Danestar hesitated. She had almost intuitive sensitivity for the significance of her instruments’ indications; and that something was being altered now, moment by moment, in the millionfold interplay of signals in the pattern seemed certain.
She said suddenly, “There’s a directing center to the thing, of course, or it couldn’t function as it does. Before it went through the force field, every part of it was oriented to that center. There was a kind of rhythm to the whole which showed that. Now, there’s a section that’s going out of phase with the general rhythm.”
“What does that add up to?”
Danestar shook her head. “I can’t tell that yet. But if the shock it got from the barrier disrupted part of its internal communication system, it might be, in our terms, at least partly paralyzed now. A percentage of the individual entities—say about one-tenth—are no longer coordinating with the whole, are disconnected from it. . . . Of course, we can’t count on it, but it would explain why it hasn’t reappeared.”
Both were silent a moment. Then Wergard said, “If it is immobilized, it killed everyone in the control building before the shock got through to it. Otherwise we would have had indications of action by Volcheme by now.”
She nodded. The intercom switch on the viewscreen was open, but the system remained dead. And whatever the smuggler and the group in the main building were engaged in, they were not at present in an area covered by her spy devices. But the space shuttle had not left the building, so they were still there. If the creature from the Pit was no longer a menace and Volcheme knew it, every survivor of the gang would be combing the Depot for traces of Wergard and herself. Since they weren’t, Volcheme had received no such report from the control building. Whatever else had happened, the men stationed there had died as the alien poured in through the barrier.
Her breath caught suddenly. She said, “Wergard, I think . . . it’s trying to come out again!”
“The barrier’s flickering,” he acknowledged from the viewscreen. An instant later: “Full on now! Afraid you’re right! Watch for signs of damage. If it isn’t crippled, and if it suspects someone is here, it may hit this building next, immediately! It isn’t in sight . . . must be moving out below ground level.”
Danestar snapped the radiation headpiece back in position without taking her eyes from the projection field. Shock darkness crisscrossed the pattern of massed twinkling pinpoints of brightness again, deepened. She could judge the thing’s rate of progress through the barrier by that now. There were no indications of paralysis; if anything, its passage seemed swifter. Within seconds, the darkness stopped spreading, began to fade. “It’s outside,” she said. “It doesn’t seem seriously injured.”
“And it’s still not in sight,” said Wergard. “Stay ready to move!”
They were both on their feet. The shortcode transmitter on the shelf was silent, but this time the creature might not be announcing its approach. Danestar’s eyes kept returning to the projection field. Again the barrier had achieved minor destruction, but she could make out no further significant changes. The cold probability was now that there was no practical limit to the number of such passages the creature could risk if it chose. But something about the pattern kept nagging at her mind. What was it?
A minute passed in a humming silence that stretched her nerves, another . . . and now, Danestar told herself, it was no longer likely that the monster’s attention would turn next to this building, to them. The barrier had remained quiet, and there had been no other sign of it. Perhaps it wasn’t certain humans were hiding here; at any rate, it must have shifted by now to some other section of the Depot.
Almost with the thought, she saw Wergard’s hand move on the viewscreen controls, and in the screen the area about them was replaced by a multiple-view pattern.
Nothing stirred in the various panels; no defense field was ablaze about any of the buildings shown. The entire great Depot seemed empty and quiet.
“At a guess,” Wergard remarked thoughtfully, “it’s hanging around the main building again now.” He moved back a step from the screen, still watching it, began to unfasten his antiradiation suit.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He glanced over at her. “Getting out of it. One thing these suits weren’t made for is fast running. I expect to be doing some of the fastest running in my career in perhaps another minute or two.”
“Running? You’re not—”
“Our alien,” Wergard said, “should take action concerning Volcheme’s boys next. But whatever it does, the instant we see it involved somewhere else, I’ll sprint for the control building. It may be the last chance we get to yell for help from outside. And I don’t want to be slowed down by twenty pounds of suit while I’m about it.”
Danestar swallowed hard. He was right. But there was something, a feeling. . . .
“No! Don’t go there!” she said sharply, surprising herself.
He looked around in bewilderment. “Don’t go there? What are you—watch that!”
His eyes had shifted back to the screen. For an instant, she couldn’t tell what he had seen. Then, just as the view began to blur into another, she found it.
Volcheme’s space shuttle had darted out of the cover of the main building, swung right, was flashing up a wide street toward the eastern section of the Depot.
“Making a run for the Keep!” Wergard said harshly. He fingered the controls, following the shuttle from view section to view section. “They might just—no, there it is!”
The great fire body—flattened, elongated—whipped past between two warehouse complexes, a rushing brightness fifty feet above the ground, vanished beyond the buildings.
“Too fast for them!” Wergard shook his head. “It knows what they’re doing and is cutting them off. Perhaps their guns can check it! You watch what happens—I’m going now.”
“No! I . . .”
Then at last the realization surged up. Danestar stared at him, completely dismayed.
“It’s a trap,” she said evenly. “Of course!”
“What is? What are you talking about?”
“The control building! Don’t you see?” She jerked her head at the projection field. “I said a section of the thing was splitting off from the main body! When it came out through the barrier again, that section wasn’t showing any shock effects. I saw it but didn’t understand what it meant. Of course! It didn’t come through the barrier at all. It’s still in there, Wergard! In the control building. Waiting for any of us to show up. There’re two of them now. . . . ”
She watched stunned comprehension grow in his face as she spoke.
The smugglers’ shuttle was caught not much more than a minute later. It had discovered the enemy between it and the Keep section, turned back. When the space thing followed, tiny bursts of dazzling white light showed the shuttle’s energy guns were in action. The fire body jerked aside and paused . . . and now the shuttle turned again, flashed straight at its pursuer, guns blazing full out.
For a moment, it seemed a successful maneuver. The great creature swept up out of the path of the machine, slipped over the top of a building, disappeared. The shuttle rushed on toward the Keep—and at the next corner a loop of purple radiance snared it, drove it smashing into a building front. The fire giant flowed down, sent the shuttle hurtling against the building again, closed over it. For seconds, the radiance pulsed about the engulfed vehicle, then lifted into the air, moved off. There was no sign of the shuttle until, some hundreds of yards away, the fire body opened to let the shattered machine slide out, drop to the surface of the Depot. Its lock door was half twisted away; and Volcheme and his companions clearly were no longer within it.
To Danestar, watching in sick fascination, it had seemed as if a great beast of prey had picked up some shelled, stinging creature, disarmed it, cracked it to draw out the living contents, and flung aside the empty shell.
The alien swung west, toward the central section of the Depot, seemed to be returning to the main building complex, but then flowed down to the surface, sank into it and vanished.
Minutes passed and it did not reappear. Again the Depot’s sections stood quiet and lifeless in the viewscreen.
“It may be waiting for somebody else to break from cover,” Wergard said suddenly. “But you’d think the first thing it would do now is push into the main building and get its gadget! Volcheme must have left it there—the thing wouldn’t have slammed the shuttle around like that if it hadn’t been sure the contraption wasn’t inside.”
Danestar didn’t reply. Their nerves were on edge, and Wergard was simply thinking aloud. They had no immediate explanation for the thing’s behavior. But it had been acting purposefully throughout, and there must be purpose in its disappearance.