Андрэ Нортон - Beast Master's Planet

Privately the Terran doubted if they could now make that return trip before the day broke. Though they had not come so far in actual distance, their struggle with the shadows had been exhausting. He knew that fatigue of both mind and body rode him, made him flinch at the thought of back-tracking. Yet if they wanted to live, they must do that before sunrise.

He had hunkered down on the pavement and was flashing his torch back forth across its surface for no conscious reason. Then his eyes sighted the pattern there, and his dull mind became alert. There was a circular strip of glassy, glossy black, which began at the point where the road met the wedge and then spiraled around and around until it ended in a circle just large enough for a man to stand upon.

Why he went into action then he could never afterwards explain. It was all a part of the weird influence of this place. He only knew that this he must do at once.

Crossing to the beginning of that spiral, he began to walk along the route it marked, around and around, approaching the center point and concentrating upon keeping his boots firmly planted on the slick surface, in no way touching the duller borders.

Dimly he was aware of Logan asking questions, demanding answers. But that sound, the words, meant nothing now. The most important thing in the world was to walk that path without deviation or error. The circle in the center could not be rightly entered in any other way, and it was a door.

Door? demanded another part of his brain. How? Why?

Hosteen fought down all questions. To walk the spiral slowly, cautiously, with all his powers of concentration, with no careless boot-toe touch beyond its border, he had to fit one foot almost directly before the other, balance like a man walking the narrowest of mountain ledges. This way only was it safe. Safe? He dismissed that query also.

Hosteen was in the circle now, turning to face the way they had come, toward those other dark mountains under which must lie the cavern of the pens, all the rest of the holdings of the forgotten alien invaders. Then he stood waiting. For what? clamored common sense.

Dark—and the sensation of being totally free from the boundaries set by time and space and everything mankind used to measure distance in two dimensions.

Then light and another path to be walked, another spiral, this glowing—not to be taken by one booted foot set carefully ahead of the other but mentally. And with the same concentration he had given to his action on the wedge, so did he now do this. He was at its center, with another kind of light rising in a haze all about him.

The process was like waking from a deep sleep. Hosteen fought a groggy disorientation, became aware of where he was and that he no longer stood in the open on a wedge under a starred sky. Instead, his boots were planted on a block of glassy material, and around him was another kind of light, a rusty glow that had no visible source unless it was born out of the air.

“Logan!” He demanded an answer, yet knew that none would come. In this place he was alone, alone with the knowledge that his species was not of this place—or time—that he was in strange exile.

The training the Terran had had acted against panic. He had followed an alien road but one that had had purpose—and it had brought him here. Now he must discover where “here” was.

Leaping from the block, Hosteen looked about. He was in a very small room—a room of three walls meeting in sharply angled corners. And those walls were unbroken by any openings of windows or doors. Again panic threatened as he faced the possibility of being imprisoned in this box. There was no spiral path to lead him out, only the block, the three walls, the ceiling over his head, the floor under him. And to his sight, walls, floor and ceiling were solid.

But eyes were not the only sense organs he possessed. Hosteen approached the nearest wall and ran his finger tips along its stick surface. It was glassy smooth to the touch and a little warm—where he had expected the chill of stone.

He walked the full length of that wall until his fingers pointed into the sharp angle of the corner. Then Hosteen turned along the second. He had reached the mid-point of that when there was a change in the surface not perceptible to the eye. Three depressions appeared, not quite the size or shape of his fingers, since he pushed in with room to spare. But he was reminded of the finger locks used on inner-system planets, locks that would open only to print patterns of their owners’ flesh ridges. If this was such a lock, he had no hope, for the fingers—or appendages—which had set it had long since vanished from Arzor. But the Terran pressed his fingers into those hollow desperately, hoping for but not really expecting action.

A tingling in each of those three fingers, spreading up across the back of his hand, reaching his wrist, now into his forearm. A tingling—or was it a sucking—a pull of strength out of his tendons and muscles to be absorbed into those glassy pits of the wall? Hosteen supported his wrist now with his other hand because, when he tried to withdraw his fingers, he found them gripped in a suction beyond his power to break.

He leaned against the wall, twisting his right wrist with the aid of his other hand, striving to break that contact, feeling strength seep out of him as clearly as if he could watch the draining process in action along every vein, through every finger-tip pore.

Then the wall shivered, shimmered, to break from ceiling to floor. A strip of surface three feet wide where his hand had touched vanished, and he fell through, then crawled out of the triangular box to lie on the floor of another, much larger space. At least he was out of the cage!

Logan! Logan left back there on the plain to await the sun—and the burning death of the Big Dry. Logan! Would he— could he —take the same escape road Hosteen had found?

The Terran wavered to his feet, nursing his right hand and arm against his chest. The skin was pallid, the hand itself numb, and his utmost efforts to move the fingers resulted only in a slight twitching. Heavy and cold, he thrust it inside his shirt against his bare chest. But for a moment he forgot that as he looked around him.

The dusky, reddish light of the box was lightened here into the golden radiance he had remembered from the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens. With the hope of another such find, Hosteen stumbled forward to a waist-high barrier just a few feet ahead. Then he was looking down from a galley into, not the gardens of his hopes, but into a vast assembly of machines and installations. And from it rose a subdued hum, a vibration of air. These installations were not only in working order, they were working!

Yet, nowhere down those rows could he see any tenders, no human or robot inspectors as one might find in off-world machine plants.

“Started—then left to run—forever?” he whispered.

For what purpose?

He started along the gallery, hunting a way down to that center hall. The room was a vast oval, and his entrance had been at one end. Now as he skirted that waist-high barrier, watching the space below, Hosteen continued to marvel at the size and complexity of the installations.

The Terran’s own training had been in psycho-biology. An Amerindian had an ancient tie with nature and the forces of nature, which was his strength, just as other races had come to rely more and more on machines. It was upon such framework that his whole education had been based, his sympathies centered. So, both inborn and special conditioning had made of him a man aloof from, and suspicious of, machines. One had to be anti-tech to be a Beast Master.

Now his disinterest in machines was growing to a repulsion as he looked down into the well of the vast chamber. The minds that had conceived and produced the Gardens he could understand. He might, though he did not find any kinship with them, grasp the motives of the pen keepers—they had dealt with living things. But these installations put a wall between him and those who had once been active here.