Fugitive of the Stars

CHAPTER VI

A great sinuous shining arm reached out of the black water directly ahead of the skiff. Horne slammed the steering lever hard over with one hand and reached for his stunner with the other. The little bullet-shaped craft shot off on a frantic tangent drawing swirls of cold phosphorescent fire from the water under its metalloy hull. The arm continued its lazy motion without any sign of disturbance. Horne began to laugh. It was only a long, thick coil of weed, given a semblance of life by the rolling of the whole bed in some hidden undercurrent.

His laughter became rather too loud, ringing with a shocking loneliness across the empty sea. Horne stopped it. He couldn't let himself get edgy now. He had come a long way and a brutal hard one, but he had a longer and harder way yet to go to the city of Rillah in quest of a ghost.

"Maybe,” he muttered to himself, “I better get some sleep."

He was sweating and shaking in a way that alarmed him.

He pulled back the speed lever until the skiff was moving at a safe rate of speed. Its radar beam would take it around rocks or islands of floating weed too thick for passage, bringing it back to the course he had set. The night would go on for a long time yet, for nights here endured almost as long as three Earth days.

He lay down in the narrow well and slid the plastic canopy over him in case it rained. Rain on Skereth was not merely a matter of getting wet. A shower could swamp the skiff before he even had time to wake up.

He lay still, feeling the quiet lift and fall of the black water like the breathing of a slumbering giant. He was exhausted, burned out inside by the intensity that life had taken on for him in these last weeks.

Lying there, he thought suddenly of Denman. He remembered how sorry he had felt for the little Federation man when they had dropped him on that barbaric planet to live with humanoids in order to try and trace” the slavers who were oppressing them. He had felt almost guilty to be leaving Denman there.

"I should have saved my pity for myself,” Horne thought.

He lay staring up at the sky through the transparent canopy, waiting for sleep, and he noticed what he thought was a dim star, low and far off in the west.

"The clouds must have broken,” he thought, and closed his eyes. The skiff moved gently over the breathing sea.

Broken clouds, a star… that meant tomorrow the sun would shine.

Horne started up, flinging back the canopy. He had been half asleep or he would have remembered that not once in a generation did the clouds break on Skereth.

Whatever the light was in the sky, it was not a star.

It was still there, but brighter, and as he watched it now he could see that it moved back and forth as well as forward. It reminded him of a man with a flashlight walking in a dark place, looking for something.

Looking for something.

He watched it, crouched over the controls of the skiff. His heart was beating hard again and his hands quivered.

Back and forth the light went, coming ever closer, sweeping the dark sea.

Looking for something…

Looking for him…

The light moved, unhurried, methodical, restless. He started to push the speed lever forward and then changed his mind. The damned phosphorescence would give him away if he made a wake. From the sky it would show like a fiery arrow pointing right at him. Even his present rate of speed was now too much. He shoved the lever into the off slot and stood looking desperately around, wondering what to do. If he stayed drifting where he was, eventually the sweeping light would catch him in its beam and the men behind it would either take him back to be tried or shoot him dead, probably the latter. He had to hide. But where in the open sea did you hide?

A weed island if you could find one and if you could get to it in time.

He peered and squinted into the night.

A smear of luminescence showed, soft and faint to his left, too high to be merely a surface patch. He glanced again at the light and then he began feverishly to strip to his shirt and shorts. His feet were already bare. There was a plastic mooring line reeled up forward for use where no magnetic moorings were available. He tied the end of it around his waist and slid over the side, trying not to splash.

The water was warm. It was calm, but with the great slow pulsing aliveness of the sea that is never quite still. It was very wide and black and there were creatures in it more hideous and hungry than any in the oceans of Earth. Horne, swam slowly, with infinite care, towing the skiff behind him, moving his head constantly from side to side looking for tell-tale gleams.

Behind him the light searched closer and closer.

He swam faster toward the pale glow ahead of him.

Cold slippery tentacles of weed came fingering his bare flesh. He shrank from it but there was no other way, so he forced himself on into the mass that grew thicker and thicker as he went until he could almost stand in it. Soon the high-growing fronds curved over his head like trees, so that he moved in a tangled tracery of soft light, leaf, steam and branch all glowing silver against the blackness of sea and sky.

He could no longer see the searching presence in the sky. The mat of weed was slimy but solid under foot. He braced himself and pulled on the skiff until it was well in under the tree-like fronds. Then he climbed hastily back in, shuddering with revulsion from the touch of the weed. He began to pull streamers of the stuff over the metal hull and over the partly closed canopy so that no tell-tale glint would give him away. Then he hunched up as in a cave surrounded by the silver-glowing weed and waited.

