The swamp was full of sound, most of it of a minor nature . . . chirps, twittering, soft hoots. Something whistled piercingly three times in the tree overhead. Behind him, not too far off, was a slow, heavy splashing which gradually moved away. At the very limit of his hearing was something else. It might have been human voices, faint with distance, or simply his imagination at work.
Nearby, nothing moved. Quillan pulled the control set out of its saddle frame, slid down from the saddle, clinging to it with one hand, finally dropped a few inches into a layer of mud above the mass of tree roots. He climbed farther up on the roots, found a dry place under one of them where he shoved the control set out of sight. Then he went climbing cautiously on around the great trunk, slipping now and then on the slimy root tangle beneath the mud. . . .
And here was where he had concealed the Sigma File. A little bay of water extended almost to the trunk itself about five feet deep. Quillan slipped down into it. There was firm footing here. He moved forward to the tip of the bay, took a deep breath and crouched down. The warm water closed over his head. He groped about among the root shelves before him, touched the file, gripped it by its handle and drew it out.
He clambered up out of the water, started back around the tree . . .
And there the thing stood.
* * *
Quillan stopped short. This was almost an exact duplication of what happened after he’d brought the Sigma File down here and concealed it. It had been daylight then, and what he saw now as a bulky manlike shape in the shadow of the tree had been clearly visible. It was a green monstrosity, heavy as a gorilla, with a huge, round bobbing ball of a head which showed no features at all through its leafy appendages. It was bigger than it had looked at a distance from the hillside, standing almost eight feet tall.
The first time, it had been only a few yards away, moving toward him around the tree, when he had seen it. His instant reaction had been to haul out his gun. . . .
Now he stayed still, looking at it. His heartbeat had speeded up noticeably. This was, he told himself, an essentially vegetarian creature. And it was peaceable because it had a completely effective means of defense. It could sense the impulse to attack in an approaching carnivore, and it could make the carnivore forget its purpose.
As often as was necessary.
Quillan made himself start forward. He had no intention, his mind kept repeating, of harming this oversized fleegle, and it had no intention of harming him. It did not move out of his path as he came toward it, but turned slowly to keep facing him as he clambered past over the roots a few feet away.
Quillan didn’t look back at it and heard no movement behind him. He saw the man-tracker floating motionless above the mud ahead, put the file down and pulled the tracker’s control set out from under the root where he had left it. A minute or two later, he was back in the machine’s saddle, out in the moonlight away from the big tree, the Sigma File fastened to his belt.
He tapped a pattern of instructions into the control set, checked them very carefully, slid the set into the saddle frame and switched it on.
The man-tracker swung about purposefully, went gliding away through the swamp. A hundred yards on, it encountered three fleegles, somewhat smaller than the one under the tree, wading slowly leg-deep through the mud. They stopped as the machine appeared, and Quillan thought friendly and admiring things about fleegles until they were well behind him again. Perhaps a minute later, the man-tracker stopped in the air above the first of the Talada’s lost crew.
He had crawled into a thicket and was blubbering noisily to himself. When two of the machine’s grapplers flicked down into the thicket and locked about him, he bawled in horror. Quillan looked straight ahead, not particularly wanting to watch this. There was a click behind him as the preservative tank opened. For a moment, his nostrils were full of the stink of the liquid. Then there was a splash, and the bawling stopped abruptly. The tank clicked shut.
The man-tracker swung around on a new point, set off again. Its present instructions were to trail and collect every human being within the range of its sensory equipment, except its rider.
They’d been on edge to begin with here, Quillan told himself. Their rifles already had brought down one brute which had come roaring monstrously at them in the dusk; and presumably the rifles could handle anything else they might encounter. But they hadn’t liked the look of the swamp the man-tracker was leading them into. Wading through pools, slipping in the mud, flashing their lights about at every menacing shadow, they followed the machine, mentally cursing the order that had sent them after the intelligence agent as night was closing in.
And then a great green ogre was standing in one of the light beams. . . .
Naturally, they tried to shoot it.
And as they made the decision, they began to forget.
Progressive waves of amnesia . . . first, perhaps, only a touch. The men lifting rifles forgot they were lifting them. Until they saw the fleegle again—
The past few hours might be wiped out next. They stood in a swamp at night, not knowing how they’d got there or why they were there. But they had rifles in their hands, and an ogrish shape was watching them.
Months forgotten now. The fleegle could keep it up.
About that point, they’d begun to stampede, scattered, ploughed this way and that through the swamp. But the fleegles were everywhere. And as often as a gun was lifted in panic, another chunk of memory would go. Until the last of the weapons was dropped.
The man-tracker wasn’t rounding up men, but children in grown-up bodies, huddled in hiding on a wet, dark nightmare world, dazed and uncomprehending, unable to do more than wail wildly as the machine picked them up and placed them in its tank.
7
Quillan came out of the compartment where the man-tracker was housed, locked the door and turned off the control set.
“You haven’t closed the vat yet,” Hace said.
He nodded. “I know. Let’s go back.”
“I’m still not clear on just what did happen,” she went on, walking beside him up the passage. “You say they lost their memories . . . ?”
“Yes. It’s a temporary thing. I had the same experience when I first got here, though I don’t seem to have been hit as hard as most of them were. If they weren’t floating around in that slop now, they’d start remembering within hours.”
He opened the door to the vat room, motioned her inside. Hace wrinkled her nose in automatic distaste at the odor of the preservative, said, “It’s very strange. How could any creature affect a human mind in that manner?”
“I don’t know,” Quillan said. “But it isn’t important now.” He followed her in, closing the door behind him, went on, “Now this will be rather unpleasant, so let’s get it over with.”
She glanced back at him. “Get what over with, Quillan?”
“You’re getting the ride to the Hub you said you wanted,” Quillan told her, “but you’re riding along with the crew down there.”
Hace whirled to face him, her eyes wild with fear.
“Ah—no! Quillan . . . I . . . you couldn’t . . .”
“I don’t want you awake on the ship,” he told her. “Though I might have thought of some other way of making sure you wouldn’t be a problem if my pilot hadn’t died as he did.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Her voice was shrill. “Didn’t I try to help you in the control room?”
“You played it smart in the control room,” Quillan said. “But you would have gone into the vat with the first group if I hadn’t thought you might be useful in some way.”
“But why? Am I to blame for what Ajoran did?”
Quillan shrugged. “I’m not sorry for what happened to Ajoran. But I’m not stupid enough to think that a Ralan intelligence agent would go out in a grav-suit to help look for me, leaving the ship in charge of a couple of junior officers. Ajoran went out because he was ordered to do it. And there were a few other things. What they add up to, doll, is that you were the senior agent in this operation. And it would suit you just fine to get back to Rala with the Sigma File, and no one left alive to tell how you almost let it get away from you.”