Tunnel in the Sky (8 page)

   
“Number two! Mshiyeni, Caroline.” Across the room the big Zulu girl who had occurred to Rod as a possible team mate got up and headed for the gate. She was dressed simply in shirt and shorts, with her feet and legs and hands bare. She did not appear to be armed but she was carrying an overnight bag.

   
Someone called out, “Hey, Carol! What you got in the trunk?”

   
She threw him a grin. “Rocks.”

   
“Ham sandwiches, I'll bet. Save me one.

   
“I'll save you a rock, sweetheart.”

   
Too soon the attendant called out, “Number seven- Walker, Roderick L.”

   
Rod went quickly to the gate. The attendant shoved a paper into his hand, then shook hands. “Good luck, kid. Keep your eyes open.” He gave Rod a slap on the back that urged him through the opening, dilated to man size.

   
Rod found himself on the other side and, to his surprise, still indoors. But that shock was not as great as immediate unsteadiness and nausea; the gravity acceleration was much less than earth-normal.

   
He fought to keep from throwing up and tried to figure things out. Where was he? On Luna? On one of Jupiter's moons? Or somewhere 'way out there?

   
The Moon, most likely- Luna. Many of the longer jumps were relayed through Luna because of the danger of mixing with a primary, particularly with binaries. But surely they weren't going to leave him here; Matson had promised them no airless test areas.

   
On the floor lay an open valise; he recognized it absent-mindedly as the one Caroline had been carrying. At last he remembered to look at the paper he had been handed.

   
It read:

   
SOLO SURVIVAL TEST-Recall Instructions

   
1. You must pass through the door ahead in the three minutes allowed you before another candidate is started through. An overlapping delay will disqualify you.

   
2.
   
Recall will be by standard visual and sound signals. You are warned that the area remains hazardous even after recall is sounded.

   
3.
   
The exit gate will not be the entrance gate. Exit may be as much as twenty kilometers in the direction of sunrise.

   
4.
 
There is no truce zone outside the gate. Test starts at once. Watch out for stobor. Good luck!

   
-B. P.M.

   
Rod was still gulping at low gravity and staring at the paper when a door opened at the far end of the long, narrow room he was in. A man shouted, “Hurry up! You'll lose your place.”

   
Rod tried to hurry, staggered and then recovered too much and almost fell. He had experienced low gravity on field trips and his family had once vacationed on Luna, but he was not used to it; with difficulty he managed to skate toward the far door.

   
Beyond the door was another gate room. The attendant glanced at the timer over the gate and said, “Twenty seconds. Give me that instruction sheet.”

   
Rod hung onto it. “I'll use the twenty seconds.”-as much as twenty kilometers in the direction of sunrise. A nominal eastward direction-call it “east.” But what the deuce was, or were, “stobor”?

   
“Time! Through you go.” The attendant snatched the paper, shutters rolled back, and Rod was shoved through a dilated gate.

   
He fell to his hands and knees; the gravity beyond was something close to earth-normal and the change had caught him unprepared. But he stayed down, held perfectly still and made no sound while he quickly looked around him. He was in a wide clearing covered with high grass and containing scattered trees and bushes; beyond was dense forest.

   
He twisted his neck in a hasty survey. Earth-type planet, near normal acceleration, probably a G-type sun in the sky . . . heavy vegetation, no fauna in sight- but that didn't mean anything; there might be hundreds within hearing. Even a stobor, whatever that was.

   
The gate was behind him, tall dark-green shutters which were in reality a long way off. They stood unsupported in the tall grass, an anomalism unrelated to the primitive scene. Rod considered wriggling around behind the gate, knowing that the tangency was one-sided and that he would be able to see through the locus from the other side, see anyone who came out without himself being seen.

   
Which reminded him that he himself could be seen from that exceptional point; he decided to move.

   
Where was Jimmy? Jimmy ought to be behind the gate, watching for him to come out. .. or watching from some other spy point. The only certain method of rendezvous was for Jimmy to have waited for Rod's appearance; Rod had no way to find him now.

   
Rod looked around more slowly and tried to spot anything that might give a hint as to Jimmy's whereabouts. Nothing . . . but when his scanning came back to the gate, the gate was no longer there.

   
Rod felt cold ripple of adrenalin shock trickle down his back and out his finger tips. He forced himself to quiet down and told himself that it was better this way. He had a theory to account for the disappearance of the gate; they were, he decided, refocusing it between each pair of students, scattering them possibly kilometers apart.

   
No, that could not be true- “twenty kilometers toward sunrise” had to relate to a small area.

   
Or did it? He reminded himself that the orientation given in the sheet handed him might not be that which appeared in some other student's instruction sheet. He relaxed to the fact that he did not really know anything. . . he did not know where he was, nor where Jimmy was, nor any other member of the class, he did not know what he might find here, save that it was a place where a man might stay alive if he were smart- and lucky.

   
Just now his business was to stay alive, for a period that he might as well figure as ten Earth days. He wiped Jimmy Throxton out of his mind, wiped out everything but the necessity of remaining unceasingly alert to all of his surroundings. He noted wind direction as shown by grass plumes and started crawling cautiously down wind.

   
The decision to go down wind had been difficult. To go up wind had been his first thought, that being the natural direction for a stalk. But his sister's advice had already paid off; he felt naked and helpless without a gun and it had reminded him that he was not the hunter. His scent would carry in any case; if he went down wind he stood a chance of seeing what might be stalking him, while his unguarded rear would be comparatively safe.

