Invaders of Space

CHAPTER SIX

PRESENTLY he saw a moon, and in glimpses of it between tree branches he saw it move swiftly across the sky. It was particoloured, one section vastly brighter than the rest. It would rise as a crescent in the west and wax as it moved, until it set as a full moon at the east, into the shadow of Carola. Speckles of surprising brightness appeared where the moonlight trickled through leaves. There were other speckles, at first brighter, from the glaring lights outside the Theban. where a blaster still rasped occasionally. But those light patches faded as Horn thrust his way on. It was necessary for him to get far enough from the ship to have a good start if Larsen led crewmen in pursuit of him.

He heard rustlings, and froze. Something moved slowly in the jungle. It was huge and it smelled of slime, but the rustlings of its passage were relatively trivial. When it was gone, towards the white light fog of the ship's floodlights, Horn pressed on to find the trail the unseen large beast had followed.

He found it, a small game trail. He'd had to force his way between treetrunks and underbrush till now, but this trail was clear to head height. Even fumbling along it, he could move at a reasonable pace.

Presently he was just barely able to see the glare of the Theban's floodlights behind him. He pushed on. A long time later he saw the moon again. It was the same one he'd seen before, passing through all its phases as it raced across the sky.

Presently he smelled swamp, and realized that the game trail he had followed had seemed to trend slightly downwards. Nobody should attempt a swamp in darkness! Horn climbed a tree; not far up, but high enough so animals using the same trail would not find him disputing the way. He braced himself to try to sleep, but inevitably his mind suggested that in this world there must be climbing carnivores, and that some things that in the darkness seemed treetrunks or branches might be something else - something deadly.

He thought of Ginny, and was comforted by the fact that she and the other castaways had realized there was a connection between the disabling of the Danae and the destruction of the stores they should have found on Carola. They'd fled when the Theban descended. There was a good possibility that, when they hid the treasure from the lifeboats, they'd hidden some foodstuffs too.

He dozed awhile, and awoke suddenly. There was a greyness overhead, and small, tentative, unfamiliar noises in the jungle. In a sense his situation was horrifying, though being afoot without food or water, and practically unarmed, in the jungle of an uninhabited planet was his own doing. The castaways he must join, too, would be deeply suspicious of anybody who'd arrived on the Theban. Any of them but Ginny, in fact, should try to kill him on sight because the nature of the Theban's errand was shown by Larsen's behaviour with the lifeboats.

He pushed his way on, ruefully trying to work out some way to meet this added problem. The jungle seemed to grow thicker as he went to lower levels and away from the ship. He followed a game trail; it was impossible to move except along these winding, meandering ways. They crossed each other from time to time, and at each such cross trail he examined the new one for signs of footprints. The ground became spongy underfoot. There was swamp somewhere nearby. He noted that the treetrunks had a uniformly muddied look up to about eight feet from the ground, as if there'd been a flood here not too long since.

Trees rustled in the wind that blew above them. There was one variety that creaked as it swayed, and for a long time Horn believed the sound to be the product of another kind of creature altogether. Far away there were occasional deep-bass bellowings, but they were minutes apart. For some reason Horn thought of the elephantine, thirty-foot-long monster he'd seen come out of the jungle on many legs to gaze raptly at the ship's floodlights. There were rare, musical noises which sounded like separate soundings of single notes upon a flute. They did not change pitch as bird calls do on planets which have been converted to human use.

And once, as he stopped to examine a crossing game trail, an animal came out of the jungle. It was the size of a small dog, and was sleek, smooth-furred and streamlined. Its paws were large out of all proportion, with widely separated fingers and webbing between them. It gazed at Horn with startled hazel eyes. He stirred, and it fled. It didn't look like a jungle animal, it seemed more like a water animal, devised for swimming.

He covered a mile, perhaps two. Once he saw a greenish-grey object lying on the ground. It looked like one of those somehow disgusting fungus masses one finds on rotting wood wherever earth-originated forests grow. It looked slippery and he went out of his way to avoid stepping on it. He saw a foot-high creature with pencil-thin legs trotting delicately along the game trail. It saw him, and darted out of sight.

