The same wild waving of leafed branches that had marked Shang’s departure heralded his return. He made a flying leap from a nearby bush top to the ground, raising small spurts of dust as he raced toward Troy.
“Man thing!” There was excitement in that report, enough to make Troy set down a water container hastily, not quite sure whether Shang meant an animate or inanimate find.
“Where?” Troy asked, and then added quickly, “What?”
Shang raised a front paw and gestured to the miniature wilderness. He seemed unable to define the “what” at all. Troy looked to the cats; he had come to accept their superior judgment in such matters.
Simba faced the screen of vegetation, and Horan, alert now to the slight changes he might not have noted hours earlier, marked that twitch of whiskered muzzle. Sahiba, limping clumsily, left his side, joined her mate, and sat in the same listening attitude.
“Call thing—” It was Simba who reported.
Troy experienced a flicker of uneasiness. There had been a “call thing” associated with Ruhkarv, and he did not want to have any close connection with that, certainly not with what rumor and legend suggested that it had called.
“Old?” He did not know how Simba could pick the answer to that out of the air, or out of Shang and the messages the air brought feline senses.
“Not old.”
“A man with it?”
Simba’s blue eyes, with their unreadable depths, lifted from the foliage wall to Troy’s. He caught the cat’s puzzlement, as if Simba was able to pluck a confused series of impressions from channels closed to the man, but as if important sequences in that series were lacking.
“Man thing—” Shang was fairly dancing up and down with eagerness, running a few steps toward the wilderness, retreating to peer at Troy, plainly urging that his find be examined by Horan. But the man continued to wait for the cats’ verdict.
“Dangerous?”
To that again neither Sahiba nor Simba made a direct answer. But the urge to caution was intensified. Then Sargon and Sheba went purposefully off into the brush as if obeying some order. Troy repacked the supplies, picked up Sahiba. He studied the matted growth before him, looking for a path, or at least a thinner patch through which he might force his way.
The light from the odd roofing overhead, which had been day-bright when he had found his way into this place, was fading, and Troy did not much relish plunging into the tangle. But, sighting a space between two bushes, he pushed in resolutely.
Within seconds he was completely lost. It was impossible to keep any sort of straight course, and he had to use his knife to get free of vines and sprawling branches. The whole growth might have been intelligently planted to form a giant trap or barrier. It was Sahiba who relayed the suggestions of the scouts and Shang who roamed from bush to bush, coming back to coax him on.
Then Troy half fell through a mass of foliage, as a tough vine gave way, and was once more in the open—facing a nightmare scene.
There was an opening in the wall here, with a well-cleared, paved space before it. And in the center of that, facing, the opening, was a small machine, a machine akin to his own time and culture. A cone of meta-plast was pointed with its large end toward the wall opening, and, as Troy stepped onto the pavement, he was immediately conscious of the fact that a faint vibration came from that machine. It was not only in working order—it was running!
Cat, foxes, kinkajou—the animals were lined up well to the left of the machine, facing the opening—waiting—
Troy’s cry was half choked in his throat as he looked beyond the machine, along the line of that pointed cone. It must—surely it must have once been human, that thing trembling a little, spread-eagled on just such a webbing as had choked the passage from the fungus cavern. Yet this was a dried rag-fashioned creature from which not only life but much of the bulk of body had vanished. The head, which still showed a thatch of dust-stiffened hair, lolled forward on the rack of bones that was the chest, and Troy was glad he could not see the features.
He surveyed the webbing, seeing not only that it covered the opening and held its long-dead prisoner upright, frail as that structure of skin and bones was, but that the cords also ran along the walls to form a pattern of stripes, some as fine as thread, others as thick as one of his fingers. And the thing that had woven the web could not have been one of the orange-red lily hearts. It must have been larger than the Terran animals.
Had been—must have been? What was there to prove that the weaver was now gone? The captive was dead. Troy thought he could guess how long he had been there—just as he knew what machine stood before them, its powers dampened out, mercifully, but still in operation. This was part of the horror that had put Ruhkarv out of bounds for his kind. The recaller had been set here, a point Fauklow had selected because his knowledge of nonhuman remains had indicated there might be a response. And there had been a response—too concrete a one.
Elsewhere the recaller had summoned only the pallid tatters of ghostly memories. Here some freak of time, space, or unknown nature had given body to a ghost and the power to use it! Out of a far and devious past and the corridors of Ruhkarv had come a creature, intelligent or not, ruler of those ways once, or a prowler in them, as great an enemy to the builders as it was to the Fauklow men, which had had the energy to revive and attack its arousers.
And perhaps the maker of that web had been only one of a number of monsters that had crawled out of the caverns of Ruhkarv. Most of the bodies of the explorers had been found aboveground with indications that they had, toward the end of their suffering, battled insanely against each other. Horrors driving them in a mad flight to the surface.
