Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 (5 page)

 
          
Darragh
forgot caution. He rose and fairly raced back in the same direction. He gained
the edge of the clearing in time to see the Cold People's littie ship, still
carrying his boat slung beneath it, descend to the top of its home structure
and dip out of sight.

 
          
Wretchedly
, softly Darragh voiced a
long and black curse. His dugout, with its sail and rudder, and its load of
food and equipment, was primitive and sketchy in a high degree; Darragh had
known that from the first. But it was all he had had in the way of transportation,
provision and base of operations.

 
          
He
had raced back through the trees without taking any thought whatever. Now, standing
still and miserable under the trees, he did some quick and serious thinking.

           
Those Cold Creatures undoubtedly had
noticed his boat by mere chance; but their discovery and seizure of it-leaving
him thus stranded and foodless in a strange, wild place far from home—meant
that they must divine his presence in the neighborhood. Very soon, therefore,
they would come out again to hunt for him and kill him out of hand, as they had
once killed almost a full generation of his fellow men.

 
          
Then
he must flee. With good luck, he might escape far into
Haiti
's howling inner jungles. But if he did . .
. what then? He would be alone, for he knew the Cold People well enough to
understand that they would have built their dome fortress on
Haiti
only after satisfying themselves that no
human colony had survived on the island or on any near shore. Even alive, he
would be cut off from home, cut off by a vast blue ocean that at that moment
seemed as impossible to cross as starry space. With only his sword and knife,
could he fell the proper sort of tree, shape and fire-hollow it, equip with
rudder and outriggers, weave himself a sail, gather provisions, find his way
back to the mouth of the Orinoco without chart or compass?

 
          
Darragh
very much doubted that he could. The Cold People would be after him. They would
quickly discover if he was working at a boat. Then they would close in to
finish him. Even if he hid himself, surely they would not scruple to blast away
the jungle that he used for shelter. And his effort to gather information to
give his fellows, back there at their fumbling war-plans in the South American
jungles, would have gone for nothing.

 
          
"I've
got to get that damned boat back again," he whispered fiercely to
himself;

 
          
Then
night fell, with the abruptness it affects in the tropics.

           
Darragh lingered at the edge of the
Cold People's clearing. A large and hungry mosquito sang near and prodded
Dar-ragh's cheek with its bill. He slapped at it—too late. It buzzed away,
then
returned to pink him again. Brushing at the pest with
his hands, he leaned close to a tree and studied the great domed shelter of his
enemies.

 
          
As
the gloom deepened, lights were flaring up inside that dome, behind the
patchwork of glass panes. The Cold People needed light in the darkness, Darragh
knew. Whatever their sensory system, they could not be properly and efficiendy
aware of objects save with light. Darragh, outside in the dark, probably would
be hard to observe. He would steal into the open, steal close to the dome.

 
          
Thus
he reasoned, but it took pluck as well as reason to force himself out into the
open. He waited for a full minute, screwing up new determination. Then,
crouching double, he stole forward across the bare, black earth.

 
          
Overhead
shone the host of stars, but no moon; Darragh was thankful for that. At last,
after what seemed breathless hours, he came close to the dome. He shifted his
direction to avoid a direct approach to any of the lower tier of windowlike
spaces. At last he came up against a comfortably opaque curve of rough stony
foundation, pressed closed against it, and sidled along until he could peer
past the edge of a transparent panel.

 
          
He
looked into a small square compartment with walls of speckless white, in which
half a dozen of the Cold People were ranged at a bench of dull metal, picking
daintily with their tentacles at a keyboardlike array of levers and buttons.
Some sort of intricate machinery, he righdy judged, that begat power—perhaps an
item of the complex refrigeration system that the shelter must demand in order
that the Cold People survive. As Darragh looked, a mosquito—might it have been
the same that had annoyed him at the edge of the clearing?—buzzed in and
assailed the tip of his big straight nose.

 
          
Again
he struck at his tormentor, and again it nimbly dodged away. Damn all
mosquitoes, thought Darragh, as he stooped low and slipped past beneath the
groundward edge of the transparent pane to reach another stretch of massive
stone wall beyond.

 
          
Here,
his hands groped along a considerable and apparently deliberate roughness. The
surface was incised with lines, one above the other, into which he could slide
his fingers. As high as Darragh could reach, those lines were scored into the
swell of the rocky wall, like rungs of a ladder.

 
          
Ladder,
he said to himself. That was what these lines were meant to be. The Cold People
could mount upward over such a deeply-cut design, with the creeping
vacuum-suction powers of their bases so like the locomotive organs of snails.
This, then, would lead to the top. He determined to climb.

 
          
He
slipped off his sandals and thrust them into his belt. He paused and listened.
Then he mounted the curve of the dome, fingers and toes probing for the heavily
notched lines. It was not too difficult a feat for an active climber who wanted
badly to reach the top, and at that moment Darragh wanted nothing else in the
world so badly. His boat had gone inside the dome, up there at the top. If he
failed to find that boat of his again, to drag it out somehow and away and at
last to the shore of the sea, the Cold People were fairly certain to get him
anyway. He might as well be hanged—or rayed—for a sheep as for a lamb.

