Hunt the Space-Witch! (19 page)

“Green hills, spreading cities, oceans, spaceliners. Earth. No?”

“Observe the heavy tan,” La Floquet pointed out. “He's from Earth, but he hasn't lived there for a while. How about Vengamon?”

“Vengamon,” Thornhill declared, not questioningly this time. The strange syllables seemed to have meaning: a swollen yellow sun, broad plains, a growing city of colonists, a flourishing ore trade. “I know the word,” he said.

“Was that the planet where you lived?” the girl prodded. “Vengamon?”

“I think—” Thornhill began hesitantly. His knees felt weak. A neat pattern of life was breaking down and cascading away from him, sloughing off as if it had never been at all.

It had
never been
.

“I lived on Vengamon,” he said.

“Good!” La Floquet cried. “The first fact has been elicited! Now to think where you were the very moment before you came here. A spaceship, perhaps? Traveling between worlds? Think, Thornhill.”

He thought. The effort was mind-wracking, but he deliberately blotted out the memories of his life in the Valley and searched backward until—

“I was a passenger on the liner
Royal Mother Helene
, bound into Vengamon from the neighboring world of Jurinalle I … had been on holiday. I was returning to my—my plantation? No, not plantation. Mine. I own mining land on Vengamon. That's it, yes—mining land.” The light of the double suns became oppressively warm; he felt dizzy. “I remember now: The trip was an uneventful one; I was bored and dozed off a few minutes. Then I recall sensing that I was outside the ship, somehow—and—blank. Next thing, I was here in the Valley.”

“The standard pattern,” La Floquet said. He gestured to the others down near the stream. “There are eight of us in all, including you. I arrived first—yesterday, I call it, though actually there's been no night. The girl came after me. Then three others. You're the third one to come today.”

Thornhill blinked. “We're just being picked out of nowhere and dumped here? How is it possible?”

La Floquet shrugged. “You will be asking that question more than once before you've left the Valley. Come. Let's meet the others.”

The small man turned with an imperious gesture and retraced his steps down the path; the girl followed, and Thornhill fell in line behind her. He realized he had been standing on a ledge overlooking the river, one of the foothills of the two great mountains that formed the Valley's boundaries.

The air was warm, with a faint breeze stirring through it. He felt younger than his thirty-seven years, certainly; more alive, more perceptive. He caught the fragrance of the golden blossoms that lined the riverbed and saw the light sparkle of the double sunlight scattered by the water's spray.

He thought of glancing at his watch. The hands read 14:23. That was interesting enough. The day hand said 7 July 2671. It was still the same day, then. On 7 July 2671 he had left Jurinalle for Vengamon, and he had lunched at 11:40. That meant he had probably dozed off about noon—and unless something were wrong with his watch, only two hours had passed since then. Two hours. And yet—the memories still said, though they were fading fast now—he had spent an entire life in this Valley, unmarred by intruders until a few moments before.

“This is Sam Thornhill,” La Floquet suddenly said. “He's our newest arrival. He's out of Vengamon.”

Thornhill eyed the others curiously. There were five of them, three human, one humanoid, one nonhumanoid. The nonhumanoid, globular in its yellow-green phase just now but seeming ready to shift to its melancholy brownish-red guise, was a being of Spica. Tiny clawed feet peeked out from under the great melonlike body; dark grapes atop stalks studied Thornhill with unfathomable alien curiosity.

The humanoid, Thornhill saw, hailed from one of the worlds of Regulus. He was keen-eyed, pale orange in color. The heavy flap of flesh swinging from his throat was the chief external alien characteristic of the being. Thornhill had met his kind before.

Of the remaining three, one was a woman, small, plain-looking, dressed in drab gray cloth garments. There were two men: a spidery spindle-shanked sort with mild scholarly eyes and an apologetic smile and a powerfully built man of thirty or so, shirtless, scowling impatiently.

“As you can see, it's quite a crew,” La Floquet remarked to Thornhill. “Vellers, did you have any luck down by the barrier?”

