The Terran worked his arm through one of the grill openings, pounded with his fist along the bar. His impatience built to a rage with the stubborn thing that kept them prisoners in the tunnel when all that fresh world lay beyond. Then his self-control began to assert itself once more. He withdrew his arm and unsheathed his belt knife.
Half-crouched, Storm flattened his body against the grill once more and picked with the knife point at every possible opening in and around that circle of metal that apparently locked the bar into place. Logan and Gorgol kept back the crowding animals while he worked. The sweat made his hand slippery, until at last he dropped the knife out of reach on the other side of the still-locked barrier. Gorgol’s belt knife was too long and Logan’s had been taken from him on his capture. There was no use in trying the blaster against the alien material of the portal.
Storm had gone back to the futile pounding when a sudden squeak from ground level – ground level on the opposite side of that obdurate door – startled him into sane thinking again. The squares of the grill might have kept out the rest of them, but Hing had squeezed through and was now watching him with expectancy.
Hing! Storm went down on his knees and schooled patience back into his voice as he chirruped to her. A Beast Master could only control and direct his charges when he was in full control of himself. He had forgotten the first rule of his training and the realization of that frightened him almost as much as the sight of the Xik weapon – more so because this fault lay within him, and it was the first time he had erred since his earliest days in the service.
The Terran forced himself to breathe more slowly and put aside his fear of not being able to master the alien lock. Hing was the important one now – Hing and her curiosity, her claws, the jobs she had been trained to do in the past. Storm blanked his mind, narrowed all his power of projection to one thing – and sent that thought along the path as he had called Baku out of the morning sky to help them clear the pass.
Hing sat up, her long clawed paws dangling in front of her lighter belly fur. Then she dropped to four feet once more, came to the door and climbed it agilely until she was perched on the bar itself, her pointed nose only inches away from Storm’s face. Again she waited and chirruped inquiringly.
He could not direct her, send those claws to the right places as he had in the past when she had destroyed buried installations, uncovered and rendered useless delicate machinery. Then the Terran had had models of the necessary kind to practise with, had been able to show Hing and her mate just what they must do. Now he did not even know the type of lock that baffled them. He could only use King’s own curiosity as a tool, urge the meerkat to solve the mystery. And since she did not have the quick and reaching intelligence of Surra, nor the falcon brain of Baku, implanting the proper impulse was a longer process and a doubtful one.
Storm put all his force into that one beam of will. He did not know that he showed the face of a man strained close to the limit of endurance. And that the two who watched him, without understanding how or why he fought, were held silent by the strain and effort he displayed.
Hing walked a tightrope along the bar. Now she balanced on her hind feet, patting that circle of the lock with her paws. And if Storm did not actually hear the click of her investigating claws on the substance, he sensed them throughout his tense body as he poured out his will.
She raked the disc impatiently and shrilled a protest – perhaps at the stubborn lock, perhaps at his soundless command. But she did not retreat. Bending her head she tried her teeth on the thing, hissed almost as angrily as Surra had done, and went back to picking with her claws. Whether she did puzzle out the pattern, or whether it was only lucky chance, Storm was never to know. But there was a tiny flash of light. Hing squealed and leaped from the bar just as it dropped.
The grill swung open, dragging the Terran with it into the place of growing things. He was too weak from his efforts to get to his feet and was only barely conscious of Gorgol pulling him back out of the path of the horses. Then he was lying on his back, partially supported by the Norbie’s arm, gazing up dazedly into a vast space filled with wisps of floating mist.
“What kind of a place –” Logan’s voice sounded subdued, with more than a touch of awe.
The air was fresh, not only fresh but filled with scents – spicy, perfumed, provocative odours, as if someone had emptied all the aromatic growing things of a dozen worlds into one limited space and kept them at the peak of production.
And that was just what someone or something had done, as they discovered. Storm, with Gorgol to steady him, got to his feet. He saw Surra squatting on her haunches before a round puffball of a thing studded with cups of purple blooms, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy as she sniffed the delicate but tantalizing fragrance those flowers spread. And the horses had cantered on, stopping to graze on the bank of cool, green grass that had certainly once been rooted on the planet of Storm’s birth.
He pulled loose from the Norbie’s hold and staggered to the pine, his hands fondling its bark. The scent of the needles, or the resin, was stronger in his nostrils than the more exotic odours about him. It was true this was a pine, standing at the apex of a triangle of mixed Terran vegetation. And with the bole of the tree to steady him, Storm looked ahead, to see the brilliance of roses in full boom, tassels of lilacs, familiar, unfamiliar, all aflower, all scented, in an unbelievable mixed array.
“What is it?” Logan joined the Terran, his bruised face turned toward the mass of flowers and green as if he too felt some healing quality in it.
“From Earth!” Storm used the old word, sweeping his arms wide. These are all from my world! But how did they come here?”
“And where and what is here?” Logan added. Those surely aren’t Terran too –” His hand fell on Storm’s arm and he drew the other part way around to face, across a narrow path of the alien black stuff, another mixed garden. And the Arzoran was very right. The oddly shaped – to Terran eyes – bushes with their bluish, twisted leaves, the striped flowers (if those flat plates were flowers) were not Terran – not from any world Storm knew.
Gorgol came across the open glade where the horses were. His fingers moved to express his own wonder –
“Many growing things – all different –”
Storm turned again, still putting one hand to the pine as an anchor, not only because of his tired body, but also because the wonder of its being here still made this all part of a strangely satisfying dream.
There were two more gardens or garden plots wedging out from the section directly before the gate grill, and each of them was widely different in the life it supported, save that odd and weird as the growing things appeared, they shared two attributes, none were truly ugly and all were sweet scented.
Logan rubbed his forehead with his bandaged hands and blinked.
There is something about all this –” He swung about slowly as Storm had done. A flight of brilliant patches that the Terran had thought firmly attached to a bush of ivory white stalks floated free, moved double wings, and skimmed to new perches. Birds? Insects? They could be either.
They have places on some worlds,” Logan pursued his own explanation, “where they keep wild animals – call ‘em zoos. It looks to me as if this place were meant to keep specimens of vegetation from a lot of different planets. One, two, three, four,” he counted the separate plots about them. “And these are just about as different from each other as you can get.”
He was right, Storm could agree to that. Gorgol put out a hand and touched with gentle hesitation one of the ivory stems that had supported the flying flowers. He withdrew his fingers and sniffed at them with some of the same pleasure Surra had shown when she drank in the perfume of the purple cups.
Surra? Storm glanced around, seeking the cat. But she was gone, vanished somewhere into this scented wilderness. He sat down at the foot of the pine, leaning his back against its trunk, his hands flat against the earth that felt like home earth, moist, but firm under his flesh. He could close his eyes now to the riot of those other gardens and their weird beauty, or look up into the tent of green over him and be back again –