He examined it more closely. The ends were made up of concentric circles, and close to one end, on the curved surface, there was a finely etched circle about half an inch in diameter. He put the cylinder between his teeth and tried biting it. To his astonishment it proceeded to elongate itself, stretching itself out of his mouth like a telescopic cigar. The other end struck a button on the control panel; instantly, there was a strange high pitched hum and the seat began to vibrate beneath him. With one single bound, he was out of the doorway and on solid ground, looking with horror at the machine that was now throbbing with life.
His father heard the noise and came running towards him. Niall realised that he had left his newly found weapon behind; his fear of the noise was overruled by his determination not to lose it, and he reached in and grabbed the telescopic rod, which was now about five feet long.
Ulf said: “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” A green light flashed on the control panel, then the humming noise stopped.
They walked around the device, tried to rock it, walked underneath it, and finally decided that it was not worth any further effort. When Ulf asked to see the telescopic rod, Niall handed it to him with reluctance. Ulf examined it carefully, swished it through the air, and then, to Niall’s relief, handed it back.
As Niall took it from him, grasping it by the broad end, there was a click and the rod contracted, and once more became a short, heavy cylinder.
Studying it closely, Niall realised that the secret lay in the finely etched circle on the curved surface. When he pressed this, the metal yielded slightly, and the cylinder expanded into a rod with a pointed tip. As he held it in his hand, balancing it gently and trying to fathom its purpose, he observed a curious tingling sensation in his fingers. If he held both ends of the rod, stretching out his arms to their full extent, it became stronger.
He pressed the circle again; there was a click, and the rod contracted again into a cylinder. The mechanism baffled him; he spent five minutes, making it expand and contract, and finally decided it was beyond his comprehension. Yet the tingling sensation he experienced when it was fully extended was somehow oddly familiar.
Time was passing; it was now the middle of the afternoon, and they had to think of moving. Back at the fort, they scrambled up the sloping ramp of sand, and Ulf jumped down into the courtyard and handed up their panniers. It was while Niall was reaching down for the second pannier that the first one unbalanced and rolled down the slope. Niall made no attempt to stop it; its closed flap would prevent the contents from escaping. But as he helped Ulf back up on to the wall, he seemed to detect some movement at the foot of the slope. He stared hard and decided that the pannier must have slid under its own weight. Slowly, he made his way down the ramp, staring intently at the pannier; once more it seemed to him that he detected some slight movement. Cautiously, Niall reached out and grabbed the strap. As he took the pannier’s weight, the sand underneath seemed to crumble. Then, to Niall’s incredulous horror, a hairy, segmented foreleg broke through the surface. Another one followed. A moment later he was looking into the eyes of a big spider, as it tried to scramble from the sand that entombed it. His reaction was immediate and instinctive; he raised the telescopic rod and drove it with all his force into the hairy, strangely expressionless face. The spider hissed with pain, and Niall recoiled as he experienced the almost physical force of its will, striking out at him like a poisoned sting. He knew with total certainty that if the spider pulled itself clear of the sand, it would be upon him with a single bound, holding him pinioned with its forelegs as it sank its fangs into his flesh. He pulled the rod free, and struck again and again — into the mouth, the eyes, the soft body behind the head. The will-power of the creature seemed to hold him at bay like an arm; his own will, nerved by terror, resisted it. Then, suddenly, its resistance ceased; he was aware that its awareness was dissolving into death.
His father was standing above them, looking down in horror. Then, when he saw that the spider was motionless, he circled round it and stood beside Niall.
The spider’s body was halfway out of the sand, and they could see that it was bigger than the grey spiders they had encountered in the fortress on the plateau. This one was about the size of the trapdoor spider on which the pepsis wasp had laid its egg. The double-segmented fangs, with a channel for poison, showed that it belonged to the tarantula species. But while the tarantula’s hairy body was brown, sometimes with patches of yellow, this spider was jet black. Instead of the double row of eyes in the front of the head, this had a single row that seemed to extend in a continuous band around the head.
The same thought struck them both together. This was not some primitive desert spider that lived in the empty rooms of the fort; it was a death spider.
Then Niall remembered the two spider balloons that had drifted overhead before the wind changed direction. He used his telescopic rod as a lever to force the black body out of the sand. Underneath it, he could see the silk of the balloon.
Ulf looked nervously over his shoulder.
“The other one must be somewhere round here. We’d better go.”
“What about the spider? If the other one finds it, they’ll know it’s been killed.” Suddenly, he remembered the story of the execution of the rebel humans who had killed a death spider — the slow, cruel torment lasting many days — and shivered.
“Yes. We’ll bury it.”
It took only a few minutes to cover the spider with sand, and to keep this in place with a number of flat stones. As they walked away, Niall looked back; from ten yards distance nothing betrayed the spot.
Niall walked to the edge of the lake and washed his telescopic spear in the salt water, cleaning off the blood and the white, gluey substance with a handful of grass. After that, he made it contract and stowed it in the bottom of the pannier. They hurried on towards the distant mountains, suddenly oppressed by a sense of danger, as if unknown eyes were scanning the landscape in search of them.
Kazak’s advice proved sound. On the far side of the mountains, rainfall had transformed a wilderness into a land of moderate abundance. The landscape was not unlike that in the vicinity of the burrow. So although the detour cost them an extra day’s travel, it was nevertheless far less arduous than the journey across the plateau. It was more than ten years since Ulf had been in this region, and he remembered it as a rocky desert. Now some climatic freak was transforming it into a habitable area. This also meant there was more danger from tiger beetles, scorpions and other night predators. So in spite of the heat, they travelled by day and spent the night in improvised shelters.
On the morning of the third day, Niall woke up in a shelter built of rocks and thorn bushes and smelt an odour that was strange to him. It was not unlike the smell of caterpillar hide when set to dry in the sun. The wind was blowing from the north-west. When he asked his father about it, Ulf shrugged and said: “It’s the smell of the delta.” It was the odour of decaying vegetation, mixed with a sweeter, slightly nauseating smell. Niall observed that Ulf seemed depressed until the wind changed.
On the morning of the fourth day, Ulf met with an accident that could have been serious. While they were sheltering under a tree in the heat of the day, they both noticed a movement in some bushes about fifty yards away. A large tailless rodent was standing on its hind legs, trying to reach some edible berries. Because Ulf and Niall were resting, it had not noticed their presence. Ulf seized his spear and moved carefully out of its range of vision, then began to move cautiously towards it, taking advantage of the shelter of creosote bushes. Niall quietly took his telescopic spear from the pannier and pressed the button to make it expand. At that moment, he heard a shout of pain, and the rodent took fright and vanished.
Ulf was on one knee, and his right foot and the lower part of the leg seemed to be in a hole. For a moment, Niall assumed he had simply stumbled into a crack in the dry ground. Then Ulf dragged the foot out, and Niall saw that a dark, hairy creature, not unlike a caterpillar, was clinging on to it. Without hesitation, he rushed forward and drove the end of the spear through the creature’s body. Even that failed to make it let go. A convulsive contraction of its body almost dragged Ulfs leg back into the hole. Then Ulf was free, although he was no longer wearing his sandal, and the blood ran from his ankle.