Time Traders (42 page)

Travis steadied the barrel of his weapon across his forearm and nicked a darting weasel-head with a sniper's expert aim. The thing did not even cry out, but reared and somersaulted backward down the ramp as the men jumped apart to give it room.

One of the creatures at the gap caught sight of the two below and pulled back, allowing its fellow through the barrier while it whirled to spring at Ross. His blast beam raked across its shoulders and it screamed hideously, collapsed and scratched frantically with its hind feet to gain footing. Ross fired again and the animal was still. But the rage of the fight beyond the barrier continued.

"Ashe!" Ross shouted. And Travis, catching his breath, echoed that call. To go through the gap in the barrier before them and perhaps be met by a blast from a friend was certainly not to be desired.

"Hullloooo!" The cry was weirdly echoed. It might be coming from ahead of them or above. But both of them had heard it. They pushed past the barrier into a wide hallway.

There was light here, coming from the white flames of smoking brands that lay on the floor at the far end as if tossed from a higher level. One of the red beasts lay dead. The men hurdled the body. Another, dragging useless hindquarters, crept with deadly purpose toward them and Travis picked it off. But the beam in his weapon died before he lifted finger from firing button. Another try proved his fears correct—the charge in the weapon was exhausted.

Something scrambled on the second ramp at the far end of the hall. Ross stood at the foot, his weapon up. Travis stooped to scoop up one of the torches. He whirled the brand in the air, bringing the smoldering end to life.

Ross aimed at a charging weasel-head, missed, flung himself to the side of the ramp and down to the floor to escape the rush. But the beast plunged insanely after him. Travis whirled the torch a second time, swinging its flaming end down against the snaky, darting head of the attacker.

One of those powerful forepaws aimed a vicious swipe that tore the torch from the Apache's hold. But Ross was up to his knees again, weapon ready. And the red animal died. Travis retreated, a little unsteadily, to pick up a second torch.

"Hullloooo!" Again that shout from overhead. Ross answered it.

"Ashe! Down here . . ."

There were no more squalls from the ramp. But Travis wondered if more of the beasts lay in wait. With a useless weapon he had no desire to climb into the unknown. A flint knife was nothing against the weasel-heads.

They waited, listening, at the foot of the ramp. But when there came no other attack, Ross pattered ahead and Travis followed, nursing his new torch. His hand shot out, closed on Ross's arm, as he caught up with the other. Something was waiting for them up there.

Travis thrust the torch into that pocket of gloom at the head of the ramp, saw Ross's weapon at ready—

"Come on in!" The words were ordinary enough, but Ashe's voice sounded a little breathless and in higher pitch than usual. But it
was
Ashe, unharmed and seeming his usual self, who stepped into the pool of light and waited for them to join him. Only he was not alone. Half-seen shadows moved behind him. Ross did not holster his weapon and Travis' hand rested on his knife hilt.

"You all right, chief?"

Ashe laughed in answer to Ross's demand. "Now that the space patrol has landed, yes. You boys introduced the right play at the proper moment. Come on and meet the gang."

The torch sputtered as those shadows moved in closer to Ashe. Then a new light blazed up well above floor level and Travis blinked at the company that fire revealed.

Ashe was six feet tall, giving Travis himself an inch or so. But in this company he towered, for the tallest of his companions came only a little above his shoulder.

"They have wings!"

Yes, with a sudden twitch a flap of wing—not feathered, but ribbed skin—had unfurled, pointing up above its owner's shoulder. Where had he seen a wing such as that? On the statue from the domed building!

However, the faces now all turned toward the humans were not as grotesque as the one of the image. The ears were not so large, the features were more humanoid, though the noses remained vertical slits. Either the statue had been a caricature, or it represented a far more primitive type.

The natives hung back, and from their narrow, pointed jaws came a low murmur, rising and falling, which Travis could not separate into distinct sounds or words.

"Local inhabitants?" Ross still held his weapon. "They the ones who kidnapped you, chief?"

"In a manner of speaking. I take it you accounted for the wild life below?"

"All we saw," Travis returned, still watching the winged people, for they were people, of that he was sure.

