Finished! Kelgarries blinked at the wall. Perhaps they were finished, too. No one would know until the transport ship landed on that other world, that jewellike disk of gold-brown they had named Topaz.
2
There were an even dozen of the air-borne guardians. Each swung in its own orbit just beyond the atmosphere of a bronze-gold planet in the four-world system of a yellow star. The globes had been launched to form a protective web around Topaz six months earlier. Just as contact mines sown in a harbor could close that landfall to ships not knowing the secret channel, so was this world supposedly closed to any spaceship lacking the signal to ward off the missiles the spheres could summon. This system for protecting the new human settlers had been tested as well as possible, but not as yet put to the ultimate proof. Still, the small bright globes spun undisturbed across a two-mooned sky at night and made reassuring blips on an installation screen by day.
Then a thirteenth object winked into being and began the encircling, closing spiral of descent. A sphere resembling the warden-globes, it was a hundred times their size, and its orbit was controlled by instruments under the eye and hand of a human pilot.
Four men were strapped down on cushioned sling-seats in the control cabin of the Western Alliance ship, two hanging where their fingers might reach buttons and levers. The two others were merely passengers, their own labor waiting for the time when they would set down on the alien soil of Topaz. The planet hung there in their viewscreen, richly beautiful in its amber gold, growing larger, nearer, so that they could pick out features of seas, continents, mountain ranges, which had been studied on tape until they were familiar—or as familiar as a world not Earth could be.
One of the warden-globes came alert and oscillated in its set path. It whirled faster as its delicate interior mechanisms responded to the signal that would send it on its mission of destruction. A relay clicked, but imperceptibly slow in setting the proper course. On the instrument, far below, which checked the globe’s new course the mistake was not noted.
The screen of the ship spiraling toward Topaz registered a path which would bring it into violent contact with the globe. They were still some hundreds of miles apart when the alarm rang. The pilot’s hand clawed out at the bank of controls; under the almost intolerable pressure of their descent, there was so little he could do. His crooked fingers fell back powerlessly from the buttons and levers; his mouth was a twisted grimace of bleak acceptance as the beat of the signal increased.
One of the passengers forced his head around on the padded rest, fought to form words, to speak to his companion. The other was staring ahead at the screen, his thick lips wide and flat against his teeth in a snarl of rage.
“They . . . are . . . here. . . .”
Ruthven paid no attention to the obvious as stated by his fellow scientist. His fury was a red, pulsing thing inside him, fed by his own helplessness. To be pinned here so near his goal, set up as a target for a mere machine, ate into him like a stream of deadly acid. His big gamble would puff out in a blast of fire to light up Topaz’s sky, with nothing left—nothing. On the armrest of his sling-seat his nails scratched deep.
The four men in the control cabin could only sit and watch, waiting for the rendezvous which would blot them out. Ruthven’s flaming anger was a futile blaze. His companion in the passenger seat had closed his eyes, his lips moving soundlessly. The pilot and his assistant divided their attention between the screen, with its appalling message, and the controls they could not effectively use, feverishly seeking a way out in these last moments.
Below them in the bowels of the ship were those who would not know the end consciously—save in one compartment. In a padded cage a prick-eared head stirred where it rested on forepaws, slitted eyes blinked, aware not only of familiar surroundings, but also of the tension and fear generated by human minds and emotions levels above. A pointed nose raised, and growling rose from a throat covered with thick buff-gray hair.
The growl aroused another similar captive. Knowing yellow eyes met yellow eyes. An intelligence, which was not natural to the animal body which contained it, fought down instinct raging to send both those bodies hurtling at the fastenings of the twin cages. Curiosity and the ability to adapt had been bred into these creatures from time immemorial. Then something else had been added to sly and cunning brains. A step up had been taken—to weld intelligence to cunning, connect thought to instinct.
More than a generation earlier mankind had chosen barren desert—the “white sands” of New Mexico—as a testing ground for atomic experiments. Humankind could be barred, warded out of the radiation limits. The natural desert dwellers, four-footed and winged, could not be so controlled.
Thousands of years earlier, the first southward roving Amerindian tribes had met with their kind, a hunter of the open country, a smaller cousin of the wolf, whose natural abilities had made an indelible impression on the human mind. He appeared in countless Indian legends as the Shaper or the Trickster, sometimes friend, sometimes enemy. Godling for some tribes, father of all evil for others. In the wealth of tales the coyote, above all other animals, held pride of place.
Driven by the press of civilization into the badlands and deserts, fought with poison, gun, and trap, the coyote had survived, adapting to new ways with all his legendary cunning. Those who had reviled him as vermin had unwillingly added to the folklore which surrounded him, telling their own tales of robbed traps, skillful escapes. He continued to be a trickster, laughing on moonlit nights from the tops of ridges at those who would hunt him down.
Then, in the early twenty-first century, when myths were scoffed at, the stories of the coyote’s slyness began once more on a fantastic scale. And finally scientists were sufficiently intrigued to seek out this creature that seemed to display in truth all the abilities credited to his immortal namesake by pre-Columbian tribes.
What they discovered was indeed shattering to certain closed minds. For the coyote had not only adapted to the country of the white sands; he had evolved into something which could not be dismissed as an animal, clever and cunning, but limited to beast range. Six cubs had been brought back on the first expedition, coyote in body, their developing minds different. The descendants of those cubs were now in the ship’s cages, their mutated senses alert, ready for the slightest chance of escape. Sent to Topaz as eyes and ears for less keenly endowed humans, they were not completely under the domination of man. The range of their mental powers was still uncomprehended by those who had bred, trained, and worked with them from the days their eyes had opened and they had taken their first wobbly steps away from their dams.
The male growled again, his lips wrinkling back in a snarl as the emanations of fear from the men he could not see reached panic peak. He still crouched, belly flat, on the protecting pads of his cage; but he strove now to wriggle closer to the door, just as his mate made the same effort.
Between the animals and those in the control cabin lay the others—forty of them. Their bodies were cushioned and protected with every ingenious device known to those who had placed them there so many weeks earlier. Their minds were free of the ship, roving into places where men had not trod before, a territory potentially more dangerous than any solid earth could ever be.
Operation Retrograde had returned men bodily into the past, sending agents to hunt mammoths, follow the roads of the Bronze Age traders, ride with Attila and Genghis Khan, pull bows among the archers of ancient Egypt. But Redax returned men in mind to the paths of their ancestors, or this was the theory. And those who slept here and now in their narrow boxes, lay under its influence. The men who had arbitrarily set them on this course could only assume they were actually reliving the lives of Apache nomads in the wide southwestern wastes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Above, the pilot’s hand pushed out again, fighting the pressure to reach one particular button. That, too, had been a last-minute addition, an experiment which had only received partial testing. To use it was the final move he could make, although he was already half convinced of its uselessness.
With no faith and only a wan hope, he depressed that round of metal flush with the board. What followed no one ever lived to explain.