Hunt the Space-Witch! (22 page)

“Well?” Thornhill asked casually. “No go?”

“We got several thousand feet before this damned fog closed in around us. It was almost as if the Watcher sent it on purpose. We had to turn back.”

“And was there any sign of a pass leading out of the Valley?”

La Floquet shrugged. “Who knows? We couldn't as much as see each other! But I'll find it. I'll go back tomorrow when both suns are in the sky—and I'll find a way out!”

“You devil,” came McKay's thin, dry voice. “Won't you ever give up?”

“Not while I can still walk!” La Floquet shouted defiantly. But there was a note of mock bravado in his voice. Thornhill wondered just what had really happened up there on the mountain path.

He was not kept long in ignorance. La Floquet stalked angrily away, adopting a pose of injured arrogance, leaving Vellers standing near Thornhill. The big man looked after him and shook his head.

“The liar!”

“What's that?” Thornhill asked, half-surprised.

“There was no fog on the mountain,” Vellers muttered bitterly. “He found the fog when we came back down, and he took it as an excuse. The little bullfrog makes much noise, but it's hollow.”

Thornhill said earnestly, “Tell me, what happened up there? If there wasn't any fog, why'd you turn back?”

“We got no more than a thousand feet up,” Vellers said. “He had been leading. But then he dropped back and got very pale. He said he couldn't go on any farther.”

“Why? Was he afraid of the height?”

“I don't think so,” Vellers said. “I think he was afraid of getting to the top and seeing what's there. Maybe he knows there isn't any way out. Maybe he's afraid to face it. I don't know. But he made me follow him back down.”

Suddenly Vellers grunted heavily, and Thornhill saw that La Floquet had come up quietly behind the big man and jabbed him sharply in the small of the back. Vellers turned. It took time for a man six feet seven to turn.

“Fool!” La Floquet barked. “Who told you these lies? Why this fairy tale, Vellers?”

“Lies? Fairy tale? Get your hands off me, La Floquet. You know damn well you funked out up there. Don't try to fast-talk your way out now.”

A muscle tightened convulsively in the corner of La Floquet's slit of a mouth. His eyes flashed; he stared at Vellers as if he were some beast escaped from a cage. Suddenly La Floquet's fists flicked out, and Vellers stepped back, crying out in pain. He swung wildly at the smaller man, but La Floquet was untouchable, humming in under Vellers' guard to plant a stinging punch on the slablike jaw, darting back out again as the powerful Vellers tried to land a decisive blow. La Floquet fought like a fox at bay.

Thornhill moved uneasily forward, not wanting to get in the way of Vellers' massive fists as the giant tried vainly to hit La Floquet. Catching the eye of the Aldebaranian, Thornhill acted. He seized Vellers' arm and tugged it back while the alien similarly blocked off La Floquet.

“Enough!” Thornhill snapped. “It doesn't matter which one of you's lying. Fighting's foolish—you told me that yourself earlier today, La Floquet.”

Vellers dropped back sullenly, keeping one eye on La Floquet. The small man smiled. “Honor must be defended, Thornhill, Vellers was spreading lies about me.”

“A coward and a liar, too,” Vellers said darkly.

“Quiet, both of you,” Thornhill told them. “Look up there!”

He pointed.

A gathering cloud hung low over them. The Watcher was drawing near—had been, unnoticed, all during the raging quarrel. Thornhill looked up, waiting, trying to discern some living form within the amorphous blackness that descended on them. It was impossible. He saw only spreading clouds of night hiding the dim sunlight.

He felt the ground rocking gently, quivering in a barely perceptible manner. What now, he wondered, peering at the enfolding darkness. A sound like a faroff musical chord echoed in his ears—a subsonic vibration, perhaps, making him giddy, soothing him, calming him the way gentle stroking might soothe a cat.

Peace among you, my pets
, the voiceless voice said softly, almost crooningly.
You quarrel too much. Let there be peace.…

The subsonic note washed up over him, bathed him, cleansed him of hatred and anger. He stood there smiling, not knowing why he smiled, feeling only peace and calmness.

