Masters of Everon (16 page)

She turned her back on the open country.

"Well and well," she said. "Let's find ourselves a place to camp. It'll be daylight in a few hours and you'll find it not so easy to fall asleep with the dawn in your eyes."

She turned back into the forest. Jef followed her; but he had to haul Mikey away from the dead eland by main force.

Jef dreamed that he was out in the midst of the sea of moss-grass he had seen the night before. It was daytime and dark clouds blew up. It began to rain and the rain fell with particular force. One drop hit him on the forehead so hard, the impact of it was like that of something solid. He woke, but the rain kept falling. Something else undeniably solid bounced off his chin.

He sat up in his sleeping bag and found himself looking across the slumbering form of Mikey at a man squatting about five meters away, and tossing small pebbles in Jef's direction. The man was short, ruddy-faced and square-bodied, but dressed in the same sort of woods clothes that Jarji was wearing.

Mikey woke at that minute, jerked his head up and began to drone a warning at the stranger.

"Shh. Easy, Mikey..." said Jef, grabbing the maolot. For the newcomer carried a crossbow cocked on his knee and it was aimed in Mikey's direction.

"Easy, that's right," said the stranger. His crossbow shifted to point away from Mikey; and Jef looked to see Jarji also sitting up in her sleeping bag. "Easy all around. Just keep your hands in sight, there, friend."

He glanced back at Jef.

"You're Jefrey Aram Robini. That right?" he asked.

"Yes," said Jef in a husky voice that was still fogged with sleep.

He cleared his throat. "Uh—you know Jarji Hillegas? That's Jarji there."

"Heard of her," said the man with the crossbow. "Pleased to meet you, Jarji. Know your mom and dad. I'm Morrel McDermott. You, Jef Robini, I got a message for you."

"Message?"

"From Beau leCourboisier, man you're looking for. Beau got word you were hunting him. He sent word you ought to come ahead. I'll tell you how to find him."

"How—how did leCourboisier find out I was looking for him?" asked Jef, still trying to get his mind awake and working.

McDermott looked across at Jarji.

"He do much of just going around asking questions right out, like that?" McDermott said to her.

"I guess you knew everything, too, the first time you ever stepped into the woods upcountry," said Jarji. Her voice was sharp.

"Well, pardon me," drawled McDermott. "Like hell I will!"

"Typical Hillegas," said McDermott, looking over at Jef. "Got the worst tempers on Everon, that family. Only people they don't fight with are each other. All the same, you go around asking questions without stopping to consider, you're liable to end up being shot—"

The whir of a spring-pull interrupted him. He had relaxed a little too much and concentrated a little too much on Jef. Now Jarji sat with her own crossbow cocked and aimed at him.

"All right, now," said McDermott, disgustedly. "I was talking about other people, not me. You figure Beau'd recruit somebody who's a hothead?"

"Just remember you said that, that's all," said Jarji. She flicked a catch on her crossbow and the tension went out of the string. "Peace."

"Peace," said McDermott. He uncocked his own crossbow and laid it aside. Jarji put her weapon beside her on the ground. McDermott turned and stared significantly at Mikey.

"Oh, Mikey'll be all right," said Jef. "I just have to give him some breakfast—"

"If he wants it," said McDermott. "He's pretty well cleaned up on that dead doe back there."

"Doe—" Jef scrambled hastily out of his sleeping bag. "But that eland was poisoned. Mikey—"

He ran his hands hastily over Mikey's belly and muzzle; but there were no signs of tightness in the maolot's stomach area or wetness around his muzzle. And in fact, if anything, Mikey had not looked so sleek and contented since they had left Earth. Right now he took the touch of Jef's hands as an invitation to play, and snapped harmlessly at them, rolling over on his back.

"Don't seem to have hurt him any," said McDermott. "Maybe that's one reason the wisent ranchers hate maolots the way they do—could be their poison doesn't work on them."

"But why wouldn't it?" asked Jef wonderingly.

McDermott shrugged.

