Star Hunter (10 page)

"That dead man—he's been here a long time. And when did the Largo
Drift disappear?"

"Five—six years ago. But I can't give you any answers. I have none."

It began as a low hum, hardly to be distinguished from the distant
howling of the wind. Then it slid up scale until the thin wail became
an ululating scream torturing the ears, dragging out of hiding those
fears of a man confronting the unknown in the dark.

Hume tugged at Vye, drew the other by force back into the brush.
Scratched, laced raw by the whip of branches, they stood in a small
hollow with the drift of leaves high about their ankles. And the
Hunter pulled into place the portions of growth they had dislodged in
their passage into the thicket's heart. Through gaps they could see
the opening where lay the body of the water-cat.

The wail was cut off short, that cessation in itself a warning. Vye's
body, touching earth with knee and hand as he crouched, picked up a
vibration. Whatever came towards them walked heavily.

Did the smell of death draw it now? Or had it trailed them from the
closed gate? Hume's breath hissed lightly between his teeth. He was
sighting the ray tube through a leaf gap.

A snuffling, heavier than a man's panting. A vast blot, which was
neither clearly paw nor hand, swept aside leaves and branches on the
other side of the small clearing, tearing them casually from the
shrubs.

What shuffled into the open might be a cousin of the blue beasts. But
where they had given only an impression of brutal menace, this was
savagery incarnate. Taller than Hume, but hunched forward in its
neckless outline, the thing was a monster. And over the round of the
lower jaw, tusks protruded in ugly promise.

Being carnivorous and hungry, it scooped up the body of the water-cat
and fed without any prolonged ceremony. Vye, remembering the crushed
spine of the human skeleton, was sickened.

Done, it reared on hind feet once again, the pear-shaped head swung in
their direction. Vye was half certain he had seen that tube-nose
expand to test the air and scent them.

Hume pressed the button of the ray tube. That soundless spear of death
struck in midsection of that barrel body. The thing howled, threw
itself in a mad forward rush at their bush. Hume snapped a second
blast at the head, and the fuzz covering it blackened.

Missing them by a precious foot, the creature crashed straight on
through the thicket, coming to its knees, writhing in a rising chorus
of howls. The men broke out of cover, raced into the open where they
took refuge behind a chimney of rock half detached from the parent
cliff. Down the slope the bushes were still wildly agitated.

"What was that?" Vye got out between sobbing breaths.

"Maybe a guardian, or a patrol stationed to dispose of any catch.
Probably not alone, either." Hume fingered his ray tube. "And I am
down to one full charge—just one."

Vye turned the knife he held around in his fingers, tried to imagine
how one could face up to one of those tusked monsters with only this
for a weapon. But if that thing had companions, none were coming in
answer to its dying wails. And after it had been quiet for a while
Hume motioned them out of hiding.

"From now on we'll keep to the open, better see trouble like that
before it arrives. And I want to find a place to hole up for the
night."

They trailed along the steep upper slope and in time found a place
where a now dried stream had once formed a falls. The empty
watercourse provided an overhang, not quite a cave, but shelter.
Gathering brush and stones, they made a barricade and settled behind
it to eat sparingly of their rations.

"Water—a whole lake of it down there. The worst of it is that a water
supply in a dry country is just where hunters congregate. That lake's
entirely walled in by woodland and provides cover for a thousand
ambushes."

"We might find a way out before our water bulbs fail," Vye offered.

Hume did not answer directly. "A man can live for quite a while on
very thin rations, and we have tablets from the flitter emergency
supplies. But he can't live long without water. We have two bulbs.
With stretching that is enough for two days—maybe three."

"We ought to get completely around the cliffs in another day."

"And if we do find a way out, which I doubt, we're still going to need
water for the trek out. It's right down there waiting until our need
is greater than either our fear or our cunning."

Vye moved impatiently, his blanket-clad shoulders scraping the rock at
their backs. "You don't think we have a chance!"

