Invaders of Space

CHAPTER SEVEN

THERE was only one use of weapons that day, though by the laws of probability there should have been more. That one was after sunset, and Horn wasn't directly involved.

From a time near noon onwards, Horn led the Danae's passengers and crew along crisscrossing jungle trails flooded to a greater or lesser depth. Sometimes the water was thigh deep on the adults of the group, and the children had to be held above water. They seemed to enjoy the whole experience. Sometimes it barely reached an adult's ankle. But at all times the footprints they left behind them were underwater and invisible. Most of the time the prints were not even deep. The water had risen too recently to have made the soil real mud.

In their journeying they saw few wild things, none actually on the game trails they followed. Twice they did see animals resembling muskrats, swimming sturdily where the water was deep. Those creatures eventually climbed treetrunks and were lost to sight overhead. And more than once Horn saw lumps, not clearly distinguishable but certainly not parts of the trees and lianas on which they appeared. He did not see any of them closely enough to be certain, but they were a greenish grey and he believed them to be more of the octopuslike things he had seen crushing a tiny deer.

He made a guess that they dwelt aground in the dry seasons, preying on ground animals, and that when floodtime approached they climbed trees and lay in wait for the tree dwellers. The swimming animals also suggested an ecological system adapted to periodic floodings. Several times during the castaways' journey, too, he heard rumblings at the very bottom limit of audibility. All sound goes down in pitch with distance, and this might well be thunder of intolerable volume, reduced to mere pulsations of the air by the distance it had travelled.

But in the clearing the Theban's crew was then still engaged in the destruction of the spaceboats. Carcasses of the fascinated beasts killed the night before littered the ground. Some of them had had to be dragged away from where they'd fallen, to allow work to continue on the lifeboats being pulled to pieces in the search for treasure.

By the time Horn allowed his followers to take some rest - they'd found a hillock that had become an island - Larsen had been forced to recognize that the money wasn't hidden in the boats. He searched further, because the fugitives had been in the clearing when the Theban landed. The cone-shaped crimson-fluorescent beacon had a doorway. He explored its interior. There was the broadcasting unit - the beacon itself - and means for changing the signal it broadcast. If a survey ship discovered a danger in the ship lane hereabouts, the beacons along the lane could be adjusted to give due warning of it to space mariners. But there was no money hidden in the cone. There was no recent excavation in the clearing where the money might have been buried. Larsen even had the supply pit emptied of its decaying, malodorous contents to be sure the Danae's people hadn't stashed away their precious cargo there.

So there was nothing to do but hunt down the fugitives and force them to reveal its location. At just about the time Horn had his partly rested followers take up their journey again, Larsen led some of his crewmen in a hunt for them. He actually wanted two things: the money and Horn. Both were necessary. If Horn could be found, Larsen believed he could threaten or bribe him into securing his own safety by his co-operation. Horn had co-operated from Formalhaut to Hermas, and from Hennas to here. But Larsen knew nothing of Ginny, whose presence had determined so much of what Horn had done.

The castaways seemed an even simpler problem. Human beings are adapted to human- ecology planets. Worlds not modified to grow Earth vegetation and support Earth animals simply don't produce food for humans to live on. The castaways had some food, but not much. They couldn't hope to find more on Carola. In time they must yield their treasure in exchange for food - which, of course, would last them only so long anyhow. So Larsen considered that, with a little judicious hunting and perhaps the killing of a few, the refugees from the Danae would surrender - under solemn promises of transportation to a civilized world - could be murdered in between the stars, and everything would be very tidily finished. Larsen led his hunting party after the castaways with a serene confidence.

The planet Carola paid no attention. Its single continent was mostly swamp, though there was higher ground along most of its coastline. There were rain clouds of incredible density, and storms of unbelievable violence. On this particular day the belts of storm clouds poured down torrents upon the empty seas and on much relatively solid ground. The swamps to the west of the beacon were filling up, and rain continued to fall beyond the western horizon at a rate of seven to ten inches per hour.

