Unhappily the way did not slope upward but ran straight, in some places so narrow that they had to turn sidewise and scrape through between jutting points of rock. But the air was a moving current, and it lacked the strange quality of that in the alien ways.
Logan sniffed again. “Not too good.”
It was back, the musky taint that had been strong before they came out into the cavern of the river. Musky taint, and damp-yet Hosteen was sure they had not circled back. They could not have returned to the beach beyond the wharf.
The feefraw had continued to flutter behind. Now its mewling became a mournful wail, and it flew with blind recklessness between the two men and vanished ahead down the passage. Hosteen pushed the pace as they came out into a gray twilight. He snapped off the torch, advanced warily, and looked down onto a scene so weird that for a moment he could almost believe he was caught in a dream nightmare.
They were perched in a rounded pocket in the wall of another cavern-but a cavern with such dimensions that perhaps only an aerial survey could chart it. Here, too, was water-streams, ponds, even a small lake. But the water was housed between walls. The floor of the cavern, as far as he could see in the grayish light, was a giant game board. Walled squares enclosed a pond and a small scrap of surrounding land, or land through which a stream wandered. For what purpose? There were no signs of cultivated vegetation such as a farm field might show.
“Pens.” Logan’s inspiration clicked from possibility to probability.
Those geometrically correct enclosures could be pens-like the home corrals of a holding in the plains. But pens to confine what-and why?
They squatted together trying to note any sign of movement in the nearest enclosures. The vegetation there was coarse, reedy stuff, as pallidly gray as the light, or low-growing plants with thick, unwholesome-looking fleshy leaves. The whole scene was repellent, not enticing as the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had been.
“This has been here a long time,” Logan observed. “Look at that wall there-“
Hosteen sighted on the section Logan indicated. The walls had collapsed, giving access to two other enclosures. Yes, and beyond was another tumbled wall. The pens, if pens they had been, were no longer separated. He stood up and unhooked the distance lenses from his belt. The light was poor, but perhaps he could see what lay beyond their immediate vicinity.
He swept the glasses slowly across the territory from right to left. Pens, water, growing stuff, the same as those that lay below them. There was a difference in the type of vegetation in several places, he thought. And one or two of the enclosures were bare and desertlike, either by design or the failure of the odd “crop” once grown there.
The walls were not the only evidence of once purposeful control, Hosteen discovered, as his distance lenses caught a shadowy pile at the far left. It was a building of some sort, he believed, and said as much to Logan. The other, taking the lenses in turn, confirmed his guess.
“Head for that?” he wanted to know.
It was a logical goal. At the same time, surveying those “pens,” Hosteen was aware of a strange reluctance to venture down into the walled squares and oblongs, to force a way through the sickly and sinister-looking growth they held. And Logan put the same squeamishness into words.
“Don’t like to trail through that somehow-“
Hosteen took back the glasses and studied the distant building. The murky dusk of the cavern’s atmosphere made it somehow unsubstantial when one attempted to pin down a definite line of wall or a roof or even the approximate size of the structure. This was like trying to see clearly an object that lay beyond a misty, water-splashed window. And perhaps that was part of the trouble-the dank air here was not far removed from fog.
There was certainly no sign of any movement about the place, just as there was none in the pens, save the ripple of some wandering stream. Hosteen did not believe that intelligence lingered here, though perhaps other life might. And the building might not only explain the purpose of the cavern but also show them some form of escape. Those who had built this place had surely had another mode of entrance than the narrow, ragged rock fault that had led the settlers in.
“We’ll try to reach that.” When he voiced those words, Hosteen was surprised at his own dubious tone.
Logan laughed. “Devil-devil country,” he commented. “I’d like it better talkin’ this one with some of our boys backin’ our play. Let’s hope our long-toothed, three-eyed whatsit isn’t sittin’ down there easy-like just waitin’ for supper to walk within grabbin’ range, and me without even a knife to do any protestin’ about bein’ the main course. Waitin’ never made a thing easier though. Shall we blast off for orbit?”
He swung over the lip of the drop with Hosteen following. Their boots thudded into the loose soil as they fell free for the last foot or so and found themselves in one of the walled patches where the barriers were at least ten feet tall. Had it not been for broken areas, they might not have been able to make their way from one pocket to the next, for what remained of the walls was slick-smooth.
Twice they had to form human ladders to win out of pens where the boundaries were still intact. And in one of those they discovered another bony remnant from the past-a skull topping a lace of vertebra and ribs, the whole forming skeletal remains of a creature Hosteen could not identify. There was a long narrow head with a minute brain pan, the jaws tapering to a point, in the upper portion of which was still socketed a horn, curving up.
Logan caught at that and gave it a twist. It broke loose in his hand, and he held aloft a wicked weapon some ten inches long, sharp as any yoris fang and probably, in its day, even more dangerous.
“Another whatsit.”
“Someone was collecting,” Hosteen guessed, walking around that rack of bones. He thought that was the reason for the pens-the water. Just as the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens had represented a botanical collection culled from at least a hundred different worlds for their beauty and fragrance, here another collection had been kept-reptiles, animals-Who knew? This could have existed as some sort of zoo or perhaps stockyard. Yet where the gardens had flourished over the centuries or eons after the disappearance of the gardeners, this had not.
“We ought to be glad of that,” was Logan’s quick reply to the Terran’s comment. “I don’t fancy bein’ hunted when I can’t do any markin’ up in return. This would make a good huntin’ trophy.” He balanced the horn in his hand, then thrust its point deep into the empty sheath where his knife had once ridden. “Bet Krotag’s never seen anythin’ like it.”
“Those broken walls-“ Hosteen sat side by side with his half-brother on the unbreached one of the skeleton enclosure. “Suppose whoever was in charge here left suddenly-“
“And the stock got hungry and decided to do something about it?” Logan asked. “Could be. But just think of things that could smash through somethin’ as tough as this!” He slapped his hand on the surface under him. “That would be like seein’ a crusher alive, wild, and rarin’ to blast! Glad we came late-this would be no place to ‘first ship’ when that breakout was goin’ on.”
They kept on their uneven course over walls and through pens. The tablets of emergency rations they had chewed from time to time gave them energy and put off the need for sleep. But Hosteen knew that there was a point past which it was dangerous to depend upon that artificial strength, and they were fast approaching the limit. If they could find refuge in the building ahead, then they could hole up for a space, long enough to get normal rest. Otherwise, the bolstering drug could fail at some crucial moment and send them into helpless collapse.
On top of the last wall they paused again, while Hosteen turned the beam of the torch on the waiting building. Between their present perch and that there was a line of slim, smooth posts set in the earth. But if they had been put there to support a fence, the rest of that barrier had long since disappeared. And as far as the two explorers could see, the way to’ the wedge-shaped door in the massive two-story structure was open.
Slipping from the wall, they were well out toward those posts when Hosteen halted and flung out an arm quickly to catch at Logan. Memories of safeguards on remote worlds stirred. Because one could not see a barrier was no reason to believe there was none there. If the creatures confined back in the pens had burst through the walls, the keepers of this place must have possessed some form of defense and protection to handle accidents. A forcefield now, generated between those poles, he warned. Logan nodded.