The big man shook his head. “I followed the main stream as far as I dared. But you get beyond that grassy bend down there and come smack against that barrier, like a wall you can't see planted in the water.” His accent was broad and heavy; he was obviously of Earth, Thornhill thought, and not from one of the colony worlds.

La Floquet frowned. “Did you try swimming underneath? No, of course you didn't. Eh?”

Vellers' scowl grew darker. “There wasn't any percentage in it, Floquet. I dove ten—fifteen feet, and the barrier was still like glass—smooth and clean to the touch, y'know, but strong. I didn't aim to go any lower.”

“All right,” La Floquet said sharply. “It doesn't matter. Few of us could swim that deep, anyway.” He glanced at Thornhill. “You see that this lovely Valley is likely to become our home for life, don't you?”

“There's no way out?”

The small man pointed to the gleaming radiance of the barrier, which rose in a high curving arc from the water and formed a triangular wedge closing off the lower end of the Valley. “You see that thing down there. We don't know what's at the other end, but we'd have to climb twenty thousand feet of mountain to find out. There's no way out of here.”

“Do we
want
to get out?” asked the thin man in a shallow, petulant voice. “I was almost dead when I came here, La Floquet. Now I'm alive again. I don't know if I'm so anxious to leave here.”

La Floquet whirled. His eyes flashed angrily as he said, “Mr. McKay, I'm delighted to hear of your recovery. But life still waits for me outside this place, lovely as the Valley is. I don't intend to rot away in here forever—not La Floquet!”

McKay shook his head slowly. “I wish there were some way of stopping you from looking for a way out. I'll die in a week if I go out of the Valley. If you escape, La Floquet, you'll be my murderer!”

“I just don't understand,” Thornhill said in confusion. “If La Floquet finds a way out, what's it to you, McKay? Why don't you just stay here?”

McKay smiled unhappily. “I guess you haven't told him, then,” he said to La Floquet.

“No. I didn't have a chance.” La Floquet turned to Thornhill. “What this dried-up man of books is saying is that the Watcher has warned us that if one of us leaves the Valley, all the others must go.”

“The Watcher?” Thornhill repeated.

“It was he who brought you here. You'll see him again. Occasionally he talks to us and tells us things. This morning he told us this: that our fates are bound together.”

“And I ask you not to keep searching for the way out,” McKay said dolefully. “My life depends on staying in the Valley!”

“And mine on getting out!” La Floquet blazed. He lunged forward and sent McKay sprawling to the ground in one furious gesture of contempt.

McKay turned even paler and clutched at his chest as he landed. “My heart! You shouldn't—”

Thornhill moved forward and assisted McKay to his feet. The tall, stoop-shouldered man looked dazed and shaken, but unhurt. He drew himself together and said quietly, “Two days ago a blow like that would have killed me. And now—you see?” he asked, appealing to Thornhill. “The Valley has strange properties. I don't want to leave. And he—he's condemning me to die!”

“Don't worry so over it,” La Floquet said lightly. “You may get your wish. You may spend all your days here among the poppies.”

Thornhill turned and looked up the mountainside toward the top. The mountain peak loomed, snow-flecked, shrouded by clinging frosty clouds; the climb would be a giant's task. And how would they know until they had climbed it whether merely another impassable barrier lay beyond the mountain's crest?

“We seem to be stuck here for a while,” Thornhill said. “But it could be worse. This looks like a pleasant place to live.”

“It is,” La Floquet said. “If you like pleasant places. They bore me. But come: Tell us something of yourself. Half an hour ago you had no past; has it come back to you yet?”

Thornhill nodded slowly. “I was born on Earth. Studied to be a mining engineer. I did fairly well at it, and when they opened up Vengamon, I moved out there and bought a chunk of land while the prices were low. It turned out to be a good buy. I opened a mine four years ago. I'm not married. I'm a wealthy man, as wealth is figured on Vengamon. And that's the whole story, except that I was returning home from a vacation when I was snatched off my spaceship and deposited here.”

He took a deep breath, drawing the warm, moist air into his lungs. For the moment he sided with McKay; he was in no hurry to leave the Valley. But he could see that La Floquet, that energetic, driving little man, was bound to have his way. If there was any path leading out of the Valley, La Floquet would find it.

