Андрэ Нортон - Beast Master's Planet

“What did—that?” Logan’s demand was a whisper.

“I don’t know.” Hosteen stood up, one hand pressed to his heaving middle. His instinct had been right. Somewhere here lurked a hunter—a hunter whose method of feeding was far removed from the sanity of human life. They must get away—out of here—now!

He grabbed for Logan, shoved him toward the passage Widders must have been trying to reach when he had been pulled down. There was a horror loose in this place that had not died long ago in those pens—if it had ever been confined there.

They ran for the open passage and sped into the dark mouth of the tunnel. And they fled on blindly into that thick dark until there was a band of tight, hard pain about their lower ribs and the panic that had spurred them could no longer push their tired bodies into fresh effort. Then, clinging together, as if the touch of flesh against flesh was a defense against the insanity behind, they sat on the floor, dragging in the dead air in ragged, painful gasps.

This—is—an—open—passage.” Logan’s warning came in separated words.

He was right. There was nothing to prevent that which had hunted Widders from prowling into this dark tunnel. Perhaps even now it lurked in the dim reaches ahead.

The arm Hosteen had flung about Logan’s heaving shoulders tightened spasmodically. He must not let panic crowd out reason—that would deliver them both over to death. They had to keep thinking clearly.

“We have the grenades and the torch,” he reassured himself as well as his companion. “Widders did not have his equipment—no light or weapon. It was a miracle he got even this far.”

The shudders that had been shaking Logan were not so continuous.

“Scared as a paca rat caught in a grain bin!” The answer came with a ghost of the old wry humor Logan had always summoned to front disaster. “Never broke and ran like that before, though.”

“That was enough to make both of us bolt,” Hosteen replied. “You didn’t see me holding back any, did you? But now I think we are past the trapped paca rat stage.”

Logan’s hand tightened on Hosteen’s forearm in a grip of rough affection and then fell away. “You’re right, brother. We’ve moved up a few steps in the panic scale—maybe now we’re on the level of a frawn bull. But I want to be a tough yoris before we face somethin’ alive and kickin’.”

“Two yoris it is,” Hosteen agreed. “I’d say keep straight ahead, but at less of a scamper.”

He fingered the atom torch indecisively. If he switched that on, would the beam signal a lurker? But the advantage of light over dark won. With the enemy revealed in the light, they would have a chance to use their grenades.

As the passage continued to bore ahead through the stuff of the mountain, Hosteen marveled at the extent of the under-the-surface work. More than just the first mountain must be occupied by this labyrinth. He was sure they were well beyond the height up which the Norbies had originally driven their captives.

There were no signs that anything had come this way before them, and the first stark shock of Widders’ end lost some of its impact on their minds. Hosteen sighted a gray glimmer ahead and switched off the torch so that they could approach another tunnel mouth warily.

Here projections hung down from overhead and stood up out of the floor of the passage, so they passed between two rows of pointed objects as thick as a man’s leg. And set in a curved space well above their heads were three ovals of a blood-red, transparent substance through which light streamed in gory beams.

What lay beyond the opening was sun heat—the sun heat of the parched outer world, where the Big Dry reigned uncontrolled.

They hunched down between those pointed pillars, shielded their eyes against the punishing glare, and tried to pick out some route across that seared landscape.

In the shimmer of the heat waves there was a thin line of poles running—with a gap here and there—into the distance, just as the poles had marked the sonic barrier before the pens.

Hosteen used the lenses to trace that line, but the glare of that open oven was as deceptive as the foggy murk of the interior cavern.

“We’ll have to lay up and wait for dark.” Logan drew his knees up to his chest and folded his arms about them. “Nothin’ could last for a half hour out there now.”

How far did that guiding line of poles stretch? Could one find shelter at the end of that path before the coming of another day? And was this indeed open country?

“Open country?” Hosteen repeated questioningly.

“You think this might be another controlled cavern, to hold things enjoyin’ bein’ baked?”

“There are those poles—they must have run a sonic through here once.” Hosteen pointed out the obvious.

“And there are a lot of gaps in that now, too.” Logan squinted to study the way ahead. “Do we go back—or do we try it?”

“I’d say try it—at least part way. If night does come here, we can try and turn back if we can’t see an end within safe travel distance.”

“That makes sense,” Logan conceded. “We wait.”

Hope was thin. Much depended now on whether this was another cavern under weather control—the wrong kind of control for them—or the open. For human eyes, there was no looking up into the inferno that marked the possible sky. Hosteen had thought that the heat and glare when they first reached the end of the passage had been that of early afternoon. So they would wait for a night that might never fall or start the long trail back to that distant cave into which the Norbies had sealed them.

Uneasily they slept in turn, keeping watch as the time crept leadenly by. Suddenly, Hosteen was aroused from a doze by Logan’s shaking.

“Look!”

Where the light had been—a yellow-white their eyes could meet only with actual pain—there was now a reddish glow. The Terran had seen its like too many times to be mistaken. Yes, there was a night out there, and it was now on its way. They need only wait for true dusk and then follow the road marked by the pole line.

They ate, drank sparingly of their water, and waited impatiently for the red to deepen to purple, the purple that meant freedom. But as they waited, Hosteen walked forward between the projections, his senses alert—to what? There was no sound out of the desert ahead, nothing moving there.

With the lenses he could follow the pole line well ahead—bare rock, the poles, with gaps in their marching line. No vegetation, no place for any living thing he had seen yet on Arzor. Yet, inside him, there was a growing fear of that sere landscape, a tension far higher in pitch than any he had known before in any of the tunnels and caverns they had traversed.

“What is it?”

Startled, Hosteen looked back over his shoulder. Logan had been testing the fastening of the canteens. But now he, too, was staring with narrowed eyes into the open.

“I don’t know,” the other answered slowly. “This—is—strange—”

They had run in open horror and fear from the place where Widders lay. Now, as the Terran weighed one emotion against the other, he was sure that the sensation he was experiencing was not the same as they had known earlier. Where that, in part, had been physical fear, this was a more subtle thing, twitching at mind and not at body.

“We’ll go—” Logan did not make a question of that, rather a promise that was half challenge to what lay ahead. His jaw was set, and the stubbornness that had made him go his own way so often in the past was in the ascendant now, setting him to face what he shrank from.

“We’ll go,” Hosteen assented. Every fiber of his body fought against his will in this. What had begun as an uneasiness was now a shivering, quivering revolt of one deeply rooted part of him against the iron form of his determination. Yet, he knew that he could not refuse to go out there and face whatever waited, for if he did, he would be broken in some strange, inexplicable way that would leave him as crippled as if he had been shorn of a leg or an arm.