Андрэ Нортон - Beast Master's Planet

His growing dislike was not blunting his powers of observation. Hosteen believed that only a small number of the machines below were in use. He passed by whole sections where there were none of those subtle waves of power rising or falling. Then he saw the platform.

He was raised not more than a Terran foot or so above the floor of the main hall, and it was backed by a tall boarding, reaching almost to the balcony on which he stood. There were lines in relief on that boarding, running in intricate tangles. One made an irregular circle, and it glowed—glowed with a pulsating light of the same mauve that made fair Arzor sky different from Terra’s lost blue.

Two other lines also showed color. One, a golden yellow, began in a straight column near the foot of the board and ran up to a midpoint, where, though there was a many-branched channel of the same tubing above, it stopped. And this pulsated with a faster beat. The third—Hosteen caught sight of the third, his attention riveted on it, startled.

That was a spiral leading to a dot. And as he watched, the light grew brighter, until its brilliance was more than his eyes could bear. The light traveled along that spiral, approached the dot, flashed there for an eye-searing second or two.

Then, the whole pattern of spiral and dot was lifeless, dead as the hundred other designs of tubing on that board. But he had not been mistaken. The light had been there—had been so bright he could not watch it, any more than a man could watch the sun of the Big Dry.

Hosteen turned and began to run back toward the triangular box from which he had emerged.

Logan—that shining swirl on the board could mean that Logan had taken the spiral and circle path out of the valley! He could be coming here!

The Terran’s wild pace was such that he brought up against the now solid wall of the cubby almost as he had crashed against the inner wall of the cave where the Norbies had sealed them in to begin this adventure.

“Logan!” he shouted and heard the sound deadened, swallowed up in the reaches of the hall. Hosteen pounded on the wall with his good hand, drew the still numb right fist out of his shirt and tried to feel for any hollows on this side of the wall.

Pits for fingers. He had found them—this time with the digits of his left hand. He hesitated to deaden that too, as the right now was—to render himself helpless. But to get Logan out—free from the desert trap. Hosteen pushed his left hand against the smooth surface, fitted three finger tips into the waiting depressions, and waited, not without an inward shrinking, for the tingling—the sucking.

This time the response came more quickly, as might a lock long unused respond more rapidly to the second turning of a key. The panel faded, was gone—He looked into the cubby to see bare walls, empty space—nothing else.

Hosteen had been so sure he would again face Logan that for a moment he could not accept that emptiness.

“Logan!” Again the cry, which had come with the full force of his lung power, was muted, flattened into an echoing murmur of sound.

Already the gap in the wall was forming into its old solidity. He had been so sure. Hosteen lifted his numbed right hand uncertainly to his head. His distrust of the machines, of the power he did not understand, was a hot fire in him, a heat that reached into his cold, blanched fingers. He crooked them with a supreme effort, felt nails scrape the skin of his forehead.

The spiral on the board—it had been a miniature of the design in the valley, the pathway that had deposited him in this place. And he was certain that when the tube had glowed, it had signaled the use of that path, or another like it. So—perhaps that board held the secret!

Hosteen lurched away from the now solid wall and started along the other arm of the balcony, searching for a way down to the platform. In the end, he found the exit, an unobtrusive opening back against the hall wall, giving on a series of notched steps. He held the guard rail of that steep stair, noting with a fierce joy that the lack of feeling in his hand was ebbing—though to raise it was still like trying to raise a leaden weight attached to his wrist.

Now he was on ground level, picking a way among the machines to the platform. The majority of the installations were encased in block coverings, and these towered well above Hosteen’s head as he hurried down the aisle.

There was no dust here as there had been in some of the tunnels, no sign that this chamber had been in existence for eons, perhaps abandoned for centuries. Yet, he was sure all of this was a part of the vanished Sealed Cave civilization.

Hosteen had almost reached the platform when he paused, took cover. A hum came from ahead, rising from a low note, hardly to be distinguished from the general voice of the machines, to a sound more impressive than his own shouts on the balcony—as if this sound was normal here, the voice of man not.

On the tube encrusted board another design had glowed into life. First blue—then white, bright enough to make him cover his eyes. When he looked again, there was a man on the platform, facing the board!

“Logan!” His lips shaped the name, but luckily he did not call aloud, for that was not Logan.

The stranger was taller than Hosteen’s half-brother, and he was not wearing Norbie dress. In fact, those green coveralls were familiar. That was the Service Center uniform Hosteen himself had worn for over a year at the Rehab station, where the homeless forces of Terrans had been held until they could either be assigned to new worlds or put through pyscho-conditioning.

Slowly the Terran edged around the boxed installation. The LB had been transporting Rehab men when it had crashed out on the mountain. Could this be a survivor, driven into the maze as Logan and he had been? Yet, the actions of the man on the platform were not those of a lost and bewildered castaway; they were the assured motions of a tech on duty.

His head turned from side to side as if he studied the twists and turns of that web of tubing. Then he moved half face to Hosteen.

Unmistakable human features, but painted over with the patterns of a Norbie Drummer—red circles about the eyes, a complicated series of lines on each cheek—just as Hosteen had seen on the faces of the warriors of the Blue. And slung about the other’s neck was a small “medicine” tambour. An off-worlder who united in his person the make-up of a primitive medicine man and the actions of one understanding and tending the complex controls of a vanished civilization!

The stranger stretched out both hands and moved them across a line of small bulbs in a carefully governed sweep. To Hosteen’s watching, he did not actually touch any, merely passed the flat of a palm over them.

And the board answered. That line of yellow light bubbling in the vertical shaft broke through whatever barrier had controlled it and threaded up and out through a dozen, two dozen filaments, each branching and rebranching until the lighted whole was the skeleton of a leafless tree. The soaring light reached the very top of the board. And around him Hosteen was conscious of an ingathering of energy, a poising of power to be launched.

Far away, but still awesomely loud, there was a clap of thunder, pounding on in a series of receding rolls. Hosteen cowered against the machine.

He closed his eyes for a second and felt as if he stood in the center of a storm’s full fury. He could sense, if he could not see, the savage lash of lightning across a night-black sky under clouds as heavy as the rocks over which they clustered. And, small, weak man-thing that he was, he was, he could only seek shelter from elements to which man was nothing.

Yet, when he opened his eyes again, there was only a man in a faded coverall watching a light pulse through a transparent tube. The stranger’s hand swept again over the bulbs. And the tree began to die, the yellow shrinking, retreating along the filaments, leaving the tubes empty. Once more it was only in the trunk from which the branches arose.