Then he heard a human-made sound, a crashing of metal upon metal, and the squeal of metal being torn. It could only be someone attacking an already wrecked spaceboat, taking it apart to make sure the money from the Danae was not hidden in its innards. Horn had intended to make a circuit of the beacon's site, hunting for footprints, but he was getting too close to Larsen. He took the next of the branching game trails to go farther away and still make a circuit of the beacon.

He knew acute unease, now. If by any chance there were footprints leading directly towards the castaways' hiding place, Larsen and his followers could easily detect them at the edge of the clearing and reach the castaways before Horn could. He hurried, trying to complete the circuit of the beacon. He was in such haste that he almost stumbled over a tragedy of the jungle about him. There was another of the greenish-grey objects in this game trail. But it was no longer flat and flaccid, wet and slippery like some fungus. Now it seemed like a bag, a sack, in which a deerlike small animal the size of a fox terrier struggled desperately, only its head outside of the all-enveloping greenish stuff.

The seeming fungus was now a lump of writhing loathesomeness. It was not a disc but an animal, boneless and all gristle, which had separated its edge into writhing, clutching, constricting arms that quivered and tightened as it grew smaller to crush its prey. It was like a flattened octopus which lay in wait until some other creature trod on it, when what had appeared to be a disc became squirming arms that clutched and squeezed the life out of whatever had touched it. The tiny deer panted and struggled - its eyes agonized.

Horn used his stun pistol, without thinking. That was foolish. The noise was not too loud, but it was a human noise. The convulsive struggle stopped. The fumbling, writhing arms collapsed. The deerlike creature lay still. It lay insensible upon the grey-green mass, which had regained its appearance of being a disgusting fungus in the trail.

Horn rather squeamishly moved the little animal away. When it regained consciousness it was not likely ever to step on anything flat and glistening and greenish-grey again.

Then he heard a blaster let go in continuous fire. It was very near, probably on this same game trail. It seemed to Horn that he heard the roaring of steam, as it develops where a blaster bolt hits something soaked with water. Automatically he snatched out his quite nonlethal stun pistol. The bellowing roar continued. It did not sound like a blast rifle in normal use; blast weapons are fired in separate bursts of energy. A gun fired single-shot - one blaster bolt for each squeeze of the trigger - may fire a thousand times before its charge is exhausted. Used in rapid fire, it can empty itself in less than two minutes, but it will melt down a metal door or burn through feet of wood or plastic. This wasn't rapid-fire, though; it was continuous. No gun could be fired this way by the use of its trigger. It would be melted down by its own violence.

The tumult diminished, though it wasn't cut off. From a bellow it became a roar, from a roar a formless shout. Then it dwindled swiftly to a growling sound, and finally it was no more than disconnected rumblings and the sound of steam rising through water.

Then Horn heard somebody sobbing.

He recognized the voice, and the sound did not rouse his sympathy. He ground his teeth and made his way swiftly along the trail. He ran into a monstrous reek compounded of steam and scorched organic matter. It drifted slowly through the jungle in an offensive, spreading fog. Horn's face wrinkled in disgust, and he saw no reason to change his expression when he came upon the Theban's engineer in a limp heap on the ground, weeping.

"What the devil are you doing here?" demanded Horn, The little man goggled at him.

"I said, what the devil are you doing here?" snapped Horn.

"I'm - trying," said the engineer miserably, "to - to get to the people from the Danae."

"What for?"

"M - maybe they won't kill me," snivelled the engineer. "On the Theban they will. They're all scheming against each other -"

"Naturally!" said Horn. "How do you expect to find the Danae's people?"

"I went around the clearing," the little man said, uneasily, "and I found footprints. But I didn't tell Larsen! I didn't tell him! I followed them. I - thought if I warned them -"

"Go on," snapped Horn.

"I - thought they might protect me from him. But then I - heard a stun pistol. I thought it might be Larsen. So - I ran, and I tripped, and my blast rifle went ahead and fell in the water...."

