“Nothin’ there!”
Logan, also? Had he heard, sensed, believed something had been out there?
“To the left!” Logan’s hand was on his wrist now, bringing the torch beam about, to shine it directly into a crevice in the ground. Of course! The thing must be crouching there, just waiting for them to draw opposite and then-!
Bare rock-empty crevice, nothing!
“There-there has to be somethin’.” Logan’s words were marked with the determination to hold his emotions in check. “They had a sonic barrier for protection, didn’t they?”
“Once they had it,” replied Hosteen.
Ghosts-spirits? The ghosts of the builders of this road, the artist who had carved that dragon mask-or of the weird life that had lived on this sun-rusted plain from which the builders protected themselves in their journeyings?
He started on, Logan matching him step by step. They started slowly and then their speed built, as the need to get past all those rock outcrops, all those sinister crevices and dips, ate at their self-control.
Croaking-or was it husky breathing? There-! Hosteen was sure this time he had spotted the danger point, not too far ahead in a shadow pool by a hillock. He gripped a grenade in one hand, ready, brought the torch up with the quick flick of a stunner draw, aiming the light as he might the stupefying ray.
Rock-only rock.
“Steady!” Hosteen was not even aware he had given himself that command aloud.
If his imagination was at work, perhaps he could bend it to his own purposes. Suppose there was some living thing out there playing games, able to project an impression of its presence where it was not in order to confuse enemies? Hosteen’s training of the team had made him open-minded in matters dealing with mental relationships between men and animals-and, who knows, perhaps some of the same techniques could work between man and alien?
That faculty, which had tied him to Surra, Hing, and Baku, in part to the stallion Rain and other non-mutant-bred living creatures, could he use it to detect what was behind this nerve-breaking attack? Something assured him that this was an attack, far more subtle and devastating than any physical thrust out of the night.
Just as a blindfolded man might feel his way cautiously through unknown territory, so did Hosteen reach out to try to contact what lay waiting out there. Intelligence-was he dealing with intelligence, alien but still to be reckoned so by human standards? Or did he front some protective device set up to warn off intruders just as the sonic barrier had been erected to protect the rulers of the pen cavern?
A touch of what-awareness? The Terran was sure he had met that, so sure that he paused and slowly pivoted toward the dark space from which that twinge of contact had seemed to come. Was it his imagination that supplied the rest? He could never have offered any proof, but from that instant Hosteen believed that he had had a momentary mental meeting with someone or something that had once lived in concert with the team.
And he believed it so firmly that he strove to hold to that thread, to impress upon that unknown creature his desire for a meeting, as he could in part impose his will on the team. Only, the frail and fleeting contact was; snapped almost as quickly as it was made.
What flooded in to follow was the anger of an aroused guardian or an embattled survivor-an attack through mental and emotional gates so intense that, had it persisted, perhaps both men would have broken under it.
Shadows boiled, twisted, crawled, slunk in upon them. The light beam stabbed each menace into nothingness, only to have another take its place. Logan called out hoarsely, snatched up stones, clawed loose handfuls of soil to hurl them at that invisible menace now ringing them in. And it built up and up!
There was rage in this-as if behind some unclimbable barrier the three-eyed monster of the caverns raced back and forth, eager to get at them. And it was when that impression grew on Hosteen that he gasped out an order:
“Stand still!”
Logan froze, his arm half up to throw a rock.
“We go on-“
Hosteen obeyed his own order, his legs moving stiffly, his active mind arguing against such folly. There-there was something crawling across the path just ahead- waiting-ready-To the left-two-converging on the strip through which the men must pass within moments. They were surrounded.
Logan shuffled along. Sweep, sweep-the torch opened the secrets of shadows. But the pressure against the intruders was reaching the point past which Hosteen was afraid he could not hold.
With a snarl Logan faced left, his hand went to his belt, and he lobbed one of the grenades into the dark. The resulting burst of light left them blinded for a second or two.
Then-nothing! As there had been the explosion, so now there was an answering burst of energy in their minds. Then, only empty land under the night sky-a landscape now without any life in it.
Shaken, they stood breathing hard with rib-stretching gasps and then began to run. Again their road approached the foot of a mountain, and they could reach that before the sun rose.
Underfoot, the trail was rising slowly but steadily above the surface of the ground. When Hosteen turned the light on that road, they saw that now it was fashioned of the black substance used elsewhere to coat tunnel walls.
They were well above the general level of the valley when the road ended in a wide wedge of black, the narrow end of which touched against a solid cliff wall in which there was no discernible break. To all their inspection with hand and torch, there was no door there, no way ahead. This was the end of the trail they had been following for so long.
“A landin’ mat for ‘copters, d’ you suppose?” Logan asked after they had made a second circling exploration of the wedge. He was sitting cross-legged on the smooth black surface, his hands resting on his knees. “What now-do we start back?”
Privately the Terran doubted if they could now make that return trip before the day broke. Though they had not come so far in actual distance, their struggle with the shadows had been exhausting. He knew that fatigue of both mind and body rode him, made him flinch at the thought of back-tracking. Yet if they wanted to live, they must do that before sunrise.
He had hunkered down on the pavement and was flashing his torch back and forth across its surface for no conscious reason. Then his eyes sighted the pattern there, and his dull mind became alert. There was a circular strip of glassy, glossy black, which began at the point where the road met the wedge and then spiraled around and around until it ended in a circle just large enough for a man to stand upon.
Why he went into action then he could never afterwards explain. It was all a part of the weird influence of this place. He only knew that this he must do at once.
Crossing to the beginning of that spiral, he began to walk along the route it marked, around and around, approaching the center point and concentrating upon keeping his boots firmly planted on the slick surface, in no way touching the duller borders.
Dimly he was aware of Logan asking questions, demanding answers. But that sound, the words, meant nothing now. The most important thing in the world was to walk that path without deviation or error. The circle in the center could not be rightly entered in any other way, and it was a door.
Door? demanded another part of his brain. How? Why?
Hosteen fought down all questions. To walk the spiral slowly, cautiously, with all his powers of concentration, with no careless boot-toe touch beyond its border, he had to fit one foot almost directly before the other, balance like a man walking the narrowest of mountain ledges. This way only was it safe. Safe? He dismissed that query also.
Hosteen was in the circle now, turning to face the way they had come, toward those other dark mountains under which must lie the cavern of the pens, all the rest of the holdings of the forgotten alien invaders. Then he stood waiting. For what? clamored common sense.
Dark-and the sensation of being totally free from the boundaries set by time and space and everything mankind used to measure distance in two dimensions.
Then light and another path to be walked, another spiral, this glowing-not to be taken by one booted foot set carefully ahead of the other but mentally. And with the same concentration he had given to his action on the wedge, so did he now do this. He was at its center, with another kind of light rising in a haze all about him.