“Still this way?” he asked a moment later.
“This way?” Dane relayed through the translator to the brach.
“It is so. Soon big hole—”
Dane supplied that information. And soon indeed did they come to a big hole—a break from the height on which they stood, leading to an unknown dark plunge.
“You see anything?” he asked.
“They’ve finished off the flitter,” Meshler returned bleakly. “But we’ll need supplies—if they’ve left any.”
The belt was suddenly hanging limp and loose in Dane’s grasp, and he heard sounds that must mean that Meshler was descending to the flitter.
10.THE TRAP
This was no time to stop to explore wreckage, Dane protested silently. With that lamp blazing behind, the hunt must be up. And who piloted the crawler that had dragged the flitter here? Those extra members of the enemy party might well be closing in on them now!
He remembered the brach’s ability to trace by reading emotions. Surely that cast off by a hunting party would be strong enough for the alien to detect.
“Do others come?” he murmured into the translator. Dane felt the brach shift its position against him and knew that the alien was turning his head as if the long nose were the pickup of some super radar.
“Behind, not elsewhere—”
Rocket blast and beam burn Meshler! They had to get out of here, and the ranger had left them more or less trapped while he went nosing around the useless wreck. It was a fact—it must be—that those who had taken them captive would not have left weapons down there. Or would they? Suppose they were trying to make the whole mess seem an accidental wreck. Then surely they would not have looted it. But a wreck needed bodies—
A chill threaded along Dane’s spine. Bodies had been to hand, ready for when they were needed to complete that cover-up. Perhaps they had wanted information first, before they were ready to turn live captives into dead bodies. And the longer the three lingered here—the four, Dane reminded himself (for the brach had proved so far the most useful member of their party)—the more certain it was that the plan on the part of the enemy might just be successful.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” He stated the obvious to Tau. “What’s the use of his prowling around down there? They’ll catch up with us soon.”
“Do you want to try it on your own?” queried the medic. “It’s apparent Meshler has night sight to a surprising degree. Unless those jacks share it, he can cut a trail they can follow only slowly.”
“Jacks?” Dane caught the one word that should not have surprised him as much as it momentarily did, for this was plainly an illegal group operating under cover, though jacks did not usually go in for elaborate planning. Strike and get away was their general pattern.
“What would they want here?”
“Who knows? Maybe Meshler does, or he ought to. Listen!”
They froze. Dane felt the medic tense as they stood, shoulder touching shoulder. That sound did not come from behind; it was from below. Meshler climbing up? Dane hoped fervently that was true.
“Let us go.” Meshler’s voice sounded from almost at Dane’s feet. The Terran started back and felt the belt jerk and tauten in his hand. And then, towed as he had been before, Tau’s hand on his shoulder, Dane followed the ranger. At intervals, Meshler whispered some terse direction to follow, but he did not say what he had found at the wreck, though a bundle slung over his shoulder now and again bumped against the hand with which Dane held the belt.
They made better time than Dane had hoped, though he was so confused by the dark that he could not have told in which direction they were now headed. If they were on their way back to the grounded LB, there must be several days of tramping before them. So perhaps Meshler’s search of the wreck for supplies was necessary.
Time meant nothing. At intervals Meshler halted to give them a breather. Dane and Tau took turns carrying the brach inside their jackets. The small alien no longer shivered but felt warm and relaxed when it was Dane’s turn to assume his weight again, so the Terran hoped he had taken no ill from his period in the night’s cold.
Dawn found them in a place of rocks, which were wind and erosion carved into weird and amazing shapes. Block masses of apparently great weight were supported on conical pillars. All of the large outcrops were riddled with holes and crevices, some almost the size of a small cave. It was an excellent place to take cover for longer than a breathing halt, and apparently Meshler selected it for that very reason.
Dane had not realized how tired he was until he hunkered down in the place the ranger chose, a niche between several rocks. Tramping in space boots was not an exercise he would recommend. While there was no more tough and sturdy footware to be found on any world, the weight of their magnetic sole plates made tired feet feel as if they had a massive bracelet of iron soldered about the ankles.
“Loosen the seals.” Tau leaned forward to snap up those on his own as he spoke. “But don’t take them off—not if you want to get them on again in a hurry.”
Even the loosening of the tight seals gave a measure of relief that made Dane sigh. Meshler opened the bag he had brought from the flitter. Now he drew from it a single ration tube. Dane could have squeezed all its contents into his own mouth, but good sense told him that Meshler was right as the ranger measured it in fours, carefully sucking only the first quarter before he passed it to Tau. The medic squeezed the second portion out on a rock, from which the brach, shooting out a long, pale tongue, licked it in two passes. And having taken his own part, Tau passed the now almost flat tube to Dane, who finished it off as slowly as possible, hoping to feel less hungry when it was down.
Of course, E-ration was highly sustaining. A man could keep going on a portion of a tube such as they had just shared out. But it was like a taste of a dish when one wanted to scoop the whole of its contents onto one’s plate,
“We’re heading north. How far back is it to the LB or to that holding you spoke of?” Dane wanted to know when he was sure there was no infinitesimal bit left in the tube.
“Too far—both—to make without transportation,” was Meshler’s daunting reply. “We can’t go on foot with very limited rations and no weapons—”
“I thought you said there were no really dangerous animals,” Dane argued. He dared not accept the ranger’s dark point of view.
“We are hunted men,” Tau reminded him. “Very well, if we can’t strike north, what do we do?”
“The crawler—” Meshler fastened the bag. “Also, this—” He held out something to Tau, and Dane recognized the detect with which Tau had picked up the radiation when they were helpless in the beam- controlled flitter.
“Does it still work?” the ranger asked.
Tau inspected it carefully and then pressed a button on the top. Straightway the needle came to life and spun to point directly at the man who held it.
“It works. Now, in which direction was that camp? I am so turned around that I don’t know north from south.”
“There—” Meshler stabbed a finger to Tau’s left with such confidence that they had to believe him.
“Then the source of the radiation is not there.”
“No equipment in sight,” Dane observed.
“That box was compact. They could have had something like it buried. But this says that direction—” The medic motioned over his own shoulder.
“No way of telling how far away?” Meshler asked.
“No, except the beam is stronger.”
The ranger leaned his head against the rock behind him. “We cannot make it on foot, even as far as Cartl’s holding. And that is the southernmost outpost.” He might have been thinking aloud as he imparted that gloomy information. “A crawler is slow and heavy, and it is not normally used far from a base camp, where it can be maintained.”