“We’ll assume it isn’t true, Dr. Cay.”
“Then,” said Ticos, “I should still be permitted to take the call and attempt to divert her from visiting me at this time. If she does not know you are here and arrives, she will discover you are here. And even if you are able to prevent her from leaving again—”
Koll made a hissing sound. “If we are able to prevent her from leaving?”
“Your own records, as you’ve implied to me, indicate that Tuvelas are extremely resourceful beings,” Ticos observed mildly. “But if you should capture or kill the Guardian, others will come promptly in search of her. Eventually your presence must be revealed.” He shrugged. “I don’t want these things to happen. As a servant of the Guardians, it is my duty to prevent them from happening if I can. As you’re aware, I’ve been attempting to persuade some of the Everliving that your plans against my species must be abandoned before a general conflict becomes inevitable.”
“I know that,” said Koll. “You’ve had an astonishing—and shameful—degree of success. The Voice of Caution becomes increasingly insistent. Even the suggested use of your communicator is supported. Is it possible, Dr. Cay, that you are a Guardian who allowed himself to be captured in order to confuse the Everliving and weaken their resolution?”
“No,” Ticos said. “I’m not a Guardian.”
“You’re a Hulon?”
“Since that’s the name you give the general run of humanity, yes, I’m a Hulon.”
“It was the name we had for a vicious and stupid creature we encountered in our past,” Koll remarked. “We destroyed the creature, so the name was free to be bestowed again. Despite your efforts, our plans won’t be abandoned, Dr. Cay. I know you’re lying. Not too clumsily, but it will not be long before we put your story to the test. . . . Now attend to your collection here—and reflect occasionally on mine. . . . ”
Ticos did not see him make any gesture, but the Oganoon on Koll’s right snapped the nerve-torture instrument to one of the harness straps about its bulky body and half turned. The tiny cowled mummy made one of its startlingly quick leaps and was perched on the underling’s shoulder. The group moved off the platform and along a raised walkway toward the exit door, the armed servitor bringing up the rear, backing off in short powerful hops, weapon still pointed alertly at Ticos Cay. The lighting brightened back to normal in the big room.
Ticos watched the three vanish through the door, heard the heavy click of its locks. He drew a somewhat shaky breath, picked up a boxed device from the worktable and fastened it by its strap to his belt. It was a complicated instrument through which he controlled temperature, humidity, radiation absorption levels and various other matters connected with his biological specimens in different sections of the room.
His hands were unsteady. The interrogation hadn’t gone to his liking. Koll wasn’t his usual savagely menacing self—and that in spite of some deliberate provocation. He’d made use of the pain-giver only once. Koll, for Koll, had been affable.
It seemed a bad sign. It indicated that Koll was as confident as he appeared to be that he could dispel the doubts Ticos was nourishing in other leading Palachs by proving their prisoner had misinformed them. And, as a matter of fact, Ticos had totally misinformed them. Over a course of weeks he’d created a carefully organized structure of lies, half-truths and disturbing insinuations designed to fill the Everliving with the fear of Man, or at any rate with the fear of Tuvelas. Who, as far as Ticos Cay knew, didn’t exist. Sometimes he’d been hard put to remain consistent, but by now the pattern was so familiar that it held an occasional illusion of truth even for him.
It had been effective in restricting their plans until now. In spite of Koll, it might remain effective—but that depended on a large factor of chance. Ticos sighed inaudibly. He’d reduced the factor as much as possible, but it was still too large. Far too large!
He moved slowly about the room, manipulating the studs of his device now and then, tending to the needs of the biological specimens. He’d never been able to determine whether he was under visual observation or not, but it was possible, and he must not appear too concerned. Occasionally he felt the floor lift and sink under him like the deck of a great ship, and then there would be a heavy sloshing of sea water in the partitioned end of the room. His communicator was in there. A permanent post of Oganoon guards was also in there to make sure he didn’t get near the communicator unless the Everliving decided to permit it. And the water covering most of the floor was there because the guards had to keep their leathery hides wet.
