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  Troy kicked, sending the tube spinning. Then he brought the edge of his hand down across Zul’s neck, dropping the little man to lie on the floor gasping. Troy had leisure to collect both knife and cylinder before Zul sat up, still breathing in hoarse rasps.

  With the knife and tube laid on top of a cabinet, Troy advanced on Zul. It was like trying to master by force a frenzied animal, one that scratched and bit. In spite of his repugnance, Troy was forced to knock the smaller man out in order to fasten his hands behind him with his own belt.

  Troy was rebuckling his rider’s broad cincture when he saw Zul’s eyes open and take in the limp body of Kyger. The small man’s face twisted in a grimace Troy could not read. Then he strained to raise his head from the floor, looked about eagerly, as if he wanted something more important for the moment than Troy. His attention centered on the tube where it lay with one end projecting over the edge of the cabinet, and he actually began to wriggle his body across the floor toward it.

  Troy stepped between. Zul’s grimace was now an open snarl. He spat, struggled to lever himself from the floor.

  Troy picked up the tube and took it with him as he moved to the red alarm button on the wall. The quicker he summoned the authorities, the less trouble he would have in telling his own tale.

  “No!” For the first time Zul spoke intelligibly. “Not the patrollers!”

  “Why not? I have nothing to hide. Have you?”

  Zul’s frantic squirming across the room had brought him to the row of cabinets. Now he wriggled his shoulders up against that support so that he was sitting, not lying.

  “No patrollers!” he repeated, and his words now held the tone of an order rather than a plea. “Not yet—”

  “Why?”

  Zul’s dark eyes were again focused on the tube Troy held. He was plainly a man torn between the need for secrecy and the necessity of having help.

  Troy pressed. “Because of the animals—the Terran animals?”

  Zul froze, his small body suddenly rigid, his face the personified mask of surprise—and perhaps some other emotions Troy could not read.

  “What do you know?” His words were harsh, rasping, as if he had to fight for the breath to expel them.

  “Enough.” Troy hoped that ambiguity would force some revelation out of his captive.

  Zul’s tongue tip wet his lips. He hitched his shoulders along the cabinets as if to reach Troy.

  “They must be killed—quickly—before the patrollers are called.”

  Troy was startled. Death for those who had met him in this room was the last thing he would have expected from Zul. And certainly he had no intention of yielding to that.

  “Why?”

  Zul’s eyes changed, became sly and suspicious once again. “If you do not know, Dippleman, then you know nothing. They are a danger—to all of us under this roof they are a great danger, now that their master is dead. You will kill, or you will wish that you had died also.”

  Troy covered the space between them in one long-legged stride. He stooped, caught Zul by the collar of his tunic, and pulled him to his feet, holding him pinned against a cabinet.

  “You will tell me why these animals are a danger,” he said softly, trying to put into that speech all the force and menace he could muster.

  “Because”—Zul’s eyes were lifted to Troy’s; apparently he was making a last throw, which might or might not contain the truth—“they are more than animals. They think, they take orders, they report—”

  “What orders do they take, and to whom do they report?”

  Zul swallowed visibly. There were small beads of oily moisture forming on his forehead just below the tight knots of his hair. Yet Troy sensed that he was not afraid of his captor, but of something else. “They take their orders from him who summons them.” Zul’s eyes flicked to the tube and back again to Troy’s face. “And they report to him—”

  “What?”

  “Information.”

  Puzzle pieces clicked together in Troy’s mind. Pets—with the ability to understand their masters’ or mistresses’ actions, to collect information—planted in households where information worth a high price could be gathered!

  “And Kyger did this?” That was a statement as well as a question.

  “Yes. Now the animals must be summoned and killed before the patrollers arrive. Give me the caller.”

  “I think not.” So Zul did not know that the animals had already arrived to answer the call of a dead or dying man. And as Troy made a decision of his own, he was answered by a thrust of emotion from the seemingly empty spaces of the room—fear, such as had moved the kinkajou to his arms in the garden, a determination to fight, perhaps, too, a vague plea. And he knew that he was again tuned in on the hidden five. If the animals had been used by Kyger in some scheme, certainly they had only been tools.

  “Let the patrollers get them,” Zul continued, “and they will have them under probes to learn what they can—and kill them afterwards. Is it not better to kill them cleanly before that is done?”

  Troy stiffened, felt his own reaction intensified as the others picked it up. What Zul said made such good sense it presented a new form of danger, and a very big one. But his own thoughts were racing ahead.

  So far only those in this room knew that Kyger was dead, with the exception of his killer—which gave Troy a small measure of time. He knew that he could not let Zul kill the animals, and he would fight to keep them from falling into the hands of those who would wring secrets out of them via the probes.

  Flight—But where? Memory painted for him a picture of that plateau high in the clean wind. Not perhaps there—but the Wild that stetched over half of this continent. To shake one man and five small animals out of that would be a long and arduous task, and before it was done perhaps he could find a solution to their problem in another way.

  “You’ll have to let me call them—and kill them quickly!” Zul was losing control, his voice rasping louder as he watched Troy with narrowed eyes.