Presently the clouds would reach the beacon clearing. Then even hillsides would become torrents, and the already rising water level would grow higher. The game trails Horn now followed would be submerged fathoms deep. If the planet were aware of anything at all - and some people believe that worlds and suns are aware of their own existence - it was absorbed in the simple fact of being. It did not heed mere bipeds moving restlessly here and there on its surface. It did not even concern itself over the slaughter of its fauna for trespass on the beacon clearing.

Larsen's hunting party had luck, at first. They found the fugitives' tracks almost at once. They followed the trail, though the footprints were much obscured by the spoor of the beasts the ship's lights had drawn to the clearing after the castaways fled. But by paying close attention, fragments of tracks could be traced. Some were men's, some women's, and a few had been made by children. Larsen was unpleasantly pleased. If he found the castaways and got the money, hunger would make Horn return. Then he must run the Theban's engines, and matters would go as Larsen had planned.

But the trailing was slow. More than once they lost the track and went past the junction of other game trails the Danae's people had turned into. They had to search painstakingly to track down the forty millions of credits the castaways had taken from the Danae when they abandoned her. The fugitives would feel Larsen's displeasure for causing him the extra effort of trailing them.

It was past midafternoon, though, when he came to the place where water began to show among the trees. The footprint trail was visible, but he didn't see the hole made by the engineer's shorted blast rifle. The water level had risen and filled it. Larsen's party came to the place where the trail ended altogether, where it went into water which glittered as far as they could see. Horn's and the engineer's footprints showed here, too, but they, like the others, went into the water and didn't come back.

Larsen cursed. He knew nothing of Ginny and he couldn't imagine Horn's purposes or habits of thought. But people didn't go into swamps to stay; they went into swamps to come out of them somewhere else. They must know of solid ground beyond this slowly surging liquid. But where they could go, Larsen could follow.

He led the way into the water, with his men trailing him. The water rose to their ankles, to their knees, to their thighs. They did not notice another jungle trail which joined the one they followed. Horn had turned back along that trail and found the Danae's company. Larsen didn't. The water continued to deepen, and he growled to his followers to hold their weapons high. He pressed on.

At just about this time, in late afternoon, Horn led his people ashore, miles away. They were on the far side of the beacon clearing. Horn led the way a full mile from the swamp's edge and worked with the others to cut a tiny open space in which to bivouac for the night. It was away from the jungle trail they'd followed. The hypochondriac passenger protested that his health would not let him exert himself. Horn drove him to labour, regardless. The engineer went through the motions of working, but he was very badly in need of a drink. The others, weary as they were, understood that a game trail was not a good place in which to camp. Large animals might want to use it during the night. But besides, the castaways realized that Horn had taken them out of a very real danger and they were safer than they had been. They weren't confident of the future, but they were much more hopeful than before.

Horn arranged for watches during the night. He organized his following briskly, and the Danae's captain dignifiedly agreed with his measures.

Larsen's enterprise was less fortunate. He led his followers deep into the swamp. From thigh deep the water became breast high. The rifles had to be carried overhead lest they come into contact with water and destroy themselves. It wouldn't be practical to use them even in an emergency.

The water grew deeper yet. The sun sank low. Larsen snarled at his followers. The branches across a jungle trail, of course, are never more than so many feet above its floor. A crewman caught his blast rifle in a branch and it was wrenched from his hand. It roared, shorted out.

The men of Larsen's party scattered as the rifle proceeded to destroy itself with thoroughness and much tumult. Another man stumbled. Another blast rifle created the monstrous uproar a short-circuit rifle does. There was panic, steam, and flying mud. There was boiling water. Branches were severed. One jungle tree toppled across the path.

Larsen's followers got to safe distances and waited out the destruction. Before they dared reassemble the sun was low indeed. Then they dared not go on. No sane man will wade in a flooded jungle after nightfall.

Larsen cursed, but his men retreated, splashing in their haste. It was dark before they came wholly out of the water. They actually took a wrong path and came out at the castaway's original hiding place, from which Horn had led them. They walked over and blotted out the footprints they were looking for, blundered on, found out that they were lost.

