Chapter IV

There was flame in the night, blinding flame, and raucous, screeching thunder. And a great round of gleaming metal rising shudderingly on a cone of dazzling, roaring light. Rising to teeter at last on the tips of long, sweeping fins, teeter and rock and walk a bit on those blades of tempered nickel-steel, until the swaying tower ceased to gyrate sickeningly across the stars, its motion settling into a quickening, shortening arc that died away into a tremble, a vibration, a stillness.

Captain Savage took his gnarled and stubby fingers away from the firing manuals and sat down, drawing a sleeve across his sopping brows.

"Nice work," said Pritchard. "One push and no correction blasts. Thy hand hath not lost its skill."

The old man took a deep breath and grinned. "It's work for a younger man. Next time I'm going to let you do it. Or Sturgis."

"There won't be a next time," said Pritchard flatly.

The captain cocked a bright eye up at him. Pritchard gazed out a viewport. The horizon of Thisbe II lay like a worn hacksaw blade against the purple glow of Piramus, rising.

"Set watches," he said briefly. "The rest of the company can turn to for six hours. Then Sturgis, Greene, Kemp and I are going off in the jets."

"Fishing, I suppose?" said Savage with gentle irony.

Pritchard smiled coldly and shook his head. "No. Witch-hunting."

* * * * *

Two plump silvery beetles screamed through the thin stratosphere high above the little planet. Behind them, dropping below the horizon, a needle stood gleaming in a black thumbprint. It was no longer possible to make out the smudge marring the _Apollo's_ alabaster flank, much less the team now hanging in buckets from eyebolts high in the nose, chipping away the cracked and carbonized glaze--cracked by last night's fall and carbonized by the hell-fires of the righting operation.

In one beetle rode the wiry Sturgis and stocky Kemp. In the other, the rangy blond, Greene, handled the controls while Pritchard studied the face of Thisbe II rolling slowly under them.

"Got any ideas yet as to what hit us last night?" said Greene.

"Nope." After righting the ship, they'd turned on the floodlights, but neither then nor in the broad light of day was there any sign or trace of their visitor. A burial detail had laid McManus the traditional six feet into the crust of Thisbe II. The long red thing had flopped and tossed startlingly as they sank hooks into it and dragged it off into the grass.

"Must have been the tail of something big, huh? How come it got past the radar?"

Pritchard shrugged and continued to peer attentively ahead.

"Sure is a mighty pretty hunk of country," sighed the blond boy. "In places it reminds me of the stuff around the Cumberland Gap. If it weren't for that lavender sunlight, that is."

Pritchard didn't answer, his eyes steadily sweeping the terrain unfolding ahead.

"That was a hell of a thing happened to poor Tom last night," Greene went on. "Do you figure he had much pain before it finished him?"

Pritchard made no response.

"Tom was a right good boy, and a hard man to beat once he had the chance to get his feet under him. Remember the time big Hayes hit him?"

There was no answer. Greene sat relaxed, one foot on the rudder bar and an index finger curled indolently around the jet firing toggle.

"Boy, old Hayes let him have it before Tom was set. Just like you clipped him yesterday."

"I thought you'd say that." Pritchard's voice was even. "You an' the rest of the boys want to be sure I don't forget that, don't you?"

"I wasn't meaning a thing, chief," complained the other. "Hell, we understand. Tom made a mistake and--and--well...."

"You can pass the word," said Pritchard softly, his eyes remaining hard on the vista ahead. "You can pass the word that I haven't forgotten the last thing Tom McManus had from me. Nor am I likely to--"

He grabbed the mike. "Cut, Sturgis, cut! Cut and glide--after me."

Greene, following instructions meant for him, too, snapped the jet toggle closed. The high-pitched thunder that had been chasing them across the sky was chopped off into utter silence.

"What you got?" he managed to say and then Pritchard's hip swung against him, neatly bowling him off the seat as the tall hunter thrust his feet toward the rudder bar.

"Stand by to fire," snapped Pritchard over his shoulder. The younger man lurched toward the rocket controls in the nose in front of Pritchard as the jet cruiser heeled silently over into a dive.

* * * * *

The bowl of Thisbe II tilted up toward them and its features steadied in the face of that arrowing plunge. Dead ahead lay a meandering thread of river stitching up a wide, jungle-filled valley. At one point the river either split in two or broadened momentarily into a lake. At any rate, there was an island, right above the little flight-sight bead on the jet cruiser's prow.

