CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The process was like waking from a deep sleep. Hosteen fought a groggy disorientation, became aware of where he was and that he no longer stood in the open on a wedge under a starred sky. Instead, his boots were planted on a clock of glassy material, and around him was another kind of light, a rusty glow that had no visible source unless it was born out of the air.
“Logan!” He demanded an answer, yet knew that none would come. In this place he was alone, alone with the knowledge that his species was not of this place-or time-that he was in strange exile.
The training the Terran had had acted against panic. He had followed an alien road but one that had had purpose-and it had brought him here. Now he must discover where “here” was.
Leaping from the block, Hosteen looked about. He was in a very small room-a room of three walls meeting in sharply angled corners. And those walls were unbroken by any openings of windows or doors. Again panic threatened as he faced the possibility of being imprisoned in this box. There was no spiral path to lead him out, only the block, the three walls, the ceiling over his head, the floor under him. And to his sight, walls, floor, and ceiling were solid.
But eyes were not the only sense organs he possessed. Hosteen approached the nearest wall and ran his finger tips along its slick surface. It was glassy smooth to the touch and a little warm-where he had expected the chill of stone.
He walked the full length of that wall until his fingers pointed into the sharp angle of the corner. Then Hosteen turned along the second. He had reached the mid-point of that when there was a change in the surface not perceptible to the eye. Three depressions appeared, not quite the size or shape of his fingers, since he pushed in with room to spare. But he was reminded of the finger locks used on inner-system planets, locks that would open only to print patterns of their owners’ flesh ridges. If this was such a lock, he had no hope, for the fingers-or appendages-which had set it had long since vanished from Arzor. But the Terran pressed his fingers into those hollows desperately, hoping for but not really expecting action.
A tingling in each of those three fingers, spreading up across the back of his hand, reaching his wrist, now into his forearm. A tingling-or was it a sucking-a pull of strength out of his tendons and muscles to be absorbed into those glassy pits of the wall? Hosteen supported his wrist now with his other hand because, when he tried to withdraw his fingers, he found them gripped in a suction beyond his power to break.
He leaned against the wall, twisting his right wrist with the aid of his other hand, striving to break that contact, feeling strength seep out of him as clearly as if he could watch the draining process in action along every vein, through every finger-tip pore.
Then the wall shivered, shimmered, to break from ceiling to floor. A strip of surface three feet wide where his hand had touched vanished, and he fell through, then crawled out of the triangular box to lie on the floor of another, much larger space. At least he was out of the cage!
Logan! Logan left back there on the plain to await the sun-and the burning death of the Big Dry. Logan! Would he-could he-take the same escape road Hosteen had found?
The Terran wavered to his feet, nursing his right hand and arm against his chest. The skin was pallid, the hand itself numb, and his utmost efforts to move the fingers resulted only in a slight twitching. Heavy and cold, he thrust it inside his shirt against his bare chest. But for a moment he forgot that as he looked around him.
The dusky, reddish light of the box was lightened here into the golden radiance he had remembered from the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens. With the hope of another such find, Hosteen stumbled forward to a waist-high barrier just a few feet ahead. Then he was looking down from a gallery into, not the gardens of his hopes, but into a vast assembly of machines and installations. And from it rose a subdued hum, a vibration of air. These installations were not only in working order, they were working!
Yet, nowhere down those rows could he see any tenders, no human or robot inspectors as one might find in off-world machine plants.
“Started-then left to run-forever?” he whispered.
For what purpose?
He started, along the gallery, hunting a way down to that center hall. The room was a vast oval, and his entrance had been at one end. Now as he skirted that waist-high barrier, watching the space below, Hosteen continued to marvel at the size and complexity of the installations.
The Terran’s own training had been in psycho-biology. An Amerindian had an ancient tie with nature and the forces of nature, which was his strength, just as other races had come to rely more and more on machines. It was upon such framework that his whole education had been based, his sympathies centered. So, both inborn and special conditioning had made of him a man aloof from, and suspicious of, machines. One had to be anti-tech to be a Beast Master.
Now his disinterest in machines was growing to a repulsion as he looked down into the well of the vast chamber. The minds that had conceived and produced the Gardens he could understand. He might, though he did not find any kinship with them, grasp the motives of the pen keepers-they had dealt with living things. But these installations put a wall between him and those who had once been active here.
His growing dislike was not blunting his powers of observation. Hosteen believed that only a small number of the machines below were in use. He passed by whole sections where there were none of those subtle waves of power rising or failing. Then he saw the platform.
It was raised not more than a Terran foot or so above the floor of the main hall, and it was backed by a tall boarding, reaching almost to the balcony on which he stood. There were lines in relief on that boarding, running in intricate tangles. One made an irregular circle, and it glowed-glowed with a pulsating light of the same mauve that made fair Arzor sky different from Terra’s lost blue.
Two other lines also showed color. One, a golden yellow, began in a straight column near the foot of the board and ran up to a mid-point, where, though there was a many-branched channel of the same tubing above, it stopped. And this pulsated with a faster beat. The third-Hosteen caught sight of the third, his attention riveted on it, startled.
That was a spiral leading to a dot. And as he watched, the light grew brighter, until its brilliance was more than his eyes could bear. The light traveled along that spiral, approached the dot, flashed there for an eye-searing second or two.
Then, the whole pattern of spiral and dot was lifeless, dead as the hundred other designs of tubing on that board. But he had not been mistaken. The light had been there-had been so bright he could not watch it, any more than a man could watch the sun of the Big Dry.
Hosteen turned and began to run back toward the triangular box from which he had emerged.
Logan-that shining swirl on the board could mean that Logan had taken the spiral and circle path out of the valley! He could be coming here!
The Terran’s wild pace was such that he brought up against the now solid wall of the cubby almost as he had crashed against the inner wall of the cave where the Norbies had sealed them in to begin this adventure.
“Logan!” he shouted and heard the sound deadened, swallowed up in the reaches of the hall. Hosteen pounded on the wall with his good hand, drew the still numb right fist out of his shirt and tried to feel for any hollows on this side of the wall.
Pits for fingers. He had found them-this time with the digits of his left hand. He hesitated to deaden that too, as the right now was-to render himself helpless. But to get Logan out-free from the desert trap. Hosteen pushed his left hand against the smooth surface, fitted three finger tips into the waiting depressions, and waited, not without an inward shrinking, for the tingling-the sucking.
This time the response came more quickly, as might a lock long unused respond more rapidly to the second turning of a key. The panel faded, was gone- He looked into the cubby to see bare walls, empty space-nothing else.