Ayyar memory supplied Naill with no picture to match that clicking pace. It was louder again, coming now from the other lip of the ravine. Either the sentry was making a circuit of the gully—or there were two of them.
The wise thing might be to break cover while there was only one sentry—or pair of sentries. But neither of the fugitives dared try that. They would be blinded by the sun, unable to either fight or run. Some flying thing was gliding down to skim just above the growth in the gully.
Hoorurr? Naill, for an instant of time, held a very forlorn scrap of hope and so was tricked into a half betrayal. He tried thought-contact with that flyer. And in return met a force so outside his comprehension that it was a monstrous blow, hurling him back against the curve of the tree-trunk wall. Not a flying thing, he thought groggily, but an intelligence, and entity using a smaller and weaker thing to discover—him!
“No!” Perhaps Naill screamed that; he could not tell—perhaps he only resisted that invasion, with mind alone. But he was no longer in the tree. He was out in a space he could not have described in any words he knew—confronting a being, or an intelligence, that had no form, only force and alien purpose, a being to which he and his kind were an enigma to be discarded because they did not fit the pattern the being created.
And it was the very fact of that alienness that was Naill’s shield of defense now. For he sensed that there was something in him that baffled the enemy, struck into the very heart of that overwhelming confidence.
“Ky-Kyc!” The old battle cry was on Naill’s lips.
“Naill!”
His head was against the petrified wood. Ashla’s hands rested on his shoulders. Her eyes held to his as if by the power of that intent gaze alone she had pulled him back from the place where he had faced the Enemy.
“It stirs! It knows!” Her features were set, stern. For a long moment her gaze continued to hold his as if she thus searched into his mind, seeking some thought, some feeling that should not be within him. Then her head moved in a small nod.
“The old truth stands! That may kill, but it cannot break us—even when one is Naill-Ayyar instead of true Ayyar.”
And he answered strangely, out of thought that was not yet clear. “Perhaps because of Naill-Ayyar, not in spite of Naill.”
She caught his confused meaning. “If so—that is well. Made to lose old knowledge, we should gain some measure of return. But now . . . that knows of us!”
Naill edged along the trunk’s interior. He did not know whether he could sight either of those sentries—that which clicked, or that which flew. Ashla lifted a hand in warning, pointing up.
The winged scout or spy was still above and now it gave voice. Not with the carrying hoot or beak-snapping of the quarrin, but in a long, shuddering wail, more suitable for stormy skies and high winds than for the sunlight of open day. And—across a piece of open sky—Naill saw it fly. Saw—what? He was not sure. The light was too strong for his eyes. And that thing could almost be a drift of cloud. He only knew it was glittering white and its form hard to distinguish.
“Not a bird . . . I think.” He qualified his first guess.
“It is a Watcher and a Seeker . . . ” Ashla brushed the back of her hand across her forehead. “Always only bits of what should be known. In itself it is not to be feared—only that it is an extension of That Other. . . . ”
“Listen!” Naill shaped the word with his lips, afraid that even a threat of whisper could reach the sentry. The clicking—from the opposite side of the gully. . . . He eyed the brush about the mouth of the tree trunk, measured the distances and the height of the growths, before he began to tug at the lashing that fastened his injured arm across his chest.
Ashla would have protested, but he signed what he would try and she loosened the tough ties of grass, leaving his arm free. Naill began to squirm a few inches at a time into the open, out of the protecting hollow of the tree.
No clicking now—the sentry had passed, was at the farther end of the gully. But Naill had discovered his spy post, was belly-flat at a point from which he could see a small portion of the rim. And now—that click was returning. Slowly Naill pulled down a straggling branch to form a screen between him and the patroller. With his green skin, his clothing meant to be camouflage in the forest, he believed he did not have to fear detection from above as long as he remained quiet.
It came into view and Naill stared unbelievingly. This was no monster from Janusan past, no alien nightmare. It was something he had seen before—many times! And yet, when his first bewilderment had vanished, he was conscious of small details that were wrong. Before he could count to ten the sentry had vanished past Naill’s vision point.
A space-suited off-worlder—walking with the jerky gait of anyone enclosed in the cumbersome covering, the clicking sound coming from the magnetic plates set in the boot soles—an off-worlder in the common rig from any star ship. And yet there were differences about that suit. The whole thing was heavier, with more bulk. And the helmet had the Fors-Genild hump at the back of the neck. The Fors-Genild had been replaced years ago. Naill tried to remember back to the days when he had had free range of his father’s ship. They had had Hammackers on every suit. Why, you only saw the Fors-Genilds now in museum collections of outmoded equipment. That suit could be a hundred years old!
He had to be sure—know that this was not some hallucination induced by the sun and his own faulty day-sight. Naill remained where he was, listening eagerly for the return click of those boots on the rock, thinking furiously. Why would the patroller be wearing a space suit on a planet where all conditions were favorable for his life form—because that was the suit of a Terran, or Terran-descended, explorer.
Click—click. . . . Naill raised his head as far as he could without moving out from behind his brush screen. Fors-Genild all right! And now that his attention was drawn to that anachronism, he spotted others. The suit was old! No modern planet hopper, no matter how out of funds, would entrust his life to a suit from that far in the past. Why, he would not be able to service it, perhaps not even be able to operate some of its archaic equipment.
Which meant . . . ?
Chilled inside in spite of the heat that reached him, Naill waited until those clicks grew fainter and then wriggled back into the tree trunk.
“What is it?” Ashla asked.
Naill hesitated. Oddly enough, he could accept in part that flying thing which was the tool of a reaching alien intelligence. He could accept his own physical change, the presence of Ayyar memory to share his mind, better than he could accept the fact that a hundred-year-old space suit was methodically tramping about the edge of a gully in this wasteland. Was it because the powers of the Iftin were alien and so could be accepted as a believing child could accept the wonders of an old tale—while science was represented by that marching suit—an object which was concrete and did not deal with memories or emotions but with stark fact—and here that fact was . . . wrong?
The suit marched—but what marched inside it? Naill had not been able from where he lay to distinguish any features behind the faceplate of the helmet. All at once he had an odd and completely disturbing vision of an unoccupied suit, animated by what could not be seen or felt, but which obeyed as the flying thing had obeyed.
“What is it?” Ashla crept to his side, her hand on his good shoulder. “What did you see?”
“A space suit—marching.” Naill supplied the truth.
“A space suit. . . . Who?”
Naill shook his head. “What?” he corrected. “It is an old suit, very old.”
“Old? They reported once that a hunting party from the port had been lost. . . .”
“Old. No hunter would wear a space suit, no crewman would have to wear one on Janus. This is an Arth planet, entirely suitable for Terran-descended life forms.”
“I do not understand.”
“I do—in part,” Naill told her. “That which is here . . . has another servant—once off-world, but now his . . . or its.”
“In two hours the sun will be gone.” Ashla looked out of the tree trunk, measuring the planet shadows as they lay on the ground. “In the dusk we shall be the favored ones. That suit—it will be clumsy. What wears it cannot move fast across broken ground.”