The island swelled into detail. It was fairly large, for up from its center thrust one of those strange rock mountains, the three straight planes of its cleavage converging in a jagged, towering peak, making it seem an elongated triangular pyramid that had been driven forth at a slant and had then had its extreme tip snapped off. The primrose light of Piramus high above reflected now in a dazzling shimmer from one flank.

At its base, or at the base of one impossibly machine-smooth wall, there was a semi-circular mark, as if someone had carelessly strewn dirt across the olive-hued turf. The grains and clods of this dirt resolved themselves, as the jets whined on down, into a twinkling, tumbling cluster of ants--with gnats hovering and darting. Then they became something larger.

Greene turned to shout excitedly at Pritchard, but at that instant Sturgis's voice cracked from the two-way mike Pritchard had hung above him.

"Hey, chief, aren't those some of that girl's animals?"

"Right," barked Pritchard. "That's a big rumpus down there. Follow me on down for a look. Then I think we'll try a couple of passes."

"Passes? At what?"

"Those are Miss Boyce's 'people', all right. They're fighting."

There was no further chance to talk. Pritchard and Sturgis gripped their separate toggles almost simultaneously and their jets roared into life, feeding power to their dives for a pull-out. The ground-contact alarm chattered its warning that they were coming too close.

As soon as the jets took hold, the pilots leaned back, pushing hard against the rudder bars. The tail elevators lifted into the slipstream, and the two silver beetles howled through a long pendulum swing that flung them far off into the sky.

But the trained eyes aboard them had ticked off the essential details of the amazing battle being waged through the tall grass toward the mountain.

"Holy rockets!" came from the blond head in front of Pritchard. "That's a regular battle line they're holding. Did you see those babies fighting!"

"Hey, chief," cracked Sturgis, "What goes on down there, anyway? Who's fighting whom? Or what's fighting which?"

Pritchard trimmed off into level flight before answering. "As far as I can make out, Cornelia Boyce's people are under attack, but I can't figure out who's doing the attacking. They're trying to hold that defense arc, but they're being snowed under. They're catching it from the air as well as on the ground. I recognize the animals inside that line. They're her people, all right. But I can't make out the attackers."

He banked the cruiser around toward that now miles-distant little spine of mountain.

Sturgis's ship followed him around as if fastened by a wire.

"They looked like reptiles and big insects."

"That's what they looked like to me. I don't remember seeing any of them yesterday--except for that bad dream I tried to shoot away from McManus."

"Anyway, there's sure a mob of them," cut in Sturgis. "The water all around that island is alive with them."

"That kid was right about one thing," said Pritchard. "There's a much higher level of intelligence here than you'd find in Terran animals, for instance. But never mind that now. Listen, boys, this is a planned and directed attack. And we're going to buy ourselves a stack of chips and sit in on the game. But, first, did anybody see the girl?"

"No," cracked the mike, and Greene shook his head.

"Well, I've got a hunch she's down there. She's mixed up in this somehow. I've a feeling a big battle like this is pretty unusual. This has all the earmarks of a war of extermination. And if those are her 'people' protecting her--something, or somebody, has her cornered."

"Could be," came Sturgis's voice. "But, then, who's this somebody or something?"

"I don't know. I don't care. This scrap's nothing to us. But we want the wench, boys. We want her on account of last night. And maybe for a couple of other reasons. She'd better come home for a little psychotherapy, for one thing. Now, here's our plan of attack...."

* * * * *

Like the pointer of a sundial, the jagged spear of mountain lay its deep blue shadow across the curve of battle, as if to mark off the dwindling hours and minutes of life for those who struggled, writhed and lay with glazing eyes in that long ribbony grass, now mashed and matted flat for acres in every direction, its pliant green-brown blades stained and mottled dark.

Red-eyed and snorting, the slate-gray boars stood shoulder to shoulder from one end of the arc to the other. As each one fell, the others closed ranks, shuffling backwards until their hides rubbed together again. Close behind them stood a thinning line of great scaled bears, clawing and biting what got past the boars. In and out among all their stiffly planted legs ran the lesser carnivores and the canines, snapping and worrying at the things creeping through the grass. Behind, in the shrinking zone of defense, roved the six-legged bovines and equines, and the leaping ones, and the shaggy-maned gorillas, prancing, goring, trampling, crushing. Overhead circled and hovered a swarm of hawks and condors, plunging and tearing.

