Otherwise, there was a variety of strange lifeforms in sight, each going about its business. Some looked big enough to make a meal of a human being—and might, if they noticed him. But the gun on Quillan’s hip should be adequate to knock such ideas out of predators who came too close.
He’d checked the gun over automatically on discovering a few minutes before that he had one. It was a standard military type, manufactured by upward of a dozen Hub worlds. There were no markings to indicate its origin; but more important at the moment was the fact that the ammocounter indicated that it contained a full charge.
What could have happened to get him into this position?
The amnesia, however he’d acquired it, took a peculiar form. He had no questions about his identity. He knew who he was. Further, up to a point—in fact, practically up to a specific second of his life—his memory seemed normal. He’d been on Orado. And he was walking along a hall on the eighteenth floor of the headquarters building, not more than thirty feet from the door of his office, when his memory simply stopped. He couldn’t recall a thing between that moment and the one when he’d found himself sitting there.
Presumably he’d had an assignment, and presumably he’d been briefed on it and had set off. If he could extend his memory even thirty minutes beyond the instant of approaching the door, he might have a whole fistful of clues to what had gone on during the interval. But not a thing would come to mind. It wasn’t a matter of many years being wiped out; if he’d aged at all, he couldn’t detect it. Some months, however, might easily have vanished, or even as much as two or three years . . . .
Had somebody given him a partially effective memory wipeout and left him marooned here? Not at all likely. A rather large number of people unquestionably would be glad to see Intelligence deprived of his talents, but they wouldn’t resort to such roundabout methods. An energy bolt through his head, and the job would have been done.
The thought that he’d been on a spaceship which had cracked up in attempting a landing on this planet, knocking him out in the process, seemed more probable. He might have been the only survivor and staggered away from the wreck, his wits somewhat scrambled. If that was it, it had happened very recently.
He was thirsty, hungry, dirty, and needed a shave. But neither he nor his clothing suggested he had been an addled castaway on a wild planet for any significant length of time. The clothes were stained with mud and vegetable matter but in good general condition. He might have stumbled into a mud hole in the swamps which began at the foot of the hills below him and stretched away to the right, then climbed up here and sat down until he dried off. There was, in fact, a blurred impression that he’d been sitting in this spot an hour or so, blinking foggily at the landscape, before he’d suddenly grown aware of himself and his surroundings.
Quillan’s gaze shifted slowly about the panorama before him, searching for the glitter of a downed ship or any signs of human activity. There was no immediate point in moving until he could decide in which direction he should go. It was a remarkable view of a rather unremarkable world. The yellow sun disk was somewhat larger than he was used to. Glancing at it, he had a feeling it had been higher above the horizon when he’d noticed it first, which would make it afternoon in this area. It was warm but not disagreeably so; and, now that he thought of it, his body was making no complaints about atmospheric conditions and gravity.
He saw nothing that was of direct interest to him. Ahead and to the left a parched plain extended from the base of the hills to the horizon. In the low marshland on the right, pools of dark, stagnant water showed occasionally through thick vegetation. Higher up, lichen-gray trees formed a dense forest sweeping along the crests of the hills to within a quarter-mile of where Quillan sat. The rock-clustered hillside about him bore only patches of bushy growth.
The fairly abundant animal life in view was of assorted sizes and shapes and, to Quillan’s eyes, rather ungainly in appearance. Down at the edge of the marshes, herds of several species mingled peacefully, devoting themselves to chomping up the vegetation. An odd, green, bulky creature, something like a walking vegetable and about the height of a man, moved about slowly on stubby hind legs. It was using paired upper limbs to stuff leaves and whole plants into its lump of a head. Most of the other animals were quadrupeds. Only one of the carnivorous types was active . . . a dog-sized beast with a narrow rod for a body and a long, weaving neck tipped by a round cat-head. A pack of them quartered the tall grass between marsh and plain in a purposeful manner, evidently intent on small game.
The other predators Quillan could see might be waiting for nightfall before they did something about dinner. Half a dozen heavy leonine brutes lay about companionably on the open plain, evidently taking a sunbath. Something much larger and darker squatted in the shade of a tree on the far side of the marsh, watching the browsing herds but making no move to approach them.
The only lifeforms above the size of a lizard on the slopes near Quillan were a smallish gray hopper, which moved with nervous jerkiness from one clump of shrubs to another. They seemed to be young specimens of the green biped in the marsh. There was a fair number of those downhill on the slopes, ranging between one and three feet in height. They were more active than their elders; now and then about two or three would go gamboling clumsily around a bush together, like fat puppies at play. After returning to the business of stripping clumps of leaves from the shrubbery they would stuff them into the mouth-slits of their otherwise featureless heads. One of them, eating steadily away, was about twenty feet below him. It showed no interest whatever in the visitor from space.
However he considered the matter, he couldn’t have been stumbling around by himself on this world for more than fifteen hours. And he could imagine no circumstances under which he might have been abandoned here deliberately. Therefore there should be, within a fifteen-hour hike at the outside, something—ship, camp, Intelligence post, settlement—from which he had started out.
If it was a ship, it might be a broken wreck. But even a wreck would provide shelter, food, perhaps a means of sending an SOS call to the Hub. There might be somebody else still alive on it. If there wasn’t, studying the ship itself should give him many indications of what had occurred, and why he was here.
Whatever he would find, he had to get back to his starting point—
Quillan stiffened. Then he swore, relaxed slightly, sat still. There was a look of intense concentration on his face.
Quietly, unnoticed, while his attention had been fixed on the immediate problem, a part of his lost memories had returned. They picked up at the instant he was walking along the hall toward his office, ran on for a number of weeks, ended again in the same complete, uncompromising manner as before.
He still didn’t know why he was on this world. But he felt he was close to the answer now—perhaps very close indeed.
2
The Lorn Worlds, Imperial Rala—the Sigma File—
Imperial Rala, the trouble maker, was one of the Hub’s two hundred and fourteen Restricted Planets. It had emerged from the War Centuries in rather good shape—a local power with quite a high level of technology, with ambitions to become a major force in interstellar politics. It had absorbed a number of other systems of minor status, turned its attention then on the nearby Lorn Worlds as its first important target of conquest.
Quillan had been assigned to the Lorn Worlds some years previously. At that time the Lornese had been attempting to placate Rala and had refused all assistance to Intelligence.
Holati had called him to the office that day to inform him there had been a basic shift in Lornese policies. He was being sent back. A full-scale invasion by Imperial Rala was in the making, and the Lorn Worlds had called for Federation support. This time he would be given their full cooperation.
Quillan worked closely with Lornese intelligence men, setting up the Sigma File. It contained in code every scrap of previously withheld information they could give against Rala. For years, the Lornese had been concerned almost exclusively with the activities of their menacing neighbor and with their own defensive plans. The file would be of immense importance in determining the Federation’s immediate strategy. For Rala, its possession would be of equal importance.