They were treated to a wealth of half glimpses of the natives moving through the sand hills as the minutes crawled on, but never did they have a chance really to study one.
“I think they’re working their way around to come in behind the globe—on our blind side,” Travis offered, having traced at least two in that possible direction.
“Won’t do them any good—this is the only opening.” Ross sounded close to smug.
But the thought of the natives coming in behind the globe could not be accepted so easily by Travis. Every buried instinct of hunter and desert warrior argued that such a chance threatened his own security. Reason told him, though, that there was only this one door to the ship, and that it was easily defended. They need only close it and nothing could reach them.
“What was the reason for this port anyway?” Ross pursued the big question a few seconds later. “There must have been some purpose for stopping here. Do we have to find something—or do something—before we can leave again?”
That thought had ridden all their minds, but Ross had brought fear into the open. And what if the solution lay over there, in that building to which there was no entrance—unless one could be forced at night? A nighttime entrance guarded by the flitting hairy things which could see in the dark and whose home hunting-ground it was . . .
“The building—?” Travis made a question of it. He felt Ashe stir beside him.
“Might just be,” the other assented. “If we are hung up here much longer, we can try burning our way in by day. These weapons pack a pretty hefty charge when set at maximum.”
Travis’ hand shot out, clamped down on Ashe’s shoulder. His helmet was locked against the grit drift in the wind, but his hand had been resting on the edge of the door casing and had caught that thud-thud transmitted by the outer skin of the globe. Below the bulge which kept the humans from viewing the ground directly under the curve of the side, something was beating on the metallic outer casing of the vessel—for what purpose and with what result, he could not guess. He groped for Ashe’s hand, drew it out beside his own and pressed the palm flat to get the same message.
“Pounding, I think.” He realized that the messages in helmet coms could not reach the ears of lurkers below. “But why?”
“Trying to hole the ship?” Ross hung over the other two. “They’ve no chance of getting through the hull—or have they?” His concluding flash of anxiety was shared by the rest. What did they know of the resources of the natives?
Coiled beside Travis was the ladder. Dare he push that out, climb over to see what the night creepers were doing below? The thud of the pounding appeared to him to be taking on both speed and intensity. Suppose by some miracle, or the use of some unknown tool, the hairy things could pierce the outer skin of the globe? Then there would be no possible hope of escape from this forgotten desert.
He began to edge the ladder forward. Ashe made a grab which the younger man fended away.
“We have to see,” he said, “we have to!”
Ross and Ashe moved together and in that narrow space blocked each other long enough for Travis to squeeze through the door, swing over the lip and climb down the length of his own body. Then he felt the ladder catch tight and knew that the other two were preventing its descent to ground level.
Gripping the rungs tightly, holding his body as close as he could to the surface of the ship, Travis looked down. The play of red flashes against the sky furnished a weird light for the activity below, for there was activity. He had been right. The hairy things had crept in unseen from behind the ship, and a group of them were now clustered about the base of the globe. But what they were doing he could not make out in the constant flickering of the light. Then one reared from its usual quadrupedal stance, and raised its forearms over its hump of head. The appendages at its midsection gave a twist, writhed out in a manner which suggested bonelessness, and clasped tight to the ship.
The creature gave a bound into the air and then hung, its hind feet now a foot or so off the ground. Apparently it held on by the grip of waist tentacles against the globe, while the fists or paws on its forelimbs pounded vigorously against that surface. There was something about that hitching climb, squirming upward as Travis watched, that spelled purposeful malevolence.
Now a second creature had hitched itself to the hull by midsection tentacles and was beginning to ascend. Travis could sight no weapons, nothing but those steadily pounding fists. But neither did he have any wish to battle the slow climbers. He reported to Ashe and was ordered back into the ship. They closed the port, took the precaution of sealing it as if making ready for flight, and then loosened their helmets.
Neither the pounding nor the sound of the climbers could reach them now. But Travis did not believe that the creatures had ceased their efforts to win into the ship, futile as those efforts might seem. The humans climbed to the control cabin to watch the outer world on the limited view of the screen. Renfry looked puzzled.
“I don’t get it. I still say that I’m sure this isn’t the end of the flight. But I can’t tell you why, or the why of this port, either. If the answer lies in that building, you’ll have to crack it open. But we may have a better cracker than just those hand weapons.”
Ross caught his meaning first. “The ship’s guns!”
“Might be.”
“Can we use them?” Ashe wanted to know.
“Well, they’re less a top secret than the rest of the stuff around here. Remember this?” He pressed a lever. Lights winked, that word from a vanished language spoke out of the thin air. It was all as it had been on their exploration of the ship.
“And you can fire them?”
“The chief—my chief—doped out that this does that”—Renfry fingered another switch he did not depress. “As far as I deduce, one of those king-sized blasters should just about clip across the roof of your strongbox. We can try it on for size any time you’re ready.”
But Ashe was rubbing his jaw in that absent-minded way which meant he had not yet come to a decision. “Too much guessing in all of this. We don’t know that we have to crack that place open in order to lift ship again. In fact, if we did crack it and couldn’t find what we needed—we wouldn’t be any better off. These natives must depend upon that shelter for their lives. Break it open and they’re just as dead as if we mowed them down with guns. They may not be anything or anybody we’d care to live with, but this is their world and we’re intruders. I’d like to wait a little before I try anything as drastic as blowing up the place.”
None of them was inclined to push him into action. Outside the flames beat into the night sky, and the white of the moon they had noted the night before was marred by a more yellow gleam from a smaller satellite trailing behind the larger. But of the activity of the dune skulkers the screen gave them no clue.
That came not by sight but by a startling shifting of the ship itself. How had the creatures outside achieved that movement? Perhaps, Travis imagined, by the sheer weight of many creeping bodies plastered to the hull. The globe canted from its landing position. And maybe that triggered the flying controls. For the now-familiar warnings of a take-off alerted them all.
“No!” Renfry protested, “we can’t—not yet—not until we know why.”
But the engines the humans did not understand, and could not hope to control, had no ears for that feeble defiance. Perhaps only a time limit had governed their visit, a full day and night of planetary time. Or maybe it was the strange attack of the hairy things.
And those creatures—would they free themselves in time, drop to the ground as the ship lifted, warned by the vibrations? Or would they cling in stupid concentration upon their attack, to be carried out into the freezing blackness of the eternal night?
The unwilling crew of the ship followed the old routine of strap down and wait for the wrench of blast-off, the break into hyperspace. Again they were being carried into the unknown with perhaps a long voyage ahead.
But it was not to be the same this time. Travis noticed the first departure from the usual routine. The take-off was not so severe—or else he had adjusted to it far better than he ever had before. He did not black out completely, nor did he have to undergo that terrible inner twisting. And he heard Renfry’s voice exclaim in wonder: