“Things-” Its pipe sounded in Dane’s hood mike. “Danger-”
“Men?” he asked quickly.
“No. Like dragons-”
Dane repeated that to his companions. Meshler was in the van. Again his head went up as Dane could see in the thin light of the half-moon; again he seemed to be sniffing. “That stink!” The word burst out of him.
Dane turned his head, coughed, and choked. Stink-stench was right! Far worse than the bad odor of the things hatched from the embryo containers, or even the smell of the antline-and so thick that they might be standing on the verge of an offal dump.
“There’s a force field there.” Tau held out the detect, and they saw that the needle quivered back and forth. So warned, Dane was able to make out the faint blue haze that formed a wall directly ahead. What faced them now was a dark, tangled mass of vegetation, but between them and it was the force field, and for that Dane was secretly glad. To plunge into that mass in the dark was more than he cared to do, whether Meshler could pilot them or not. And the stench plainly came from that direction.
“Crawler tracks turn left.” Meshler followed them. Dane reluctantly did the same, Tau falling into step beside him. The Terran guessed that the medic was no more pleased with this than he was.
By now there was a road of sorts, or at least a way beaten flat by the treads of crawlers. Either one had made this trip many times, or else more than one had gone so. They paralleled the haze, which gave a wan and very ghostly light to the road they followed and the growth behind it. Light enough to-
Dane did not utter that gasp. Meshler, for all his familiarity with the wild, had voiced it, stopping short, as if the force field had swung out a sudden arm to restrain him. But Dane was as frozen.
There had been movement behind the haze. Now they looked up at something that, in that very limited light, was enough to send any sane man flying. Only for a second did they see it, and then it was gone. Dane could not be sure now he had really seen it at all. There was no sound, no movement, now. Only it was something so alien that even a star voyager flinched from facing it.
“Was it-?” Was it really there, Dane wanted to ask.
But Meshler was moving on, taking long strides so that the Terrans had to hurry to catch up, slipping and stumbling in the rutted road. It was as if the ranger was denying what he had seen, or might have seen, by that dogged advance. Nor did any of them speak. Even the brach hung quiet, a growing weight.
The haze of the force wall curved to the right, but the road kept on. Then Meshler halted again and flung out his arm as a barrier against which Dane ran. They were standing on the top of a small rise. Below them the slope grew steeper, descending to where there came the sound of water running in the night. But across the stream was a bridge, and there were very discreetly shielded lights placed at either end to mark it, diffuse-set on lowest beam. As far as the three on the height could see, there was no sentry there, which did not in the least mean that there was none in existence. Dane spoke to the brach.
“Men there?”
“No men,” the brach replied promptly.
“We’ll have to chance it,” Meshler commented as Dane passed that along. “Chances are there is no other way of crossing the stream, or they wouldn’t go to the trouble of bridging it. A crawler can usually pass through a fordable body of water.”
Dane felt very naked and vulnerable as they hurried downslope, crossed the bridge, and dashed on into the welcome shadows ahead.
“We are very close to the radiation source,” Tau said as they trotted along the crawler road. “But it is more to the left.”
As if his words had been an order, the path also swung left. They could still see the haze, though there was a distance between them and it at this point, a fact for which Dane was grateful. The road was now a narrow alley between two dark, looming walls of brush. It had been roughly cleared. There were the remains of roots and sapling trunks crushed and broken-wretched footing. They had to go slow here and depend once more on Meshler’s night sight and his ability to lead them around trip-traps.
Here they could not see the haze, but that did not prevent Dane’s imagination picturing the idea of that behind the growth. His half glimpse of it, he thought, was really worse to remember than perhaps a full confrontation might have been.
The track curved again, and they saw ahead diffuse lights as if on guides. Once more the brach, appealed to, stated there was no guard. But Dane hesitated and found Tau joined him in that. To the Terran, to go blundering on with no better idea of what they might face was rank folly. He said as much firmly.
“Machines,” piped the brach, “machines, yes-men no.”
“There you are,” Meshler retorted when Dane reluctantly relayed the alien’s comment. “We get in, take a crawler, and get out-if he continues to warn us.”
Tau was moving the detect slowly from side to side. “If they have a snooper rigged,” he said, “the other radiation covers it.”
“We can’t be sure they haven’t,” Dane persisted. The feeling that they were on the verge of a nasty trap had grown so strong in him that he could not yield to Meshler. “I’ll scout ahead,” the ranger returned. “Stay where you are.”
They could see him as a shadow between them and the lamp glow. Then he fell to his knees and seemed to be running his hands over the rutted ground. So feeling his way ahead, he crawled to the open space by the lamps. He did not rise to his feet there but crawled back the same way.
“No ray alarm.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Fresh damar tracks. It went through that gate. If there is any alarm, it is set for something going on two feet, or at least larger than a damar.”
Dane had no idea what a damar might be, probably an animal. But Meshler was sure of his facts. And he himself, with the brach reporting nothing ahead to be feared, could not hold back on a hunch alone.
So he found himself crawling on his hands and knees between the lamps, though he expected at any moment to hear some alarm, feel again the constriction of a tangle loop shooting out of the dark to bring him down. In fact, he was so sure that would happen that he could not believe they had made it, but crawled on until he nearly ran into Meshler, standing again.
“You’re safe.” Was there a shadow of contempt in the ranger’s voice? If there was, it did not lash Dane’s pride. Safety first on strange worlds was so much ingrained in any Free Trader that an accusation of cowardice would not set his hand seeking a stunner for reply.
With the brach still in his hold, he found it rather hard to struggle up-and was still on his knees when what he had so constantly feared happened. It was no alarm to shatter the night quiet, no physical assault from ambush.
There was a sudden flash on his left. And then, as Dane slewed around, ready to run back the way they had come, he saw the haze rise between him and the lamps, between them and the freedom that lay ahead.
They stood in a narrow corridor, walled by a force field on either side, a blind corridor, and that was beginning to close in, forcing them down the only open way-to the right, buckling in upon itself and closing, to become no corridor at all now but a wall, yet sweeping them before it as if they were in a net and that net was being drawn in by him who had cast it.
11. SECURITY OR-?
They were being herded east, back toward the area where they had seen the monstrous thing. And to be caught in there-! Yet there was no possible way to defeat a force field.
Defeat a force field! The brachs had gotten through the weak field intended to restrain the dragons. But that was a weak field. This, judging by that haze, was a major lay-on of power. The only way would be to turn it off at its source. And since the source must be on the other side of the wall, they might as well give that idea up. Yet Dane kept remembering the brachs had broken that other field, seemingly only by wishing.