  “Be quiet!” Troy enforced that order by planting his hand over the other’s mouth. Holding Zul so in spite of his renewed writhings, Horan tried to contact the animals.

  “Go together—away from here.” He thought those words with all the emphasis he could, not trying to analyze why he must champion the five, only knowing that it was very important to do so—not only for them but for him.

  If Zul understood what he was doing, he gave no sign of it. As he fought to be free of Troy’s hold, his eyes were now wild above the temporary gag of the other’s palm.

  There was again a flicker of movement, which Troy caught only from the corners of his eyes. The black cat materialized as if from the flooring, came stealthily, with its belly fur brushing the carpet, skirting Kyger’s outflung arm. And Zul, sighting it over Troy’s hand, was still. Troy waited as the cat reached them, to front Zul with a silent, menacing snarl, hatred expressed in every fluid line of its body.

  “They do not need to be called, Zul,” Troy said softly, “for they are here. And from here they shall go safely.”

  So they came—the other cat in a swift spring, the foxes side by side, and last of all the kinkajou in a rush that brought it to Troy, to climb up his body as if it were a tree.

  “We shall all go together for a little, Zul.” Troy swung the smaller man about, held him before him with one hand as he transferred Zul’s knife to his own belt. He dropped the tube to the floor, and the black cat went into instant action, setting it rolling with small paw taps until the cylinder disappeared under one of the cabinets. Now all the animals, save the kinkajou which rode on Troy’s shoulder, its tail loosely coiled about the man’s neck, slipped out the door.

  Zul might have been shocked speechless by the appearance of that furred company and their cooperation with Troy. He obeyed the other’s push like a controlled robot, and all his struggles ceased as they went down the stairs, heading toward the courtyard.

  One part of Troy’s mind considered the
matter of supplies—and the flitter. So much depended now on chance and luck, and he would have to hope for help from both.

  Still holding Zul, he paused just within the passage door and looked out into the courtyard. The flitter was just where he had seen it last. From the pens and cages came the usual night sounds. And there was no sign of the yardman who should have been on duty.

  Troy caught a stir at the side of the flitter, knew that the animals had picked that much of his intention from his mind. At this hour the air lanes would be crowded with villa dwellers returning home from night spots in Tikil. He would have that traffic for cover from the patrollers.

  Now that he had made his decision, Troy had to throttle down the excitement bubbling in him. For the first time in years he was going to sample freedom. He had had a very small taste of that on the expedition with Rerne, but this time the choice was his alone.

  Zul remained the immediate problem. Troy continued to propel the other before him until they reached the storeroom. Since they had left the room in which Kyger lay, the other had not struggled. It might have been that he had no more desire than Troy to draw attention to their activities.

  Inside, Troy shoved his captive into a corner and worked fast. He knew that Kyger had made a point of supplying the Terran animals with special imported food, and he tossed into a sack such containers of that as he could find. Zul’s knife was in his belt and in addition the flitter would have a stunner in its arms locker. He drew the cord of the sack tight, with Zul watching him. The latter spoke and Troy knew he meant every word he said.

  “We shall hunt and we shall kill. And the patrollers will hunt also. There is no place you can hide that one or the other of us will not find. And for you also there will be death now.”

  “Because I know too much?” Troy suggested.

  “Because of that—and because of this. We cannot allow knowledge of this thing.”

  “And you will set the patrollers on me—”

  Zul grinned. “There will be no need to tell them of the animals. They will come and find a dead man where one of his hirelings has fled. That is a story that needs no telling, even to the most stupid.”

  “Suppose they find that two have fled?” Troy asked. He had no wish to take Zul along; that would be like fitting a triggered egg bomb into the flitter. But the disappearance of two of Kyger’s employees at the same time, and one of them an old associate of the ex-spacer, might muddy the trail as far as the law was concerned.

  Slinging the bag over his shoulder, he closed on Zul again, herding him out of the storeroom in the direction of the flitter. But that plan was to go awry. There was a sudden shout from the passage leading to Kyger’s quarters. Zul relaxed, made himself a dead weight that Troy could not hope to manhandle into the flyer without a loss of precious time. He leaped over the prone man and scrambled into the flitter, hoping the animals were already on board.

  “Here!” Out of nowhere came that reassurance as Troy took the lift control and raised the machine out of the well of the courtyard. Lights showed in the forepart of Kyger’s rooms. Perhaps one of the yardmen had discovered the body. Troy must make the best use of the small head start that he had.

  The main stream of the late traffic went north, not east, and he would have to weave into that, not making the necessary turn until he was well over the villa section. Also the flitter must keep within the lawful speed of the passenger lanes.

  Troy triggered the com on the control panel and listened intently for any hint that the alarm had been raised behind him. Zul’s words had not been an idle threat. However, once in the Wild, he did not fear the patrollers too much.

  What did concern him was the Clan rangers, organized to track down just such unauthorized invasions as his own. They knew the wilderness intimately. This realization made future prospects suddenly far more bleak for Troy, and they grew grimmer the farther he flew. Yet he had made his choice and there was no turning back.

