It all seemed to have happened in an instant. He ran on, wondering. That odd sensation, switching on and off—an alert signal? An alarm to which even the animals here were conditioned to respond immediately, in a predetermined manner, a “take cover!” that cleared the surface level of anything capable of reacting to it in moments . . . it indicated a degree of efficiency and preparedness he wouldn’t have attributed to these asteroid dwellers. What sort of emergencies could they expect here?
He saw no more fleeing beasts, or any beasts at all; and in perhaps another minute the tingling irritation in his nerves had ended. The space lock section couldn’t be far away. He’d been cutting across the slopes, avoiding the leisurely winding and intersecting paths along which he’d come with Elisabeth, and keeping to cover when it didn’t slow him down. At last then, coming out of a grove of trees on the crest of one of the little hills, he saw the administration building ahead—or rather one corner of it, warm brown, edged with gleaming black, the rest concealed behind trees. There was no one in sight, but he moved cautiously now, staying within the shrubbery. A hundred feet on, he came to a point which overlooked the landing area beneath the space lock. The Prideful Sue’s skiff stood in the center of the area, entry port open. Otherwise the section looked deserted.
Above the skiff nothing showed but the simulated Earth sky. If the space lock through the energy carriers englobing the asteroid had been activated, it would have been visible—a ring of frozen fire from below, a glowing cylinder from where Harold stood, the cylinder’s thickness depending on the degree to which the lock was expanded. Undoubtedly it could be expanded enough to let in the Prideful Sue, and undoubtedly Hiskey had just that in mind. But whatever else he might have accomplished so far, he hadn’t yet got around to bringing down the ship.
The skiff wasn’t large, but eight or nine men with raiding gear—about half the crew—could have been crammed in with McNulty and left waiting in concealment until they received Hiskey’s signal to emerge and go into action. The open entry lock indicated they’d already received the signal, were now inside the administration building. In other words, at some point within the past few minutes the attack on the asteroid had begun. Barnes, the second Rilf, and the rest of the crew were still on the ship. If they joined the group on the asteroid, the situation might become nearly hopeless. As things stood, it seemed quite bad enough, but at least there’d been no sign as yet of the Rilf toziens. It was possible that if Jake Hiskey met no significant resistance from Alston’s people, he would prefer not to turn this into a killing operation.
But he’ll want to get me in any case, Harold thought. To keep me from interfering . . .
They hadn’t had time to try to locate him with scanners, but somebody might have been posted outside the administration building to ambush him if he showed up here. The most likely spot for a watcher seemed the cluster of trees and bushes which screened the building.
A blue and golden bird twice the size of a pigeon burst out of the undergrowth six feet ahead and launched itself upwards with a strong beat of wings. Startled—that might easily have advertised his approach—Harold dropped to a deep crouch, glancing after the bird. It rose swiftly to a point about thirty feet above the ground. There something struck and destroyed it.
It seemed as abrupt as an explosion. The flying shape changed to sprays of blood and colorful ribbons and rags which were slashed and scattered again and again in the same instant, then left to fall back to earth. So it was a killing operation after all, and McNulty had turned loose his toziens. Not, of course, all of them. There were thousands packed away in his thick nonhuman thorax; and only a small fraction of that number were required to sweep the surface of the asteroid and any sections of the interior open to intrusion clear of animal life large enough to attract their attention. They could have been released only moments ago or he would have been made aware of their presence—as he was aware of it now. An eerie whispering about him, now here, now there, as the toziens darted down in turn in their invisible speed towards this living flesh, sensed the Rilf drug which protected him as it protected all those who manned the Prideful Sue, and swerved away. But everyone else on the asteroid who had not found shelter had died or was dying in these seconds.
Starting forwards again, he shut that thought away. Jake Hiskey and McNulty, having begun the slaughter, would finish it. They’d be in the control room at present, securing their hold on the asteroid. That done, they’d bring in the ship and start looking for holed-up survivors.
* * *
The man Hiskey had selected to act as lookout at the building was Tom Connick. Not the brightest, but an excellent shot and normally steady as a rock—a good choice as an assassin. He stood, screened by a thicket, thirty feet from what seemed to be the only entrance into the building, a gun ready in his hand. They knew Harold wasn’t armed; and if he wanted to get into the administration building, he’d have to come past the thicket, within easy range for Connick. It must have seemed as simple as that.
McNulty’s toziens, however, had provided a complication. Connick’s usual calm was not in evidence. He kept making small abrupt motions, bobbing his head, flinching right or left, jerking up the gun and putting it down again. Harold could appreciate his feelings. He, too, was still drawing the interest of the invisible swarm; every few seconds there would be a momentary indication that a tozien was nearby, and each time his flesh crawled though he knew, as Connick did, that theoretically they were protected from the little horrors. The thought remained that some tozien or other might not realize in time that they were protected. But at present that was all to his advantage. Connick darted glances this way and that, now and then half turning to see what was in back of him; but he was looking for the wrong kind of danger. So in the end Harold rose quietly from the undergrowth ten steps behind Connick with a sizable rock in either hand.
He lobbed the left-hand rock gently upwards. It lifted in a steep arc above Connick’s head and came down in front of him. And, for a moment, Connick’s nerves snapped. He uttered a frightened sound, a stifled squeal, jabbed the gun forward, shoulders hunching, attention frozen by the deadly dark moving thing which had appeared out of nowhere. It was doubtful whether he even heard the brief rustle of the thicket as Harold came up behind him. Then the edge of the second rock smashed through his skull.
And now there was a gun for Harold, and for Jake Hiskey one man less he might presently send out to look for surviving asteroid people. Harold found a recharger for the gun in one of Connick’s pockets. There’d been some question in his mind whether there mightn’t be a second man around, though he had studied the vicinity thoroughly before moving in on Connick. But nothing stirred, so Connick’s death had not been observed. He could expect to find somebody else stationed inside the building entrance, as a standard precaution.
He started quickly towards the building, then checked. On the far side of the space lock area there was a faint greenish shimmering in the air, which hadn’t been there before. Harold stared at it sharply, looked around. Behind him, too, much closer, barely a hundred feet away—like a nearly invisible curtain hanging from the simulated sky, fitted against the irregularities of the ground below. He pointed Connick’s gun into the air, triggered it for an instant. There was a momentary puff of brightness as the charge hit the immaterial curtain. More distantly to the right, and beyond the administration building to the left, was the same shimmering aerial effect.
Energy screens. Activated within the past few minutes. By whom? They enclosed the space lock section, boxed it in. If they’d been thrown up before the tozien swarm appeared in the section, then McNulty’s weapon was still confined here unless it had found an entry to the asteroid’s interior from within the building. And the screens might have gone up just in time to do that; he’d been too involved in his wary approach to the building area to have noticed what happened behind him. There was suddenly some real reason for hope . . . because this fitted in with the silently pervasive alert signal which had come so quickly after his warning to Sally Alston, with concealed doors opening and closing on the surface and animals streaming off it into the interior. The asteroid had defenses, and somebody was using them—which did not make it any less urgent to do something about the Prideful Sue’s crew and its Rilf allies before the defenses were broken down.