He reached out one more time for the machine pistol and almost sprawled on his face.
Deep, guttural laughter spewed down over him.
One of the mole men reached down, took up the machine pistol, examining it with interest.
It took an eternity, but Illya managed to lift his head. The men stood, peering squint-eyed through their thick glasses at him, their faces pulled into savage caricatures of something they remembered as laughter.
The laughter raked at him and Illya tried to cry out. He could not force a sound past his lips. His throat felt swollen, closed. He tried to brace himself, but had no muscular coordination. The warm thick pressure of that strange sick-sweet gas closed upon him like an occluding fog.
He toppled helplessly upon the floor, suffocating and paralyzed, the sound of the weird, wicked laughter raging in his ears.
And then the warmth darkened around him, shutting out everything except that laughter, and this spun like enraged hornets inside his mind.
TWO
The unbroken, whispered clatter of his wrist-watch alarm awakened Solo an hour before dawn.
For a moment he lay unmoving, protected from the chilled Wyoming darkness, from all the unknown that lay ahead of him.
From the corral below he heard movement and subdued voices of men calling to each other. Wind riffled the curtains at the windows.
Solo yawned, throwing back the covers.
A shard rap sounded at his door. Maynard's whispered voice came through the facing. "Your horse and pack are ready, Mr. Solo."
"Thanks," Solo said. "I'll be right down."
He swung out of bed, snapped on the small bed-lamp. He slipped his legs into corduroy trousers, and then stood up, donning a heavy shirt.
The whispering, dry-hinge creak of his balcony door, brought him wheeling around.
The door pushed slowly open, Solo caught up his gun, but dropped it when he recognized Mabel Finnish. She moved in from his balcony.
He stared at her. She was dressed for the trail in slacks, heavy jacket and riding boots.
"I'm going with you," she said.
"What makes you think I'm going anywhere?"
"Let's not waste time, Mr. Solo. You're riding alone up into the Sawtooth ranges looking for some trace of those missing cattle, and I'm going with you."
"Nobody but Maynard knew my plan. How did you find it out?"
She gave him a faint smile. "I may as well tell you the whole truth—"
"That will be refreshing."
"I have a small listening device. I hear what I must. It's like a hearing aid, only concealed, and much more powerful. I'm sorry to force myself upon you like this, Mr. Solo, but I have no choice."
"I could think of several—"
"I must find my grandfather. That's all that matters to me. I have to know what you say, what you learn about the disappearance of those cattle, just as I must go with you."
"I'm sorry. That's impossible."
Mabel seemed not even to hear him. "I can be of help to you."
"I don't need your help."
"I've been on those trails."
"I have maps of the ranges. I know where the cattle were last seen. No, I'm sorry, Mabel. It's too dangerous. I don't have to tell you that Pete and Marty died because they were up there. They were attacked by some kind of nerve gas and it was fatal. I can't expose you to such danger."
Her head lifted. "I'm not afraid."
Solo's jaw was taut. "Well, I've sense enough to be afraid for you."
"You don't understand, Mr. Solo. You're wasting time. I'm going with you."
"Then you're bigger and stronger than you look."
"I'm big enough and strong enough, Mr. Solo."
He grinned. "And lovely enough. I'm truly sorry I can't take you with me."
"I told you." Her voice became deadly. "You'll take me, or you won't go."
He laughed, turning slowly. "How do you plan to stop me?"
For the first time Solo saw the gun in Mabel's hand. He saw something else, too. Her grip was steady. Her finger was firm on the trigger. She knew how to use that small firearm, and she would not hesitate to do it.
Her voice mocked him. "Now do you understand why I'll go with you? I won't hesitate to shoot you."
"What will that buy you?"
"That's it, Mr. Solo. It won't buy either of us anything. That's why I hope you'll be smart enough to take me. I know the mission you're on is urgent to you. But my search is even more urgent to me. I'm sorry, Mr. Solo, but I'm desperate—"
"Enough to shoot me?"
He watched her, but the gun in her hand did not waver.
She nodded. "I'm desperate enough to do anything that will help me to learn the truth about my grandfather. I know his disappearance is somehow related to all this. I've got to find out."
"If I find your grandfather, I'll bring him back. I promise that."
The muzzle of her gun tilted slightly. "That's not good enough, Mr. Solo. I go with you or nobody goes. That's up to you now."
Solo chewed at his lip a moment studying her, and that unwavering gun in her fist. He shrugged his shoulders, giving her a reluctant grin of capitulation. "I've been wondering all along how to beg you to ride out with me, Miss Finnish."
Mabel sighed out heavily. "You're very wise, Mr. Solo."
He lifted his hands deprecatingly. "It's really very easy to be wise, Miss Finnish, with a gun staring you in the face."
THREE
They climbed steadily into the blue-hazed heights of the Sawtooths, the silences deepening through the morning, noon.
There were no longer even any trails on these lava-scarred mesas. The uncharted wilds had been tortured into ridges and ravines by countless suns and mountain winds.
They reached a treeless escarpment by midafternoon. Solo halted the horses.
Shifting in his saddle, he gazed downward along the way they'd come. It was as if they were the only human beings in the breathless world of sand-scarred boulders.
Their horses slipped, fighting for footing on the slate outcroppings.
Far below them sprawled waterless plains, vast and uninhabited; above them reared inaccessible plateaus, crags jutting against the sky, massive ranges lost inside monstrous mountains, trackless and forgotten.
Solo shivered slightly. He glanced at Mabel. "I never really knew what the word desolate truly meant until today."
"The silence is unbelievable," she said. "Not even a bird, or an animal."
He sighed. "What are you really doing up here, Mabel?"
She frowned. "I told you. I'm looking for my grandfather."
"I know. It just doesn't add up."
"Nevertheless, it's true."
"Is it? I keep asking myself, why should a young, beautiful girl like you spend her life looking for a man who has been missing for five years?"
"That man is my grandfather, Mr. Solo."
"But he must be dead. They would have found some trace of him."
"Have they found any trace of your trains, Mr. Solo?"
He frowned. "But you. So young. Looks like you'd marry, have a family—"
"It's more important to me to find my grandfather. I know he's alive. He was a very great man, Mr. Solo. I never met another man worth taking me from the search for him."
Solo smiled despite himself. "You're a strange girl."
"It's a strange world, Mr. Solo." She prodded her horse and moved away.
Solo rode slowly. He could not explain why, but felt himself growing taut.
He stiffened in the saddle, searched the boulders and the cliffs around him, moving his gaze slowly, peering. He found nothing, yet the feeling increased that they had ridden into trouble.