"You're going to tell us how to find Beau, I figure," Jarji put in. She had already climbed out of her sleeping bag and stood facing McDermott.

"Sure. Toss me your mapcase."

Jef dug out his mapcase and tossed it over to the other man. Rising, McDermott caught it easily in one hand.

Squatting again, he punched out coordinates on the keys of the case, fingered the stylus from its clip, and marked in a route on the map section for which he had punched. Then he replaced the stylus and tossed the mapcase back.

"Move by day," he said. "There'll probably be aircraft up from the city, looking for you. But travel along the edge of the woods and hide out in the tall grass if you see any craft in the air. There's enough sunlight reflected from the grasstops to shield your body temperatures from a flyer's heat-scope unless the craft goes right directly over top of you."

He nodded to Jef, reassuringly.

"But if they do land and chase you, run into the woods," he said. He turned to Jarji. "I'll tell Beau it was you not only got word to Robini to come here, but brought him yourself. He'll appreciate. Say hello to your folks for me when you get back."

"I'll tell Beau myself," said Jarji. "I'm going on with Jef."

McDermott's eyebrows went up.

"Now," he said slowly, "there wasn't any thought of that, that I know of. I don't know what Beau'll say. It was figured Robini could come in on his own. Less chance of us being traced through him, that way."

"And more chance his going astray!" said Jarji. "I'll bring him in. You, Beau and all don't like it—lump it!" McDermott shrugged.

"It'll be between you and Beau," he said. He got once more to his feet and nodded to Jef. "It's about a five-day trek. Luck to you both, that far."

He turned and vanished into the woods. There was no sound of his going.

"All right," said Jarji. "We'd better eat before we take off. Let me see that mapcase." Jef turned to her.

"Now wait a minute," he said. "Just a second. I told you I appreciated all you'd done for me; but this goes beyond neighborliness. I've got the mapcase. You don't have to go along with me the rest of the way."

"That's my choice," she said.

"Why?" he said. "You don't need to. And it isn't as if you seem to think a lot of me."

"I don't have to give anybody reasons," she said. "And that includes you."

"But," he said, "you really don't think much of me, do you? In fact, you don't even like me."

"I didn't say that." She looked stubborn. "All right, you're from Earth. You don't understand Everon, even as well as the wisent ranchers and the down-city people—and they don't understand it at all. You people from Earth come in here for the Ecolog Corps or on a job for some outfit like that; and you sit in your office down by the spaceport and think you've been on Everon. Far as I'm concerned, you could all stay home. No, I don't particularly like you, Robini!"

"My brother," said Jef, "had an office down by the spaceport. But he knew Everon and loved it just as much as you do. I know, because I've heard him talk about his work here, when he was home on leave. He was as close to this world as anyone on it."

"Might be," she said. "But I didn't know him. If he felt that way, he was the first off-Everon job import I've ever seen who did."

"You know what the matter is with you?" Jef said. He had not intended to say this much, but now he found himself committed. "You're a colonist on a new world, just beginning to make a living under primitive conditions; and you've got an inferiority complex where people from Earth are concerned. So you turn it around and try to pretend that I'm the one who doesn't know anything, and don't feel anything."

"That's pretty," she said. "Where'd you read that?"

"I didn't read it—"

"You," she said, getting to her feet and slinging her crossbow over her back, "better quit right now. I can talk rings around you. I can walk rings around you. I can run rings around you. I can shoot you full of holes. I know these woods and you don't. If I want to go along with you to meet Beau, there's not one damn thing you can do about it."

Jef opened his mouth to retort, and then shut it again. Unfortunately, she was right.

"On the other hand," she said after a pause, "I'll give you something; and that's your maolot. It was seeing him with you that made me take a second thought about you in the first place. You like him and he likes you. So, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because he does. Figure yourself lucky you've got a friend like him to vouch for you, that's all. Now toss me the mapcase the way I told you and go find us some dry wood for a fire. Like I say, we ought to eat before taking off."

"Are you hungry all the time?" Jef demanded.

"No. And I'm not particularly hungry now," she answered. "But if an aircraft spots us and we have to run and hide and run for a day and night without a chance to stop, we'll at least have had full bellies when we started."

