Hulida said, “Our purpose goes beyond looting the survey station, Jeslin. Its equipment and personnel, of course, are valuable prizes in themselves, and so, to a lesser extent, are the patrol boat and its crew.”
Jeslin looked over at him. “The personnel—”
“The personnel,” Hulida explained, “and the crew will be transformed into machmen, naturally. They have highly trained minds, experience and skills which we can use to good advantage. Their consent isn’t required. Not all of those who are machmen now underwent the transformation willingly, but their objections vanished as their experiences made its advantages fully apparent to them. They are as loyal to the group and its goals now as any of the others. And so will you be.”
Jeslin felt a surge of cold anger. Mind-conditioning, of course. And it could be done . . .
“But our plan goes much farther than that,” the machman was continuing. “This is a matter which has been very carefully investigated and prepared, Jeslin. The immediate consequence of your transformation will be that you will resume your work here as if nothing had happened—and, in fact, nothing else will have happened. You will continue to return favorable reports on Lederet to your department in the Hub. Within a year, the decision will be made to open precolonial operations on the planet.
“That is what we want. Equipment and supplies will be moved out here on a scale otherwise unobtainable by a small group such as ours. And with it will come technicians and scientists from whom we can select further recruits to round out our ranks. We will work carefully and quietly, but when we leave the planet, it will be to go forever beyond the Federation’s reach with everything we need to found our own machman colony.”
Jeslin was silent a moment, asked, “Why are you telling me all this?”
“To make it clear,” the machman said, “that we simply cannot allow someone who knows about us to remain at large here. The possibility that you would still be alive and in a position to interfere with our plans when the Hub shipments begin to arrive may be slight, but we aren’t ignoring it. Every other member of the survey team was accounted for during the morning. If necessary, we could turn all our resources now for months on end to the single purpose of hunting you down.”
“You’re inviting me to surrender?”
Hulida said, “I’m appealing to your reason. You have the opportunity of participating voluntarily in one of mankind’s greatest adventures. If you reject it, it may not be possible to avoid killing you.”
“At the moment,” Jeslin said mildly, “it seems that I have one of the group’s more important members as my hostage.”
Hulida shook his blindfolded head. “No one of us is important enough to stand in the way of the group’s goals. The fact that I’m your prisoner will be given every consideration, of course. But if it becomes necessary, we will both die.”
Jeslin’s gaze shifted to the course chart above the panel. He studied it a moment.
“I won’t argue,” he remarked, “with your claim that being transformed into a machman is a better way to live or the coming way to live. Possibly it’s both. It’s your methods I object to.”
“They are our methods out of necessity,” Hulida said.
“Perhaps. I’ll think about it. And since you seem to have presented your case completely now, I’ll appreciate it if you keep quiet for a while.”
The machman smiled, shrugged, remained silent. After some minutes, Jeslin slowed the Pointer’s advance. There was a valley ahead, a wide, sandy riverbed winding along it. His route led across the river. At this point, there was forest again on the other side, but there was no way he could avoid coming out from under the shelter of the trees for a distance of at least half a mile.
He had been watching the search screens constantly and did not think he was being followed. It would have been almost impossible for even a single machman to keep the fleeing Pointer in sight in the forest without coming into view occasionally in the screens. The sky was a different matter. Jeslin could not check for them there without showing himself above the forest. For all he knew, there were machmen directly overhead at the moment.
But he had to get over the river before the hunt for him became organized, and this was his best opportunity to do it. Now he could see sunlit patches of the valley ahead, between the trunks and undergrowth and he slowed the Pointer again. Prowl up to the edge of the open ground, he thought; then if there were no pursuers immediately in sight, make a quick dash across. It would be too bad if he was seen, but once he reached the forest on the other side of the valley, he should be able to lose them again . . .
He heard a sound from Hulida, an abrupt, soft intake of breath, looked over at him and saw the knotted jaw muscles, the tight, fixed grin of the machman’s mouth. Immediately, almost before he could form a conscious thought of why he should do it, Jeslin was spinning the Pointer away from the valley, back into the forest, and slamming on speed.
Behind him, the forest crashed. In the rear search screen, he saw the thing sweep after him . . . a vertical torrent, fifteen feet across, composed of earth, brush, uprooted and shattered trees rushing into the air, sucked up by a tractor beam. Beyond it, a group of flying figures darted into the forest, fanned out.
In thick growth, Jeslin turned the Pointer left again, raced on, hugging the ground, for a hundred yards, swung sharply to the right. For perhaps a minute, he saw nothing in the screens except the thickets the machine was slashing through. Then there was a glimpse of two machmen weaving around tree trunks above the undergrowth. The roar of the tractor beam had lessened, now grew stronger again. The Pointer flashed into another thicket.
“Useless, Jeslin!” Hulida was shouting. “They’ve found you and you can’t shake them off!”
For a while, it seemed Hulida was right. The fliers couldn’t match the Pointer’s speed in the forest. They would be there for instants, coming down through the crowns, fall behind as Jeslin swerved off, and vanish again. But they could rise back up through the trees and overtake him in the open air, and were doing it. He didn’t know how many they were in all, but half the time he seemed to be in momentary view of one or the other of them.
And the tractors followed the fliers. There must be at least two of the machines moving across the forest after him, guided by the flying scouts. Suddenly the roar of the beam would arise, shredding the growth as it rushed in towards him; sometimes a second one appeared almost simultaneously from the other side. Once he nearly ran the Pointer directly into one of the dark, hurtling columns of forest debris; as he slewed away from it, the vehicle shuddered as if it were being shaken apart, and Hulida uttered a short, hoarse cry.
And then everything was quiet again. The Pointer rushed on—a minute, two minutes, three, four; and no pursuer appeared in the screens. Jeslin saw a gully ahead, a narrow, dry water bed, dropped into it, moved along it a quarter of a mile until it turned into a deep, rocky ravine almost enclosed by dense undergrowth above. There he stopped the machine.
The time display in the instrument panel told him twelve minutes had passed since he reached the edge of the valley. He would have said he had been running from the tractors for nearly an hour.
He rubbed his sweating palms along his thighs, looked over at Hulida’s slumped form. There was no particular satisfaction in knowing that the chase had unnerved the machman more than it had him.
“Now talk,” he said unsteadily, “if you care to go on living. What happened?”
Hulida straightened slowly but did not answer at once. Then he said, speaking carefully and obviously struggling to recover his self-possession, “Several of the survey team members were given truth drugs and questioned as soon as we secured the station. They told us of the long-range transmitter which was to be used to call for help if the station was disabled or overwhelmed by a hostile force. When you were warned off and escaped, it was assumed that that was where you would try to go. The transmitter has been located and is, of course, being guarded. We ran into the group which was watching the route you were most likely to take.”
Jeslin had a sense of heavy, incredulous dismay. He hadn’t expected that particular piece of information to get to the machmen so quickly. It had been the one way left open now to defeat their plans.