Galactic Derelict tt-2 Page 17

  “The sand people!” His words were a hiss of whisper but they carried the authority of a shout. What were the nocturnal creatures of the shrouded desert world doing here?

  “You are sure?” To his surprise Ross questioned his identification no further than that.

  “You don’t forget a stink like that in a hurry.” Travis’ eyes were busy, surveying the pools of shadow about the crates and boxes piled in the hallway. Had anything moved out there? Were they being watched now by eyes which could see farther than their own in this dusk?

  The hand of the native touched his arm, an appeal for attention. Travis’ head swung slowly as he saw the other ready a spear. He fitted a dart in his blowgun.

  “There is something—to the left.” Ross’s whisper was the thinnest trickle of sound. His blaster was pointed at that shadowy comer.

  Then the hall came alive, a boiling up of forms from every likely and concealing cover. The things which beat toward them in attack shambled swiftly on four limbs like animals. Their silent advance carried with it an added horror in the fact that those slavering beasts had once been—or their remote ancestors had been—men!

  The last of blaster fire crackled, brought down three of the clumsy runners. A tentacle licked out and then a fourth attacker went down, a dart dancing in its hairy throat. Behind Travis the native ran back a few steps up stairs, launched out into the air with a beat of his wings. Wheeling over the enemy, he stabbed down at the boneless middle limbs raised to drag him down with a concentration which hinted at a long enmity between the two species.

  Ross cried out. A tentacle flicked from the shadows, coiled about his ankle and pulled, as he fought to keep his balance. He turned the blaster beam on that rope of living flesh. He was answered by a roar as the loop fell away. Then Travis’ dart caught the thing which arose to its hind legs clawing for Ross’s shoulders. The Apache shot as fast as he could insert darts into the pipe. He had backed to the stairs and now he flailed out with his weapon as a club, clearing a space to drag Ross with him.

  The native’s spear had been jerked from his hold by a tentacle. He perched on one of the piles of boxes, and now he rocked back and forth on his refuge, beating his wings to hasten the tumble of the stack. He rose into the air just as the bulky containers crashed down across the foot of the stairway to provide the beginnings of a barrier.

  “Blaster charge—exhausted,” Ross panted. He gripped the barrel of the weapon now useless as a gun, smashed the butt down on the round skull of a creature scrambling over the wreckage.

  They retreated up the stairway. Travis kicked out, catching another coarsely haired head under the chin, slamming its owner back and down to tangle with another eager attacker. The native sent a second pile of boxes crashing. Now he was flying back and forth over the ruck of the enemy main body, bombing them with smaller packages he snatched up from the heaps.

  For a moment the Terrans were free. They took advantage of that lull to win back to the gallery where they had entered what might have proved a trap. The native shot up, over their heads. He stood on the sill of the open window to beckon them on. uttering excited hums which rose in the scale until their volume approached squeaks.

  Travis shouldered Ross behind him toward the exit. “I’ve only two more darts—get out quick!”

  For a moment the other resisted, then his common sense took command and he ran for the window. Travis aimed a dart at a hunched shoulder and head just appearing above the stairs. But that missile only nicked a furred upper arm, and fangs showed in a gap which was no longer a man’s mouth. Eyes, small, red with fury, and yet alight—horribly so—with a spark of intelligence, were on him.

  He backed to the window. A lavender-skinned arm reached over his shoulder, a hand fastened on the blowgun, twisted at it, trying to pull the tube from his grasp. The native still kept his post on the sill; now he wanted the weapon.

  And Travis, knowing that the other had a means of escape he himself did not possess, surrendered the blowgun, then boosted his body over and out on the rope. He watched the lavender back of their rear guard. Wings projected outside the frame of the window and they were raised, ready….

  Then the native threw himself backward and out in a wild display of aerial gymnastics. His wings flapped wide, broke his fall and he roared again, spiraling upward as the first shaggy head protruded from the window. Hairy fists pawed at eyes which were apparendy blinded by the sun. Ross had reached the ground, Travis was not far behind him. The rope swung vigorously, scraping him along the building, and he realized that those above were trying to draw him up.

  The Apache let go, falling as relaxed as he could, and the lightened rope flapped wildly as it was jerked up into the window. But they were safely out in the day and he did not believe that the nocturnal creatures would pursue them into the light. However, as they crossed the strip of jungle to reach the ship, both of them applied their scoutcraft to discovering whether or not they were being trailed.

  Ashe listened to their report frowningly. “It might be worse—if we were staying here.”

  Ross threw aside the useless blaster. “D’you mean we’re getting out? When?”

  “Another day—maybe two. Renfry is ready to try rewinding the tape.”

  For the first time Travis made himslef face how much would depend upon the proper handling of that slender length of wire, how one small break would defeat their purpose and leave them exiled here forever. Or how a weakness which they could not see might develop in space, snapping their invisible tie with their home world, to set the ship drifting between solar systems an eternal derelict. Could Renfry rewind the spool? And if it were rewound—would it work in reverse? There could be no test flight. Once they raised ship from this spot, they were gambling with their lives on a very slender thread composed mainly of hope and an illogical belief in luck.

