Андрэ Нортон - Beast Master's Planet

Slipping from the wall, they were well out toward those posts when Hosteen halted and flung out an arm quickly to catch at Logan. Memories of safeguards on remote worlds stirred. Because one could not see a barrier was no reason to believe there was none there. If the creatures confined back in the pens had burst through the walls, the keepers of this place must have possessed some form of defense and protection to handle accidents. A force-field now, generated between those poles, he warned. Logan nodded.

“Could be.” He caught up a stone and hurled it through the space directly before them. It struck with a sullen clunk on the wall beside the door of the building, passing the pole area without hindrance.

“If it ever was there—it must be gone now.”

The evidence was clear, yet a part of Hosteen walked in dread as they advanced. Instinct, rained and tested many times in the past, instinct that was a part of that mysterious inborn gift making him one with the team, argued now against this place. He fought that unease as he stepped between the poles.

His hands went to his ears. He cowered, threw himself forward, and rolled across the hard ground in an agony that filled his head with pain, that was vibration, noise, something alien enough so that he could not put name to it! The world was filled with a piercing screaming, which tore at his body, cell by living cell. Hosteen had known physical pain and mental torment in the past, but nothing had ever reached this point—not in a sane world.

When he was again conscious, he lay in the dark, huddled up, hardly daring to breathe lest that punishment return. Then, at last, he moved stiffly, levered himself up, conscious of light at his back. He looked over his shoulder at a wedge-shaped section of gray. Wedge-shaped! The door in the building! He had reached the building then. But what had happened? He forced himself to remember, though the process hurt.

The pole barrier—a sonic, a sonic of some sort! Logan—Logan had been with him! Where was he now?

Hosteen could not make it to his feet; the first attempt made his head whirl. He crawled on his hands and knees back into the open and found Logan on the ramp that led to the doorway, moaning dully, his eyes closed, his hands to his head.

“What was it?” They lay side by side now within the first room of the building. Logan got out the question in a hoarse croak.

“A sonic, I think.”

“That makes sense.” Sonics were known to frawn herders, but the devices were not in general good favor. Such broadcasters had to be used by a master and were not easily controlled. The right degree of sound waves could keep a herd in docile submission, a fraction off and you had a frenzied stampede or a panic that could send half your animals to their deaths, completely insane.

“Still working—but it didn’t kill us,” Logan commented.

“Tuned in for a different life form,” Hosteen pointed out. “Might not kill them either—just stun. But I don’t want another dose of that.”

Their experience of crossing the barrier had wrung the last of their drug-supported strength from them. They slept, roused to swallow tablets and drink from the canteens they had filled at one of the pen springs, and drifted off to sleep again. How long had lethargy lasted they could not afterwards decide. But they awoke at last, clear-headed and with a measure of their normal energy.

Logan studied two sustenance tablets lying on his palm. “I’d like me some real chewin’ meat again,” he announced. “These things don’t help a man forget he’s empty—”

“They’ll keep us going—”

“Goin’ where?”

“There must be some way out of here. We’ll just have to find it.”

They had explored the building. If the keepers of the pens had left in such a hurry that they had not had time to care for the future of their captive specimens, still they had taken the contents of the rooms with them. No clues remained among those bare walls as to the men or creatures who had once lived here. That the building had been a habitation was proved by a washing place they found in one room and something built into another that Hosteen was sure was a cook unit. But all else was gone, though holes and scars suggested installations ripped free in a hurry.

When they reached the top floor of the building, they found a way out onto the flat roof, and from that vantage point they studied what they could see of the surrounding cavern.

At the back of the structure there were no pens. A smooth stretch of ground led directly to a passage-opening in the cave wall—a very large one.

“That’s the front door,” Logan observed. “Straight ahead—”

“Straight ahead—but with something in between.” Hosteen pivoted, surveying the surrounding terrain. He was right; the posts marking the sonic barrier made a tight, complete circle about the building. To reach the tempting “front door” meant recrossing that unseen barrier. And to do that—

Also, why did he keep thinking that there was a menace lurking out there? The only living thing they had seen in any of these burrows was the feefraw that had somehow found its way into this deserted world. The bones of the creature that had once been penned here were old enough to crumble. Yet whenever he faced those walled squares, his flesh crawled, his instincts warned. There was some danger here, something they had not yet sighted.

“Look!” Logan’s hand on his shoulder pulled him around. He was now facing the entrance to the big passage. “There,” his half-brother directed, “by that side pillar.”

The sides of the passage opening had been squared into pillars, joined to the parent rock. And Logan was right; here was a dark bundle on the ground at the foot of one. Hosteen focused the distance lenses. The half light was deceiving but not enough to conceal the nature of what lay there—that could only be a man.

“Widders?” Logan asked.

“Might be.” Had that crumpled figure stirred, tried to raise a hand? If that were Widders and he had crossed the sonic barrier, he could have been knocked out only temporarily.

“Come on,” Hosteen called, already on his way from the roof.

“Make it quick,” Logan answered.

That could be their best defense—a running leap with impetus enough to tear a man through the beam. Hosteen knew of no other way to cross without the shields they did not possess. Having tested the straps of their equipment, they toed the mark just beside the outer wall, then sprinted for the pole line.

Hosteen launched himself, felt the tearing of the sonic waves as he shot through them, landed beyond, to roll helplessly, battling unconsciousness. Logan spiraled over him with flailing arms and legs and lay now beyond.

Somehow the Terran fought to his knees. It seemed to him the shock this time was less. He crawled to Logan, who was now striving to sit up, his mouth drawn crooked in his effort to control his whisper.

“We made it—”

They crouched together, shoulder touching shoulder, until their heads cleared and they were able to stand. Then they headed for the man by the pillar.

Hosteen recognized the torn coverall. “Widders! Widders!” He wavered forward, to go down again beside the quiet form. Then his eyes fastened on one outflung hand unbelievingly.

Skin over bone, with the bone itself breaking through the tight pull of the skin on the knuckles! Fighting his fear of the dead, the inborn sense of defilement, he took the body by one shoulder, rolled it over on its back—

“No—no!” Logan’s cry was one of raw horror.

This thing had been Widders, Hosteen was sure of that. What it was now, what anyone could swear to, was that it might once have been human. The Terran thrust his hands deep into the harshness of the sand, scrubbed them back and forth, wondering if he would ever be able to forget that he had touched this—this—