Nik went one step at a time, pausing to listen for that odd cry, for sounds of movement that might mean he was being stalked. His imagination could provide more than one answer, but still he crept on.
This was not another room but a lengthening passage, so narrow his shoulders brushed the walls. Nik began to count the paces, ten, twelve -. Now the outline of another door was visible.
More than an outline, there was light ahead – the outer day? But Nik came out into another chamber where the alien quality of his surroundings reached a peak.
Reptilian life! He almost drew his blaster – until he saw that those rounded lengths were not legless bodies but roots – or branches – of plants. They stretched across the floor, tangled and intertwined, but they all reached for a crack in the middle through which flowed a stream of water. The roots were outsize, the plants they nourished relatively small, forming a line of white fleshy growths along the walls. And from them arose a musty odor, adding to the heaviness of the air.
“Welcome back!”
Nik started. He had been so intent upon that loathesome growth that he had not seen the man within the arch of roots until Leeds spoke.
“How.” Nik stepped over a hump of root, somehow shrinking from any contact with the growth. “Vandy?” he demanded before he completed his first question.
“All right. You’re alone? You didn’t get the rations?”
Leeds’ eyes were deep in his head; his face was fined down until the bony ridges of cheekbones and chin were too clearly defined. He did not move as Nik came up.
Leeds’ eyes – his goggles were gone! The light from the unearthly plants must give him a measure of sight, but what had happened to his cins? Nik bestrode another root tangle and was at Leeds’ side.
The captain’s injured leg was stretched stiffly out, tightly bound to a length of thick plant stem, the end of which protruded beyond his boot sole and was splintered and worn.
“I take it the storm’s over,” he said wearily.
“Yes.” Nik looked for Vandy, but the boy was nowhere in sight.
He shifted the strap of the ration bag from his shoulder and dumped the pouch beside Leeds. “Here’re the rations. Where’s Vandy?”
Leeds grimaced. “An answer I wish I could give you.”
Nik stooped to catch the other’s shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Just that. No, you fool, I didn’t leave him behind or knock him out or do any of those things you’re thinking! Why should I? He’s our only pass out of here. That’s why you have to find him.”
“Find him! But what happened?”
“I had a packet of Sustain tablets.” Leeds’ voice was very tired. “Thought about them later and gave them to him – they brought him around all right. Then, we saw the storm coming and knew we had to move. He didn’t want to go – had a tussle with him – but without goggles he didn’t want to stay alone either. We went along the cliffs and found this hole. But it was a long trip in this far with my leg bad. By the time we reached here, I was pretty tired. Then the boy took over.”
“Took over – how?”
Leeds’ mirthless grin was a wider stretch of tight skin and thin lips. “By knocking me out, taking the goggles, and going on his own. There’s no way of telling how long he’s had to set distance between us. But he’s gone – somewhere. And you’re the only one who can track him – unless you did bring the Patrol. And that wouldn’t be good for us under the circumstances. He has both blasters, too – at least mine’s gone!”
“But why.” Part of this Nik thought he could understand the taking of Leeds’ goggles, yes. To be eternally in the dark on this hostile world would have led an older man to make such an attempt much sooner, but to strike out alone – Vandy, though, had once before played just such a trick on him back in the ruined city.
“He’s conditioned,” Leeds said flatly. “He’d stay with you but not with me. I thought he would be easy to handle – as soon as he got energy enough, he made a run for it. And I needn’t remind you, Kolherne, that if the Patrol does catch up with us and he isn’t here. This bag – did you go all the way to the refuge?”
“No, they found me. I was with them coming here when the storm hit.” Nik remembered Commander i’Inad. Yes, Leeds was entirely right. If the Patrol caught up with them now and Vandy was missing, they would suffer for it. There was no evidence that they ever had the boy at all. They had to find Vandy, not only for the boy’s sake, but also for their own. Vandy with the cins and maybe two blasters, urged by his conditioning to put as much distance between Leeds and himself as he could – where would he go?
“You were here when he jumped you?” he demanded.
“Yes. A good thing for me. These plant things give off some light. If he’d left me in the dark with this leg.”
“And you don’t know how long ago?”
“All I know is that I sat down to ease my leg. The next thing I remember, I was lying on my back with a big ache behind my eyes. And I’m not even sure how long ago that was.”
“You’d better eat.” Nik took one of the ration containers out of the pouch and handed it to Leeds… “Any other way out of this place except that passage? And does he have a torch?”
“No, we left that as a signal – which I see you found.”
No torch. Even with the cins on, to retreat along that passage and into the big chamber was a move Nik would not care to make. But had Vandy been driven hard enough by his conditioning to do just that? He’d have a look around here first.
Leeds pressed the button on the container. The hands with which he held the tin were shaking. Nik gazed about the root-matted room. At the opposite end of the room, there was one easily noticed exit, the way the water flowed, and that was large enough for a stooping man to enter. Vandy could have walked through there. Nik went to inspect that exit.
He noted that any touching of the roots left dark bruises on their surfaces – one way of tracing Vandy’s passage. But those clustered at the mouth of the water tunnel were unmarked. Either they had recovered in that interval of time between Vandy’s flight and now or he had not tried that path.
Nik began a circuit of the walls. The plants were more thickly massed to the left; to the right only a few smaller and more widely spaced ones grew. The entrance to this whole series of cavern rooms had been hidden behind a plug of vegetation. Could another such exist here behind the plants? He loathed going near them, but it had to be done.
Only, as far as he could see, there was no break in the wall behind them, and the light given off by their fleshy leaves, those twining reptilian roots, was enough to make the rock surfaces plainly visible. It began to appear that Vandy had gone back down the entrance passage. Nik said as much, but the captain shook his head.
“Without a torch – no. He hated that place when we came through, dragged back on me all the way. That’s what made me so tired that I got careless when I hit here and he stopped whining about being in the dark. The cins wouldn’t give him vision enough, there. He went some other way. Through that water channel probably.”
Nik went back to the channel. He did not see how even one as slight as Vandy could have worked his way through the mass of roots directly before that opening without leaving some trace on the vegetation. The marks of his own passing were not only darkened, but now, a few moments after that bruising, the stuff seemed to be sloughing off as if his touch had killed it. Vandy’s path had to be the other way – in spite of Leeds’ report.
The captain had finished the. contents of the container. “Think the Patrol will follow you?”
Remembering Commander i’Inad, Nik had no doubt of that. But whether the Patrol could trace him into this cave maze, he did not know.
Leeds had been fingering the pouch; now he looked up with a very grim twist of lips.
“Well, I do!” he said. “Look here.”
He turned the pouch upside down, sending its contents spinning and displaying to Nik the inner part. There was a small bar set there.