  “You understand now?” Ashe asked. “Remember this—we can stay here.”

  They would be exiles for the rest of their lives, but they would be alive. There were enemies here, but they could set up an alliance with the winged natives, join them. Suddenly Travis got to his feet. He went to that compartment in the cabin where they had put the square of picture block which could tune in on a man’s memory and make home visible to him. He had to know—whether the past had pull enough to push him into this greatest gamble of his life.

  He held the slab between his hands, looked into its curdled depths. Soon he saw—red cliffs rising from the fringe of smoky green marking pinon—a blue sky—the hills of home. He could almost taste the bite of alkali dust in a rising wind, feel the swell of a horse’s barrel between his legs. And he knew that he must take the chance….

  In the end they all made the same choice. Ross summed up their feelings:

  “Time travel—that is different. We’re still on our own world. If something goes wrong and we’re marooned back before history began—well, it’ll give a guy a bad jolt, sure. Who wants to play around with mammoths when he’s more used to A-jets? But still, he’d know pretty well what he was up against and that the people he’d meet would be his own species. But to stay here— No, not even if we get the job of playing gods for the winged people! They aren’t our kind— we’re visitors, not immigrants. And I don’t want to be a lifetime visitor anywhere!”

  They made a last trip to the record library, transporting back to the ship and stowing away in every available storage place all the record tapes which appeared to be intact. The chief of the natives, delighted with the blowguns, allowed them to choose other objects from the tribe’s treasure room. He only asked that they return in time, bringing with them new knowledge to share. They saw no more of the nocturnal creatures from the funnel-spired building—though they again took the precaution of sealing the ship at night.

  "Will we be back?” Ross asked when Ashe came from his last meeting with the chief.

  “Let us get home safely with this haul,” Ashe returned dryly, “and someone will be back, all right. You can depend
on that. Well, Renfry?”

  The technician looked like a ghost of his usual self. Lines of tension, probably never to be erased, bracketed his mouth, marked the corners of his tired eyes. His hands shook a litde and he could not lift his drinking container to his mouth without hooking all ten fingers about it.

  “The tape’s rewound,” he said flatly. “And the wire didn’t break. Tomorrow I’ll thread it ready to run. For the rest—we pray the trip out. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Travis lay on his bunk that night—his bunk, their ship…. The globe and its contents had grown progressively less alien when compared to what lay without. Around his wrist was a heavy band of red metal set with small, full, sea-green stones in a pattern which suggested breaking waves, a gift presented to him by the winged chief at their formal farewell. He was sure that the lavender-skinned flying man had not fashioned that bracelet. How old was the ornament? And from what world, from the art of what forgotten and long-vanished race had it come?

  They had not even scratched the surface of what was to be found in this ancient port. Had the jungle-cloaked city been the capital of some galaxy-wide empire, as Ashe suspected? They had had no time to explore very far. Yes, there would be a return—sometime. And men from his world would search and speculate, and learn, and guess—perhaps wrongly. Then, after a while there again would be a new city rising somewhere—maybe on his own world—which would serve as a storehouse of knowledge gained from star to star. Time would pass, and that city, too, would die. Until some representative of a race as yet unborn would come to search and speculate—and guess—Travis slept.

  He awoke swiftly, with a quick sense of urgency. Over his head he heard the sigh of the speaker from the control cabin.

  “All ready,” came Renfry’s voice, thin, drained. Why, the technician must have worked through the night, eager to prove his handiwork.

  “All ready.”

  They still had time to say “no” to this crazy venture, to choose known perils against the unknown. Travis felt a surge of panic. His hands levered against the bunk, pushing his body up. He had to stop Renfry—they must not blast into space.

  Then he lay down once more, made his hands clasp the bunk straps across his body, his lips pressed tighdy together. Let Renfry push the proper button—soon! It was the waiting which always wore on a man. He felt the familiar vibration, singing through the walls, through his body. There was no going back now. Travis closed his eyes and tried not to stiffen his whole body in protest against that waiting.

  17

  “We’re out—safely.”

  “So far—so good.” Another voice made answer to that over the com system.

  Travis opened his eyes and wondered if anyone ever became thoroughly inured to the discomfort of a planetary take-off. He had forgotten during the past days when they had been comfortably earth-bound what it meant to be wrenched into the heights beyond atmosphere and gravity. But at least the tape had worked to the extent that they had lifted safely off world.

  And their flight continued, until at length they all breathed easier and began to hold more confident feelings than just hope concerning their future.

  “If we simply repeat the pattern,” Ashe observed thoughtfully on the evening of the fifth day, “we set down again on the desert world sometime tomorrow.”

  “Be better if we could eliminate that stop,” Travis remarked. There was something in the desolate waste and the night things which repulsed him as nothing else had during this fantastic voyage.

  “I’ve been thinking….” Ross glanced across the swinging seat to the pilot’s perch where Renfry spent most of his waking hours. “We refueled on the trip out—at the first port. Suppose—just suppose that we exhausted the supply there.”