From the energy-screened ventilator window near the ceiling came dim sounds like the muted roaring of a beast. That and the periodic heaving of the floor were the only indications Ticos had been given for the past several days that the typhoons still blew outside. . . .
* * *
Rain squalls veiled half the sea below the aircar. It was storm season in the southern latitudes of Nandy-Cline . . . the horizon loomed blue-black ahead; heavy swirling cloud banks drove across the ocean to the south. The trim little car bucked suddenly in twisting torrents of air, was hauled about on its controls and, for the moment, rode steady again along a southeasterly course.
Inside the cabin, Nile Etland stabbed at a set of buttons on the panel communicator, said sharply into the transmitter, “Giard Pharmaceuticals Station—come in! Nile Etland calling . . . Giard, come in!”
She waited a moment, tanned face intent. A hum began in the communicator, rose to a wavering howl, interspersed with explosive cracklings. Impatiently, Nile spun the filter control right, then left. Racketing noise erupted along the scale. She muttered bitter comment. Her fingers flicked over the call buttons, picked out another symbol.
“Danrich Parrol—Nile calling! Come in! Dan, can you hear me? Come in!”
Silence for an instant. Then meaningless sound spat and spluttered again. Nile’s lips twisted in angry frustration. She muted the speaker, glanced down at the animal curled in a thick loop of richly gleaming brown fur on the floorboards beside her. It lifted a whiskered head, dark eyes watching Nile.
“Dan?” it asked, in a high thin voice.
“No Dan! No anybody!” snapped Nile. “We keep hitting a soup of static anywhere beyond twenty miles all around.”
“Soup?”
“Forget it, Sweeting. We’ll try calling the sledmen. Maybe they can help us find Ticos.”
“Find Tikkos!” Sweeting agreed. The furred shape shifted, flowed, came upright. Bracing short sturdy forelegs against the control panel, Sweeting peered at the sections of seascape and sky in the viewscreens, looked over at Nile. Seven and a half feet in length from nose to the tip of her muscular tail, she was the smaller of Nile’s pair of mutant hunting otters. “Where’s sledmen?”
“Somewhere ahead.” Nile had swung the car fifteen degrees to the east. “Settle down.”
The sled she’d sighted in the screens several minutes earlier presently came to view again, now only a few miles away. The car’s magnification scanners showed a five hundred foot floatwood raft with flattened, streamlined superstructure, riding its runners twelve yards above the surging seas. The central heavy-weather keel was down, knifing through the waves between runners. On a day of less violence, the sled would have been drifting with an illusion of airy lightness over the water, keel withdrawn, sails spread. Now the masts were hauled flat to the deck, and it was the set of cannon drives along the sled’s edges which sent it rushing toward the moving front of the storm. The rain-darkened afterdeck was emblazoned with a pair of deep-blue triangles—the Blue Guul symbol of the Sotira Fleet.
As the sled vanished below the next cloud bank, Nile switched the communicator to ten mile close-contact band, said into the transmitter, “Dr. Nile Etland of Giard Pharmaceuticals calling Sotira sled! Acknowledge, please!” Close-contact seemed to have stayed operational. And they should know her by name down there. The Sotira sleds did regular sea-harvest work for Giard.
The communicator said suddenly, “Captain Doncar of Sotira sled acknowledging. Go ahead, Dr. Etland. . . . ”
“I’m in the air behind you,” Nile announced. “May I come aboard?”
A moment of silence. Then Doncar’s voice said, “If you wish. But we’ll be running through heavy storm in less than fifteen minutes.”
“I know—I don’t want to lose you in it.”
“Come down immediately then,” Doncar advised her. “We’ll be ready for you.”
They were. Almost before Nile could climb out of the aircar, half a dozen men in swimming gear, muscular naked backs glistening in the slashing rain, had the small vehicle strapped securely against the sled’s deck beside a plastic shrouded object which might be an oversized harpoon gun. It was a disciplined, practiced operation. As they stepped back, a brown-skinned girl, dressed down for the weather like the crewmen, hurried up from the central row of cabins. She shouted something almost lost in the din of wind and rain.