For more than an hour they fumbled about on jungle trails that led everywhere and nowhere. They tended to panic. Then the small particoloured moon passed swiftly overhead and Larsen oriented himself by it. He noted the relative position of certain bright stars to each other and the line of the moon's orbit, then snarled his followers to silence and led the way towards the ship.

They were halfway back to the clearing when one of the party stepped on a flat, flaccid, greenish-grey splash of what looked like a mould or fungus on the ground. He did not see it, though it was nearly six feet across. He knew nothing of its presence until something stirred violently under his foot and then cold, wet, invisible snaky things seized him in the darkness. He screamed and struggled. Rough mouth openings with rasping bristles scraped at his garments and tore them. Something fastened on his cheek. He clawed at it. Monstrous, sinewy, horrible arms closed upon him and began to squeeze the life out of him.

Larsen and the others heard the noise. Somebody shakily made a light. They saw their fellow crew member engulfed by what now appeared to be a monster land octopus whose tentacles formed a net about him which swiftly grew smaller. The thicker, central portion of the horror slavered and bubbled in its eagerness to feed, and many other small mouths attempted to begin.

Larsen used a blast rifle. He could have been more careful, but there was desperate need for haste. There were more lights held up in shaking hands. The monster dropped off after the blaster bolt hit it, but the crewman fell to the ground too. Then other blast rifles opened up on the thing. Presently it was only a writhing group of unspeakable fragments on the ground, each of them seeming separately alive and ravenous.

The returning party hastened on. Now they carried lights, and things came out of the jungle to gaze raptly at the torches. The men used blast rifles again, shooting their way along the game trail. Two of them helped the man the beast had almost killed. Larsen had burned his own leg badly with his first shot while blowing the monster apart.

Then something utterly gigantic blocked the trail and stood gazing fascinatedly at the torches. The men of the Theban desperately poured blaster bolts into it. Presently they were able to believe it was dead. But they heard other rustlings. Their torches were bringing other beasts.... Glassy-eyed with terror, they tiptoed past the monster they had killed, which smelled of slime.

When they reached the clearing, the state of their nerves was deplorable. Some of them stumbled across the carcasses of the creatures Larsen had killed from the air lock door. They were terrified.

But Horn's group of fugitives was in a much better situation. When night fell, they were safe from pursuit. True, their food supply was to be counted only in days; they were hunted; they couldn't expect rescue. But they were safe from pursuit, or so it seemed, and only this morning they hadn't been. They rejoiced in the wisdom of their new leader.

Except the engineer. He was restless and racked by his need for the bottles he depended on. The others were very weary, and an hour after the sudden sunset only Ginny and Horn were awake - aside from the engineer. Horn was taking the first night watch and Ginny sat beside him. They talked in the darkness. Sometimes Ginny laughed - not because Horn had said something humorous, but because she was happy. Fortunately we humans are really rational only part of the time.

Once, though, the Theban's engineer disturbed them to ask pitifully if there wasn't even part of a bottle among the castaways. Even part of a part - There wasn't.

As they talked, Horn worked in the darkness on a bit of bark from a thick-barked tree. He carved out an object some six inches wide and eight long, felt his handiwork, then made a second. When he was satisfied, he awoke the Danae's junior officer. He gave him the stun pistol for armament, then went to sleep with Ginny's fingers intertwined with his own.

Again he awoke when the sky grew grey. He took back the stun pistol and some other items. He went into the water alone, moving faster with no others to shepherd.

It took him an hour instead of a much longer time to reach a spot suited to his purposes. This was at the edge of the swamp. The water level had risen half a foot during the night. He strapped the carved bark items to his feet and ventured on solid ground, then examined his tracks.

They weren't human tracks. He'd invented an animal and the animal's tracks. He left those tracks behind him instead of his own. He went briskly along the jungle trails. And as he went, he spread bait.