Horn looked down at the bare soil underfoot. There were footprints, evidently coming out of a game trail that had joined the one he was on a little way back. Then he saw the glitter of water. The trail dipped down and vanished under feeble ripples. The footprints went into it and vanished.

Horn could not believe his eyes. This was no ordinary swamp of tussock grass and reeds, with sluggish streams here and there; this was a forest whose trees grew out of water, though a little way back they grew on dry land. Horn could see a liquid surface ahead for as far as the foliage let him look.

Beside the trail there was the evil-smelling, still-smoking proof that a blast rifle had been shorted out. He saw the stock of the weapon, partly carbonized by heat. There was a pit exploded out of mud and already filling from the water around it. Mud had been thrown in all directions. It stank.

But Horn only glanced at the weapon. That was ruined. More important, he could see that the game trail went on and on through the treetrunks growing in the water. Presumably the footprints did the same. There was dense vegetation growing in the water on either side of a game passage, as if water-dwelling animals kept paths clear to swim in when they went ashore into the jungle.

Then he realized the truth. Water animals did not graze fixed paths through swamp water. Rather, the water had risen and flooded the trail. Recently. He looked to right and left, and it was evident. The muddied treetrunks proved that water had risen here some weeks or months ago. It had been not less than eight feet deep where now was spongy solid ground. Now the water was rising again. It might stop at a lower level, or it might rise to eight feet in depth here again.

The situation was appallingly clear. He said shortly, "Come along!"

He waded into the water, which barely covered his instep. As he moved on it deepened to his ankles. After two hundred yards, it was up to his knees. The little man said fearfully, "It's getting deeper!"

Horn only grunted in reply. He moved slowly, watching the treetrunks on either side. The water was halfway up his thighs when he found what he was looking for - another game trail joining this one; submerged, like this one; apparently kept clear by wild beasts, and actually a forest trail which had become covered by rising water.

Horn turned into the new trail, heading back in the direction of the beacon and the Theban. He moved slowly and carefully, making few ripples and not enough disturbance to be heard. The engineer made the beginning of a whimpering sound, but Horn turned upon him a face so filled with menace that the little man gasped instead.

Fifty yards. A hundred. The water was again up to his knees, and no higher. He moved more slowly and more silently still. This was a long way from where the blast rifle had burned itself out - at least a mile, possibly two. Then there was a sound which did not belong in a swamp: a child spoke querulously. The engineer gasped. The water grew more shallow.

Horn walked out of the water into a relatively dry new trail with very many footprints in it. Less than thirty feet from the water's edge, he looked straight into the astounded, unbelieving eyes of a man not six feet from him in the jungle.

"Where's Ginny Forbes?" asked Horn in a matter-of-fact voice. "I've come to help out in the mess you're in. She'll tell you why."

The man, with a spasmodic gesture, belatedly raised his weapon. Horn said impatiently, "Don't be an idiot! Where's Ginny Forbes?"

There were startling stirrings. Faces appeared. Then, with a little cry, Ginny came running down the path. She clung to Horn. "I knew you'd come! I knew you'd come!"

"That's more than I did," said Horn wryly. "You'd better introduce me. I must seem a suspicious character."

Ginny had to weep a little, from relief, before she could explain to the other castaways who Horn was. She didn't know how he'd got here, but he'd come because, she was in danger. And he would help them. Perhaps he had someone with him -

"Not him," said Horn coldly, of the engineer. "He's useless."

But there was no time to go into a long explanation of how he happened to be here in a swamp of rising water on a beacon planet several light years from where he should have been waiting for Ginny. At the beginning, he doubted that he'd be believed. The captain of the Danae regarded him with calm eyes that Horn at first thought were noncommittal.

He said politely, "You know the water's risen?"

"Naturally!" said the Danae's captain, composedly. "That gave us the idea of hiding here. We can't be trailed to this place."

"I trailed you," said Horn shortly. "Have you noticed how high the water's likely to rise?"

"We are watching it," said the captain, as calmly as before.