   
Something ahead in the grass!

   
He froze and watched. It had been the tiniest movement; he waited. There it was again, moving slowly from right to left across his front. It looked like a dark spike with a tuft of hair on the tip, a tail possibly, carried aloft.

   
He never saw what manner of creature owned the tail, if it was a tail. It stopped suddenly at a point Rod judged to be directly down wind, then moved off rapidly and he lost Sight of it. He waited a few minutes, then resumed crawling.

   
It was extremely hot work and sweat poured down him and soaked his overshirt and trousers. He began to want a drink very badly but reminded himself that five litres of water would not last long if he started drinking the first hour of the test. The sky was overcast with high cirrus haze, but the primary or “sun”- he decided to call it the Sun- seemed to burn through fiercely. It was low in the sky behind him; he wondered what it would be like overhead? Kill a man, maybe. Oh, well, it would be cooler in that forest ahead, or at least not be the same chance of sunstroke.

   
There was lower ground ahead of him and hawklike birds were circling above the spot, round and round. He held still and watched. Brothers, he said softly, if you are behaving like vultures back home, there is something dead ahead of me and you are waiting to make sure it stays dead before you drop in for lunch. If so, I had better swing wide, for it is bound to attract other things. . . some of which I might not want to meet.

   
He started easing to the right, quartering the light breeze. It took him onto higher ground and close to a rock outcropping. Rod decided to spy out what was in the lower place below, making use of cover to let him reach an overhanging rock.

   
It looked mightily like a man on the ground and a child near him. Rod reached, fumbled in his vest pack, got out a tiny 8-power monocular, took a better look. The man was Johann Braun, the “child” was his boxer dog. There was no doubt but that they were dead, for Braun was lying like a tossed rag doll, with his head twisted around and one leg bent under. His throat and the side of his head were a dark red stain.

   
While Rod watched, a doglike creature trotted out, sniffed at the boxer, and began tearing at it . . . then the first of the buzzard creatures landed to join the feast. Rod took the glass from his eye, feeling queasy. Old Yo had not lasted long- jumped by a “stobor” maybe- and his smart dog had not saved him. Too bad! But it did prove that there were carnivores around and it behooved him to be careful if he did not want to have jackals and vultures arguing over the leavings!

   
He remembered something and put the glass back to his eye. Yo's proud Thunderbolt gun was nowhere in sight and the corpse was not wearing the power pack that energized it. Rod gave a low whistle in his mind and thought. The only animal who would bother to steal a gun ran around on two legs. Rod reminded himself that a Thunderbolt could kill at almost any line-of-sight range- and now somebody had it who obviously took advantage of the absence of law and order in a survival test area.

   
Well, the only thing to do was not to be in line of sight. He backed off the rock and slid into the bushes.

   
The forest had appeared to be two kilometers away, or less, when he had started. He was close to it when he became uncomfortably aware that sunset was almost upon him. He became less cautious, more hurried, as he planned to spend the night in a tree. This called for light to climb by, since he relished a night on the ground inside the forest still less than he liked the idea of crouching helpless in the grass.

   
It had not taken all day to crawl this far. Although it had been morning when he had left Templeton Gate the time of day there had nothing to do with the time of day here. He had been shoved through into late afternoon; it was dusk when he reached the tall trees.

   
So dusky that he decided that he must accept a calculated risk for what he must do. He stopped at the edge of the forest, still in the high grass, and dug into his pack for his climbers. His sister had caused him to leave behind most of the gadgets, gimmicks, and special-purpose devices that he had considered bringing; she had not argued at these. They were climbing spikes of a style basically old, but refined, made small and light-the pair weighed less than a tenth of a kilogram- and made foldable and compact, from a titanium alloy, hard and strong.

   
He unfolded them, snapped them under his arches and around his shins, and locked them in place. Then he eyed the tree he had picked, a tall giant deep enough in the mass to allow the possibility of crossing to another tree if the odds made a back-door departure safer and having a trunk which, in spite of its height, he felt sure he could get his arms around.

   
Having picked his route, he straightened up and at a fast dogtrot headed for the nearest tree. He went past it, cut left for another tree, passed it and cut right toward the tree he wanted. He was about fifteen meters from it when something charged him.

   
He closed the gap with instantaneous apportation which would have done credit to a Ramsbotham hyperfold. He reached the first branch, ten meters above ground, in what amounted to levitation. From there on he climbed more conventionally, digging the spurs into the tree's smooth bark and setting his feet more comfortably on branches when they began to be close enough together to form a ladder.

   
About twenty meters above ground he stopped and looked down. The branches interfered and it was darker under the trees than it had been out in the open; nevertheless he could see, prowling around the tree, the denizen that had favored him with attention.

   
Rod tried to get a better view, but the light was failing rapidly. But it looked like. . . well, if he had not been certain that he was on some uncolonized planet 'way out behind and beyond, he would have said that it was a lion.

   
Except that it looked eight times as big as any lion ought to look.

   
He hoped that, whatever it was, it could not climb trees. Oh, quit fretting, Rod!- if it had been able to climb you would have been lunch meat five minutes ago. Get busy and rig a place to sleep before it gets pitch dark. He moved up the tree, keeping an eye out for the spot he needed.