There was a kind of lazy whistling in the sky now. He could not see the craft but, by the sound, he figured it was one of the cone-fliers. The scientists of Skereth had learned to control the G-particle in the nucleus of the iron atom some time before the scientists of Earth had even discovered its existence. This one sounded like a compressed-air unit for low-velocity flight.

The soft luminescence of the weed was blanked out by a harsher and more brilliant light. It moved with agonizing slowness across the floating island, seeking, probing.

Horne drew his head down between his shoulders, as though that would help.

Through the open end of the canopy, looking over the stem, Horne could see the weed now as an ugly tangle of pallid wormy stems and flabby leaves, all its fairy-like beauty destroyed by the pitiless light. And he saw something else.

Something large and wetly glistening and independently alive.

Horne froze where he crouched, one hand outstretched to touch the little stunner laid ready beside him, but not picking it up.

The large glistening thing flowed and contracted, flowed and contracted, moving with a kind of single-minded determination that was horrible to watch. All Horne's boyhood nightmares returned to him. Long ago and far away on Earth he had lived near the sandy beaches, loving the sea but wondering why it had to spawn such disgusting creatures in its splendid depths. Now the ultimate in horror was lapping steadily toward him, and the damned cone hovered overhead sweeping its searchlight back and forth, suspicious of the island which was the only place where a man might hide a stolen skiff and himself.

Horne sat, trapped. He didn't dare to make any undue disturbance in the weed by using the stunner to fight the thing off.

He did not dare let it get into the skiff with him, either.

The light penetrated through his camouflage of weed fronds and lit up the inside of the skiff so that he felt as though everybody in the universe could see him. He swore at it under his breath, muttering, “Go on, can't you? Go on!” He drew himself together, flinching from the momentarily expected blast of destruction from above, and staring hollow-eyed at the hungry creature that was only interested in getting its dinner, flowing at him over the wet weed. Finally he couldn't stand it any longer. He slid the canopy the rest of the way shut, nipping a rubbery gelatinous edge that was already flapping over the stem. It was a very small movement. If they saw it overhead they would have to see it, that was all.

Apparently they did not. The light filtering into the skiff got dimmer. At first he thought it was all because the sea-thing was climbing up over the top of the canopy. But then he realized that the cone had moved on. The whistling of its propulsion unit became more distant, fading slowly as the cone continued its sweeping operations out over the sea again.

He picked up the stunner and waited, feeling the stern sink a little with the dragging weight, watching the underside of the creature slide up over the canopy and hoping the plastic would hold.

When the weed was all gleaming silver again and the sound of the cone was quite gone, Horne did several things with almost hysterical swiftness. With his left hand he punched the firing key that started the skiff's small jet. Simultaneously, with his right hand, he wrenched canopy back a few inches and triggered the stunner directly into the creature, praying that the thing had at least enough of a nervous system to feel it.

It had. The creature began a slow, enormous flopping that shook the weed island and threw the skiff around so violently that Horne was tumbled with bone-cracking force against ‘the side, where he managed to hang on. After a few minutes the motion subsided and he looked up and saw that the canopy was clear. The shaking of the weed had subsided outside. He shut off the jet and peered cautiously over the stern, pushing the canopy back. The thing, not liking the stunner's shock, had floundered deep in the water and only ripples from underneath rocked the weed. Horne waited until they had died away and crept to the bow of the skiff. Then with the utmost reluctance he entrusted himself to the weed again.

When he had hauled the skiff into open water again he clambered into it and dried himself and pulled his clothes on, and then took a couple of deep pulls on a flask he had found among the meager stores. The dim “star” was still visible, this time moving away toward the eastern horizon. He looked after it, hatefully. He'd been lucky this time, but it was in no sense a victory.

If they were hunting for him on Skereth they knew why he was here and where he was most likely to go to Rillah, Ardric's home city. Their course across this landlocked sea was also the course to Rillah, and they would inevitably be there long before him. So he would have to change all of his plans, such as they were. He would not head straight for Rillah now, but would have to land somewhere many miles out of his way and circle around to come at the city from another direction. Because, of course, they would be waiting for him.

They. Impersonal word, meaning Federation officials possibly, Skereth police certainly, the local authorities of Rillah, and, if Ardric was alive yet, Ardric himself. The whole damned city would be watching for him, and he wouldn't have a chance if they saw him.