"Then we can get out of here." Ashe turned to the waiting shadows and holstered his own weapon with an emphatic slam. Two of the winged men beckoned and the rest stood back, allowing Ashe, Ross and Travis to pass them, to climb a third ramp. At the top the humans saw open sunlight, and came out into a wide hall with archways, not doors, down its length.

Travis' nostrils expanded as he caught a mixture of scents, some pleasant, some otherwise. There was activity here; there were indications of a permanent settlement. The archways were hung with green nets into which flowers had been tucked here and there. Many were like the one he had found on his first day of exploration. Hollowed logs made into troughs stood about the walls. From these grew a mixture of plants, all reaching toward the sun which came through windows, forming a curtain of green from floor to ceiling.

The people were no longer just shadows. And in this brighter light their humanoid resemblance was marked. The furled wings covering their backs might have been folded cloaks. They wore no clothing save ornaments of belt, collar or armlets. Their weapons, which all within sight carried, were small spears—little enough protection against the red killers who had assailed them from below.

They watched the humans closely, keeping up their murmur of speech, but making no threatening gestures. And since it was impossible for the humans to read any expression on their faces, Travis did not know whether the three from the ship were considered prisoners, allies, or merely strange objects of general interest.

"Here . . ." Ashe stopped before one of the curtained archways and pursed his lips to give a gentle hoot.

The curtain parted and he went in, signaling the other two to follow him.

Under their feet was thick matting plaited from vines and leaves. And there were low partitions of latticework over which living plants climbed to form dividing walls, cutting one large room into a series of smaller cubicles around a central space fronting the archway.

"Pay attention to nothing around the wall," Ashe said quickly. "Keep your eyes on the one at the table."

One of the winged men squatted by a table raised some two feet from the carpeted floor. Those they had seen in the outer hallway had had dusky lavender skins, close in shade to the stone from which the image had been carved. But this one was much darker, almost a deep purple. And the stiffness of his constrained movements suggested advanced age.

But when the native looked up to meet Ashe's gaze in welcome, Travis knew that this was not only a man, but a great man among his kind. It was there in his eyes, in the pride of his carriage, and in the slow deliberation with which he regarded the three humans.

"What a junkyard!" Ross stared about him in sheer stupefaction.

"Treasure house!" his chief corrected him almost sharply.

Travis simply stood between them and gazed. Perhaps both descriptions could apply in part.

"They kidnapped you to sort
this
out for them?" Ross demanded, as if he couldn't believe a word of that conclusion.

"That's the general idea," Ashe admitted. "Question is—where do we start, what do we have, and how can we get across to them the meaning of anything we do find—if we can make it out ourselves?"

"How long have they been collecting all this?" Travis wondered. There were paths through those piles of moldering materials, so one
could
investigate the contents of the heaps. But the general confusion of the mass was intimidating.

Ashe shrugged. "When your total method of communication consists of gestures, a lot of ragged guessing, and pointing, how is anyone to know anything?"

"But why you? I mean—how are you supposed to know what makes all this tick, or thump, or otherwise run?" Ross asked again.

"We came in the ship. They may have some hazy tradition—legends—that the ship people knew everything."

"The Fair Gods," Travis threw in.

"Only we are not Cortez and his men," Ashe returned with a snap.

"They aren't the baldies, or that furry-faced operator I saw on the screen of the ship the Russians had. So where do they fit in?"

"Judging by that statue, their ancestors were known to the builders of the dome," Ashe replied. "But I think they are primitive, not decadent."

Travis' imagination made a sudden, swift leap.

"Pets?"

Both of the others looked at him. Ashe drew a deep breath.

"You might just be right!" The way he spaced his words gave them an impressive emphasis. "Give our world enough time and the right combination of conditions and see what could happen to our dogs or our cats."

"Are we prisoners?" Ross came back to the main point.

"Not now. Our handling of the weasels took care of that. A common enemy is an excellent argument for mutual peace. And we have a common purpose here, too. If we're going to find out anything which will help Renfry, it will be in just such a collection as this."

"It'd take a year just to shuffle through the top layer in this mess," Ross gave a gloomy opinion.