Against them came a nightmare horde. Those that could not fly or swim made clumsy rafts from odds and ends of vegetation and branches plundered from the jungle; some scurried across on swaying creepers, all along the banks.

Crawling, creeping things, reptilian and crustacean and multi-legged, undulating and gliding, disappearing into the grass to emerge at the last deadly moment. Scurrying, spiny things were there in force--scuttling over the mashed-flat grass in beady-eyed haste to be in at the kill. Above them flew skull-headed, mandible-snapping horrors, with membranous wings.

There were no tactics other than individual duel and the wearing down by sheer weight of numbers. Aloft, the winged ones met, clashed and fell, buzzing and flapping. Below, tusk and fang and claw and beak and hoof mandible rent and tore and worried and stung. The long, vicious lizards and the sudden-striking snakes kept coming through only to go down under churning, stamping hooves or be shredded by horns and claws and fangs.

Yet the battle was unequal. Slowly and wearily, the defenders gave before the superior numbers, the more skillful killing. The bodies they left dotting the meadow began to outnumber the crushed remains of the things they fought.

Deep in a cleft in the base of the mountain crouched a young Terran female. Every inch of her brown body shaking in helpless terror.

Cornelia Boyce's left hand gripped the handle of her long knife, still in its sheath. She would need it any time now.

For The One was coming for her at last. Why it had ordered Its people against hers, calling them with Its vicious mind from the far corners of this world, instead of coming for her directly, she didn't know. Perhaps It regarded her as the lesser objective and relegated the task of smashing her and her converts to this horde, while It moved against the ship. Perhaps It regarded the ship of the hunters with the same contempt It had had for the Survey ship and was moving against her first--and was using this battle to toy with her, show her death, as it were. Perhaps there was some other reason. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered any more, for this was the end.

It had tolerated her. For four of Thisbe II's years--not quite three Terran years--The One had left her alone, almost, it would seem, keeping out of her way. It was as if It realized that she, the only one of her kind to survive the debacle at the Survey camp, was essentially harmless. It had not minded her attempts to win over and tame and domesticate some of the people. After all, she had converted only the weaker and gentler of them with her synthetabs; she had gained control over only a small percentage of the killers, the lesser carnivores. No, she had never really threatened The One's dominance.

Pritchard was right. Now that her carefully woven veil of illusion was torn away, she knew that there were killers. Everywhere. Always had been. Killers, killers, killers....

The One proved that. It killed a hundred times a day. This world was Its preserve and It roamed and fed and slew as It chose, only occasionally for food. Perhaps this was the only reason for existence, in the last analysis--in a cruel Cosmos one lived only to be killer or killed.

It mattered not. This was the end. Angered by the advent of more of her kind, It had no doubt decided to wipe out both her and them, recognizing in them all a degree of intelligence which, in force, could threaten Its control. It would move against the ship, if indeed It had not already done so.

But It would certainly destroy her. This attack would have no other meaning.

But she would cheat It. The One could not move faster than her knife!

There was not much time now, and certainly no hope. The battle raging before her was mounting to its inevitable bloody climax.

Her people could not hold out much longer. Their courage and faith and loyalty might not survive so terrible an ordeal. Were not some of the birds already winging away to distant refuge?

It was too bad. She would have liked to see the tall hunter once more before she.... His eyes had been so piercing! She had forgotten what a man could be like. If only she had not been so balky yesterday!

But it was not to be. He had come, in one of those two jet cruisers, thundering across the killer-infested meadow, and he had gone. He had seen and not understood. Battles between alien beasts were of no concern to him. He might even return, to make cam-rec footage from aloft of this amazing battle.

Hope flashed. She could signal him! What could she use?

How could she catch a roving eye in a ten-mile-a-minute jet?

She tossed up her head, eyes suddenly narrowed.

Something came screaming around the mountain above her, followed by a second screaming something.

Then hell erupted beyond the battle line. Blast followed concussive blast, causing the big gorillas to cower and the other ones to charge about in helpless panic. Between the jarring blasts sounded the rippling crackle of dual-mounted automatic snappers.

The screams faded off into the sky. A stunned silence reigned along the battle perimeter. An acrid smoke drifted over the ground.

Then, just as groups were sporadically renewing their death-grips here and there, the twin screams sounded beyond the mountain again.