The cloud began to lift; the Watcher was departing. The unheard note diminished in intensity, and the motion of the ground subsided. The Valley was at rest, in perfect harmony. The last faint murmur of the note died away.

For a long while no one spoke. Thornhill looked around, seeing an uncharacteristic blandness loosen the tight set of La Floquet's jaws, seeing Vellers' heavy-featured, angry face begin to smile. He himself felt no desire to quarrel with anyone.

But deep in his mind the words of the Watcher echoed and thrust at him:
Peace among you, my pets
.

Pets
.

Not even specimens in a zoo, Thornhill thought with increasing bitterness as the tranquility induced by the subsonic began to leave him. Pets. Pampered pets.

He realized he was trembling. It had seemed so attractive, this life in the Valley. He tried to cry out, to shout his rage at the bare purple mountains that hemmed them in, but the subsonic had done its work well. He could not even vocalize his anger.

Thornhill looked away, trying to drive the Watcher's soothing words from his mind.

In the days that followed they began to grow younger. McKay, the oldest, was the first to show any effects of the rejuvenation. It was on the fourth day in the Valley—days being measured, for lack of other means, by the risings of the red sun. The nine of them had settled into a semblance of a normal way of life by that time. Since the time when the Watcher had found it necessary to calm them, there had been no outbreaks of bitterness among them; instead, each went about his daily life quietly, almost sullenly, under the numbing burden of the knowledge of their status as
pets
.

They found they had little need for sleep or food; the manna sufficed to nourish them, and as for sleep, that could be had in brief cat naps when the occasion demanded. They spent much of their time telling each other of their past lives, hiking through the Valley, swimming in the river. Thornhill was beginning to get terribly bored with this kind of existence.

McKay had been staring into the swiftly running current when he first noticed it. He emitted a short, sharp cry; Thornhill, thinking something was wrong, ran hurriedly toward him.

“What happened?”

McKay hardly seemed in difficulties. He was staring intently at his reflection in the water. “What color is my hair, Sam?”

“Why, gray—and—and a little touch of brown!” McKay nodded. “Exactly. I haven't had brown in my hair in twenty years!”

By this time most of the others had gathered. McKay indicated his hair and said, “I'm growing younger. I feel it all over. And look—look at La Floquet's scalp!”

In surprise the little man clapped one hand to the top of his skull—and drew the hand away again, thunderstruck. “I'm growing hair again,” he said softly, fingering the gentle fuzz that had appeared on his tanned, sun-freckled scalp. There was a curious look of incredulity on his wrinkled brown face. “That's impossible!”

“It's also impossible for a man to rise from the dead,” Thornhill pointed out. “The Watcher is taking very good care of us.”

He looked at all of them—at McKay and La Floquet, at Vellers, at Marga, at Lona Hardin, at the aliens. Yes, they had all changed. They looked healthier, younger, more vigorous.

He had felt the change in himself from the start. The Valley, he thought. Was this the Watcher's doing or simply some marvelous property of the area?

Suppose the latter, he thought. Suppose through some charm of the Valley they were growing ever younger.

Would it stop? Would the process level off?

Or, he wondered, had the Watcher brought them all here solely for the interesting spectacle of observing nine adult beings retrogressing rapidly into childhood?

That “night”—they called the time when the red sun left the sky “night” even though there was no darkness—Thornhill learned three significant things.

He learned he loved Marga Fallis, and she him.

He learned that their love could have no possible consummation within the Valley.

And he learned that La Floquet, whatever had happened to him on the mountain peak, had not yet forgotten how to fight.

Thornhill had asked Marga to walk with him into the secluded wooded area high on the mountain path where they could have some privacy. She seemed oddly reluctant to accept, which surprised and dismayed him, for at all other times since the beginning she had gladly accepted any offers of his company. He urged her again, and finally she agreed.

They walked silently for a while. Gentle-eyed cat creatures peered at them from behind shrubs, and the air was moist and warm. Peaceful white clouds drifted high above them.

Thornhill said, “Why didn't you want to come with me, Marga?”

“I'd rather not talk about it,” she said.

He shied a stone into the underbrush. “Four days, and you're keeping secrets from me already?” He started to chuckle; then, seeing her expression, he cut short his laughter. “What's wrong?”

