He turned suddenly. Sally, upright on her haunches twenty feet away, had made a soft, snarling sound. Her head was pointing at the thickets to their left, and the black eyes glittered with excitement.
“Better not talk any more,” Frazer cautioned. “He’s fairly close, though he’s taking his time. He’s a good hunter.” he added with a curious air of approval. “Now I’m giving you another shot to keep you quiet while he closes in, or he might be able to force you to do something that would spoil the play.” He was reaching for her arm as he spoke.
Lane started to protest but didn’t quite make it. Something jolted through her body like an electric shock. Her legs jerked violently—and Frazer’s face, and the trees and rocks behind him, started vanishing in a swirling blackness. In the blackness, she felt herself running; and at its other end, the Nachief’s smiling face looked at her, waiting. She thought she was screaming and became briefly aware of the hard, sweaty pads of Frazer’s palm clasped about her mouth.
* * *
Frazer stood beside Lane’s slowly twisting and jerking body a few seconds longer, watching her anxiously. He couldn’t very well load her down with any more drug than she was carrying right now. Satisfied then that she was incapable of making any disturbance for the time, he moved quietly back to Sally, gun ready in his hands.
“Getting close, eh?” he murmured. Sally twitched both ears impatiently and thereafter ignored him.
Frazer, almost immediately, became as oblivious of his companion. In a less clearly defined way, he was also quite conscious of the gradual approach of the Nachief of Frome, though the fierce little animal beside him was using more direct channels of awareness. He knew that the approach was following the winding path through the thickets he had taken thirty minutes earlier with Lane slung across his shoulder. And he didn’t need the bristling of the hair at the back of his neck or the steady thumping of his heart to tell him that an entirely new sort of death was walking on his trail.
If the Nachief of Frome followed that path to the end, he told himself calculatingly, it was going to be a very close thing—probably not even the fifty-fifty chance he’d previously considered to be the worst he need expect. He had selected the spot where they and their guns would settle it, if it came to that. But it would be the Nachief then who could select the exact instant in time for the meeting. And Frazer knew by now, with a sure, impersonal judgment of himself and of the creature gliding up the path, that he was outmatched. The Nachief simply had turned out to be a little more than he’d counted on.
For a long minute or two, it seemed the stalker had stopped and was waiting. Lane hung quietly in her harness. Frazer decided the Nachief had given up trying to prod her into action. So he knew also, now, that it was between the two of them. Frazer grinned whitely in the shadows.
But what happened next took him completely by surprise. A sense of something almost tangible but invisible, a shadow that wasn’t a shadow, coming toward him. Sally, Frazer realized, wasn’t aware of it; and he reassured himself by thinking that whatever Sally couldn’t detect could not be very damaging, physically. Nevertheless, he discovered in himself, in the next few seconds, an unexpected capacity for horror. The mind of the Nachief of Frome was speaking to him, demandingly, a momentary indecision overlying its dark, icy purpose of destruction. Frazer, refusing the answer, felt his own mind shudder away from that contact.
Almost immediately, the contact was broken; the shadow had vanished. He had no time to wonder about it; because now the final meeting, if it came, would be only seconds away . . .
Then, as if she had received a signal, Sally made a soft, breathing sound and settled slowly back to the ground on all fours, relaxing. She glanced up at Frazer for a moment, before shifting her gaze to a point in the bushes before her.
Frazer, a little less certain of his senses, did not relax just yet. But he, too, turned his eyes cautiously from the point where the path came into the glade to study the thickets ahead of them.
Those twenty-foot bushes were an unusual sort of growth. Not precisely a native of Nalakia, but one of the genetic experiments left by the colonists, that couldn’t have been tolerated on any less isolated world. The tops of a group of the shrubs dead ahead, near one of the turns of the hidden path, were shivering slightly. The Nachief, having decided to make his final approach through the thickets, was a sufficiently expert stalker not to disturb the growth to that extent.
The growth was disturbing itself . . .
Aware of the warm-blooded life moving through below it, it was gently shaking out the fluffy pods at its tips to send near-microscopic enzyme crystals floating down on the intruding life form. Coating it with a fine, dissolving dust—
Dissolving through the pores of the skin; entering more swiftly through breathing nostrils into the lungs. Seeping through mouth, and ears, and eyes—
A thrashing commotion began suddenly in the thickets. It shook a new cloud of dust out of the pods, which made a visible haze in the air, even from where Frazer stood. He watched it a trifle worriedly, though the crystals did not travel far, even on a good breeze. The growth preferred to contact and keep other life forms where they would do it the most good, immediately above its roots.
The thrashing became frenzied. There was a sudden gurgling screech.
“That’s fine,” Frazer said softly between his teeth. “A few good breaths of the stuff now. It’ll be over quicker.”
More screeches, which merged within seconds into a wet, rapid yapping. The thrashing motions had weakened but they went on for another half minute or so, before they and the yapping stopped together, abruptly. The Nachief of Frome was giving up life very reluctantly; but he gave it up.
And now, gradually, Frazer relaxed. Oddly enough, watching the tops of the monstrous growth that had done his killing for him continue to quiver in a gentle, satisfied agitation, he was aware of a feeling of sharp physical letdown. Almost of disappointment—
But that, he realized, was scarcely a rational feeling. Frazer was, by and large, a very practical man.
* * *
Some time later, he removed from his knapsack one of the tools an employee of the Bureau’s lonely outworld stations was likely to require at any time. Carefully, without moving from his tracks, he burned his vegetable ally out of existence. With another tool, he presently smothered the spreading flames again.
After a little rummaging, he discovered what must be the ultrasonic transmitter—a beautifully compact little gadget, which the fire had not damaged beyond the point of repair. Frazer cleaned it off carefully and pocketed it.
It was near nightfall when he put Lane Rawlings down on his bed in the station’s living area. She had not regained consciousness on the long hike back to the station. He was a little worried, since he had never been obliged to use that type of drug in so massive a dose on a human being before. However, he decided that Lane was sleeping naturally now. Her sleep might be due as much to emotional exhaustion as to the effects of the drug. She should wake up presently, very hungry and with very sore muscles, but otherwise none the worse.
Straightening up, he found Sally beside him with her forepaws on the bed, peering at the girl’s face. Sally looked up at him briefly, with an obvious question. The same hungry question she had asked when they first met Lane.
He shook his head, a gesture Sally understood very well. “Unh-uh,” he said softly. “This one’s our friend—if you can get that kind of idea into your ugly little head. Outside, Sally!”
He shut the door to the room behind him, because one couldn’t be quite sure of Sally, though the chances were she would simply ignore the girl’s existence from now on. A decision involving Lane Rawlings had been shaping itself in his mind throughout the day; but he had kept pushing it back out of sight. There was no point in getting excited about it before he found out whether or not it was practicable.
Sally padded silently after him as he made his customary nightfall round of the station’s control areas. A little later, checking one of the Bureau’s star-maps, he found the world of Frome indicated there. That was exceptionally good luck, since he wouldn’t have to rely now on the spotty kind of information regarding its location he could expect to get from Lane. And, considering his plans, the location couldn’t have been improved on—almost but not quite beyond the range of the little stellar flier waiting to serve in emergencies in its bombproof hangar beneath the station. He intended to leave the Bureau’s investigators no reason to suspect anything but a destructive space-raid had occurred here. But even if he slipped up, they wouldn’t think of looking for Frazer as far away as Frome.