"We know what we are looking for—we have examples on the ship. Anything we can uncover in the process which might help our winged friends, we turn over to them. And who knows what we may find?"

Ashe was right about the attitude of the winged people. The chief or leader, who had first received them in the vine-walled room and brought them in turn into the huge chamber containing the loot gathered by his tribe, showed no unwillingness to let them return to the ship. But their path back, followed on ground and not by the aerial ways of the natives, was supervised by two of the blue flyers that had some link with the winged people—perhaps a relationship not unlike man and hound.

During his period of captivity Ashe had learned that the red weasels were the principal local menace and that the winged folk had tried to wall off the lower sections of their dwelling towers to baffle the hunters. These creatures had worked with sly cunning—which suggested a measure of intelligence on their part also—on the ramp barrier. But only a determined raid made by a whole pack had finally broken through that laboriously constructed wall to get at the living quarters of the flying people. Ashe's readiness to use his weapon on the behalf of his captors, plus the surprise attack by Ross and Travis had completely destroyed the marauding pack. These two things had also made a favorable impression upon the intended victims. As Ashe had commented, a common enemy was a firm base on which to build an alliance.

"But they can fly," Ross protested. "Why didn't they just take off—out the windows, and let those six-legged weasels have the place?"

"For a reason their chief was finally able to make plain. This is apparently the season during which their young are born. The males could have escaped, but the females and young could not."

They found Renfry awaiting their arrival at the ship in a fingernail-gnawing state of impatience. Relieved to see them whole and together, he greeted them with the news that he had managed to trace the routing of the trip tape through the control board. Whether he could reset another tape, or reverse the present one, he did not yet know.

"I don't know about rewinding this one." He tapped the coin-sized disk they had seen ejected from the board on the morning of their arrival. "If the wire breaks—" He shrugged and did not need to elaborate.

"So you'd like to have another to practice on." Ashe nodded. "All right, we all know what to look for when we start our digging into the treasure trove tomorrow."

"If any still exist." Renfry sounded dubious.

"Deduction number one." Ashe took a long pull from the froth-drink can. "I believe most of the stuff the winged folk have gathered came from towers such as the one that houses their village. And there are a number of towers here. The buildings of radically different design are not duplicated. Which leads you to surmise that the tower structures are native to this planet, while the other types represent imported architecture.

"When that pilot set the control tape to bring the ship here, he was setting course either for his home—or his service headquarters. Therefore, it is not too improbable to suppose that we can hope to come across something in that miscellaneous mixture of loot they've gathered which is allied to record tapes we have found on this ship. And I will not rule out journey wires among the litter."

"There are a lot of ifs, ands, and maybes in that," Renfry said.

Ashe laughed. "Man, I have been dealing with ifs and maybes for most of my adult life. Being a snooper into the past takes a lot of guessing—then the hard grind of working to prove your guesses are right. There are certain basic patterns which become familiar—which you can use as the framework for your guess."

"Human patterns," Travis reminded. "Here we do not deal with humans."

"No, we don't. Unless you widen the definition of human to include any entity with intelligence and the power to use it. Which I believe we shall have to do, now that we are no longer planet—or system—bound. Anyway, to hunt through the remains of the tower civilization is our first job.

The next morning found them all, Renfry included, back at the tower. And, in those patches of sunlight which entered the packed room, the job Ashe and the chief of the winged people had set them looked even more formidable.

That is—it did until the cubs, or chicks, or children of the natives turned up to offer busy hands and quick bright eyes to assist. Travis found himself the center of a small gathering of the winged halflings all watching him with eager attention as he tried to disentangle a pile of disintegrating objects. A pair of small hands swooped to catch a rolling container, another helper brought out a box. A third straightened a coil of flexible stuff which was snarled about the top layer of the pile. The Apache laughed and nodded, hoping that both gestures would be translated as thanks and encouragement. Apparently they were, for the youngsters dived in with a will, their small hands wriggling into places he could not reach. Twice, though, he had to hurriedly jerk some too-ambitious delver back from a threatened avalanche of heavy goods.