Andre Norton (ed) (4 page)

For
sheer lack of a subject to work upon, the three Neshantans were compelled to
laze through several time-units. It was high noon before another prospect
appeared.

This
one came the opposite way from the first two—out of the mountains and toward
the village.

Again
a biped, he was old, ill-dressed and on foot. Rheumy-eyed and with a ragged
beard, he trudged along bearing a bundle hung on a stick.

"The two previous tests were mainly
visionary," Beneker whispered. "Let's try out a predominantly
tactile job this time. It will give us a worthwhile check on his nervous
system."

"What do you
propose?" asked Dith.

"Let's
afflict him with some gnawers and nibblers. We can't go far wrong with that. If
the cosmos has a universal law, it is that the unwashed become bug-ridden."

Scuffle, scuffle went the
biped's worn and gaping boots as he mooched along with minimum lift of feet.
"Nowl" breathed Beneker.

They
projected together, all three of them, each providing
his own
quota of biters and his own intensity. It was irresistible.

The
victim stopped dead in his tracks, waggled his eyebrows,
smote
himself in ten different places. It didn't do any good. He tried twenty places
at twice the speed and greater force. That brought no improvement either. So he
became really vigorous about the matter, getting to work on himself in the
frantic fashion of one who could do with six pairs of hands, maybe a couple of
wooden mallets and a fence to rub against.

Beneker
generously increased the supply, sending an imaginary regiment of crawlers
down
the small of the biped's back. That was the last straw.
With amazingly intensified animation, the subject shot off the trail, took
refuge behind the opposite bushes and tore off his clothes. That gave the
watchers some worthwhile information about alien anatomy.

For
some weird reason nobody could understand, the afflicted one resumed his boots
before carrying on with his campaign.

In this incongruous attire, he shook his
underthings repeatedly, beat them on a rock,
gave
them
close examination. All the time he was muttering deeply in his beard. A few
visible crawlers were supplied to lend verisimilitude to the occasion, and
these he picked off and pinched between finger and thumb.

Still
muttering peevishly, he dressed himself, picked up stick and bundle, again
trudged toward the village. His expression was sour rather than puzzled,
suggesting that he viewed what had occurred as a familiar condition which
somehow had built up to critical mass.

"Here's a chance to check on
range," Beneker told the others. "See how far we can get him. Give
him a slight itch when I tell you." He let the subject progress some forty
steps before he said, "Go!"

They
were rewarded with an irritated scratching. Another forty steps and they tried
again. The victim raked himself and voiced a few words that seemed to give off
sparks.

The
third attempt was a flop—the subject had got beyond illu-sionary range.

"About
one-twentieth of a linid," Beneker estimated. "H'm!
A fair average.
He looked a stupid, insensitive type. We
should be able to affect a more receptive brain at twice or three times the
distance."

He
glanced at the sun now beginning to lower westward,
then
consulted his time-meter.

"We
won't be ready to take off before dusk and there is little we can do if we go
back to the ship. We might as well sit this out and test any other fauna that
comes along. We'll call it a day when the sun does the same."

"That's
all right with me," approved Dith, who liked sitting under a bush rather
than cleaning a ship. "But, Commodore, I'm getting pretty hungry."
Hastily he added, "And so is Molop."

"Yuck, yuck,"
exclaimed Beneker. "Now that you've
mentioned it, I could savage a gallumpat-steak myself. Go and tell Mushab Two
to leave his weapon with you while he fetches rations for all of us."

"Yes,
Commodore."

Eagerly,
Dith sneaked away. In short time there sounded a loud whump and a tree fell
over. Molop opened his mouth but nothing came out.

"Bang goes Dith," remarked Beneker,
resigned to that sort of thing. "Those Mushabs never had enough room from
the start. One egg—and it has conditioned them for life. I hope the fools have
not alarmed the whole village." Parting the leaves, he looked down the
trail. He let the leaves fall together and turned his attention back to Molop.
"Nothing for it but to try again.
Go get the
rations."

His expression slightly bemused, Molop got up
and made ready to depart. At that point, Dith reappeared, liberally sprinkled
with dirt and dragging a weapon.

"The
crack-shelled murt popped one at me but he missed by fifty linids."

"Poor shooting," said Beneker.
"Has he gone for the food?"
"Of course.
I told him to hurry." "Good," said Beneker, "Now shut
up."

The pay-off came in the early evening with
the sun three-quarters of its way down the sky and another couple of time-units
to go before dark. Bored by inactivity, Beneker had twice considered giving
up the watch and returning to the ship. The tests already carried out were, he
felt, sufficient to justify marking this world a free gift to Neshanta.

"Someone
coming," informed Dith, who was watching the trail. He waited a moment,
counted, "One, two, four of them."

Beneker had a look. The four were halfway
from the village. Bipeds, as expected, but there was something queer about this
lot.

He continued to look, sensed the queemess
increasing as they got nearer. Although he was careful not to reveal it, a
trace of unease came over him. There were peculiarities about these arrivals
that he could not understand.