  Renfry grinned, a death’s-head stretch of skin across bones. His thumb jerked downward in the immemorial gesture of sardonic defeat. “Then we’ve had it, fella. Let’s hope that we can stretch out luck past that particular point along with all the rest of the elastic tricks.”

  This time they downed on the desert port in the early morning, when the lavish display of flames along the horizon was paling into nothingness. They saw the blaze of the rising sun reflected too brightly from the endless drifts of sand.

  “Two days here, roughly—if we do duplicate the pattern exactly.”

  Waiting two days, cooped up in the ship, not sure that they would take off again. At the thought of it, Travis shifted restlessly in his seat. And the specter Ross had evoked shared the narrow confines of the cabin with them all.

  “Any walk-about?” Ross must be feeling it too—that goading desire to be busy, to drown in action ever-present fears.

  “Not much reason for that,” Ashe replied calmly enough. “We’ll take a look outside—in daytime. Not that I believe there is much to see.”

  The sun-repelling helmets on, they opened the outer hatch. They surveyed the expanse where the winds might have whittled new patterns among the dunes, but where they could see no change since their last visit. The enigmatic sealed buildings still squatted beyond, with no sign of life about.

  “What did they do here?” Ross’s hands moved restlessly along the frame of the exit port. “There was some reason for this stop—there had to be. And why were those same things-people, animals, whatever they are—or were—on the other world, in the funnel-topped building?”

  “Which are the exiles?” Ashe asked. “Is this their home world, while those others exist across the void and have for generations because they were not recalled in time? Or are these the exiles and the others are at home? We may never know the reason or answer to any questions about them.” He studied the squat building among the creeping dunes. “They must live underground, with that building covering the entrance. Perhaps they live underground on the other planet also. Once they must have been here to service ships—to maintain some necessary outpost.”

  “And then,” Travis said slowly, “the ships didn’t come any more.”

  “Yes. There were no more ships. Perhaps a whole generation waited—hoping for ships—for recall. Then they either sank into apathy and stagnation, to slide down the hill of evolution, or they more consciously adapted to their surroundings.”

  “In the end, the result was the same,” Ross observed. “I don’t think those here are any different from the ones in the funnel building. And there they had a better world to adapt to.”

  “Wait!” Travis had been studying that sand-enclosed block with interest. Now he thought that his memory of the place as it had been weeks earlier did not match what he saw now. “Was that elevation on the left there before?”

  Ross and Ashe leaned forward, their attention settling on the end of the structure he indicated.

  “You’re right, that’s hew!” Ross’s affirmation came first. “And I don’t think that projection is made of stone like the rest, either.”

  The block which had so oddly appeared on the corner of that distant roof did not give out a metallic answer to the sun’s rays. But neither was it dull-coated. There was a sleek sheen to it, such as might be displayed by opaque glass or obsidian. The hump had no openings that they could see, and what its purpose might be remained as much of a mystery as the rest of this age-old puzzle.

  It remained so for a very few moments. Then there was action of a sort the watchers in the ship did not expect. They had seen the rays which protected the roof of the building against assault or investigation. Now they witnessed the use of what must have been one of the aggressive weapons of the men who had first erected that block.

  What was it which lashed out, cracked a whip’s thong about the skin of the ship? A beam of fire? A bolt of energy? A force which the Terrans could neither imagine nor name?

  Travis only knew that the energy wash of that blow crushed him back into the globe, hurled him into the inner door of the lock with Ross and Ashe thrust tight against him. Their bodies were flattened on the metal wall of the ship until the breath was forced from their lungs and
the world went black about them.

  Travis was on the floor, fighting for the air his body had to have, pain in bands about his chest. And before his blurred eyes was the open door of the port. In that moment all that mattered was that oblong of empty space—that, and beneath the torture of his body, the sense that that space must be shut out—that what lay beyond it meant final extinction.

  He clawed at the body across his knees, turned over somehow and inched painfully from under its weight, moving in a worm’s progress toward the outer port. There was a singing in his ears, filling his head, adding to bis daze. Then he was staring out into the glare of sun and sand.

  At first he thought he was lightheaded—that what he was seeing could not be true. For there was no wind, yet from the hidden floor of the landing space sand was rising in thin, unwavering sheets, walling in the globe. And those curtains of grit arose vertically, unmoved by any breeze! It was incredible—it could not happen—yet before his eyes it did.

  He lunged to his knees, thrust against the door, shut out the curtains of sand, the harsh light of the sun, the thing which could not be true. And as his hands fumbled to shoot home I he alien bolts, the pain lessened. He could breathe again without the constriction which had held his lungs imprisoned. He turned to the other two.

  The congested blueness of their faces startled him into quick action. He jerked both men up into a sitting position against the wall. Ashe’s blue eyes opened.

  “What—?” He only got out that one faint word as Travis turned his attention to Ross.

  There was a thin thread of blood trickling from the corner of the younger scout’s slack mouth. He moaned as Travis shook him gendy. Ashe moved and winced, his hands going to his chest.

  “What happened?” He was able to get out the whole demand this time.