Green earth. Out here there were other green worlds, as well as blue, red, white, violet, yellow—but none of them wore just the same tint of green as that which covered Terra’s hills. Terra—man’s home. Mankind had come late into space, and had been pushed to one side of the game Central Control managed. But there were many worlds where native life had never reached intelligence. What if man had been allowed to spread to those—to colonize? What if the very ancient legends of his race were true and there had been earlier trips into deep space from which the voyagers had never returned? Were there worlds where once Terran colonies had taken root? Where he could find his own distant kin free of the Central Control yoke, men who had won the stars by their own efforts?
He drifted into sleep thinking of that. But then he was crouched in a Fronnian thicket, a bloody knife in his hand—
“—up!” Kana rolled over. The dawn was gray and above him Bogate, rifle slung over his shoulder, marching supplies in place, stood, his thumbs hooked in his waist belt, his helmet gleaming in the growing light.
Kana rolled his own kit together hurriedly. The AL packets he crowded into the front of his tunic where he could reach them easily.
“Moving out now?”
“Shortly. Draw your rations and fall in.”
Hansu and a picked party equipped with ropes were already busy at the rim of the canyon. Three men had worked their way, ledge by ledge, to the sliver of beach far below. There they took turns, one roped to another, wading and swimming out into the flood, wedging native lances and driftwood between the boulders, trying to make a barrier which might save a man, swept from his feet, from being washed away. It was plain that Hansu was determined to get them across the river.
The pioneers below had fought their way less than half the distance across when Kana, together with Bogate’s scouts, started down. They fastened rifles, packs, and other supplies into waterproof coverings which were lowered on a makeshift platform faster than they climbed. Kana was dangling on a rope between two ledges when a shout which was half scream tore at his ears and nerves. He did not turn his head—he dared not. A moment later the rope a few feet to his right, taut seconds before with the weight of the scout who had crawled over the rim beside him, slapped the rock loosely—that weight gone.
Even when his boots rested on the next ledge Kana did not look down. He rested, spread-eagled against the wall, his fingers gritting on the rock, the sweat dripping from his chin.
Three ledges more and he reached the shingle. The men who had preceded him were still gazing downstream, a bewildered horror in their eyes. But there was no time to mourn as there had been none to save. Bogate slid down the last length of rope and was shouting orders:
“Get your gear, you Lothurian leaf eaters! We cross over and then we go up—and we do it in space time!”
They did it—if not in space time—with the loss of another man, sucked under by the current and smashed against a rock, then by some freak of the flood flung contemptuously back at them limp and broken. But roped, sometimes thrown off their feet and carried downstream, fighting from one boulder to the next, they got across. Another of their company, nursing an arm snapped like a twig during his final two-foot fight for the shore, remained there to watch the guide ropes they had left for those following.
Up the cliff they crept from handhold to handhold, shaking with effort, their fingers slippery with sweat, their hearts and lungs laboring. Salt stung in their eyes and the rawness of their hands, but they climbed.
Kana concentrated on the foot of earth immediately before his eyes, and then on the next higher and the next. This had gone on for hours—would go on and on without end.
Then a hand closed about the wrist he had extended for a fresh hold. He was lifted with a yank which brought him sliding on his face across the lip of the wall to lie panting in tearing gasps, too bone weary to reach for the canteen of water his mouth and throat craved.
He sat up as Bogate came along. There was a coil of rope about his waist—that must be knotted to other lengths, the whole dropped to form a ladder for the Horde.
Kana drank and was able to scramble to his feet when their rifles and packs were hoisted. Nor was he the last to fall in as Bogate gave the signal to move on—into the dark future of the mountains.
7 — THE BADLANDS
As they left the river the rest of the scouts fanned out. Only Kana continued with Bogate. He was a supernumerary in this operation, his duties beginning if and when they found traces of intelligent life. To his surprise, instead of ignoring his presence entirely, Bogate waited for him to catch up, asking:
“Just what do we look for?”
“Hansu thinks we may find Cos—they’re a pygmy race supposed to inhabit these mountains—hate the Llor and are highly dangerous—use poison darts and build mantraps.”
Bogate’s reply to the sketchy information was a grunt. The wind was rising in gusts which whistled eerily between the heights, propelling the migrating puff-balls—circular masses of spiky vines which traveled so until they found water where they could root for a season. Of a sickly, bleached, yellow-green, they were armed with six-inch thorns and the Terrans granted them the right of way. This was the start of the Fronnian windy season. And to fight across the ranges during that period was to front dangers no Llor would willingly face.
A weird moaning rose to a shriek among the rocks far above them as the wind was forced through crevices and cracks. But for the most part the scouts were sheltered from the full blast by the ridges.
Here the soil was a mixture of gravel and clay, liberally salted with the rocky debris of slides. Each side canyon or gully had to be blazed with a fluorescent brand so that the Horde would keep to the main trail. They detoured around boulders taller than a man until Kana began to wonder why such a large number of landslides should occur in the length of a single dried watercourse. Suddenly the answer to that lay before his eyes and it was grim.
Sun flashes reflected from something half buried in the soil. He knelt to scrape away the earth. A Llor sword protruded from under a rock. And its haft was still encircled by the finger bones of a skeleton hand!
“Smashed flat—like a bug!” was Bogate’s comment. The veteran’s eyes narrowed as he looked along the way they had come and then on up the slit at the dusky shapes of the mountains. He had been too well trained by warfare on half a hundred planets not to mistake clues.
“Rolled rocks and caught ’em. Neat. This Cos work?”
“Might be,” Kana assented. “But it was a long time ago—” He was interrupted by a shout which sent Bogate sprinting ahead.
The narrow canyon they had chosen to follow widened out into an arena—an arena where a deadly game had once been played and lost. Bones brittle with years carpeted the arid floor. And Llor skulls, very human looking, mingled with the narrow, fanged ones of guen, were easy to identify in the general litter, but not one skeleton was unbroken or entire. Kana picked up a rib, the bone light in his fingers. He had been right—those deep indentations could only be the marks of crushing molars. First there had been a killing and then—a feasting! He pitched the bone away.
Keeping aloof from the mass of ghastly relics the Terrans walked around the wall of the valley. There were no weapons in that gray waste, no remains of Llor war harness. Even the trappings of the guen were missing. The dead had been stripped completely. And since they lay unburied, the massacre must have gone unavenged.
“How long ago, d’you think?” Bogate’s throaty bellow was subdued.
“Maybe ten years, maybe a hundred,” Kana returned. “You’d have to know Fronnian climate to be sure.”
“They got caught bunched,” Bogate observed. “Larsen,” he snapped at the nearest scout, “climb up and use the lenses—cover us from above from now on. I’ll take point on the other wall. The rest of you—go slow. Soong, report back on the speecher. We haven’t seen nothin’ livin’ so far. But we don’t want our fellas caught like this!”
At a snail’s pace they progressed to the far end of the valley of death, threading the narrow opening there as if they feared any second to hear the roar of an avalanche. But Kana, taking notice of the barren countryside, thought that the Cos would not ordinarily inhabit that section. The slaughter behind them might be the sign of some war—if Cos had caused that havoc. The tooth marks on the rib continued to haunt him. Some primitive peoples ate enemy dead, believing that the virtue of a brave foe could be so absorbed by his slayer. But surely those scars on the bone had never been left by the molars of a humanoid race!