Hunt the Space-Witch! (24 page)

The air, surprisingly, remained warm, though not oppressively so; the wind picked up as they climbed. The mountain was utterly bare of life; the gentle animals of the Valley ventured no higher than the timberline, and that was far below. The party of nine scrambled up over rock falls and past sheets of stone.

Thornhill felt himself tiring, but he knew the Valley's strange regenerative force was at work, carrying off the fatigue poisons as soon as they built up in his muscles, easing him, giving him the strength to go on. Hour after hour they forced their way up the mountainside.

Occasionally he would glance back to see La Floquet's pale, fear-tautened face. The little man was terrified of the height, but he was driving gamely on. The aliens straggled behind; Vellers marched mechanically, saying little, obviously tolerant of the weaker mortals to whose pace he was compelled to adjust his own.

As for Marga, she uttered no complaint. That pleased Thornhill more than anything.

They were a good thousand feet from the summit when Thornhill called a halt.

He glanced back at them—at the oddly unweary, unlined faces.
How we've grown young!
he thought suddenly.
McKay looks like a man in his late forties; I must seem like a boy. And we're all fresh as daisies, as if this were just a jolly hike
.

“We're near the top,” he said. “Let's finish off whatever of the manna we've got. The downhill part of this won't be so bad.”

He looked up. The mountain tapered to a fine crest, and through there a pass leading down to the other side was visible. “La Floquet, you've got the best eyes of any of us. You see any sign of a barrier up ahead?”

The little man squinted and shook his head. “All's clear so far as I can see. We go up, then down, and we're home free.”

Thornhill nodded. “The last thousand feet, then. Let's go!”

The wind was whipping hard against them as they pushed on through the dense snow that cloaked the mountain's highest point. Up here some of the charm of the Valley seemed to be gone, as if the cold winds barreling in from the outlands beyond the crest could in some way negate the gentle warmth they experienced in the Valley. Both suns were high in the sky, the red and the blue, the blue visible as a hard blotch of radiance penetrating the soft, diffuse rays of the red.

Thornhill was tiring rapidly, but the crest was in sight. Just a few more feet and they'd stand on it—

Just up over this overhang—

The summit itself was a small plateau, perhaps a hundred feet long. Thornhill was the first to pull himself up over the rock projection and stand on the peak; he reached back, helped Marga up, and within minutes the other seven had joined them.

The Valley was a distant spot of green far below; the air was clear and clean, and from here they could plainly see the winding river heading down valley to the yellow-green radiance of the barrier.

Thornhill turned. “Look down there,” he said in a quiet voice.

“It's a world of deserts!” La Floquet exclaimed.

The view from the summit revealed much of the land beyond the Valley, and it seemed the Valley was but an oasis in the midst of utter desertion. For mile after gray mile, barren land stretched before them, an endless plain of rock and sand rolling on drearily to the farthest horizon.

Beyond, this. Behind, the Valley.

Thornhill looked around. “We've reached the top. You see what's ahead. Do we go on?”

“Do we have any choice?” McKay asked. “We're practically out of the Watcher's hands now. Down there perhaps we have freedom. Behind us—”

“We go on,” La Floquet said firmly.

“Down the back slope, then,” said Thornhill. “It won't be easy. There's the path over there. Suppose we—”

The sudden chill he felt was not altogether due to the whistling wind. The sky suddenly darkened; a cloak of night settled around them.

Of course
, Thornhill thought dully.
I should have foreseen this
.

“The Watcher's coming!” Lona Hardin screamed as the darkness, obscuring both the bleakness ahead and the Valley behind, closed around them.

Thornhill thought,
It was part of the game. To let us climb the mountain, to watch us squirm and struggle, and then to hurl us back into the Valley at the last moment as we stand on the border
.

Wings of night nestled around them. He felt the coldness that signified the alien presence, and the soft voice said,
Would you leave, my pets? Don't I give you the best of care? Why this ingratitude?

“Let's keep going,” Thornhill muttered. “Maybe it can't stop us. Maybe we can escape it yet.”

“Which way do we go?” Marga asked. “I can't see anything. Suppose we go over the edge?”

