Thus far everything the subject had experienced was familiar to Farrell at least in outline. The subject’s hope began to mount; the column was near its goal. Then—
The image failed in horror so complete that the subject’s mind could not fix the cause in memory. Farrell viewed a confused montage of hills, of broad boulevards cut through the landscape, of running in blind terror.
Humans couldn’t have survived the panicked dash through half a mile of this jungle; a surprising number of the Kalendru did. Their quickness saved them where the strikers wouldn’t have been able to bring their firepower to bear.
The subject didn’t see the starship lift off and immediately crash, though he was aware of the event when it happened. Farrell couldn’t be sure whether the vessel fled in response to whatever had happened to the ground expedition or if the crew was reacting to threats against themselves. It was the wrong decision, but perhaps there was no right one.
The column’s forty survivors set off to hike out of the crater. Their only goal now was personal survival. The jungle killed them, but only a few. They were crack troops, experienced in the dangers of their environment and driven by desperate need.
Again Farrell coursed forward in time:
The subject’s first sight of the crater’s wall brought a glow of elation that forced aside fear’s crushing miasma like a bubble forming as water boils. Farrell felt personal joy: the sheer rock wall was the human expedition’s goal, too, and this was the first time he’d seen it.
The ground twenty feet back from the edge of the cliffs was almost clear. Vines or roots, yellow-gray and whip thin, ran up the rock at frequent intervals. They had no foliage, but their suckers invaded minute cracks.
Three Kalendru took off their boots and all equipment except a coil of fine cord each. They began to climb while their fellows kept guard on the ground. The climbers studiously avoided the vines. Instead, they found hand and footholds in the slight cracks and knobs present even on a smooth rock face. The Spooks’ long limbs were an advantage in a task like this.
The subject stood with his back to the stone, looking up the green wall of jungle rising nearly as high as the cliffs did. He—and Farrell—expected something to come from the trees to attack the climbers.
When the climbers were halfway to the top the rocks supporting their weight crumbled.
The Kalendru plunged a hundred feet straight down in a spattering of gravel. Two died instantly. The third lay with his eyes open and his lips moving slowly while blood spread in a brown pool beneath the body.
The subject’s slender fingers appeared in memory, lifting one of the pebbles that had dropped with the climbers. Hair-fine rootlets still clung to what had been its inner surface. The roots’ hydrostatic expansion had wedged the rock loose; the victim fell with it, unharmed until impact crushed him against the stone beneath.
The subject’s memory stared at the cliffs, then covered his face with his hands. His skin puckered and was turning blotchy green in the Kalendru equivalent of weeping. He and his fellows would never be able to climb the rock. To attempt to use the wood of this jungle as building material would be a slower, surer form of suicide.
Something iridescent and sun-bright gleamed in the high sky. A ship was landing in the crater. An enemy ship, but still a vessel which could be captured or at least might supply the weapons and equipment the remnants of the Kalendru expedition lacked.
It was their only chance to escape this crater.
Major Arthur Farrell’s body writhed as he came out of the interrogation trance. Kristal and Nessman grabbed him. Even without drugs, the similarity of his situation to that of the subject was so close that he’d been dragged in deeper than he’d expected.
“There’s no way out!” Farrell shouted. “There’s no way out!”
“They move pretty good,” said Caius Blohm. “Now, a lot of it’s the way they’re built, sure, legs and arms sticking way out like some kind of spider.”
The patients lay under the trailers against the likelihood of rain, but a clear tarpaulin sheltered the life support system itself. The lighted control panel gleamed, slightly distorted by folds in the fabric. Dr. Ciler sat sideways to it as he stolidly ate spoonfuls of his dinner. His back was to Blohm.