Her mind halted a moment. Ticos’ laboratory! Nile made a sound of muted fury. If he’d left a clue for her anywhere, given any time to do it, he’d left it there! She’d felt she was overlooking something. She hesitated. If she hadn’t been in partial shock because of what she’d come upon—
She returned along the route she’d followed from the laboratory to the lagoon, staying some thirty feet above what should be her actual trail.
And presently: a special minor area of agitation in the mass of wind-shaken growth below and ahead. A shimmer of blue-gray.
Nile sank smoothly to the floatwood branch she was crossing, flattened herself against it, then carefully shifted position enough to let her peer down.
The Parahuan was coming out of a thicket beneath her, following another branch. He crept along on all fours. It looked awkward, but his motion was fairly rapid and showed no uncertainty. He came to a parallel bough, paused, took a short hop over to it, went on. He seemed indifferent to the fact that he was several hundred feet above the sea. So they were capable climbers. As he reached a curtain of secondary growth, another Parahuan appeared, trailing the leader by twenty-five feet, and vanished behind him. Nile checked two minutes off on her watch. No more aliens had showed up—the pair seemed to be working alone. She went up twenty feet, hurried back in the direction of the lagoon.
It had startled her that they’d been able to pick up her trail so promptly in this vast green warren. The odds seemed all against that, but there was no question that they were following it. Both carried guns, heavy-looking thick-barreled devices fastened to the web of straps about their trunks. The one in the lead had a curved box attached to the top of his head, a number of tubes projecting from its sides and twisting about in the air with a suggestion of sentient searching. The second Parahuan carried a much smaller instrument directly above the vocal slit in the upper part of his head. That probably was a communicator.
Nile dropped back down, found a place to wait. There’d been a practical detail in the information contained in the old war records: the lower half of a Parahuan’s head was the best point to aim at to put them out of action quickly. Second choice was the lower torso. . . .
The leading Parahuan came into sight again on a lower branch, edging out of a wind-tossed cluster of great leaves she’d been watching. He paused there, staring about and ahead. Nile held her breath, wondering what signals he was getting from his tracking instrument, until he started forward along the branch. She let him pass below. Parahuan Number Two showed up punctually in turn. As he came within twenty-five feet, Nile sighted along the UW, squeezed the trigger carefully. The big body turned sideways, rolled off the branch without a sound.
Nile twisted left, aimed again. The leader had noticed nothing. Moments later he too plunged down into the waving vegetation and was gone.
* * *
The buti was an unremarkable shrublike growth in the inhis category, with lacy fronds and thick woody stems, living as a semi-parasite on the floatwood. Its stems were hollow, and the creamy sap they oozed when cut had the quality of nullifying a wide variety of smells, though the sap had no pronounced odor of its own. Specifically, in this case, it nullified the scents of a human body. When floatwood had been hunted over enough to make some of its harvestible life shy of human visitors, anointing oneself with buti sap, if it was obtainable, was a common move among experienced collectors.
The buti stand Nile had remembered from earlier visits was not much more than a hundred yards from Ticos’ laboratory, and somewhat above it. She let herself drop thirty feet into the center of the shrubs against the antigrav effect of the belt, then spent several minutes meticulously adding a coating of the sap to her color camouflage and to the various articles of her equipment. Her nerves were on edge; she did not like at all being in the immediate vicinity of the laboratory. They might know she’d been here before—the laboratory in fact was likely to be the point where their tracking instrument had picked up the fresh human trail and started them in pursuit. There might be a swarm of the creatures not far away at the moment.
But the job with the buti couldn’t be hurried too much. Nile finished it at last, cut off a two foot section of the stem, seared its ends shut with the UW and added it to the items already attached to her climb-belt. Salt water dissolved the sap; and she should have swimming to do presently. Her scent trail ended now thirty feet above the buti shrubs. If they followed it that far and could not pick it up again, they might conclude she’d lost her footing and fallen through the forest into the ocean. At any rate, she’d become as nearly indetectable as she could be.
She moved out of the stand, approached the laboratory with quick caution, conscious of a growing urgency to be out of this area. When she reached the platform, nothing seemed changed. The interior looked undisturbed; she could make out no marks of webbed Parahuan feet in the debris on the floor.
She came in quietly, gun held out before her, eyes shifting about. The rigid human exhibits watched her walk past toward Ticos’ former work area. As she went by the tiny hooded idol, dreaming its dreams on the shelf, she glanced over at it.
Two thoughts flashed simultaneously into her mind.
She was in abrupt motion almost before she became fully conscious of them—spinning around toward the shelf, dropping the gun. An instant later she had whipped up both ends of the leathery cloth on which the Parahuan manikin sat, brought them together with a twist over the hooded head, gripped them hard in both hands and swept the bundled figure from the shelf.
By then there was a great deal of activity inside the cloth, a furious jerking and twisting, carried out with such amazing vigor that it nearly tore the cloth from her hands. But she swung the bundle up, slammed it down hard against the floor, brought it up, slammed it down again. The bundle stopped jerking. Nile scooped up her gun, spilled the inert thing inside the cloth out on the floor. She stood gasping and shaking in fright and hate, staring down at it.
It had shifted its position on the shelf since she’d seen it last. Not much, perhaps three or four inches. As her mind had recorded the fact, memory brought up another datum from the old records. Some rescued human prisoners had reported that the Parahuan leaders were dwarfed creatures by comparison with their fellows.
She recalled no mention of their being dwarfed to this improbable extent. But if she hadn’t killed it, she might have a useful captive.
She dropped to her knees, pulled off the hood. Something attached to the thing’s chest—a flat dark disk with studs in it, metallic or plastic. Attached how? Nile gripped the disk in her fingers, tugged, then slid the point of her knife in sideways between the device and the Parahuan’s body, pried upward. There was a momentary resistance. Then four prongs in the underside of the instrument pulled suckingly out of the wrinkled skin. A communicator? She turned it over quickly in her hand. That was how the first trackers had known how to start on her trail. And it probably had been used again as she appeared in the entrance a minute ago, to call other searchers back to the laboratory—
She opened the kit pouch with flying fingers. There was stuff in there ordinarily used to secure some vigorously active floatwood specimen which was wanted alive—and it should hold this specimen. She pulled out flat strips of tanglecord, taped the Parahuan’s small wiry arms to the dumpy body, taped the webbed feet together, sealed the narrow vocal orifice above the eyes with a section of cord. She turned the midget quickly around, looking it over for other trick devices. Nothing but a few dozen brightly colored small jewels set in the wrinkled top of the head in what might be a symbol of rank or a decorative pattern. She bundled the captive back into the cloth, knotted the ends of the cloth together, spent another dragging minute nicking the buti stem and giving the bundle the sap treatment.
She left the bundle on the floor, went over to the section of Ticos’ work area and found his message to her almost at once, scrawled blandly and openly among the many notations that decorated the wall:
Nile note. The sestran stand should be carefully studied.