Come
, crooned the Watcher,
come back to the Valley. You have played your little game. I have enjoyed your struggles, and I'm proud of the battle you fought. But the time has come to return to the warmth and the love you may find in the Valley below
—

“Thornhill!” cried La Floquet suddenly, hoarsely. “I have it! Come help me!”

The Watcher's voice died away abruptly; the black cloud swirled wildly. Thornhill whirled, peering through the darkness for some sign of La Floquet—

And found the little man on the ground, wrestling with—something. In the darkness, it was hard to tell—

“It's the Watcher!” La Floquet grunted. He rolled over, and Thornhill saw a small snakelike being writhing under La Floquet's grip, a bright-scaled serpent the size of a monkey.

“Here in the middle of the cloud—
here's
the creature that held us here!” La Floquet cried. Suddenly, before Thornhill could move, the Aldebaranian came bounding forward, thrusting beyond Thornhill and Marga, and flung himself down on the strugglers. Thornhill heard a guttural bellow; the darkness closed in on the trio, and it was impossible to see what was happening.

He heard La Floquet's cry: “Get … this devil … off me! He's helping the Watcher!”

Thornhill moved forward. He reached into the struggling mass, felt the blubbery flesh of the Aldebaranian, and dug his fingers in hard. He wrenched; the Aldebaranian came away. Hooked claws raked Thornhill's face. He cursed; you could never tell what an Aldebaranian was likely to do at any time. Perhaps the creature had been in league with the Watcher all along.

He dodged a blow, landed a solid one in the alien's plump belly, and crashed his other fist upward into the creature's jaw. The Aldebaranian rocked backward. Vellers appeared abruptly from nowhere and seized the being.

“No!” Thornhill yelled, seeing what Vellers intended. But it was too late. The giant held the Aldebaranian contemptuously dangling in the air, then swung him upward and outward. A high ear-piercing shriek resounded. Thornhill shuddered. It takes a long time to fall twenty thousand feet.

He glanced back now at La Floquet and saw the small man struggling to stand up, arms still entwined about the serpentlike being. Thornhill saw a metalmesh helmet on the alien's head. The means by which they'd been controlled, perhaps.

La Floquet took three staggering steps. “Get the helmet off him!” he cried thickly. “I've seen these before. They are out of the Andromeda sector … telepaths, teleports … deadly creatures. The helmet's his focus point.”

Thornhill grasped for it as the pair careened by; he missed, catching instead a glimpse of the Watcher's devilish, hate-filled eyes. The Watcher had fallen into the hands of his own pets—and was not enjoying it.

“I can't see you!” Thornhill shouted. “I can't get the helmet!”

“If he gets free, we're finished,” came La Floquet's voice. “He's using all his energy to fight me off … but all he needs to do is turn on the subsonics—”

The darkness cleared again. Thornhill gasped. La Floquet, still clutching the alien, was tottering on the edge of the mountain peak, groping for the helmet in vain. One of the little man's feet was virtually standing on air. He staggered wildly. Thornhill rushed toward them, grasped the icy metal of the helmet, and ripped it away.

In that moment both La Floquet and the Watcher vanished from sight. Thornhill brought himself up short and peered downward, hearing nothing, seeing nothing—

There was just one scream … not from La Floquet's throat but from the alien's. Then all was silent. Thornhill glanced at the helmet in his hands, thinking of La Floquet, and in a sudden impulsive gesture hurled the little metal headpiece into the abyss after them.

He turned, catching one last glimpse of Marga, Vellers, McKay, Lona Hardin, the Regulan, and the Spican. Then, before he could speak, mountain peak and darkness and indeed the entire world shimmered and heaved dizzyingly about them, and he could see nothing and no one.

He was in the main passenger cabin of the Federation Spaceliner
Royal Mother Helene
bound for Vengamon out of Jurinalle. He was lying back in the comfortable pressurized cabin, the gray nothingness of hyperspace outside forming a sharp contrast to the radiant walls of the cabin, which glowed in soft yellow luminescence.

Thornhill opened his eyes slowly. He glanced at his watch:
12:13, 7 July 2671
. He had dozed off about 11:40 after a good lunch. They were due in at Port Vengamon later that day, and he would have to tend to mine business immediately. There was no telling how badly they had fouled things up in the time he had been vacationing on Jurinalle.