To the surface! That registered in Troy’s mind now as he strove desperately to keep his imagination under control, to observe without trying to reconstruct what had happened here. Fauklow’s men had set up the recaller, and they had fled from this point. So there was an exit to the surface somewhere from this chamber—did it lead through that opening before him?
He thought not. There would be no reason to aim the recaller on the back trail of the passage that had brought explorers here. No, that opening had had some significance for the dead archaeologist, but not as a door of escape. The old story of the treasure of Ruhkarv—had Fauklow found some clue that had led him to believe he could summon a whisper from the past to reveal the hiding place of the treasure?
Troy only knew that nothing would have led him to explore that dark tunnel mouth behind the spread and wasted body of a man who might have tried just that. He glanced at the animals. They were intent upon the scene, but not hostile.
“Dead only?” he asked.
Sahiba pushed back against his shoulder, her good foreleg rigid on his arm.
“Dead here—” But there remained an odd note of puzzlement in that reply.
“Here?” he echoed.
“It is here—yet it is not here.” She shook her head.
Troy could not be sure of what she was trying to tell him. “The man is dead.”
“Yes.”
“And that which made the net?”
“It is”—the gray-blue head moved, soft fur rubbing his shoulder—“dead here—but waiting.”
“The recaller!” Troy thought he knew now. Blanketed by the quencher beam from the rangers’ installation, the machine could no longer materialize the uncanny thing from the past. But under that blanket the recaller still ran. Let anything again lift the quencher and the weaver of those webs would return!
Troy stared at the array of dials and buttons on the small control board set into the back of the machine. There was no way of his knowing which of those would close down the dangerous ray, and he had no intention of experimenting.
Simba crept slowly toward the web and the captive there. He might have been a hunter stalking prey. One black foreleg stretched, a paw with claws extended patted the drift of dust that lay at the foot of the webbing. Something bright spun from that dust and Simba followed it, keeping it rolling away from the opening, back, until it struck against Troy’s boot.
The man stooped to pick it up. By the slick, cold feel he knew he held a ring of metal, a deep crimson-red. But as his fingers closed on it, there was a change in that plain blood-colored band. Sparks flashed on it, single and in pinpointed clusters, just as they had appeared on the walls of the water tunnel. And Troy believed that on his palm now rested no memento from the body of the unknown dead captive, but something that was native to these chambers and halls from the beginning, perhaps the only piece of the lost treasure of Ruhkarv that men of his own time would ever see. Had that, too, been summoned out of the past, given substance by some chance of the recaller? Or had it been found in the tunnel by the web captive, who had fled carrying it—only to be taken just as he was within sight of freedom?
On the band the sparks winked faster. Also—Troy frowned, completely puzzled. He had picked up a ring only a size too large for any of his fingers; now he was holding a much larger loop. Sahiba sniffed, then put out a paw, touched the hoop. It spanned his palm. Troy pushed his fingers together, inserted them. The band moved down, closed about his wrist, tightened there.
Startled, he jerked and tugged at it, only to find the bracelet now immovable, not tight enough to pinch the flesh, but resting as if it had been fashioned exactly to the measure of his arm. Yet under his exploring fingers the metal was solid surface, with no discernible joints or stretching bands to account for the alteration in size.
Sahiba patted it, apparently attracted by the winks of light still flickering on and off around it. Was it only a piece of personal ornamentation—or some outlandish weapon defensive or offensive?
“Good or bad?” he asked aloud, wondering if the acute senses of the animals could give him a reply to that.
“Old thing.” Sahiba yawned.
“A way out?” Troy returned to the main problem. Perhaps some kind of trail would be marked in the earth of the garden away from this point. He walked along the edge of the pavement on which the recaller had been set, searching for any trace of the route taken coming or going by those who had brought the machine here and then must have fled or been driven back to the surface.
Simba and the foxes accompanied him, then darted ahead, while Shang swung into the bushes again. They reached the end of that rectangle of pavement, and there Troy had eyes keen enough to pick out old scars of lopped branches, once again woven with a cloak of thick growth but still to be seen. He swung his knife, cutting a new way by those guides.
The light from overhead had dimmed into what was more night than dusk when he came out facing the foot of one of those ramps such as had led them down into this strange territory hours—or was it days?—earlier. He had lost all sense of time.
They made camp in a pocket of bare earth with the slope of the ramp at their backs. Troy eyed the now dark jungle distrustfully. So far only the lily hearts had been sighted as living things. But that did not mean that there were no other, just-as-vicious unknowns. And perhaps, as on the upper surface of Korwar, nocturnal hunters were more to be feared than those who stalked by day. Now more than ever he was dependent upon the senses of his companions. And that balance had shifted again—here man might be a liability to the Terrans.
He shared out supplies, noting that the animals made no move to hunt their own food.
“Hunting bad?”
Simba regarded the now gray-black mass of vegetation.
