Before he could say anything else, she nudged him toward the incline that would take them above the waterfall. And Jared sensed the pall of fear that lay over the Zivver World. In the distance the settled area was enveloped in a thick, ominous silence. From the indistinct echoes of cascading water, he received a composite of Zivvers drawing apprehensively back from the barricaded entrance.
Halfway up the rise he drew up sharply and his nostrils flared around a disturbing scent drifting down from above. Desperately, he scooped up several pebbles and rattled them in the hollow of his hand. In full audible clarity, Mogan stood waiting at the top of the slope.
“I suppose you think you’re going to escape and tell the monsters how to get in,” he said threateningly.
Jared clicked his stones rapidly, precisely, and trapped impressions of the Zivver beginning his charge downhill.
But just then the noise of a thousand cataracts abruptly rocked the world. At the same time a great, angry burst of the monsters’ roaring silence stabbed into the Zivver domain from the vicinity of the blocked entrance. And, in the next beat, everyone below was screaming and scurrying frantically about as the reopened tunnel belched a mercilessly steady cone of inaudible sound.
Jared scrambled to the top of the incline, tugging Della along. Mogan, stunned, retreated with them.
“Light Almighty!” the Zivver leader swore. “What in Radiation’s happening?”
“I’ve never zivved anything like this!” Della exclaimed, terrified.
Intense, painful sensations assaulted Jared’s eyes, confusing but somehow complementing his auditory perception of the entire world. Noise reflections fetched a more or less complete impression of the fissure-rent far wall. Yet, also associated with that wall somehow were areas of concentrated silent sound that etched every detail of its surface as clearly as though he were running his hand over all of it simultaneously.
Suddenly the wall faded into relative silence and he managed to link that development with the fact that the furious cone had shifted and was at the moment cutting across another segment of the auditory composite. Now he seemed to be aware of the presence and size and shape of each shack in the center of the settlement. The fierce, screaming silence touched every object within hearing range and boiled into his conscious with agonizing ruthlessness.
He clamped his hands over his face and found immediate relief while he listened to monsters pouring in from the passageway. And with them came the familiar zip-hisses.
“Don’t be afraid!” one of the creatures shouted.
“Throw some Light this way!” another cried.
The words reverberated in Jared’s mind. What did they mean? Was Light actually associated with these evil beings? How could anyone throw Light? Once before he had wildly assumed that the stuff these creatures hurled ahead of themselves in the passages might somehow be Light. And he had at once rejected that possibility, just as he was forced to discard it anew now.
His eyes ificked open involuntarily but he only stood there, confounded by a new bewilderment. For a moment he could almost detect a deficiency of something — just as he had imagined once before that he was on the verge of putting his finger on the lessness he was seeking. Now the conviction was even firmer that there was not as much of something in the Zivver World as there had been before the evil beings came!
“The monsters!” Mogan shouted. “They’re coming up here!”
Della screamed and the reflection of her voice brought back the impression of three of the creatures racing up the incline.
“Jared!” she tugged on his arm. “Let’s get—”
Zip-hiss.
She collapsed and before he could seize her she went rolling down the incline. Frantically, Jared started after the girl. But Mogan held him back, saying, “We can’t help her now.”
“We can if we reach her before—”
But the Zivver leader swung him around, shoved him into the river and dived in after him.
Before Jared could shout out in protest, Mogan dragged him beneath the surface and began the desperate underwater swim against the current. He fought stubbornly against the other’s grip, but the combination of giant strength and the threat of drowning swamped his struggles and there was nothing he could do but allow himself to be towed helplessly along.
At a point that he judged to be halfway through the underground stretch, the current hurled him against a boulder and whatever air he had managed to retain in his lungs escaped in an involuntary grunt. Morgan plunged for the bottom and Jared frenziedly staved off the compulsion to release his breath. His resistance snapped finally and a great mouthful of water boiled down his windpipe.
He revived to the rhythmic motion of the Zivver’s broad hands as they pressed down on the small of his back and withdrew, pressed and withdrew. He retched and coughed up warm water.
Mogan stopped pumping air into his lungs and helped him to a sitting position. “Guess I was wrong about you plotting with those creatures,” he said apologetically.
“Della!” Jared exclaimed between coughs. “I’ve got to get back in there!”
“It’s too late. The place is filled with monsters.”
Jared listened anxiously for the river. But he heard no water anywhere around them. “Where are we?” he demanded.
“Out in a lesser passage. After I dragged you ashore I had to haul you off before the soubats got us.”
Listening to reflections of the words, Jared traced out the details of a tunnel that broadened ahead after issuing from the constriction of pinched walls behind them. And from back there came the infuriated sounds of the soubats that couldn’t get through.
“We’re not headed toward the main corridor, are we?” he asked disappointedly.
“The opposite direction. It beats fighting off soubats barehanded.”
Jared rose and steadied himself against the wall. There might have been a chance of overtaking the monsters in the larger passageway, but the soubats had overruled that possibility, he conceded glumly. “Where does this tunnel lead?”
“Never been this way before.”
Realizing he had no choice, Jared followed the reflections of their voices down the corridor.
Later, when he stumbled for a second time, he wondered why he was groping around in a noiseless passage without sounding stones. He felt along the ground until he found a pair of pebbles that almost matched, then filled the air with clicks before continuing.
After a while Mogan said, “You hear pretty good with those things, don’t you?”
“I manage.” Then Jared heard he was being abrupt for no reason at all, unless it was because he resented the Zivver’s having kept him from trying to reach Della — an attempt which certainly would have failed anyway.
“I’ve had practice with the things,” he added more affably.
“I suppose they’re all right for someone who can’t ziv,” Mogan ventured, “but I’m afraid the noise would drive me crazy.”
They traveled in silence for some time. And, as Jared’s steps took him farther from the Zivver domain, the possibility that he might never hear Della again burdened him with despair. He knew finally that he would have settled with her in a secluded world and that it would have made no difference whether she was his superior or not — as long as they could be together.