--but furnished with horns set halfway down the
nose, horns which began in a single root and then branched into two
sharp points.
They were unearthly! Again Travis blinked, brought his hand up to his
head as he continued to view the browsers. There were three of them: two
larger and with horns, the other a smaller beast with less of the ragged
fur and only the beginning button of a protuberance on the nose; it was
probably a calf.
One of those mental alerts from the coyotes broke his absorption.
Nalik'ideyu was not interested in the odd appearance of the grazing
creatures; she was intent upon their usefulness in another way--as a
full and satisfying meal--and she was again impatient with him for his
dull response.
His examination took a more practical turn. An antelope's defense was
speed, though it could be tricked into hunting range through its
inordinate curiosity. The slender legs of these beasts suggested a like
degree of speed, and Travis had no weapons at all.
Those nose horns had an ugly look; this thing might be a fighter rather
than a runner. But the suggestion which had flashed from coyote to him
had taken root. Travis was hungry, he was a hunter, and here was meat on
the hoof, queer as it looked.
Again he received a message. Naginlta was on the opposite side of the
clearing. If the creatures depended on speed, then Travis believed they
could probably outrun not only him but the coyotes as well--which left
cunning and some sort of plan.
Travis glanced at the cover where he knew Nalik'ideyu crouched and from
which had come that flash of agreement. He shivered. These were truly no
animals, but _ga-n_, _ga-n_ of power! And as _ga-n_ he must treat them,
accede to their will. Spurred by that, the Apache gave only flicks of
attention to the browsers while at the same time he studied the part of
the landscape uncovered by mist.
Without weapons or speed, they must conceive a trap. Again Travis sensed
that agreement which was _ga-n_ magic, and with it the strong impression
urging him to the right. He was making progress with skill he did not
even recognize and which he had never been conscious of learning.
The bushes and small, droop-limbed trees, their branches not clothed
with leaves from proper twigs but with a reddish bristly growth
protruding directly from their surfaces, made a partial wall for the
pocket-sized meadow. That screen reached a rocky cleft where the mist
curled in a long tongue through a wall twice Travis' height. If the
browsers could be maneuvered into taking the path through that cleft....
Travis searched about him, and his hands closed upon the oldest weapon
of his species, a stone pulled from an earth pocket and balanced neatly
in the palm of his hand. It was a long chance but his best one.
The Apache took the first step on a new and fearsome road. These _ga-n_
had put their thoughts--or their desires--into his mind. Could he so
contact them in return?
With the stone clenched in his fist, his shoulders back against the wall
not too far from the cleft opening, Travis strove to think out, clearly
and simply, this poor plan of his. He did not know that he was reacting
the way scientists deep space away had hoped he might. Nor did Travis
guess that at this point he had already traveled far beyond the
expectations of the men who had bred and trained the two mutant coyotes.
He only believed that this might be the one way he could obey the wishes
of the two spirits he thought far more powerful than any man. So he
pictured in his mind the cleft, the running creatures, and the part the
_ga-n_ could play if they so willed.
Assent--in its way as loud and clear as if shouted. The man fingered the
stone, weighed it. There would probably be just one moment when he could
use it to effect, and he must be ready.
From this point he could no longer see the small meadow where the
grazers were. But Travis knew, as well as if he watched the scene, that
the coyotes were creeping in, belly flat to earth, adding a feline
stealth and patience to their own cunning.
There! Travis' head jerked, the alert had come, the drive was beginning.
He tensed, gripping his stone.
A yapping bark was answered by a sound he could not describe, a noise
which was neither cough nor grunt but a combination of both. Again a
yap-yap....
A toad-head burst through the screen of brush, the double horn on its
nose festooned with a length of grass torn up by the roots. Wide
eyes--milky and seeming to be without pupils--fastened on Travis, but he
could not be sure the thing saw him, for it kept on, picking up speed
as it approached the cleft. Behind it ran the calf, and that guttural
cry was bubbling from its broad flat lips.
The long neck of the adult writhed, the frog-head swung closer to the
ground so that the twin points of the horn were at a slant--aimed now at
Travis. He had been right in his guess at their deadliness, but he had
only a fleeting chance to recognize that fact as the thing bore down,
its whole attitude expressing the firm intention of goring him.