“Is there any reason why I
shouldn't
keep secrets from you?” she asked. “I mean, is there some sort of agreement between us?”

He hesitated. “Of course not. But I thought—”

She smiled, reassuring him. “I thought, too. But I might as well be frank. This afternoon La Floquet asked me to be his woman.”

Stunned, Thornhill stammered, “He—why—”

“He figures he's penned in here for life,” Marga said. “And he's not interested in Lona. That leaves me, it seems. La Floquet doesn't like to go without women for long.”

Thornhill moistened his lips but said nothing.

Marga went on. “He told me point-blank I wasn't to go into the hills with you anymore. That if I did, he'd make trouble. He wasn't going to take no for an answer, he told me.”

“And what answer did you give—if I can ask?”

She smiled warmly; blue highlights danced in her dark eyes as she said, “Well—I'm here, aren't I? Isn't that a good enough answer to him?”

Relief swept over Thornhill like an unchecked tide. He had known of La Floquet's rivalry from the start, but this was the first time the little man had ever made any open overtures toward Marga. And if those overtures had been refused—

“La Floquet's interesting,” she said as they stopped to enter a sheltered, sweet-smelling bower of thickly entwined shrubs. They had discovered it the night before. “But I wouldn't want to be number four hundred eighty-six on his string. He's a galaxy roamer; I've never fallen for that type. And I feel certain he'd never have been interested in me except as something to amuse him while he was penned up in this Valley.”

She was very close to him, and in the bower not even the light of the blue star shone very brightly.
I love her
, he thought suddenly to himself, and an instant later he found his voice saying out loud, “I love you, Marga. Maybe it took a miracle to put us both in this Valley, but …”

“I know what you mean. And I love you, too. I told La Floquet that.”

He felt an irrational surge of triumph. “What did he say?”

“Not much. He said he'd kill you if he could find some way to do it in the Valley. But I think that'll wear off soon.”

His arm slipped around hers. They spoke wordlessly with one another for several moments.

It was then that Thornhill discovered that sex was impossible in the Valley. He felt no desire, no tingling of need,
nothing
.

Absolutely nothing. He enjoyed her nearness, but neither needed nor could take anything more.

“It's part of the Valley,” he whispered. “Our entire metabolic systems have been changed. We don't sleep more than an hour a day, we hardly eat (unless you call that fluff food), our wounds heal, the dead rise—and now this. It's as if the Valley casts a spell that short-circuits all biological processes.”

“And there's nothing we can do?”

“Nothing,” he said tightly. “We're pets. Growing ever younger and helpless against the Watcher's whims.”

He stared silently into the darkness, listening to her quiet sobbing. How long can we go on living this way, he wondered. How long?

We have to get out of this Valley
, he thought.
Somehow
.

But will we remember one another once we do? Or will it all fade away like a child's dream of fairyland?

He clung tightly to her, cursing his own weakness even though he knew it was hardly his fault. There was nothing they could say to one another.

But the silence was abruptly broken.

A deep, dry voice said, “I know you're in there. Come on out, Thornhill. And bring the girl with you.”

Thornhill quickly rose to a sitting position. “It's La Floquet!” he whispered.

“What are you going to do? Can he find us in here?”

“I'm sure of it. I'm going to have to go out there and see what he wants.”

“Be careful, Sam!”

“He can't hurt me. This is the Valley, remember?” He grinned at her and clambered to his feet, stooping as he passed through the clustered underbrush. He blinked as he made the transition from darkness to pale light.

“Come on out of there, Thornhill!” La Floquet repeated. “I'll give you another minute, and then I'm coming in!”

“Don't fret,” Thornhill called. “I'm on my way out.”

He battled past two clinging, enwrapped vines and stepped into the open. “Well, what do you want?” he demanded impatiently.

La Floquet smiled coldly. There was little doubt of what he wanted. His small eyes were bright with anger, and there was murder in his grin. Held tight in one lean, corded hand was a long, triangular sliver of rock whose jagged edge had been painstakingly abraded until it was knife-sharp. The little man waited in a half-crouch, like a tiger or a panther impatient to spring on its prey.