“There is hunting—for others—”
“Others—” That word might not echo in the air, but it did repeat itself in Troy’s mind. He tried not to think of the captive in the web. Yes, there had been cruel hunting for others here.
“That which caught the man?” Against his will almost, Troy pressed the point. Did darkness activate what the recaller had summoned out of the past? With that thrust of apprehension, to be fed by his species’ age-old distrust of the dark, Troy put out a hand to gather up the supply bag. Tired as he was, he had the atom torch, and he could keep going on the ramp until he dropped rather than face that weaver of webs. The residue of terror here bit at him now.
“No.” Simba seemed assured of that. “Other things—this their place—”
As though on cue there came a cry out of the miniature jungle, a long, wavering screech that was made up of pain, terror, and the approach of death. Yet it was no cry that could have come from any animal he had ever known. And those he did know retreated, edging in around him, their heads turned to the jungle, their eyes alert, their lips lifted in snarls of warning.
“Out of here!” Troy’s torch snapped on. “Up—”
He did not have to urge. The foxes sprang from the camp site to the ramp; the kinkajou was already racing after them. As Troy, carrying Sahiba and the bag, started that same climb, Simba fell in behind, looking back over his shoulder now and again, a low growl coming from his throat to warn off would-be trailers.
They went on climbing, the torch showing only the rise before them. Soon they were above the surface of the garden cavern, now in a sloping tunnel enclosed by rock walls.
They came to a level with corridors starring out at five different points, bare corridors in which his torch showed the dust disturbed, perhaps by the feet of the men who had planted the recaller and died for it.
Another length of walled-in climbing, then again corridors—four this time.
Troy’s ribs ached; his breath came in heaving gasps. More and more often he had to pause to rest. But he was driven now by the need to gain the open air and the world he knew. How long that climb continued he could not have told, for at last he moved through a daze of fatigue, weaving and staggering from wall to wall on the ramp, no longer aware of any communication with the animals, or even if they were still with him. It seemed that the residue of terror that had sent him out of that cavern grew stronger instead of weaker as he went, until it blanketed out his normal reactions and whipped him on and on—
Then there was gray light—and cool air, fresh air—air that bore with it the burden of fine rain, but which cleansed him and fought the shadows in his mind. Troy reeled, caught at a block of masonry, dimly conscious that he was out in the open now and that he was done. With that crumbling wall as a prop to keep him from crashing on his face, he slid down and lay on his back, the soft steady rain pouring over his face and body, plastering his clothing to him.
“Danger!” That word rang in his head as a shout might have torn at his eardrums. Troy raised his head groggily. The rain was over. There was a patch of sunlight on the ground just beyond his hand. He shook his head, trying to wake up fully.
Then he heard more than that mental warning. He heard the sound made by a flitter hovering over a landing site in a cramped space. A flitter!
More by instinct than by any conscious move, Troy drew back against the wall that had given him partial shelter, trying to locate the machine, which, by the sound, must be very close. Around him were the domes and walls of surface Ruhkarv. There could be only one reason why anyone had invaded this forbidden territory —they must have traced him here. And who were “they”? The patrollers, Zul—or the rangers on their usual duty of keeping the unauthorized out of this danger zone?
For the first time he looked about for the animals. And they were nowhere to be seen. Even the injured Sahiba had disappeared. Yet they had warned him mentally—or had they? Perhaps he was only still tuned in on some wave length of their intercommunication.
The sound of the flitter grew louder, and Troy tried to squeeze his bulk smaller in the shadow of the wall. He saw the flyer as it crossed between two domes. It was that of a ranger.
Troy crept backward, angling toward the mouth of the ramp. He discovered that the fact he might be the object of an air search removed a great deal of the nebulous distaste he had known in the depths. Then, to his astonishment, for he had felt very naked and plainly in sight, he watched the flitter keep straight on course and vanish behind the rise of another dome, the sound of its passing dying away in the distance. With a sigh of relief he sat up.
“Simba, Sahiba—” He pictured the cats in his mind, aimed his mental call.
“One comes.”
Troy was not sure of the direction of that ambiguous answer.
“The flitter has gone.” He tried to reassure the furred company, to summon one of them into sight.
“One comes.” It was repeated. “One comes from the big man.”
From the big man—Kyger! Zul?
“Where?” Troy pushed that effort at communication to the top pitch he could hold. For a long moment he feared they had cut their contact, refusing to answer. Then Shang frisked around the shell of the dome behind which the flitter had disappeared, showed himself to Troy, and was gone again.
With far less speed and agility the man followed that lead, crossing the space between wall and dome with care as to his path but as quickly as he could. Then, one hand braced against the side of the structure, the other gripping his stunner, he began a slow and, he hoped, a noiseless journey. He could hear the buzz of a few insects. But there were no birds here, no sign of life in this desolation that was the upper cover of Ruhkarv. And he caught no sign of the animals save that momentary glimpse of Shang.