He hurled his stone and then flung his body to one side, stumbling and
rolling into the brush where he fought madly to regain his feet,
expecting at any moment to feel trampling hoofs and thrusting horns.
There was a crash to his right, and the bushes and grass were wildly
shaken.
On his hands and knees the Apache retreated, his head turned to watch
behind him. He saw the flirt of a triangular flap-tail in the mouth of
the cleft. The calf had escaped. And now the threshing in the bushes
stilled.
Was the thing stalking him? He got to his feet, for the first time
hearing clearly the continued yapping, as if a battle was in progress.
Then the second of the adult beasts came into view, backing and turning,
trying to keep lowered head with menacing double horn always pointed to
the coyotes dancing a teasing, worrying circle about it.
One of the coyotes flung up its head, looked upslope, and barked. Then,
as one, both rushed the fighting beast, but for the first time from the
same side, leaving it a clear path to retreat. It made a rush before
which they fled easily, and then it whirled with a speed and grace,
which did not fit its ungainly, ill-proportioned body, and jumped
toward the cleft, the coyotes making no effort to hinder its escape.
Travis came out of cover, approaching the brush which had concealed the
crash of the other animal. The actions of the coyotes had convinced him
that there was no danger now; they would never have allowed the escape
of their prey had the first beast not been in difficulties.
His shot with the stone, the Apache decided as he stood moments later
surveying the twitching crumpled body, must have hit the thing in the
head, stunning it. Then the momentum of its charge had carried it full
force against the rock to kill it. Blind luck--or the power of the
_ga-n_? He pulled back as the coyotes came padding up shoulder to
shoulder to inspect the kill. It was truly more theirs than his.
Their prey yielded not only food but a weapon for Travis. Instead of the
belt knife he had remembered having, he was now equipped with two. The
double horn had been easy to free from the shattered skull, and some
careful work with stones had broken off one prong at just the angle he
wanted. So now he had a short and a longer tool, defense. At least they
were better than the stone with which he had entered the hunt.
Nalik'ideyu pushed past him to lap daintily at the water. Then she sat
up on her haunches, watching Travis as he smoothed the horn with a
stone.
"A knife," he said to her, "this will be a knife. And--" he glanced up,
measuring the value of the wood represented by trees and bushes--"then a
bow. With a bow we shall hunt better."
The coyote yawned, her yellow eyes half closed, her whole pose one of
satisfaction and contentment.
"A knife," Travis repeated, "and a bow." He needed weapons; he had to
have them!
Why? His hand stopped scraping. Why? The toad-faced double horn had been
quick to attack, but Travis could have avoided it, and it had not hunted
him first. Why was he ridden by this fear that he must not be unarmed?
He dipped his hand into the pool of the spring and lifted the water to
cool his sweating face. The coyote moved, turned around in the grass,
crushing down the growth into a nest in which she curled up, head on
paws. But Travis sat back on his heels, his now idle hands hanging down
between his knees, and forced himself to the task of sorting out jumbled
memories.
This landscape was wrong--totally unlike what it should be--but it was
real. He had helped kill this alien creature. He had eaten its meat,
raw. Its horn lay within touch now. All that was real and unchangeable.
Which meant that the rest of it, that other desert world in which he had
wandered with his kind, ridden horses, raided invading men of another
race, that was not real--or else far, far removed from where he now sat.
Yet there had been no dividing line between those two worlds. One moment
he had been in the desert place, returning from a successful foray
against the Mexicans. Mexicans! Travis caught at that identification,
tried to use it as a thread to draw closer to the beginning of his
mystery.
Mexicans.... And he was an Apache, one of the Eagle people, one who rode
with Cochise. No!
Sweat again beaded his face where the water had cooled it. He was not of
that past. He was Travis Fox, of the very late twentieth century, not a
nomad of the middle nineteenth! He was of Team A of the project!
The Arizona desert and then this! From one to the other in an instant.
He looked about him in rising fear. Wait! He had been in the dark when
he got out of the desert, lying in a box. Getting out, he had crawled
down a passage to reach moonlight, strange moonlight.
A box in which he had lain, a passage with smooth metallic walls, and an
alien world at the end of it.
