“They may not be using regular transportation—whoever ‘they’ are,” Dane pointed out.
“True. There’s only one main port here, and they don’t keep a planet-wide radar system. There’s no need for it. There’s nothing here to attract any poachers, jacks, or smugglers—or is there?”
“Drugs,” ventured Dane, supplying the first and easiest answer, some narcotic easily raised in virgin ground, a small, light cargo bringing a fantastic return for growers’ and suppliers’ trouble.
“But why the box? Unless it is used to force growth in some way. Drugs might be the answer. If so, we may be facing some blaster-happy jacks. But why import an antline and turn it into a monster? And why did that dead man come on board wearing your face? That seems more like a frame for the Queen. I can suggest a good many different solutions—”
“Water ahead—” The pipe of the brack rang in Dane’s ear.
“Do you sense the dragons?” Dane attended to the matter now at hand.
“Water—no dragon now. But dragon needed water.” “If he doesn’t pick them up,” Ali commented when Dane passed on this information, “they may be already dead.”
Dane shared the other’s pessimism. They now threaded a way among the trees, their boots sinking into a decayed mass of fallen leaves. The brush, which had been like a wall before, was gone, and the land sloped downward.
Glancing back, Dane could see the marks of their trail plainly. They would not have to be beamed back to the LB but simply retrace that.
The brach’s water came into sight, almost too suddenly for their own safety, for the ground was cut by a giant slash, and they stood on the brink of a very deep and steep-walled gully through which wound a stream.
“Outflow of the lake,” Ali said, squinting along the direction from which it flowed.
Well out from the shores, it was encased in ice, but in the middle was a clear channel, where they could see a swift—very swift—current passing from northeast to southwest. There was no sign of any frost-bitten or frozen dragon.
“Do you feel them now?” Dane asked of his alien burden.
“Not here. Away—beyond—”
“Which way?” Dane tried to pin that very vague direction to something definite.
“Over water—”
If they had crossed that river, they had indeed taken to wing. There was no other way of crossing. Dane could not understand how they had continued to survive the cold unless they were far less susceptible to the frigid climate than he supposed. Now it remained for him and Ali to find some place where the banks of the gulch could be descended, where the stream itself could be bridged. Within sight there was no such place.
They separated, Ali going northeast toward the lake, Dane southwest. But the river remained much the same until Dane came to a place where there was a break in the bank on his side. The thing that had gouged that was at river level, slewed around, trapped in the thick ice of the stream edge, the lip of the swift current tearing at it, sending spray to give it a further icy coating.
A crawler—made for heavy duty on rough land! There was no one to be seen in the cabin. He had not expected to find a driver, since the indications were that the vehicle had been there for some time, but he skidded down the broken bank to look it over.
Short of getting tackle as strong as that used at a port, Dane believed there was no chance of bringing this battered machine from its present bed. Perhaps if the river rose high enough, it might tear it loose and roll it on. That the crawler could be of any service to them he doubted.
It was not an agricultural machine with the various attachments used in farming. Instead, it mounted a small borer, now knocked askew, and the battered remains of a digger. This was a mining machine, or at least one for a prospector on a very small scale. In hopes it might give him some clue to a near camp or settlement, Dane worked his way cautiously out on the rough ice that had frozen about its treads to hammer at the cabin door.
When he forced that open at last, he wished he had not, for the cabin was occupied after all, though its occupants had fallen out of sight, lying on the floor, one above the other. Both men had been blaster- burned. There was a strip of ident plate on the fore of the controls, and very gingerly Dane worked that out of its slot. When—if—they returned to the port, this might give some aid in solving these deaths—these murders.
He closed the door, wedging it the tighter with chunks of ice to lock it. But before he left, Dane opened the supply compartment. The rations might be of some use to them, though he could not carry them now, but it was what lay in the transport bin he wanted most to see. They had been killed. Had that bin been plundered?
His hunch was right. The seal on that compartment had been burned out, and the door hung half melted. It was empty, save for a single small piece of rock stuck in the edge of the broken door, as if it had been caught there when someone swept the contents out in a hurry.
The piece of rock was small enough to take along with the ident, and if it had been valuable enough to keep behind a seal lock, it must have some meaning.
Dane had no way of judging how long the crawler had been here, but he thought by the ice that had locked around it, it had been some time. As he climbed to the top of the cliff down which the machine had dug its way, he backtracked a little. The trail left there ran parallel with the cliff rim for a short space before the plunge down, which might mean that the descent had not been an attempt to flee across river but that the machine had been running off automatics, already carrying a dead crew when it went.
Was this the same machine that had left the marks below the plateau? It was likely, only he was not to be sidetracked any longer to find out.
“Calling Thorson! Calling Kamil!” The signal was so sharp from his com that he started. “Return to LB, return to LB—at once!”
It was unlike Rip to be so formal—unless some emergency warranted that formality as a warning. The antline? Or, thought Dane, turning back on his trail at a steady trot and looking down at the crawler as he passed, had they two-legged enemies as well? Could those who had blasted the prospectors have turned their attention now on the spacecraft? Was Rip in such a position that he could not warn them save through his choice of words?
The brach made no sound. If the alien sensed trouble ahead as he had been able to sense the dragon’s actions, he was not saying so. Suddenly another thought crossed Dane’s mind, and it was almost as startling as that summons from the ship because it presented what was an impossibility as far as he knew. When they had found the brachs at bay before the antline, they had been inside the force field, a barrier that had kept the monster uneasy and unwilling to make an attack. And the dragons had been gone, also through that field. It had been a weak one, yes, but Ali had tested it, and it had worked. Then how had both species managed to pierce it?
“When the little one”—Dane spoke into the translator—“found the cage, there was a protection around it. Yet he went in, opened the door for the dragons—” Could he make the brach understand, or what had happened to the field? Had the aliens turned it off and then on again? They could turn it off if they had understood it. But to turn it on again from the inside was impossible.
The answer came hesitatingly as if the brach was also finding it difficult to explain a process he had taken for granted or else had not the proper vocabulary to make himself understood. “We think—if a thing is not alive, we can think what we wish to do, and it does that—”
Dane shook his head. If the brach meant what he said—that they had some control over the inanimate, some esper control—But the proof was that they had gone through the defense field. And the dragons, but it couldn’t be that the dragons could also do that?