Again crawling with Ku-La’s one hand hooked into his belt, Furtig worked into the left-hand passage. If they moved now behind the walls of separate rooms there was no way of telling it, for there were no gratings. And distance in the dark and under such circum-stances was as hard to measure as time. The duct ran straight, with no turns or side cuttings. Furtig could not help but believe they must be heading back to-ward the lairs used by his own kind.
He tried to tap that directional sense which had guided him so surely before. But whether he had exhausted his talent, if he had any special talent in message sending, he did not know. One thing only was certain: He had no strong urge in any direction and could only crawl unguided through the dark.
Far ahead there was a glimmer of light. Another grating? He did not greatly care, he merely wanted to reach it, the need for light as much an ache within him as hunger or thirst. As he advanced, Furtig was sure it was stronger than the weak glimmers of the other gratings. They reached the opening, which seemed, to eyes accustomed to the black of the ducts, a blaze of light. It was a grating, but one giving on the open, even though they must be many levels into the earth. Rain was falling without, and the dampness blew through the grating to bead their fur.
Here a well had been cored through the lairs, large enough so that with the haze of the rain they could hardly see the far side. What they could make out of the walls showed them smooth, unbroken by more than gratings. Only in one place the smooth wall was blackened, broken with a hold of jagged edges.
Furtig thought of lightning and how it could rend even rocks if it struck true. Also of the lightning of the Demon weapon. Perhaps that could not have caused that hole. But suppose the Demons had similar but greater weapons, ones of such force as to knock holes through stone walls? Like giant rumblers? The old legends of how the Demons had turned upon each other in the end, rending, killing—this might mark such a battle.
On the other hand, that hole could well give them entrance into the very parts of the lairs they wanted to gain. Furtig was heartily tired of crawling through the ducts. There was something about being pent in these narrow spaces which seemed to darken his mind so that he could not think clearly any more. He want-ed out, and the fresh air beyond was a restorative moving him to action.
“But this place I know!” Ku-La cried. “I have seen it—not from here, but from above—“ He crowded against Furtig, pushing the other away from the grating, trying to turn his head at some impossible angle to see straight up. “No, I cannot mark it from here. But there are places above from which one can see into this hole.”
Furtig was not sure he wanted Ku-La to recognize their whereabouts. It would have been far better had they found a place he knew. But he did not say that. Instead he pushed Ku-La away in turn to see more clearly; he wanted another look at the wall break. Yes, it was not too far above the floor of the well. He was sure they could reach it. And he set to work on the grating.
As he levered and pulled, he made his suggestion about going through the break.
“A good door for us,” Ku-La agreed.
The grating loosened, and he wriggled through into the open. He was glad .for once to have the rain wet his fur, though normally that would have been a discomfort he would have tried to avoid. He dropped easily, and water splashed about his feet. That gathered and ran in thin streams to drain through openings in the base of the walls.
Furtig signalled for Ku-La, turning his head from side to side watchfully. Above, as the other had said, there were rows of windows. And he could see, higher still, one of those bridges crossing from the wall against which he stood to a point directly opposite. Or had once crossed, for only two thirds of it were still in existence, and those were anchored to the buildings. The middle of the span was gone.
There were no signs of life. Rain deadened scent.
However, they would have to take their chances. Furtig tugged the cord which he had made fast above for the second time. Ku-La descended by its aid, the rain washing the crust of dried blood from his matted fur .as he came.
Those windows bothered Furtig. He had the feeling which was so often with him in the lairs, that he was being watched. And he hated to be in the open even for so short a time. But Ku-La could not make that crossing in a couple of leaps. He hobbled, and Furtig had to set hand under his shoulder to sup-port him or he would not have been able to make the journey at all. It seemed long, far too long, before they reached the break and somehow scrambled up and into that hole.
Ayana lay pent in the web, staring up at the small visa-screen on the cabin bulkhead. So she had lain through many practice landings. But this was different—this was real, not in a mock-up of the ship while safely based on Elhorn II, where one always knew it was a game, even if every pressure and possible danger would be enacted during that training.
Now that difference was a cold lump within her, a lump which had grown with every moment of time since they had snapped out of hyper to enter this sys-tem. Were the old calculations really to be trusted? Was this the home planet from which her species had lifted into space at the beginning of man’s climb to the stars?
When one watched the histro-tapes, listened to the various pieced-together records, one could believe. But to actually take off into the unknown and seek that which had become a legend—
Yet she had been wildly excited when her name had appeared with the chosen. She had gone through all the months of testing, training, of mental conditioning, in order to lie here and watch a strange solar sys- tem spread on the visa-screen in a cramped cabin— know that they would flame down, if all went well, on a world which had not been visited for centuries of planet time. ,
She saw the shift in the protect web hung above hers. Tan must be restlessly trying to change position again, though the webs gave little room for such play.
Even their rigorous training had not schooled that restlessness out of Tan. From childhood he had al- ways been of the explorer breed, needing to see what lay beyond, but never satisfied with the beyond when he reached it, already looking once more to the horizon. That was what had made life with Tan exciting— on Elhorn; what had drawn her after him into the project. But what can be a virtue can also be a danger. She knew of old that Tan must sometimes be curbed, by someone close enough for him to respond to.
Ayana studied the bulging webbing—Tan safe, but for how long? His nature had been channeled, he had been educated as a First-in Scout. Once they had landed, he would take off in the flitter—unless there were direct orders against that. Now Ayana hoped that there would be. She could not understand the deepening depression which gathered as a fog about her. It had begun as they had come out of hyper, growing as she watched the visa-screen. As if those winking points of light which were the world awaiting them marked instead the fingers of a great dark hand stretching forth to gather them in. Ayana shivered. Imagination, that was her weak point, as she had been told in the final sifting when she had almost been turned down for the crew. It was only because she was an apt balance for Tan, she sometimes thought unhappily, that she had been selected at all.
“Well—there they are!” There was no note of depression in Tan’s voice. “So far the route equations have proved out.”
Why could she not share his triumph? For it was a triumph. They had had so little to guide them in this search. The First Ship people had deliberately destroyed their past. A search of more than a hundred years had produced only a few points of reference, which the computer had woven into the information for this voyage.
Five hundred planet years had passed since the First Ships—there had been two—had landed on El-horn. What mystery had made those in them deliberately destroy not only all references to the world from which they had lifted but some of the instruments to make those ships spaceworthy? The colonists had suffered a slow decline into a primitive existence, which they had actually welcomed, resisting with vigorous fanaticism any attempt by the next generation to discover what lay behind their migration.