The coyote's ears twitched, her head came up, she was staring at the
man's drawn face, at his eyes with their core of fear. She whined.
Travis caught up the two pieces of horn, thrust them into his sash belt,
and got to his feet. Nalik'ideyu sat up, her head cocked a little to one
side. As the man turned to seek his own back trail she padded along in
his wake and whined for Naginlta. But Travis was more intent now on what
he must prove to himself than he was on the actions of the two animals.
It was a wandering trail, and now he did not question his skill in being
able to follow it so unerringly. The sun was hot. Winged things buzzed
from the bushes, small scuttling things fled from him through the tall
grass. Once Naginlta growled a warning which led them all to a detour,
and Travis might not have picked up the proper trace again had not the
coyote scout led him to it.
"Who are you?" he asked once, and then guessed it would have better been
said, "What are you?" These were not animals, or rather they were more
than the animals he had always known. And one part of him, the part
which remembered the desert rancherias where Cochise had ruled, said
they were spirits. Yet that other part of him.... Travis shook his
head, accepting them now for what they were--welcome company in an alien
place.
The day wore on close to sunset, and still Travis followed that
wandering trail. The need which drove him kept him going through the
rough country of hills and ravines. Now the mist lifted above towering
walls of mountains very near him, yet not the mountains of his memory.
These were dull brown, with a forbidding look, like sun-dried skulls
baring teeth in warning against all comers.
With great difficulty, Travis topped a rise. Ahead against the skyline
stood both coyotes. And, as the man joined them, first one and then the
other flung back its head and sounded the sobbing, shattering cry which
had been a part of that other life.
The Apache looked down. His puzzle was answered in part. The wreckage
crumpled on the mountain side was identifiable--a spaceship! Cold fear
gripped him and his own head went back; from between his tight lips came
a cry as desolate and despairing as the one the animals had voiced.
4
Fire, mankind's oldest ally, weapon, tool, leaped high before the naked
stone of the mountain side. Men sat cross-legged about it, fifteen of
them. And behind, guarded by the flames and that somber circle, were the
women. There was a uniformity in this gathering. The members were
plainly all of the same racial stock, of medium height, stocky yet fined
down to the peak of stamina and endurance, their skin brown, their
shoulder-length hair black. And they were all young--none over thirty,
some still in their late teens. Alike, too, was a certain drawn look in
their faces, a tenseness of the eyes and mouth as they listened to
Travis.
"So we must be on Topaz. Do any of you remember boarding the ship?"
"No. Only that we awoke within it." Across the fire one chin lifted; the
eyes which caught Travis' held a deep, smoldering anger. "This is more
trickery of the Pinda-lick-o-yi, the White Eyes. Between us there has
never been fair dealing. They have broken their promise as a man breaks
a rotten stick, for their words are as rotten. And it was you, Fox, who
brought us to listen to them."
A stir about the circle, a murmur from the women.
"And do I not also sit here with you in this strange wilderness?" he
countered.
"I do not understand," another of the men held out his hand, palm up, in
a gesture of asking--"what has happened to us. We were in the old Apache
world.... I, Jil-Lee, was riding with Cuchillo Negro as we went down to
the taking of Ramos. And then I was here, in a broken ship and beside me
a dead man who was once my brother. How did I come out of the past of
our people into another world across the stars?"
"Pinda-lick-o-yi tricks!" The first speaker spat into the fire.
"It was the Redax, I think," Travis replied. "I heard Dr. Ashe discuss
this. A new machine which could make a man remember not his own past,
but the past of his ancestors. While we were on that ship we must have
been under its influence, so we lived as our people lived a hundred
years or more ago--"
"And the purpose of such a thing?" Jil-Lee asked.
"To make us more like our ancestors perhaps. It is part of what they
told us at the project. To venture into these new worlds requires a
different type of man than lives on Terra today. Traits we have
forgotten are needed to face the dangers of wild places."
"You, Fox, have been beyond the stars before, and you found there were
such dangers to face?"
"It is true. You have heard of the three worlds I saw when the ship from
the old days took us off, unwilling, to the stars. Did you not all
volunteer to pioneer in this manner so you could also see strange and
new things?"
"But we did not agree to be returned to the past in medicine dreams and
be sent unknowingly into space!"