The bait was interstellar credit notes which he laid along the game trail he followed. There were hundred-credit notes, and five-hundred-credit notes, and thousand-credit notes. He left them in plain sight. Anybody searching for a human trail where Horn moved would not find one. But anybody from the Theban who saw money in a jungle path would cease to look for anything else.

Halfway along the trail, Horn came upon the place where Larsen and the others had encountered a greenish-grey constrictor beast the night before. They'd blown it to bits with blast rifles, and the smaller bits were quite dead now. But the thicker, more noisome centre of the creature still throbbed faintly. Horn was sickened by the fact even as he put money down beside it.

He went on. Presently he hid himself carefully, to watch the clearing and what might happen in it. The bodies of the light-dazzled creatures were moved now from where they'd been. They were now food for some of those same greenish-grey horrors. The men of the Theban had shot some of them for sport, and shot and shot again the fragments into which they separated. But they were mindless, mere ravenousness. To kill them was poor sport even for strong- stomached men like Larsen's followers. They'd dragged the dead larger beasts out of the way, and now the flat discs squirmed and swarmed over them, embracing them foully while the mouths at the ends of the tentacles fed, and fed, and fed.

These things Horn saw. The gluttony of the monsters was revolting. But he waited for the movements of men.

At barely midmorning a second hunting party started out from the Theban. The men filed into a trail leading into the jungle. They vanished. Horn kept watch from a place well within the jungle's edge, listening. Not long after the departure, he heard a faint shout in the distance.

Then silence. The Theban stood almost perfectly upright, with the blazing sunshine of tropical Carola beating upon her. 'There was no movement except of the grey-green things devouring dead animals. There were the normal, strangely sweet sounds of the jungle, flutelike noises similar to bird calls, and small creakings from a particular kind of tree which became vocal when it swayed. Once or twice he heard deep-bass bellowings, minutes apart, and once he was sure he heard very deep, very faraway thunder.

Just after midday there was a sudden waning of the light. Horn looked up, and there were clouds almost reaching to mid-sky, thick and sullen and dark grey in colour. Lightning flashed among them. They did reach mid-sky, and then they sullenly floated away again.

The party from the Theban came back before dusk. Their clothing was dry. They hadn't attempted to follow the castaways to an imaginary destination beyond the swamp. Instead, they'd found money spread invitingly along a trail they came to, and they'd picked it up. They gathered up every bit of bait Horn had spread for them, and devoted the rest of the day to trying to find more. They were exuberant. They were excited. They'd found money!

They went joyously into the ship. Before they were all inside the air lock, they were babbling to those who had kept ship. They'd found money! Much money!

And it was true. Forty million credits was an abstraction. It didn't really exist. Hundred- credit notes did. So did five hundreds. And they had visible proof that there were such things as thousand-credit notes. These were not abstractions. These were things one could hold in one's hand. They felt rich!

Horn went back on his bark animal-track soles and left more money on another trail. Then still another. He baited two small sections only a hundred yards each. He left patches of jungle trail displaying bright, rectangular, beautifully printed certificates saying that so many credits would be paid to the bearer at any bank in the galaxy. Then he went back to the Danae people's encampment. He wanted to see Ginny. If things had happened differently, he and Ginny would now be married and living happily ever after. As it was, they were in a very nasty situation, along with two officers, four crewmen, and six other passengers of the Danae. It was no time for romance, but Horn was working and planning exclusively for Ginny. He thought only in terms of what was best for Ginny. He didn't notice the anguish of the Theban's small engineer, two days without access to a bottle. The engineer was suffering intensely.

The Danae's captain had gravely decided that some sort of shelter should be built against rainstorms. They'd made a leanto of sorts, and it was partly thatched. Horn believed it would leak, but he praised it generously. He showed the castaways a small patch of what looked like mould or fungus on the game trail. With all watching, he touched it at its centre with a stick. It was barely six inches in diameter, but instantly it seemed to sprout tiny, horrible tentacles which seized the stick and squeezed and slavered lustfully over it. It was unspeakably disgusting. Horn flirted the stick and the small beast went hurtling through the air. It fell some distance off in the jungle, and Horn considered that his followers were properly warned against that and larger beasts of the kind.

