away by a fierce heat and the very soil and rock turned into a simmering
puping.
A laser, Enoch thought. The alien’s weapon was a laser, packing a
terrific punch in a narrow beam of light.
He gathered himself together and made a short rush up the hillside,
throwing himself prone behind a twisted birch clump.
The air made the frying sound again and there was an instant’s blast of
heat and the ozone once again. Over on the reverse slope a patch of ground
was steaming. Ash floated down and settled on Enoch’s arms. He flashed a
quick glance upward and saw that the top half of the birch clump was gone,
sheared off by the laser and reduced to ash. Tiny coils of smoke rose lazily
from the severed stumps.
No matter what it may have done, or failed to do, back there at the
station, the alien now meant business. It knew that it was cornered and it
was playing vicious.
Enoch hupled against the ground and worried about Lucy. He hoped that
she was safe. The little fool should have stayed out of it. This was no
place for her. She shouldn’t even have been out in the woods at this time of
day. She’d have old Hank out looking for her again, thinking she was
kidnapped. He wondered what the hell had gotten into her.
The dusk was deepening. Only the far peak of the treetops caught the
last rays of the sun. A coolness came stealing up the ravine from the valley
far below and there was a damp, lush smell that came out of the ground. From
some hipen hollow a whippoorwill called out mournfully.
Enoch darted out from behind the birch clump and rushed up the slope.
He reached the fallen log he’d picked as a barricade and threw himself
behind it. There was no sign of the alien and there was not another shot
from the laser gun.
Enoch studied the ground ahead. Two more rushes, one to that small pile
of rock and the next to the edge of the boulder area itself, and he’d be on
top of the hiding alien. And once he got there, he wondered, what was he to
do.
Go in and rout the alien out, of course.
There was no plan that could be made, no tactics that could be laid out
in advance. Once he got to the edge of the boulders, he must play it all by
ear, taking advantage of any break that might present itself He was at a
disadvantage in that he must not kill the alien, but must capture it instead
and drag it back, kicking and screaming, if need be, to the safety of the
station.
Perhaps, here in the open air, it could not use its stench defense as
effectively as it had in the confines of the station, and that, he thought,
might make it easier. He examined the clump of boulders from one edge to the
other and there was nothing that might help him to locate the alien.
Slowly he began to snake around, getting ready for the next rush up the
slope, moving carefully so that no sound would betray him.
Out of the tail of his eye he caught the moving shadow that came
flowing up the slope. Swiftly he sat up, swinging the rifle. But before he
could bring the muzzle round, the shadow was upon him, bearing him back,
flat upon the ground, with one great splay-fingered hand clamped upon his
mouth.
“Ulysses!” Enoch gurgled, but the fearsome shape only, hissed at him in
a warning sound.
Slowly the weight shifted off him and the hand slid from his mouth.
Ulysses gestured toward the boulder pile and Enoch noped.
Ulysses crept closer and lowered his head toward Enoch’s. He whispered
with his mouth inches from the Earthman’s ear: “The Talisman! He has the
Talisman!”
“The Talisman!” Enoch cried aloud, trying to strangle off the cry even
as he made it, remembering that he should make no sound to let the watcher
up above know where they might be.
From the ridge above a loose stone rattled as it was dislodged and
began to roll, bouncing down the slope. Enoch hunkered closer to the ground
behind the fallen log.
“Down!” he ‘shouted to Ulysses. “Down! He has a gun.”
But Ulysses’ hand gripped him by the shoulder.
“Enoch!” he cried. “Enoch, look!”
Enoch jerked himself erect and atop the pile of rock, dark against the
skyline, were two grappling figures.
“Lucy!” he shouted.
For one of them was Lucy and the other was the alien.
She sneaked up on him, he thought. The damn little fool, she sneaked up
on him! While the alien had been distracted with watching the slope, she had
slipped up close and then had tackled him. She had a club of some sort in
her hand, an old dead branch, perhaps, and it was raised above her head,
ready for a stroke, but the alien had a grip upon her arm and she could not
strike.
“Shoot,” said Ulysses, in a flat, dead voice.
Enoch raised the rifle and had trouble with the sights because of the
deepening darkness. And they were so close together! They were too close
together.
“Shoot!” yelled Ulysses.
“I can’t,” sobbed Enoch. “It’s too dark to shoot.”
“You have to shoot,” Ulysses said, his voice tense and hard. “You have
to take the chance.”
Enoch raised the rifle once again and the sights seemed clearer now and
he knew the trouble was not so much the darkness as that shot which he had
missed back there in the world of the honking thing that had strode its
world on stilts. If he had missed then, he could as well miss now.
The bead came to rest upon the head of the ratlike creature, and then
the head bobbed away, but was bobbing back again.
“Shoot!” Ulysses yelled.
Enoch squeezed the trigger and the rifle coughed and up atop the rocks
the creature stood for a second with only half a head and with tattered
gouts of flesh flying briefly like dark insects zooming against the
half-light of the western sky.
Enoch dropped the gun and sprawled upon the earth, clawing his fingers
into the thin and mossy soil, sick with the thought of what could have
happened, weak with the thankfulness that it had not happened, that the
years on that fantastic rifle range had at last paid off.
How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our
destiny. For the rifle range had been a senseless thing, as senseless as a
billiard table or a game of cards-designed for one thing only, to please the
keeper of the station. And yet the hours he’d spent there had shaped toward
this hour and end, to this single instant on this restricted slope of
ground.
The sickness drained away into the earth beneath him and a peace came
stealing in upon him-the peace of trees and woodland soil and the first
faint hush of nightfall. As if the sky and stars and very space itself had
leaned close above him and was whispering his essential oneness with them.
And it seemed for a moment that he had grasped the edge of some great truth
and with this truth had come a comfort and a greatness he’d never known
before.
“Enoch,” Ulysses whispered. “Enoch, my brother…”
There was something like a hipen sob in the alien’s voice and he had
never, until this moment, called the Earthman brother.
Enoch pulled himself to his knees and up on the pile of tumbled
boulders was a soft and wondrous light, a soft and gentle light, as if a
giant firefly had turned on its lamp and had not turned it off, but had left
it burning.
The light was moving down across the rocks toward them and he could see
Lucy moving with the light, as if she were walking toward them with a
lantern in her hand.
Ulysses’ hand reached out of the darkness and closed hard on Enoch’s
arm.
“Do you see?” he asked.
“Yes, I see. What is …”
“It is the Talisman,” Ulysses said, enraptured, his breath rasping in
his throat. “And she is our new custodian. The one we’ve hunted through the
years.”
33
You did not become accustomed to it, Enoch told himself as they tramped
up through the woods. There was not a moment you were not aware of it. It
was something that you wanted to hug close against yourself and hold it
there forever, and even when it was gone from you, you’d probably not forget
it, ever.
It was something that was past all description – a mother’s love, a
father’s pride, the adoration of a sweetheart, the closeness of a comrade,
it was all of these and more. It made the farthest distance near and turned
the complex simple and it swept away all fear and sorrow, for all of there