Travis nodded. "Deklay is right. But I know no more than you why we were
so sent, or why the ship crashed. We have found Dr. Ruthven's body in
the cabin with that new installation. Only we have discovered nothing
else which tells us why we were brought here. With the ship broken, we
must stay."
They were silent now, men and women alike. Behind them lay several days
of activity, nights of exhausted slumber. Against the cliff wall lay the
packs of supplies they had salvaged from the wreck. By mutual consent
they had left the vicinity of the broken globe, following their old
custom of speedily withdrawing from a place of death.
"This is a world empty of men?" Jil-Lee wanted to know.
"So far we have found only animal signs, and the _ga-n_ have not warned
us of anything else----"
"Those devil ones!" Again Deklay spat into the fire. "I say we should
have no dealings with them. The _mba'a_ is no friend to the People."
Again a murmur which seemed one of agreement answered that outburst.
Travis stiffened. Just how much influence had the Redax had over them?
He knew from his own experience that sometimes he had an odd double
reaction--two different feelings which almost sickened him when they
struck simultaneously. And he was beginning to suspect that with some of
the others the return to the past had been far more deep and lasting.
Now Jil-Lee was actually to reason out what had happened. While Deklay
had reverted to an ancestor who had ridden with Victorio or Magnus
Colorado! Travis had a flash of premonition, a chill which made him
half foresee a time when the past and the present might well split them
apart--fatally.
"Devil or _ga-n_." A man with a quiet face, rather deeply sunken eyes,
spoke for the first time. "We are in two minds because of this Redax, so
let us not do anything in haste. Back in the desert world of the People
I have seen the _mba'a_, and he was very clever. With the badger he went
hunting, and when the badger had dug up the rat's nest, so did the
_mba'a_ wait on the other side of the thorny bush and catch those who
would escape that way. Between him and the badger there was no war.
These two who sit over yonder now--they are also hunters and they seem
friendly to us. In a strange place a man needs all the help he can find.
Let us not call names out of old tales, which may mean nothing in fact."
"Buck speaks straightly," Jil-Lee agreed. "We seek a camp which can be
defended. For perhaps there are men here whose hunting territory we have
invaded, though we have not yet seen them. We are a people small in
number and alone. Let us walk softly on trails which are strange to our
feet."
Inwardly Travis sighed in relief. Buck, Jil-Lee ... for the moment their
sensible words appeared to swing the opinions of the party. If either of
them could be established as _haldzil_, or clan leader, they would all
be safer. He himself had no aspirations in that direction and dared not
push too hard. It had been his initial urging which had brought them as
volunteers into the project. Now he was doubly suspect, and especially
by those who thought as Deklay, he was considered too alien to their old
ways.
So far their protests had been fewer than he anticipated. Although
brothers and sisters had followed each other into the team after the
immemorial desire of Apaches to cling to family ties, they were not a
true clan with solidity of that to back them, but representatives of
half a dozen.
Basically, back on Terra, they had all been among the most progressive
of their people--progressive, that is, in the white man's sense of the
word. Travis had a fleeting recognition of his now oblique way of
thinking. He, too, had been marked by the Redax. They had all been
educated in the modern fashion and all possessed a spirit of adventure
which marked them over their fellows. They had volunteered for the team
and successfully passed the tests to weed out the temperamentally unfit
or fainthearted. But all that was before Redax....
Why had they been submitted to that? And why this flight? What had
pushed Dr. Ashe and Murdock and Colonel Kelgarries, time agents he knew
and trusted, into dispatching them without warning to Topaz? Something
had happened, something which had given Dr. Ruthven ascendancy over
those others and had started them on this wild trip.
Travis was conscious of a stir about the firelit circle. The men were
rising, moving back into the shadows, stretching out on the blankets
they had found among other stores on the ship. They had discovered
weapons there--knives, bows, quivers of arrows, all of which they had
been trained to use in the intensive schooling of the project and which
needed no more repair than they themselves could give. And the rations
they carried were field supplies, few of them. Tomorrow they must begin
hunting in earnest....
"Why has this thing been done to us?" Buck was beside Travis, those
quiet eyes sliding past him to seek the fire once more. "I do not think
you were told when the rest of us were not----"