He conferred at length with the Danae's captain, and gravely agreed upon measures to be taken if any of the beasts of Carola should attempt to investigate their camp after nightfall. Lights were to be the prime defence. Local creatures would become fascinated when lights were flashed into their eyes. They could be led past the camp, or even killed if necessary - but in silence if possible. Sharp-pointed poles might be used as spears while a beast was held hypnotized by light. But there should be no avoidable noise, because sound travelled a long way in the jungle.

So Horn and Ginny had not much opportunity to be together this night. The Danae's captain made a formal, even bitter protest against Horn's use of currency as a weapon in a psychological war, but he couldn't protest too much. He needed Horn to think of things he'd never been trained to think of, and therefore never had thought.

In the end, Horn left the encampment again very near the middle of the planet's dark hours. He headed back along the water route he'd used before. There'd be no constrictor beasts in the water, but after he came out he moved through blackness, with cold chills running up and down his spine. He carried his stun pistol out and in his hand. He'd use it if one of the monsters lay in wait.

Ultimately he came to the edge of the clearing. The particoloured moon went overhead and during the half minute of its passage the clearing was astonishingly bright. The Theban loomed high in the rapidly moving moonlight. It showed no lights. There was no movement except unseen, slithering stirrings where the beasts fed. There was no sound anywhere.

But the atmosphere inside the Theban must have changed very much. The crew of the Theban had money and nothing to do with it. They would probably be shooting dice soon. There'd be exultation when they won and anger when they lost. At least some of them would try to cheat the others. And they'd be beginning to want to get away from Carola. Not immediately, to be sure. Now that they had so much, they could imagine having much more. But when they had that much, they'd want to start spending it. It is a part of human nature that most men don't want to accumulate money; they want to spend it. Most men get nervous when they have more than they're used to, and will abandon any prospect for future wealth in favour of wild extravagance and celebration in the present.

Horn estimated how this human character trait would work on the Theban. Normally, no spaceman will work if he has two thousand credits. If he has ten, he won't try to get more. The money left on the jungle trail should mean to the men of the Theban's crew that they had vast excitement, great satisfaction, and wild parties waiting for them to get where they were going. Money was like a ticket to something thrilling. Nothing was more sure to undermine Larsen's authority than money burning holes in the pockets of his crew.

Actually, there was a dice game already going on in the tramp ship's crew's quarters. The money found on the trail was changing hands frequently and rapidly. Those who had the money bet it, and those who didn't watched. So there was nobody watching the clearing from inside the ship.

Horn made his way from the far side of the cone-shaped beacon to the beacon itself. He avoided the dead beasts and the revolting nightmares-made-flesh around them. The particoloured moon was long vanished. There was abysmal blackness everywhere. Horn guided himself by starlight alone as he found the entrance to the cone.

He went inside and found what Larsen had discovered before him. There was the broadcast unit, separately covered and sealed inside a plastic case. An infinitely tiny sound came from where the beacon's plastic recording went round and round under a magnetic pickup.

"Carola beacon. Carola beacon," said the infinitesimal voice. It gave galactic co-ordinates by which a ship could check its own position. "Unmanned commerce refuge only. Unmanned commerce refuge only. Carola beacon. Carola beacon." It had broadcast that message millions of times in the past, yet it went on monotonously: "Carola beacon. Carola beacon..."

Horn cut off the broadcast. There was a special device alongside the pickup. Using it, a patrol ship surveying the Rhymer passage could change its message and add warning of a newly discovered meteor stream, the future approach of a burned-out solar system, or a new patch of cosmic dust. Cosmic dust was particles ranging in size from much smaller than grains of sand to pebbles the size of pinheads. A ship striking such a dust cloud at full speed would vanish in a flare of vapourized metal and white-hot gas.

Horn used the equipment provided to give warning of newly found dangers. He recorded a terse and succinct notice that there were castaways aground on Carola. They were refugees from the wrecked liner Danae. They were being hunted by the crew of the space tramp Theban, which had caused the wreck of the Danae.

