Catseye (14 page)

“It is good to run free.” Out of the general aura of satisfaction those definite words arose.

“It is good to run free!” Troy echoed. Free of the Dipple, of Tikil—of the ways of men, which he had endured only because of his own stubborn determination not to be broken.

Overhead the stars made a clear, cold pattern, and the green round of the moon, rising above the mountains, showed snow caps like clear jade. The fugitives were across the first run of the Larsh—into the Wild—and still no hint that the chase was up behind. Troy knew again the heady exultation of one who is pulling off an odds-against mission. He had no map, no points of reference, but he was certain that to simply continue northeast would bring him out along the fringe of the plains.

He set the controls on complete autopilot, stretched his arms wide. His shoulders ached from the rigid tension that had held him during the first hours of flight.

“By dawn,” he told his companions, “we shall be down—in a big country where there are no trails.”

The kinkajou had crowded into his lap, was curling up against him. And now the black cat was at his side, sitting upright, watching the night sky outside the bubble of the flitter, as if it had now accepted Troy as one of its own kind.

He must have drowsed, for the red snap of light on the control panel brought him awake with the stupid dullness of a too quickly aroused sleeper.

“Warn off! Warn off!”

Troy had heard just that same metallic voice before, but he could not remember when or why.

His hands went to the controls. He thumbed the autopilot release, but it did not give. As he hammered at it with his fist, that blink of light became steady and he remembered—Ruhkarv!

“Warn off!”

Troy reached for the mike, to say the words that would end their escape attempt. But that move came too late. The red light was now a beam. Out of the night blossomed a huge burst of eye-searing white. The flitter lurched, lost speed, started down.

ELEVEN

Afterwards Troy could recall little of that crazy falling-leaf descent that threw them from one side of the pilot's seat to the other. They were not quite helpless before the force that had shaken them off course and out of the sky, for the accident-safety ray had flashed on automatically, bringing them down to ground level at a speed under that of a direct crash. Troy fought the controls, beat at the lock with the full force of his wrists and arms. Something gave and for an instant or so the flitter was his again. He tried to put the nose up and the flyer gave a giant hop.

If that action did not win them the sky again, it did carry the flyer—with the effect of bursting through a taut curtain—beyond the influence of the thing that had grabbed them out of the air. Troy felt the flitter wheels strike, bouncing them up. They flattened off in a second crash, and it was dark—moon and stars blotted out.

His chest hurt and his head ached. In his mouth was the unforgettable flat sweet taste of blood. Before him was darkness, but from behind came a measure of light that he could sight as he tried to turn his head.

“Out—out—” That was a plea rising to a kind of frenzy. Troy could feel movement beside him, back and forth across his bruised body until he grunted with pain.

Somehow he forced up his left arm, worked at the catch of the cabin door, lunging against that stubborn barrier with the strength of his shoulder. The panel gave, tumbling him out, and small paws thudded on him as their owners raced into the open.

Troy pulled himself up and tried to see where they had come to earth. Under him the surface of the ground seemed singularly smooth. His hand, questing over it, scraped up the grit of sand that lay in a drifted skim on stone or rock, very level stone or rock. As he twisted fully around, he could see the shaft of moonlight better. Behind—yes—the flitter had in some incredible way fitted itself nose first into a crevice where an arch of roof shut off the sky.

Troy worked his way around the wreckage to the light. But it was after he had crawled those few feet that he realized what had happened and how chance, the protective device of the Clans, and his own last-moment attempt to control the flitter had landed them in an unusual hiding place. Those rounded domes and crumbling walls, blind of any window or door opening were set deep in the sand of a desert waste. He had crashed straight into the heart of Ruhkarv itself!

“Where—?” He tried to summon the animals—and since he had no names to call, he pictured them mentally. The cats, black and gray-blue, the foxes, russet and cream, the kinkajou, where were they? Hurt? Still about?