Horn pointed to the treetrunks about him. Very plainly, when one looked, at some time not too long past this jungle had been flooded to a depth which here was fully ten feet. The Danae's captain blinked. He hadn't noticed it. His expression wavered, then returned to a conscious and confident calm.

"Ah, yes!" he said composedly. "We have to take account of that."

The castaways clustered around, staring. All the ship's company of the Danae were gathered here; two officers, four crewmen, and seven passengers. The Danae's captain wore that air of calm confidence which is so reassuring to passengers that it is practically part of a liner captain's uniform. But it might mean nothing more than that, by following all the rules, obeying all directions, and travelling only on surveyed space lanes, he has never faced an emergency and therefore has an unblemished record.

The junior officer looked boyish and uneasy. Space-academy training had not prepared him for a situation like this. The passengers were oddly assorted. There were two children. a stout businessman, two women besides Ginny, and a cadaverous man who, muddied and dirtied like all the rest, still looked like one of that dismal brotherhood who travel from world to world seeking a cure for what they refuse to believe is hypochondria.

The crewmen were no more and no less than the usual crew of a space liner; men who had made their runs stolidly on well-found vessels between well-equipped spaceports with the regularity and all the sense of adventure of wind-up clocks, and who had lived until now in placid expectation of eventual pensions. They were not well suited to the role of castaways or fugitives from the crew of the Theban.

Horn noticed eyes turned on his companion. "This man," he said dryly, "is the engineer of the Theban, which landed last sundown. He has run away from his ship because he fears he'll be murdered for proven incompetence. I can't think of any way in which he'll be of use to himself or anybody else, but here he is. Now, how much food have you?"

They had food for some days yet. There'd been more, but it was left in the lifeboats. They hadn't finished stocking their hiding place when the Theban appeared in the sunset sky.

"Load up," commanded Horn. "It looks to me as if this planet has rainy seasons to make your hair curl. Every animal I've seen looks like a water dweller. They're equipped to live in a flooded jungle, but we aren't! So we've got to move to where we won't be drowned."

The Danae's captain said with calm dignity, "I chose our hiding place because we couldn't be trailed here by our footprints."

"But I trailed you," said Horn.

"Yes," agreed the captain, gravely. "But still -"

"There's a ridge of high land behind the beacon," Horn told him, "with hills beyond that. I'm going there. Ginny will come with me. When this swamp is under water we won't be here. Those are the facts. The decision is yours."

The Danae's captain frowned, as if in deep thought. But he was badly shaken inside. The fact that Horn had trailed his party was a severe shock. He'd hoped to stay hidden until the Theban went away. He apparently had no idea how long men will keep up a search for forty million credits. His training and experience were comparable, in a way, to those of a ferryboat captain. The space journeys he'd made demanded just about as much skill as steering a ferry across a river. He was official leader of the castaways because of his rank, and he had his rank because he'd never got into trouble. But Horn was another kind of man. The Danae's captain relievedly accepted his direction.

"Since you were able to find us," he said with a fine air of decision, "the men of the - the Theban might do so too. We should move, if only for that reason. And it will certainly be more - ah - salubrious at a higher ground level." He turned to the others. "We will go on. We must carry everything we have brought here."

There was a bustling. Ginny stood close by Horn. She said in a low tone, almost a whisper, "I'm so glad you're here! Now everything will be all right."

"I wish I were as confident," he told her. "But I'm glad I'm here, too."

He watched the preparations for a move. The castaways gathered up bundles of foodstuffs. There were other bundles, larger and probably heavier than the food. Horn said, "How many weapons? Where are they?"

Ginny shivered a little. "There's one blast rifle usable. The others - it's so damp here. The dew made them get hot. A - short circuit?"

Horn made a bitter, inarticulate sound. A blast rifle dropped in water will be shorted out, but a blast rifle with the safety left off in damp air will gradually lose its charge. It had not occurred to any of these people, that a weapon's safety might exist for another reason than preventing accidental discharges. A blast weapon has to be kept on safety when not in use. It has to be! Sheer ineptitude had practically disarmed the castaways.