  Rerne! If cornered, dare he appeal to the Hunter? Once more he experienced the odd quality he had known that morning on the plateau. Part of him was untrusting, wary, disillusioned, and another segment pulled toward confidence in the ranger, a longing for the freedom in which he and his kind walked under an open sky.

  A patroller cruised above his flitter, and Troy sat stiff and tense, waiting for the order to land. Then the official flyer darted away, and he drew a really deep breath once more. The traffic about him was thinning. Soon he would have to make his dash out of the regular lanes into what he hoped would be the concealment of the night. He saw the twinkle of villa lights, two of them among the rising heights. Snapping off his lawful lights, he banked to the right, coming around to head eastward in a burst of speed that should tear him well away from the city lanes before he was noticed.

  But it was several very long moments before he could be sure of that escape. So far there had been no warning broadcast on the com. Certainly if the men in the shop had been aroused, they would have called in the patrollers and there would be a blanket alarm out for the stolen flitter. Zul—was Zul still determined to hold off the law as long as he could to serve his own purposes?

  And in that last warning the little man had said “we”—not “I”. Who were “we”? If Kyger was not the master of the animals—and Zul was certainly a subordinate—then who was? Someone in Tikil with power enough to delay the official hunt so that a private and deadly one could be put into motion? Zul had warned Troy that he would be the quarry of two chases. And in the Wild perhaps tailed by the Clans as well.

  Troy’s lips shaped a mirthless smile. Too many hunting parties might just foul each other. He would not speculate on chances that might not exist. One move at a time was all anyone could make.

  The flitter sped on into the night, northeast. Before daylight caught them and he would have to set down, they should be well into the wilderness. And, remembering the mountain chains Rerne had lifted them above, he set the flyer to climbing, though the automatic alarm system was on and the auto-pilot would avoid any crash against an unseen peak.

  He became conscious of warmth against his thigh and side, the soft touch of a small paw on his nervously rigid arm. The kinkajou was pressed against him, and the rest of that odd crew had climbed into the other half of the driver’s seat. Troy began to talk, not knowing how much of what he said reached their minds, but driven by the impulse to put his nebulous plans into words.

  “There is the Wild ahead—and only the rangers and the native animals in it. Such a place should hold many hiding places for such as we—”

  “And good hunting.” From one of them had come that quick reply. He sensed a rising excitement that was born not of fear or the need for defense but of anticipation—an emotion that all five of them shared.

  “Good hunting.” He confirmed that. “Trees, and plains, mountains, rivers, rocks—”

  “It is good to run free.” Out of the general aura of satisfaction those definite words arose.

  “It is good to run free!” Troy echoed. Free of the Dipple, of Tikil—of the ways of men, which he had endured only because of his own stubborn determination not to be broken.

  Overhead the stars made a clear, cold pattern, and the green round of the moon, rising above the mountains, showed snow caps like clear jade. The fugitives were across the first run of the Larsh—into the Wild—and still no hint that the chase was up behind. Troy knew again the heady exultation of one who is pulling off an odds-against mission. He had no map, no points of reference, but he was certain that to simply continue northeast would bring him out along the fringe of the plains.

  He set the controls on complete autopilot, stretched his arms wide. His shoulders ached from the rigid tension that had held him during the first hours of flight.

  “By dawn,” he told his companions, “we shall be down—in a big country where there are no trails.”

  The kinkajou had crowded into his lap, was curling up against him. And now the black cat was at his side, sitting uprigh
t, watching the night sky outside the bubble of the flitter, as if it had now accepted Troy as one of its own kind.

  He must have drowsed, for the red snap of light on the control panel brought him awake with the stupid dullness of a too quickly aroused sleeper.

  “Warn off! Warn off!”

  Troy had heard just that same metallic voice before, but he could not remember when or why.

  His hands went to the controls. He thumbed the autopilot release, but it did not give. As he hammered at it with his fist, that blink of light became steady and he remembered—Ruhkarv!

  “Warn off!”

  Troy reached for the mike, to say the words that would end their escape attempt. But that move came too late. The red light was now a beam. Out of the night blossomed a huge burst of eye-searing white. The flitter lurched, lost speed, started down.

  ELEVEN

  Afterwards Troy could recall little of that crazy falling-leaf descent that threw them from one side of the pilot’s seat to the other. They were not quite helpless before the force that had shaken them off course and out of the sky, for the accident-safety ray had flashed on automatically, bringing them down to ground level at a speed under that of a direct crash. Troy fought the controls, beat at the lock with the full force of his wrists and arms. Something gave and for an instant or so the flitter was his again. He tried to put the nose up and the flyer gave a giant hop.

  If that action did not win them the sky again, it did carry the flyer—with the effect of bursting through a taut curtain—beyond the influence of the thing that had grabbed them out of the air. Troy felt the flitter wheels strike, bouncing them up. They flattened off in a second crash, and it was dark—moon and stars blotted out.

  His chest hurt and his head ached. In his mouth was the unforgettable flat sweet taste of blood. Before him was darkness, but from behind came a measure of light that he could sight as he tried to turn his head.

  “Out—out—” That was a plea rising to a kind of frenzy. Troy could feel movement beside him, back and forth across his bruised body until he grunted with pain.