“Come—come back!” He called softly aloud, heard odd echoes reply from the ruins about. Outside now, he could look around, see how the flyer had nosed into a dome that had a crumbled opening in one side.

A shadow leaped from one of the broken arches, pattered to him. The kinkajou had answered his call. It leaped to his shoulder, coiling its flexible tail about his upper arm in a grip tight enough to pinch. Troy reached up his other hand, caressed the round head butting against his cheek.

Then the foxes returned in a swift lope, stopping before him, their pointed noses up, testing the wind, their eyes agleam.

“Come,” Troy coaxed the cats. When there was no answer, he detached the kinkajou, started back into the dome cave to explore the wreck. In the pocket of the door he had wrenched open he found an atom torch and thumbed its button. The cone of light made clear the nose of the flyer embedded in the space of the dome as a too thick thread might have been forced into the eye of a needle.

Troy flashed the light into the machine and then stood very still as he saw a small limp body. Blue eyes wide with pain were raised to his. The gray-blue cat lay flat, its mouth open, panting. Now and again it licked a foreleg that was clamped tight between two buckled pieces of metal. Above it crouched its black mate, who, upon seeing Troy, uttered a series of sharp, demanding cries.

Setting down the torch, Troy went to work to free the delicate leg. Then he carried the cat into the open, placing it on the ground until he could salvage the aid kit of the flyer.

By the time the first thin streaks of false dawn were in the sky, he had done what he could. The leg had been set and treated. He had dragged out of the flitter the food bag, the stunner, and some of the kit tools, which he festooned from his own belt. As time had passed and no one had invaded the forbidden area of the ruins to gather them up prisoners, Troy began to believe that they had been brought down by some automatic guard device and that on foot they still had a chance to escape capture. But whether the Clans had set other guards about Ruhkarv, which might now keep them inside, he did not know.

The foxes and the black cat melted into the shadows, leaving Troy to his collection of equipment. Only the kinkajou remained to watch and at last to come to his aid, dragging small objects from the wrecked flyer to pile by the dome. Troy sat back on his heels. He had been so busy that he had not had time to consider the future further than the next job to be done, for he had been driven by a sense of working against time.

“Wall—wall that cannot be seen—” The black cat stepped out from a neighboring dome and came directly to the man.

“Wall around here?” Troy's hand swept in a gesture to indicate the ruins.

“Yes. We have tried to cross many places.”

One of Troy's fears had materialized. The Clans must have set a barrier about Ruhkarv. Intended to bar interlopers, it would make him and the animals prisoners within. How he had managed to pierce it with the flitter was a mystery.

“There are many dens—maybe hunting in them—” One of the foxes drifted into the open. The cat had gone to its injured mate, was licking its head caressingly.

“Danger underground here.” Troy countered that half suggestion from the prick-eared scout.

“Not now.” The report was emphatic and Troy wondered. Before Fauklow's expedition with the recaller had turned the name of Ruhkarv into a synonym for nightmare, the upper galleries of the strange city or structure had been explored with impunity by a handful of the curious. If it had been only the action of the recaller that had damned the place—well, the rangers had put an end to the machine's broadcasts, according to Rerne, and the undersurface passages might give the fugitives shelter for a time. He would have to have some rest, Troy knew, and perhaps here in the heart of a forbidden territory they had found temporary safety after all.

“We go then—to a safe den.”

With the food bag over his shoulder, the injured cat held as comfortably as he could manage against his chest, and the stunner ready in his free hand, Troy moved out. The kinkajou rode on his shoulder, making small twittering noises and now and then patting its two-legged steed with a fore-paw as if to make Troy continually aware of its presence. The foxes and the black cat guided him to another dome, in which a large segment of wall had been cut through in the past, either by one of the early treasure seekers or by the ill-fated Fauklow men.