He blinked. Of a sudden, strange images flashed into his eyes—a valley somewhere on a barren, desolate planet beyond the edge of the galaxy. A mountain peak, and a strange alien being, and a brave little man falling to the death he dreaded, and a girl—

It couldn't have been a dream
, he told himself.
No
.

Not a dream. It was just that the Watcher yanked us out of space-time for his little experiment, and when I destroyed the helmet, we re-entered the continuum at the instant we had left it
.

A cold sweat burst out suddenly all over his body.
That means
, he thought,
that La Floquet's not dead. And Marga
—
Marga
—

Thornhill sprang from his gravity couch, ignoring the sign that urged him to PLEASE REMAIN IN YOUR COUCH WHILE SHIP IS UNDERGOING SPIN, and rushed down the aisle toward the steward. He gripped the man by the shoulder, spun him around.

“Yes, Mr. Thornhill? Is anything wrong? You could have signaled me, and—”

“Never mind that. I want to make a subradio call to Bellatrix VII.”

“We'll be landing on Vengamon in a couple of hours, sir. Is it so urgent?”

“Yes.”

The steward shrugged. “You know, of course, that shipboard subradio calls may take some time to put through, and that they're terribly expensive—”

“Damn the expense, man! Will you put through my call or won't you?”

“Of course, Mr. Thornhill. To whom?”

He paused and said carefully, “To Miss Marga Fallis, in some observatory on Bellatrix VII.” He peeled a bill from his wallet and added, “Here. There'll be another one for you if the call's put through in the next half an hour. I'll wait.”

The summons finally came. “Mr. Thornhill, your call's ready. Would you come to Communications Deck, please?”

They showed him to a small, dimly lit cubicle. There could be no vision on an interstellar subradio call, of course, just voice transmission. But that would be enough. “Go ahead, Bellatrix-
Helene
. The call is ready,” an operator said.

Thornhill wet his lips. “Marga? This is Sam—Sam Thornhill!”

“Oh!” He could picture her face now. “It—it wasn't a dream, then. I was so afraid it was!”

“When I threw the helmet off the mountain, the Watcher's hold was broken. Did you return to the exact moment you had left?”

“Yes,” she said. “Back in the observatory, with my camera plates and everything. And there was a call for me, and at first I was angry and wouldn't answer it the way I always won't answer, and then I thought a minute and had a wild idea and changed my mind—and I'm glad I did, darling!”

“It seems almost like a dream, doesn't it? The Valley, I mean. And La Floquet, and all the others. But it wasn't any dream,” Thornhill said. “We were really there. And I meant the things I said to you.”

The operator's voice cut in sharply:
“Standard call time has elapsed, sir. There will be an additional charge often credits for each further fifteen-second period of your conversation.
”

“That's quite all right, Operator,” Thornhill said. “Just give me the bill at the end. Marga, are you still there?”

“Of course, darling.”

“When can I see you?”

“I'll come to Vengamon tomorrow. It'll take a day or so to wind things up here at the observatory. Is there an observatory on Vengamon?”

“I'll build you one,” Thornhill promised. “And perhaps for our honeymoon we can go looking for the Valley.”

“I don't think we'll ever find it,” she said. “But we'd better hang up now. Otherwise you'll become a pauper talking to me.”

He stared at the dead phone a long moment after they broke contact, thinking of what Marga looked like, and La Floquet, and all the others. Above all, Marga.

It wasn't a dream
, he told himself. He thought of the shadow-haunted Valley where night never fell and men grew younger, and of a tall girl with dark flashing eyes who waited for him now half a galaxy away.

With quivering fingers he undid the sleeve of his tunic and looked down at the long, livid scar that ran almost the length of his right arm, almost to the wrist. Somewhere in the universe now was a little man named La Floquet who had inflicted that wound and died and returned to his point of departure, who now was probably wondering if it had all ever happened. Thornhill smiled, forgiving La Floquet for the ragged scar inscribed on his arm, and headed up the companionway to the passenger cabin, impatient now to see Vengamon once more.