I crouched down on the animal trail on the cliff. I was not going to peer over the top of those rocks. Not yet!
"I was right," said the driver. "Somebody followed us!"
"Get up there and peek over," I said.
He scrambled a bit. A rock came loose and started a small avalanche. That sound was what did it!
A spray of blastfire roared over the top of the rocks. The concussion was awful! Whoever it was was using a fangun! It is a weapon that puts out electric fire in a forty-degree front arc! No hunting weapon that! No gamekeeper weapon! That was military! My Gods, who was after us? The Army?
"Maybe they made a mistake," said the driver. And before I could stop him, he yelled, "Hey! This is just us!" Another fangun blast! This time it actually took some of the tops off the protective wall rocks. Splinters, melted rock, spattered us.
But the enemy, whoever it was, had made a mistake. He or they had given me light to see by. We were crouched on an animal path. About ten feet to our left was a cave. Three thousand feet down was the river, unseen now. It was black night!
"It's robbers," said the driver. It is true that people were often robbed in these mountains. But it wasn't true that he had ever learned much working with the contrabandists.
ROOOOOOOOAR!
They or whoever it was were shooting at his voice!
But I am up to such things. I whispered to the driver, "Can you do a dwindling scream?"
"No," he said.
"Well, you just better imitate what I do. As soon as I do it, I will dive for that cave and as soon as I do it, you do it and dive for that cave. Understand?"
"I don't know how!" he whispered. The idiot. It is right in the training manuals.
I shouted, "Go away!" ROOOOOAR!
I shouted a dwindling scream. When you do it right it sounds like it is declining in the distance. Whoever it was would think they'd made a hit and knocked me off the edge.
I was diving for the cave.
My driver, prompted by necessity and probably on the verge of screaming anyway, imitated it for all he was worth. He spoiled it a little bit because when he hit his knee landing in the cave beside me he said, "(Bleep)!" We crouched there. After a few minutes a light played down over the path where we had been. We hugged back out of sight in the cave.
The light went off.
Then, mysteriously, a couple of minor shots sounded. Then a crackle of flames.
Finally, in the distance, there was a screech of a vehicle's drives starting up and then a roar as it went away. The sound racketed around the mountains and died out.
I became brave. I sent the driver up to look.
"My Gods!" he said at the top.
He was still standing there and hadn't been shot so I went up.
"We're stranded in the Blike Mountains!" said the driver.
The airbus was burning.
"Good," I said.
"But we can't cross those mountains! Even in the passes the air is too thin." I suddenly remembered that my driver had a name. I never used it. Now was the time. "Ske, have you ever dreamed of the sylvan life, the woods, the trees, the streams? Living off nature? With no cares?" It had no appeal, apparently. He started cursing like fury and ran down and started throwing sand on the wreck. I didn't help him at all. It was just the engine burning. Whoever it was had fired a shot into the fuel capacitors and another one into the generator converter. That engine would never run again.
I hummed happily. I found my needle blastrifle in the brush. I found my game bag and the ammunition. I pulled somewhat toasted sweetbuns out of the back and somewhat boiled sparklewater from under the driver's seat. And while I was doing this, I suddenly beheld that the toolbox lid was open and the toolbox was empty.
I sat down and began to laugh. I laughed and laughed. It was the first time I had laughed for a long while. The driver, who had gotten the engine fire down to a flicker, looked at me a little scared. Well, maybe I did sound a bit hysterical.
"What's so funny?" he demanded.
"The money! It's gone!" And I went off into another spasm. "They followed us in to rob us. They cut their engines way back and coasted in. They crept up carefully. They thought they killed us. And . . ." It was so rich I had to laugh and laugh again. The driver got me by the shoulders to steady me or shake me or something. I didn't mind. I sat down and laughed some more. Finally, I could talk again.
"They did it all to rob us of counterfeit money! Spreading that much around they will start a major investigation. And they'll be executed out of hand!" Ske didn't think it was funny. "All I know is, we're completely off all traffic lines, we don't have any communication at all, we can't walk out of here and we're surrounded by deep canyons and a country full of savage beasts."
"That's the nice part of it," I said.
I watched him build up the cooking fire again – whoever it was would just think the airbus was still burning if they looked back and saw a pinpoint of light. He located some of the game birds and began to pick the dust and rocks off them. I sat there grinning.
Gone was Tug One.Gone was Heller. Far away was the Countess Krak. If found, I could even explain to Lombar we were looking for the patrol craft he had ordered burned and we crashed.
I was looking ahead to happy years in this wilderness full of game. All my problems were solved.
Looking back, I wish it had been so. How wrong I was to feel happy that night!
Chapter 5
At the end of three weeks, my "idyll of primitive atavism" came to an abrupt end.
I awoke from a dreamless, lovely sleep to find a hunting blastgun prodding my chin.
These valleys between the ranges were the heavens themselves: grassy plateaus, stately forests, picturesque rock formations, streams which rippled or roared in an interesting complexity, surrounded all about by majestic snow-crowned peaks!
Songbirds and an infinite variety of game abounded and fed the stomach and the eyes and ears alike.
Day after day we had wandered, from one enticing campsite to the next, each one seemingly more charming than the last.
I had a bit of trouble with my driver, Ske. Because one has to have the identification impress on the vehicle frame, or one can't get a replacement, he had insisted, at great labor – since he had no tools – in hammering that section off, using rocks, using twists to heat the metal so it would break. It had taken him hours and hours. The result was that he was left carrying a twenty-foot piece of vehicle frame, quite heavy and cumbersome, always getting in the road when he scrambled down cliffs or tried to go through dense trees.
He also had to carry the toasted sweetbuns and the remains of sparklewater in its warped containers as well as some singed upholstery I was using for blankets. When you added to this the weight of recent kills, one could imagine that it was a burden. And as I wandered along, pausing to admire the view, savor the redolent perfume of the air or take a shot at some songbird, I was nevertheless aware of his critical stares at my back when he thought I was not looking.
One day, as I sauntered up a steep path, and after he had fallen back down three times, tripped by the vehicle frame's propensity for gouging into the dirt, I heard him muttering. And so, while he stood teetering on the unfirm path, I took the time to try to put him right. I sat down on a boulder and began to explain to him what this was all about.
I told him that every being had in him a throwback, an atavism, to the primitive; I went into considerable technical details, all in the best traditions of Earth psychology. I even analyzed him as having an atavism deficiency. And all the thanks I got was him falling down the path again and this time swearing!