 
          
He
wriggled sidewise around two more glasslike panels in the surface of the dome,
also around several nozzlelike projections that might have been ray-throwing
devices. He wanted to look down into these
latter
but
withstood the temptation. There was the mosquito again, relishfully prodding
him in the middle of his bare back.

 
          
With
a furious shudder, Darragh fairly bucked the little insect away. "Get out
of here!" he whispered in the night. "Go bite a Cold Creature if
you're hungry!"

 
          
Then
he clung trembling to the notched lines, for his saber-sheath had scraped
loudly on the stone. He felt that all the Cold People in the universe must have
heard it, that a whole throng of them would burst from inside to surround him.
But could they hear? Were they sensitive in any way to sound waves? He had seen
them gesturing to each other. Perhaps he still was lucky. He unfastened the
saber from his belt and slung it behind his shoulder lest it betray him.

 
          
He
had mounted a considerable distance by now, and the curve of the dome was not
so
steep as it had been at first. He made faster progress,
and was glad that the mosquito was not plaguing him any more. For a moment he
wished he could be a mosquito, unnoticeably small, able to dart here and there
and spy out the enemy's secrets. Up he scrambled toward the top of the dome.
Ahead of him he saw darkness, more black than the night. It was some sort of an
opening. He crept cautiously to the edge of it.

 
          
Here
a great slice of the dome was slid away into some sort of recess, leaving a gap
like that made by the cutting away of a plug in the rind of a plump melon.
Darragh moved forward, and found
himself
crouching at
the brink of a sizable quadrangular pit, a good forty feet long by half as
wide. At the bottom was a bare glimmer of pale light, oozing up through a floor
that appeared to be made of a substance like heavily clouded glass. Upon this
floor rested a small aircraft of the Cold People. Darragh leaned farther into
the pit to peer.
Yes,
and his boat rested there beside
the flying ship, still wound in the lashings of cord.

 
          
He
drew a deep, silent breath of triumphant joy.
Pausing there
on the hp of the opening, he once nfere put two and two together.

 
          
This
entrance hole to the fortress had not been closed against the inhospitable heat
of a tropic night. Therefore, the ship down yonder on the translucent floor
would shortly take to the air again. And still fastened to the ship was his
dugout canoe. It was going along on the voyage. Where?

 
          
The
answer to that was evident. The boat would be flown to some greater and more
central community of the Cold People, for exhibition to creatures in high
authority—perhaps as evidence that human beings still dared to spy upon their
terrible vanquishers. If Darragh was to save his belongings, he must move
prompdy.

 
          
He
examined the walls of the orifice. They were sloping, and no more than twenty
feet in height. He saw, too, that they were scored all the way around with the
ladder slits. Quickly he flung his feet over the edge, groped with his toes for
purchase, and began to climb down.

           
Quickly he reached the lighted level
bottom, and stood still there for a moment. His bare feet felt an icy chill at
their soles, apparendy filtered from the frozen interior of the dome shelter. Then
he moved noiselessly across to the boat where it lay in its netting beside the
aircraft.

 
          
He
studied the criss-cross of lines. They were tough and pliable, and of a rubbery
texture to his exploring fingers. He could not guess the substance, but when he
drew his knife and tried one of the lines he found that it could be cut. He
paused again, to take council with himself.

 
          
Suppose
he cut the various binding ropes almost through. Then, when the aircraft rose
again, it would carry the dugout only a little distance before the nearly
severed strands parted and dropped their burden. Falling, the dugout might with
luck strike into the jungle, be cushioned by the twigs and branches of the
trees, and so slide through unharmed, to the ground beneath. It was possible
that such a falling of the boat might occur in the night without the knowledge
of the Cold Creatures piloting the craft. He, Darragh, would be lurking in the
jungle to run and reclaim his little vessel, drag it somehow to the water, get
in, raise his sail and voyage away from Haiti with the knowledge his spying had
gathered. All these things would need luck to achieve; but luck had been with
Darragh from the very beginning of his expedition. And, despite a most
practical and logical pattern of mind, Darragh could never persuade himself to
stop believing in luck.

 
          
He
took another strand of the rope in his hand and set the edge of the knife to
it, but paused again. He could see that the dugout had been emptied of all his
stores. Even the mast had been stripped of the palm-fiber
sails,
the slate hearth had been pried from its fastenings and taken away. He needed
those things, wherever they had been carried.

 
          
He
glanced here and there. After a moment, he studied the aircraft of the Cold
People as it lay next to the boat. It was a metal cigar in which a hatchway
gaped. He rose from beside the dugout, tiptoed gingerly to the aircraft and
stared in through the open hatch.

           
He saw something bundled inside, in
a dim reddish light like the light from an ember of his charcoal cooking-fire.
Darragh thought he recognized the string-woven fruit bag in which he carried
guavas and plums harvested on various islands of the
Caribbean
. He moved boldly through the hatch into
that murkily lighted interior and began to fumble for his belongings.

 
          
With
his hand on the fruit bag, he suddenly snapped erect.
Outside
the craft had sounded a sliding rasp of metal.
Somewhere a panel was
opening.

           
Listening with a sudden throb of his
heart, Darragh heard movement, a creaky flow of movement like the dragging of
something heavy and wet.

 
          
Cold
People were coming out of their shelter into the open port-chamber. They were
coming to the ship.