Jef gave up. He want off into the woods to look for fallen tree limbs, or anything else that would burn readily.

His mind was spinning. There was a sort of hard edge of sense to everything she said. Only... it bothered him that somehow he always seemed to end up the loser in the argument. It went against reason to assume that he was always wrong, and she always right.

But undeniably she was right now in saying that they should eat while they had the chance... the mention of food reminded Jef of Mikey. The maolot had tagged along with him as he had gone out after the wood. He stopped now to examine Mikey again; but Mikey had never looked better nor acted more frisky. Jef ended by going back to look at the eland carcass and was surprised when he found it to see how much Mikey had eaten. Both forequarters and a hindquarter were stripped to the bone. The stomach area was untouched—possibly the reason Mikey himself seemed unharmed.

Jef looked about the little area of torn up moss-grass and brush where the eland had thrashed about in dying. However, there was no sign he could find of any obvious poison. He carefully examined the bushes and the ground. There was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them; and the moss-grass was the typical mixture of the low form of the vegetation with tender stems half as high as those in the open, topped with tiny yellow seeds, like young oats. Jef was suddenly tempted to investigate the stomach contents of the dead animal and see what he could learn. But at that moment a call from Jarji reminded him of the firewood he was supposed to be gathering.

He gathered it, and brought it back. They ate, packed and moved out.

It was still early morning when they started. They traveled just inside the shade of the trees at the edge of the forest area, for the sake of shade. Under the strong, Everon sunlight, the open grasslands were indeed hot—in spite of the fact that these were the upper latitudes of the planet's northernmost continent and summer was almost over. The route McDermott had marked out for them followed the forest edge in a northwesterly direction away from the greater width of the prairie country leading down to Spaceport City.

They hid from only one aircraft that first day. An outburst of the clock-birds, a tintinnabulation greater than any Jef had yet heard from these Everon creatures, was followed by the distant, singing buzz of the approaching craft's ducted fans. He, Jarji and Mikey headed out into the open grassland at a run and dived in among the stalks, crawling some little distance until the feathery tops closed over them.

Looking up through the tops of the moss-grass stems, they saw the craft approach, flying low over the trees, but well inside the edge of the forest, obviously looking for them there. For a moment its fan noise filled their ears and it passed between them and the golden sun, its wings looking black, momentarily, except for a grey circle in each one, where a ducted fan whirled at high speed inside its housing.

Then the craft passed on, its sound faded and was gone. They got to their feet, moved back into the forest edge and once more took up their trek.

During the next few days they had to hide frequently. Jef was astonished that the Constable either could or would put so many vehicles in the air to search for them; but Jarji pointed out that one aircraft could cover a single day's foot-marching distance in a matter of minutes; and that probably what they had seen was the same one, passing and repassing.

Daily, on their way, they ran across more poisoned and dead elands. Always these were at the very edge of the woods where the trees met the grasslands and the young stems of the moss-grass began to take over from the forest vegetation. If the eland were recently dead, Mikey struggled to feed on them; and Jef, after several instances in which Mikey ate and survived with no apparent harm, gave up and let him stuff himself as much as the maolot wanted. After all, Jef thought, all the rations in his packsack together would barely make a snack for Mikey's present appetite.

By the third day Mikey was stopping to gorge himself whenever they came across a dead eland that was still in edible condition. For the first time in Jef's experience, the maolot was beginning to refuse to come when ordered—until he had finished eating as much as he could hold. He crouched on the ground when Jef shouted angrily at him; he made apologetic noises; but he would not go on until his sides were drum-tight with meat.

Jef was frankly baffled. Mikey had always been a large eater; but this was beyond reason, even beyond nature. But Mikey's sudden growth was equally beyond reason. He now stood a good meter and a half high at the shoulder.

It was Jarji who finally brought this matter out into the open conversation, somewhere along in the afternoon on the fourth day.

"Your beast's growing," she said, "at this rate he'll be adult-size in a couple of weeks."