"We aren't dead. And as long as a man is breathing, and on his feet,
with all his wits in his skull, he always has a chance. I've blasted
off-world with odds stacked high on the other side of the board." He
flexed that plasta-flesh hand which was so nearly human and yet not by
the fraction which had changed the course of his life. "I've lived on
the edge of the big blackout for a long time now—after a while you
can get used to anything."

"One thing I would like—to get at the one who set this trap,"
commented Vye.

Hume laughed with dry humor. "After me, boy, after me. But I think we
might have to wait a long time for that meeting."

Vye crawled weakly from the area of a rock outcrop. The sun, reflected
from the cliff side, was a lash of fire across his emaciated body. His
swollen tongue moved a pebble back and forth in his dry mouth. He
stared dimly down the slope to that beckoning platter of water open
under the sun, rimmed with the deadly woodland.

What had happened? They had gone to sleep that first night under the
ledge of the dried waterfall. And all of the next day was only a haze
to him now. They must have moved on, though he could remember nothing,
save Hume's odd behavior—dull-eyed silence while stumbling on as a
brainless servio-robot, incoherent speech wherein all the words came
fast, running together unintelligibly. And for himself—patches of
blackout.

At some time they had come to the cave and Hume had collapsed, not
rousing in answer to any of Vye's struggles to awaken him. How long
they had been there Vye could not tell now. He had the fear of being
left alone in this place. With water perhaps Hume could be returned to
consciousness, but that was all gone.

Vye believed he could scent the lake, that every breeze up slope
brought its compelling enticement. Just in case Hume might awake to a
state of semi-consciousness and wander off, Vye tethered him with
blanket bonds.

Vye fingered Hume's knife, which had been painstakingly lashed to a
trimmed shaft of wood. Since he had emerged from that clouding of mind
which still gripped the Hunter, he had done what he could to prepare
for another attack from any roving beast. And he also had Hume's ray
tube—its single charge to be used only in dire need.

Water! His cracked lips moved, ejected the pebble. Their four empty
water bulbs were in the front of his blanket tunic, pressing against
his ribs. It was now—or die, because soon he would be too weak to
make the attempt at all. He darted for the first stand of bush
downhill.

As the brooding silence of the valley continued, he reached the edge
of the wood unhindered, intent on his mission with a concentration
which shut out everything save his need and the manner of satisfying
it.

He squatted in the bush, eyeing the length of woodland ahead. Then he
tried the only action he had been able to think out. That beast Hume
had killed had been too heavy to swing up in trees. But Vye's own
weight now did not prohibit that form of travel.

With spear and ray tube firmly attached to him, Vye climbed into the
first tree. A slim chance—but his only defense against a possible
ambush. A wild outward swing brought him, heart-thudding, to the next
set of limbs. Then he had a piece of luck, a looped vine tied together
a whole group of branches from one treetop to the next.

Hand grips, balance, sometimes a walk along a branch—he threaded
towards the lake. Then he came to a gap. With hands laced into
tendrils, Vye hunched to look down on a beaten ribbon of gray earth—a
trail well used by the evidence of its pounded surface.

That area had to be crossed on foot, but his passage through the brush
below would leave traces. Only—there was no other way. Vye checked
the lashings of his weapons again before leaping. Almost in the same
instant his sandals hit the packed earth he was running. His palms
skinned raw on rough bark as he somehow scrambled aloft once more.

No more vines, but broad limbs shooting well out. He dropped from one
to another-stopped for breath—listened.

The dark gloom of the wood was broken by sunlight. He was at the final
ring of trees. To get to the water he must descend again. A dead trunk
extended over the water. If he could run out on that and lower the
bulb, it could work.

Eerie silence. No flying things, no tree dwelling reptiles or animals,
no disturbance of any water creature on the unruffled surface of the
lake. Yet the sensation of life, inimical life, lurking in the depths
of the wood, under the water, bore in upon him.

Vye made the light leap to the bole of the dead tree, balanced out on
it over the water, moving slowly as the trunk settled a little under
his weight. He hunkered down, brought out the first bulb tied fast to
a blanket string.