All the fantastic tales that had been told of this place were peopling the dusk Troy faced with a myriad of nightmares, but the readiness of the animals to explore was his insurance. Troy knew that their senses were far keener and more to be relied upon than his own, and that they would give warning of any trouble ahead. He snapped on the atom torch he had slung from his belt, watched the cone of light bob and wave across flooring and walls as it swung to the rhythm of his walk.

There was nothing to be seen but walls and a pavement of blocks, fitted together with precision and skill. At the far side of the dome was the dark mouth of a ramp leading down into the real Ruhkarv. That murk had a quality close to fog, Troy thought—as if the dark itself swirled about with independent motion. And even the atom light was sapped, weakened by it. Yet the lead fox had already padded down into those depths, and its mate and the cat were waiting for Troy almost impatiently.

“This is a place where there has been great danger,” Troy warned, combining words with the mental reach.

“Nothing here—” He was sure that impatient overtone came from the black cat.

“Nothing here,” Troy repeated even as his boots clicked on that sloping length of stone, “but perhaps farther on—”

“There is water.”

Troy was startled at that confident interruption. They had the supplies from the flitter, but the problem of water had nagged at him. If somewhere within this maze the animals had located water, they were even better provided for than he had dared to hope.

“Where?”

“We go—”

The ramp carried him down through three levels of side corridors, all empty as far as the beams of the atom light could disclose, all exactly alike, so that Troy began to think a man might well become lost in such a place without a guide. And he tried to set his own entrance path in his head, memorizing each corridor by counting.

Somewhere there must be an unseen air system, for the atmosphere, though dry and acrid, remained breathable, and he was sure that now and then from one of the offshoot corridors he scented a whiff of some fresh import from the surface.

At the fourth level, though the ramp continued on to Korwarian depths, Troy found the three scouts waiting for him. And now, unless his sense of direction was completely bemused, they took a way that headed directly east. For a moment he dared to wonder if some one of these long hallways might not take them outside the range of the blocking-wave wall so that they could emerge free in the Wild.

Stark walls of red-gray stone, paved footing—nothing else, save the fine sifting of centuries of dust, which arose almost ankle-high and muffled the sounds of his own footfalls. Twice only were those walls broken by round openings, but when he swung the beam of the torch in, he saw nothing save a bare, circular cell hardly large enough for a man to crouch in, without any other opening. The purpose of such rooms—if rooms they could be called—remained another of the Ruhkarv mysteries.

But their journey was not to continue so easily. The eastern corridor ended in a huge well, and again a descending ramp faced them, curving about the side of that opening, narrow enough to make Troy thoughtful, though the slope was not too steep as far as he could sight with the torch's aid. Again the scouts moved ahead, and there was nothing to do except follow.

As he went down, there was a change in the air—not a freshness, but a rise of moisture. As the wall against which he steadied himself from time to time began to grow clammy under his fingers, he knew that the fox had been right. Somewhere below was a source of water—a large one, if he could judge by the present evidence.

As the moisture content grew, he was aware of a fetid under scent—not exactly the stagnant stench of an undrained and unrenewed pond under the sun, but the hint of something ill about that water. However, there were trickles of damp on the walls and his thirst grew.

Around and around—the coiled spring of the ramp inside the well began to form a dizzying pattern. There was no break here made by side corridors. Troy lost track of time; his legs ached, and every bruise on his body added to his punishment. He was sure now that if he should try to reverse his path and reach the surface—or even the last corridor from which this drop had issued, he would not be able to summon up strength enough to finish. There was only the need to get to the bottom of the well, out on the level somewhere where he could drop down and rest.

And finally the torch did show him a pavement. Troy reached it in a long stride and flashed the light about the bottom of the well. There was water right enough, but—as dry as his mouth now was, as much as his body cried out for a drink—he could not bring himself to approach closely that sullenly flowing runnel.

The water was a ribbon of oily black, looking as thick and turgid as if the substance were more than half slime, and it moved with sluggish ripples on its surface from one side of the pit to the other, filling to within a few inches of the pavement surface a stone trough that had been constructed to carry it.