When the recording was complete, Horn utterly smashed the device for changing it. Nothing else could be substituted for it now. He turned on the beacon broadcast again and went quickly away. If by any chance Larsen should again pick up the tedious beacon signal and discover the change, he could only turn off the broadcast permanently, as Horn had done it temporarily. And even that would be reported by the first ship to pass this way. A patrol ship could come to make repairs, and it would find out what had happened.

As a result of Horn's just-ended visit to the beacon, it was absolutely necessary for the Theban to lift off from Carola. Whether or not her crew found the castaways, and whether or not they secured the money for which they had committed several capital crimes, they had to get away! Only, of course, they couldn't without Horn to run the engines.

There was no alarm. Horn was back in the jungle within minutes. He ensconced himself in a tree and tried to doze until daybreak.

There was reaction to what he'd done earlier, though, at a very early hour of the next morning. Crewmen of the Theban came bustling out of the ship and moved eagerly and briskly towards the west. The men who'd previously been left as ship guards were in this group. They went zestfully and hurriedly to look for money strewn on the game trails of the jungle.

They'd find it, of course. Some would have been trampled by passing beasts, but there was a mile-long stretch of trail on which credit notes had been strewn not too lavishly by Horn. There was another, quarter-mile-long section. And there were two short bits of trail where money was to be picked up by any passerby.

The searchers found money. Horn heard the noise as they bellowed boasts. But presently the men did not come back, and they didn't brag of their findings, either. There is a sum of money beyond which to boast is to invite robbery. There is another sum, and to boast of having it is an invitation to murder.

Horn moved away from the clearing's edge. The long stretch of money bait had been found first. It was now cleaned up. The quarter-mile section was found. He'd heard the noise there, too. He went carefully and cautiously to examine the hundred-yard strips he'd baited. The money itself was both bait and trap. A quaint side light, too, was that the men in the Theban would become desperately suspicious of each other, now, but no one would want to kill Horn. He was their only hope, and if he'd found the treasure he could give more of it.

He almost ran into two men on a hundred-yard bait trail, but he heard them squabbling and passed them by. There was another man.... It was the ship's cook. Horn heard him searching feverishly. He stepped quietly aside into the jungle and waited.

Presently the cook came by, half crazed by his good fortune. He'd found more money than he'd ever had before.

Horn coldly squeezed the trigger of his stun gun. Then he came out of hiding and picked up the cook, who'd fallen senseless as Horn had done at the gatehouse of the spaceport on Formalhaut. Horn carried the limp figure of the cook on his shoulder, trending gradually downhill towards the rising water. It had risen another foot during the night.

Horn fastened the unconscious cook to a tree. Then he went to the encampment of his followers. Ginny seemed about to faint with relief when she saw him. He drew the Danae's captain aside and explained. The captain was astounded, shocked and unwilling. Horn grimly offered to sign a statement acknowledging full responsibility.

The Danae's captain followed reluctantly when Horn went away from the encampment once more. The two of them, together, moved towards where Horn had left the cook tied up.

They heard him screaming from a quarter mile away. He shrieked as the Theban's little engineer had done when thrown out to space for a landing on the Danae. And he had reason for screaming. A five-foot constrictor beast swarmed over him. It seemed to embrace him, horribly. Its tentacles with their hungry, lipless mouths at the ends lapped at his flesh as if caressingly. His eyes seemed about to start out of his head as he shrieked.

It was necessary to get close, and Horn was almost repentant that he'd bound the cook for such a monster to find. But then he noticed something new; a new angle on the creature's natural history.

From a slit in the thickest part of the monster's central portion, little three-inch monsters squirmed and hitched their way out. They were miniatures of the full-grown beast. They were carried in a sack or pocket like an opossum, like a seahorse, like all monotremes and kangaroos, like many insects and a few fish. These infantile horrors squeezed their way to freedom, and they squirmed and writhed their way under their parent's constricting arms to feed on whatever the parent had captured.

Horn used his stun pistol carefully.

Just in time.