In the first place, they were dressed so
similarly that it was too much for mere coincidence. Standardized attire
suggested some land of uniform and that, in turn, implied officialdom. The
dress had a slight resemblance to that worn by the one who'd ridden a
quadruped—big hat, colored neck-scarf, two-piece body clothes separated by a
belt.
Also boots.

But these belts had shaped attachments from
which protruded the grips of what appeared to be some kind of hand-projectors.

If
so, these were the first bipeds to be seen bearing arms. That would give them a
special status, Beneker decided, and special weapon-bearing status must be
viewed as ominous.

But
it was the weird manner of their approach that bothered him most. They had no
steady pace, fast or slow. At one moment they were walking in a bunch, the next
they were running in single file. Two of them went off the road to stalk warily
around a tree behind which nothing was concealed, and the other two waited for
them. Once or twice they adopted an exceedingly strange gait, a kind of jumping
run with knees rising high. It did not get them along any quicker than an
ordinary run.

"I
do not like this," Beneker admitted to the others. "There is
something extraordinary about those four. They are armed and eccentric and that
is a highly dangerous combination."

"Do you think they might be coming in
search of us?" asked Dith, reaching for his hand-projector.

"I
cannot see why they should be. How can they know of our presence?"

Beneker
looked again. Now that the four were nearer he could discern that they were a
kind of biped unlike those observed before.

Their
bearing was self-assured, grim, sharp-eyed and occasionally wary. Their
physique was small and compact.
Their attire neat and
decorative.

They
were walking at that moment, but as he watched they again broke into that
strange, leg-lifting run, doing it simultaneously as if sharing a group-mind,
stringing out one behind the other and heading straight up the middle of the
trail.

Then
there came a point where something hit Beneker smack in the brain. It landed
with such shocking vividness that he gasped, flattened himself to avoid being
seen, and kept well down until the four had passed, still at an ungainly,
knee-raising run.

Intent
solely on whatever was the purpose of their journey, they went by seemingly
unconscious of the Neshantans.

Raising
himself for a cautious glimpse of the departing figures, Beneker said, "I
got a picture out of them! By the space-demon, I got a picture!"

"So
did
I
." Dith's antennas were still quivering.
"Their minds don't operate on the same band as the others' minds did, or
perhaps they use a wider band, or maybe they are more efficient
projectors."

"They
were riding," said Beneker, a little pop-eyed.
"On
quadrupeds.
I could even feel the animals' back muscles moving and
smell their hides. The first two animals were black and had foam on their
faces."

"The
third was a kind of spotty gray and the last was mottled brown and white,"
Dith contributed. "The riders were going ten times as fast as they were
really going."

"Shooting
along like rockets," confirmed Beneker. He was dazed and worried.
"How can it be possible that—?"

"Look!" chipped in Molop, pointing.

They sent quick gazes up the trail, saw that
the uniformed quartet had left the route and concealed themselves behind a
large rock. From this lower angle they could be seen huddled closely together
in the shadow, but to anyone coming down they would be invisible. No more
pictures came from them, being too far away.

"Something is about to happen,"
Beneker decided. He glanced behind to choose his line of escape, and hoped the
Mushabs would function as intended.

Hardly had he spoken than another biped
appeared over a slight rise, coming from the mountains and toward the village.
He was a huge specimen with immense shoulders, a heavy, pugnacious jaw. No hat
covered his thick mop of iron-gray curls. His dress was a dark brown one-piece
affair with a slide fastener down its front.

Obviously unaware of the ambush, the newcomer
marched steadily past the rock, his boots making weighty crunching noises. The
armed quartet edged around to keep the rock between
themselves
and the other, then sprang out onto the trail immediately behind him.

One
of them must have made a slight sound, for the big biped threw a startled
glance rearward and promptly broke into a run.

The four emitted a bloodthirsty yell and set
off in hot pursuit. At top pace the entire bunch of pursuers and pursued went
past the Neshantan hideout, giving the crouching watchers a very brief replica
of the foaming quadruped vision seen before.

They raced on, the chasers gaining slowly but
surely. Beneker had to stick his head right out of the bush to see what was
about to happen.

Giving up all hopes of escape, the fleeing
biped suddenly stopped, whirled round to face his enemies,
made
a swift snatching motion with both hands at the region of his thighs. The
significance of that was a puzzler, but it brought superswift reaction. With expert
precision, the four conjured gleaming instruments into their hands. There
sounded several thin cracks, made faint by distance. No smoke, flames or
visible rays spurted from the weapons, but the target clapped a hand to his
shoulder and reeled back against a tree.

"Space
preserve
me!" exclaimed Beneker. "They are touchier than the Mushabs." He
could not take his eyes away from what was going on.

Surrounding
their captive, the four uttered commanding words, made commanding gestures,
prodded him with their projectors.

Despite his injuries, he obediently lifted
his hands to shoulder height, started toward the village, the others following
close behind.

Beneker
continued to protrude from the bush like a pornicker mortifying his carcase
amid thorns. He watched until captors and captive disappeared into the village.
Then and only then did he come to life.

"We are going back to the ship.
At once.
Tell the Mushabs to pack up and follow without
delay."

Safe in his control room, Beneker tapped
restless fingers on his desk, waited for Dith to return from his inspection of
the vessel.