Horn inspected the one weapon not made useless. Its safety was on. One weapon against the fully armed crew of the Theban! It did not look good. Now the whole party was loaded down for moving. The cadaverous passenger carried less than any of the rest. Horn curtly ordered him to exchange burdens with one of the women. He protested that his health did not let him overexert himself.

"Then you'll stay here," said Horn gently, "and enjoy your death." He ran his eyes over the other loads. "What's this stuff that isn't food?" he demanded. But he knew.

The Danae's captain said, "That's currency. Forty million credits in cash. The most valuable part of the Danae's cargo. It is my duty to try to save all I can from the wreck of my ship."

"Which isn't wrecked," said Horn. "But I wish you'd left this money outside the spaceboats up by the beacon, for the Theban's crew to find. It would have done most of the job we face."

The captain said reproachfully, "But they'd have gone away with it. It's what they're after!"

"They'd have started killing each other over it," said Horn, grimly. "We wouldn't have so many of them to deal with."

"But you don't propose -"

"To give it to them? The devil, no! Not now! We need all the weapons we can get!"

The party was ready to move. Horn led the way, with the one working blast rifle. Ginny walked beside him. Her expression was one of joyful, absolute confidence. It apparently didn't occur to her that with Horn on hand anything could possibly go wrong.

It was a strange journey. They waded into the slowly, slowly rising water till presently they came to where a game trail joined the one they followed. They backtracked on it, approaching the beacon and the Theban. Always, before they came to solid ground, they found another flooded game trail leading partly in the direction they wished. They moved in a succession of zigzags, going three or four feet sideways for every foot of advance around the ridge of higher ground they meant to reach presently.

They plodded on for hours. It was exhausting. Once they came to a hillock which at the moment was an island. Horn allowed them to rest here. A hunting party from the Theban wasn't likely to wade to it to find the signs of their pausing. They ate, frugally. The Danae's captain drew Horn aside.

"I understand how you got here," he said uneasily, "because of your fiancee. But isn't there someone who - knows where you are and will try to find you and us?"

"Only the gang on the Theban," said Horn.

The captain of the Danae almost looked distressed. "When you found us, I had so much hope...."

"We're not too badly off," said Horn. "We've food for a few days, and there's the Theban with more food aboard, and shelter when the rains come, and there's not too much more tinkering to be done to make her safe for a journey to Formalhaut."

"The rainy season!" said the captain. "Before we abandoned ship I looked up Carola in the space lane directory. It isn't really inhabitable. It's four-fifths ocean and most of the rest swamp." His tone took on traces of agitation. "It has a hundred and ten feet of rainfall a year! And as I compute it, the rainy season is about to begin."

"Then we'd better take the Theban," said Horn, "if only for shelter."

"But how?"

"We'll manage," said Horn shortly. "For one thing, since it's a bit chancy, I want to attract the attention of a passing ship."

"Impossible! The boats had communicators of limited range, but they're smashed."

"The beacon isn't of limited range," said Horn irritably. He had plans, and was trying to believe that they were sound. It was annoying to have the Danae's captain point out obstacles to all he intended to do. "The beacon's long-range. And I've designs on it."

"But the ship is there!" protested thecaptain. "You say it can't go away. The men in it will murder us; they've every reason to do so. And we aren't armed to defend ourselves!"

Horn frowned. It did not seem to him that in addition to thinking for all the castaways, plus the Danae's captain, and planning for the future, he should be required also to console the captain.

"Where," asked Horn, "did you get the idea that we aren't armed? We've got a weapon that's worth a thousand blast rifles. It's the deadliest weapon in the galaxy. And we've got it, and they haven't." Then he said annoyedly, "Come along! Let's rouse these people. We've got to carry on and try to get to solid ground far enough away before sunset."

"But," protested the captain helplessly, "what weapon have we got?"

"We," said Horn as patiently as he could, "have forty million credits in interstellar currency. Try to find a more deadly weapon than that!"