His eyes came to rest on Marga Fallis. The girl was handsome, no doubt about it. Yes, he could stay here a while longer under these double suns, breathing deep and living free from responsibility for the first time in his life. But they were supposed to be bound together: Once one left the Valley, all would. And La Floquet was determined to leave.

A shadow dimmed the purple light.

“What's that?” Thornhill said. “An eclipse?”

“The Watcher,” McKay said softly. “He's back. And it wouldn't surprise me if he's brought the ninth member of our little band.”

Thornhill stared as a soft blackness descended over the land, the suns still visible behind it but only as tiny dots of far-off radiance. It was as if a fluffy dark cloak had enfolded them. But it was more than a cloak—much more. He sensed a
presence
among them, watchful, curious, as eager for their welfare as a brooding hen. The alien darkness wrapped itself over the entire Valley.

This is the last of your company
, said a soundless voice that seemed to echo from the mountain walls. The sky began to brighten. Suddenly as it had come, the darkness was gone, and Thornhill once again felt alone.

“The Watcher had little to say this time,” McKay commented as the light returned.

“Look!” Marga cried.

Thornhill followed the direction of her pointing arm and looked upward toward the ledge on which he had first become aware of the Valley around him.

A tiny figure was wandering in confused circles up there. At this distance it was impossible to tell much about the newcomer. Thornhill became chilled. The shadow of the Watcher had come and gone, leaving behind yet another captive for the Valley.

Chapter Two

Thornhill narrowed his eyes as he looked toward the ledge. “We ought to go get him,” he said.

La Floquet shook his head. “We have time. It takes an hour or two for the newcomers to lose that strange illusion of being alone here; you remember what it's like.”

“I do,” Thornhill agreed. “It's as if you've lived all your life in paradise … until gradually it wears off and you see others around you—as I saw you and Marga coming up the path toward me.” He walked a few paces away from them and lowered himself to a moss-covered boulder. A small, wiry, catlike creature with wide cupped ears emerged from behind it and rubbed up against him; he fondled it idly as if it were his pet.

La Floquet shaded his eyes from the sunlight. “Can you see what he's like, that one up there?”

“No, not at this distance,” Thornhill said.

“Too bad you can't. You'd be interested. We've added another alien to our gallery, I fear.”

Thornhill leaned forward anxiously. “From where?”

“Aldebaran,” La Floquet said.

Thornhill winced. The humanoid aliens of Aldebaran were the coldest of races, fierce, savage beings who hid festering evil behind masks of outward urbanity. Some of the out-worlds referred to the Aldebaranians as devils, and they were not so far wrong. To have one here, a devil in paradise, so to speak—

“What are we going to do?” Thornhill asked.

La Floquet shrugged. “The Watcher has put the creature here, and the Watcher has his own purposes. We'll simply have to accept what comes.”

Thornhill rose and paced urgently up and down. The silent, small, mousy woman and McKay had drawn off to one side; the Spican was peering at his own plump image in the swirling waters, and the Regulan, not interested in the proceedings, stared aloofly toward the leftward mountain. The girl Marga and La Floquet remained near Thornhill.

“All right,” Thornhill said finally. “Give the Aldebaranian some time to come to his senses. Meanwhile, let's forget about him and worry about ourselves. La Floquet, what do you know about this Valley?”

The small man smiled blandly. “Not very much. I know we're on a world with Earth-norm gravity and a double sun system. How many red-and-blue double suns do you know of, Thornhill?”

He shrugged. “I'm no astronomer.”

“I am … was …” Marga said. “There are hundreds of such systems. We could be anywhere in the galaxy.”

“Can't you tell from the constellations at night?” Thornhill asked.

“There
are
no constellations,” La Floquet said sadly. “The damnable part is that there's always at least one of the suns in the sky. This planet has no night. We see no stars. But our location is unimportant.” The fiery little man chuckled. “McKay will triumph. We'll never leave the Valley. How could we contact anyone, even if we were to cross the mountains? We cannot.”

A sudden crackle of thunder caught Thornhill's attention. A great rolling boom reverberated from the sides of the mountains, dying away slowly.