The water of the river had been brown, opaque. But here the liquid was
not so cloudy. He could see snags of dead branches below its surface.

And something else!

Down in those turgid depths he made out a straight ridge running with
a trueness of line which could not be nature's unassisted product.
That ridge joined another in a squared corner. He leaned over,
strained his eyes to follow through the murk the farther extent of
those two ridges. Looked along both pointed protuberances aimed at the
surfaces of the lake, like fangs in an open jaw. Down there was
something—something artificially fashioned which might be the answer
to all their questions. But to venture into the lake himself—he could
not do it! If he could bring the Out-Hunter to his senses the other
might find the solution to this puzzle.

Vye filled his bulbs, working speedily, but still studying what he
could see of the strange erection under the lake. He thought it was
curiously free of silt, and its color, as far as he could distinguish,
allowing for the dark hue of the water, was light gray—perhaps even
white. He lowered his last bulb.

Down in the bleached forest of dead branches, well to one side of the
mysterious walls, there was movement, a slow rolling of a shadow so
hidden by a stirring of bottom mud that Vye could not make out its
true form. But it was rising to the bulb.

Vye hated to lose a single precious drop. Once he might have the luck
to make this journey unmolested, a second time the odds could be too
high.

A flash—the slowly rising shadow was transformed into a whizzing
spear of attack. Vye snapped the bulb out of the water just as a
nightmarish, armored head arose on a whiplash of coiled, scaled neck,
and a blunt nose thudded against the tree trunk with a hollow boom.
Vye clung to his perch as the thing flopped back into deeper water
from a froth of beaten foam, leaving a patch of odorous scum and slime
to bracelet the waterlogged wood.

He ran for the shelter of the trees to get away. This time there was
no rear, no thump of feet in warning. Out of the ground itself, or so
it seemed to Vye's startled terror, reared one of the tusked beasts.
To reach his tree and its dubious safety he had to wind past that
chimera. And the creature waited with a semblance of ease for him to
come to it.

Vye brought around his spear. The length of the haft might afford him
a fighting chance if he could send the point home in some vulnerable
spot. Yet he knew that the beasts were hard to kill.

The mouth opened in a wide grin of menace. Vye noted a telltale
tightening of shoulder muscles. It was going to rush for him now with
those clawed forepaws out to rip.

To wait was to court disaster. Vye shouted, his battle cry piercing
the silence of the lake and wood. He sprang, aiming the spear point at
the beast's protuberant belly, and then swerved to the side as the
knife bit home, raking his weapon to open a gaping wound.

The spear was jerked from Vye's hold as both those taloned paws closed
on it. Then the creature pulled it free, snapped the haft in two. Vye
fired a short blast from the ray tube before it could turn on him, saw
fur-fuzz afire, as he ran for the tree.

Beneath its branches he looked back. The beast was pawing at the
burning fur on its head, and he had perhaps a second or two. He jumped
and his fingers caught on the low hanging branch, then he made a
superhuman effort, was up out of the path of the thing which rushed
blindly for the tree, shrieking in frenzied complaint.

The huge body crashed against the trunk with force which nearly shook
Vye from his hold. As the giant forepaws belabored the wood, strove to
lift the body from the ground, Vye worked his way out on another
branch. In the end it was the shaking of that limb under him which
aided his swing to the next tree. And from there he traveled
recklessly, intent only on getting out of the woods as fast as he
could.

By the noise the beast was still assaulting the tree, and Vye marveled
at its vitality, for the belly wound would long ago have killed any
creature he knew. Whether it could trace his flight aloft, or whether
its howls would bring more of its kind, he could not guess, but every
second he could gain was all important now.

At the gap over the trail he hesitated. That path ran in the direction
of the open, and to go on foot meant the possibility of greater speed.
Vye slipped from the bough, hit the ground, and ran. His ragged
lungsful of air came in great gasps and he doubted if he could take
the exertion of more tree travel now. He raced down the path.