They flinched together as the intercom hurled the sounds of a hard metallic crashing into the control room. It was repeated a few seconds later.
“Compartment D!” whispered Hulik, nodding at the intercom panel. “They’re through the first wall-“
A dim, heavy snarling came from the intercom, then a blurred impression of Yango’s voice. Both faded again. “Shut them off,” the captain said quietly. “We’re through listening.” Eleven and a half minutes … and it might have been a minute or so before Yango set the Assassin to work on the wall.
Hulik switched off the intercom system, said, a little breathlessly, “If Yango realizes we’ve landed… “
“I’m going to try to keep him from realizing it,” the captain told her. The ship was racing down smoothly towards the mouth of a steep-walled valley he’d selected as the most promising landing point barely a minute before.
“But if he does,” Hulik said, “and orders the robot to beam a hole directly through the side of the ship, how long would it be before they could get outside that way?”
Vezzarn interjected, without looking up from his work, “About an hour. Don’t worry about that, Miss do
Eldel! He won’t try the cargo lock or blister either. He knows ships and knows they’re as tough as the rest of it and can’t be opened except from the desk. He’ll keep coming to the control room, and he’ll be here fast enough!”
“We’ve got up to thirty minutes,” the captain said. “And we can be out in three if we don’t waste time! You’re finished, Vezzarn?”
“Yes. “
“Wrap it up, don’t bother to be neat! Any kind of package I can shove into my pocket—“
The red sun vanished abruptly as the Venture settled into the valley. On their right was a great sloping cliff face, ragged with crumbling rock, following the turn of the valley into the mountains. The captain brought the ship down on her underdrives, landed without a jar on a reasonably level piece of ground, as near the cliffs as he’d been able to get. Beside him, Hulik gave a small gasp as the control section lock opened with two hard metallic clicks.
“Out as fast as you can get out!” The captain stood up, twisted the last set of drive keys from their sockets, dropped them into his jacket pocket, jammed the package Vezzarn was holding out to him in on top of them, zipped the pocket shut, and started over to the couch to pick up Goth. “Move!”
Faces looked rather pale all around, including, he suspected, his own. But everybody was moving….
NINE
THE CAPTAIN used the ground-level mechanism to close the lock behind them, sealed the mechanism, and added the key to the seal to the assortment of minor gadgetry in his jacket pocket. Then, while Hulik stood looking about the valley, her gun in her hand, he got Goth up on his back and Vezzarn deftly roped her into position there, legs fastened about the captain’s waist, arms around his neck. It wasn’t too awkward an arrangement and, in any case, the best arrangement they could make. Goth wasn’t limp, seemed at moments more than half-awake; there were numerous drowsy grumblings, and before Vezzarn had finished she was definitely hanging on of her own.
“Been thinking, skipper,” Vezzarn said quietly, fingers flying, testing slack, tightening knots. “He ought to be able to spot us in the screens-“
“Uh-huh. Off and on. But I doubt he’ll waste time with that.”
“Eh? Yes, a killer robot’d be a good tracking machine, wouldn’t it?” Vezzarn said glumly. “You want to pull Yango away from the ship, then angle back to it?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Desperate business!” muttered Vezzarn. “But I guess it’s a desperate spot. And he wants Dani. I never’d have figured her for one of the Wisdoms!… There! Finished, sir! She’ll be all right now-“
As he stepped back, Hulik said in a low, startled voice, “Captain!” They turned towards her quickly and edgily. She was staring up the valley between the crowding mountain slopes.
“I thought I saw something move,” she said. “I’m not sure… ”
“Animal?” asked Vezzarn.
“No … Bigger. Farther away … A shadow. A puff of dust. If there were a wind-“ She shook her head. The air was still. No large shadows moved anywhere they looked. This land was less barren than it had appeared from even a few miles up. The dry, sandy soil was cluttered with rock debris; and from among the rocks sprouted growth, spiky, thorny, feathery stuff, clustering into thickets here and there, never rising to more than fifteen or twenty feet. “Let’s go!” said the captain. “There probably are animals around. We’ll keep our eyes open-“
As they headed towards the ragged cliffs to the right of the ship, the valley’s animal life promptly began to give indications of its presence. What type of life it might be wasn’t easy to determine. Small things skittered out of their path with shadowy quickness. Then, from a thicket they were passing, there burst a sound like the hissing of ten thousand serpents, so immediately menacing that they spun together to face it, guns leveled. The hissing didn’t abate but drew back through the thicket, away from them, and on to the left. The uncanny thing was that though their ears told them the sound was receding across open ground, towards the center of the valley, they could not see a trace of the creature producing it.
They hurried on, rather shaken by the encounter. Though it might have been, the captain thought, nothing more ominous than the equivalent of a great swarm of harmless insects. A minute or two later Hulik said sharply, “Something’s watching us!”
They could see only the eyes. Two brightly luminous yellow eyes peering across the top of a boulder at them. The boulder wasn’t too large; the creature hidden back of it couldn’t be more than about half-human size. It made a high giggling noise behind them after they were past. Other sets of the same sort of eyes began peering at them from around or above other boulders. They seemed to be moving through quite a community of these creatures. But they did nothing but stare at the intruders as they went by, then giggle thinly among themselves.
The ground grew steeper rapidly. Goth’s weight wasn’t significant; the captain had carried knapsacks a good deal heavier in mountaineering sport and during his period of military training. His lungs began to labor a little; then he had his second wind and knew he was good for a long haul at this clip before he’d begin to tire. Vezzarn and Hulik were keeping up with no apparent effort. Hulik, for all her slender elegance, moved with an easy sureness which indicated she was remarkably quick and strong, and Vezzarn scrambled along with them like an agile, tough little monkey.
The ground leveled out. They waded through low tangled growth which caught at their ankles, abruptly found a steep ravine before them, running parallel to the cliffs. Beyond it was a higher rocky rise.
“Have to find a place to cross!” panted the captain.
Vezzarn looked back at the long shadow-shape of the Venture in the valley below and behind them. “If we climb down there, sir,” he argued, “we can’t see them when they come out! We won’t have any warning. “
“They won’t be out for a while,” Hulik told him. “We’ve been walking only ten minutes so far.”
They turned left along the edge of the ravine. Perhaps half a mile ahead was a great rent in the side of the mountain, glowing with the dim light of the red sun. Cross a few more such rises, the captain thought, then turn right to a point from where they could still see Yango when he came tracking them with the robot. As soon as their pursuers had followed the trail down into his maze of ravines, they’d have their long headstart back to the ship….
They came to a place where they could get down into the ravine, hanging to hard, springy ropes of a thick vine-like growth for support. They scrambled along its floor for a couple of hundred yards before they reached a point where the walls were less steep and they could climb out on the other side. Level ground again, overlooking the valley; they began glancing back frequently at the dim outline of the ship. Something followed them for a stretch, uttering short, deep hoots, but kept out of sight among the rocks. Then another ravine cutting across their path. As they paused at its edge, glancing up and down for a point of descent, Vezzarn exclaimed suddenly, “He’s opened the lock!”
They looked back. A small sharp circle of light had appeared near the Venture’s bow. They hurried on. The light glowed steadily in the hazy dimness of the valley for about two minutes. Then it vanished. “Could he gave found a way to seal the lock against us?” Hulik’s tone was frightened.