Chapter VI

Boone died a thousand times in that one moment. Then, shouting a warning to the four remaining crewmen, he caught up an axe from the rack of emergency equipment and crept towards converter-room and monster.

The thing had withdrawn now, dragging the dead man's body with it--for what awful purpose Boone could not even guess.

Yet the question that lay implicit in the thought made him pause just short of the door for the fraction of a second. It turned out to be a pause that saved his life.

For in that same instant a claw-hand snaked back through the hatchway. Filth-encrusted nails scraped along his arm, endeavoring to seize him.

Boone jerked back with a hoarse, involuntary oath. Wildly, he swung the axe.

The keen blade bit into the monster's extended arm. A muddy sludge of blood gushed forth. The claw-hand jerked back.

Yet the thing made no sound--not a single groan or snarl or murmur.

Boone hesitated, even more wary than before. He kicked a fallen spanner towards the doorway.

Like lightning, the monster lunged from its hideout--and now Boone saw why it had made no outcry.

The thing had no head! It consisted of arms only--six hairy, humanoid arms radiating out from a central core that looked like an enormous mushroom button.

Careening, the creature changed course. The arms clawed out to clutch Boone.

Leaping wide, he slashed with the axe--a savage blow with all his strength behind it, straight for the central core, the button.

There was a sound like a watermelon bursting. The button broke and flew apart, not so much sliced as shattered. A sickening stench erupted through the cabin. The arms sagged, limp save for spasmodic twitchings.

Half-sick with the sight, the smell, Boone stumbled back.

But before he could even drop the axe, a new cry came.

It rose behind him, this time--from the cabin's other end, the hatchway to the landing ladder.

Boone spun, ran towards the ladder.

From the bottom of the narrow shaft, a white-faced crewman beckoned in a frenzy. "Out--! Get out!" He vanished through the exit port.

Boone dropped the axe and, sliding, plummeted down the ladder. In seconds he, too, was stumbling through the port.

The crewman who'd shouted crouched on the ground in the shadow of the ramping fins beside one of his fellows, the man who'd lain unconscious since they landed. "Look!" His whole arm shook as he pointed.

Boone veered, then froze.

If what had gone before were nightmare, surely this was utter madness! For from beyond the circling hills, a hand was stretching towards them--a hand vast beyond all human concept! Like living columns carved in flesh, the fingers reached out, nails glittering in the filtered sunlight of the ice-shell.

With a mighty effort, Boone forced himself to motion. Lunging back through the port, he tore a long-range blaster from its wall-clip, then leaped to the ground once more and raced away, off to one side where there was space clear of the ship for him to use the weapon.

His action seemed to break the paralysis of the crouching crewman. Jumping up, the fellow disappeared for a moment into the carrier, then rushed out again with a second blaster and darted after Boone.

The giant hand's shadow fell upon the ship. The circling fingers closed about it.

Boone stumbled to a halt. Twisting, he swung round the blaster ... triggered a bolt at the clutching hand.

For the barest instant the hand stopped short. Then, in one savage, spasmodic motion, the great fingers clamped down on the carrier, clenching.

* * * * *

There was a clash and crash of rending metal; a roar of compressor tanks exploding. Flame spurted out between the crushing fingers.

Wrist-muscles bulging, the hand whipped high into the air, then down again with earth-shaking force. The fingers opened ... spilled out the crumpled mass of wreckage that had been the ship.

... Wreckage, and the pitiful, broken bodies of the two crewmen who had been trapped inside.

A hoarse cry burst from the throat of their comrade, the man who'd followed Boone. Whipping up his blaster, he blazed bolt after bolt into the hand.

As a human might slap at a mosquito, the hand smashed down and crushed him, then started towards Boone.

Shock-rocked, quaking, he dived into the closest flower-clump's cover ... rolled and writhed through the foliage, flat against the earth.

Overhead the hand paused, searching.

Then, bare yards from him, suddenly, it fell.

But not in a blow. No. This was different. For it fell limp and sagging, as if the muscles all at once had lost their power.

Boone lay like a statue--frozen, waiting.

Nothing happened.

The tension in him grew moment by moment, till he could hold it down no longer. He surged to his feet, blaster at the ready.

But the hand did not move. Before his eyes, as he stood there, it was ... melting ... oozing away into the ground in stinking rivulets of slime.

Numbly, Boone moved along it; and now, incredibly, he could see its termination, just below the rim of the nearest hills.

For it was an arm without a body--an arm that trailed off into nothing, like a figure cast in wax.

Yet there too lay the carrier, crushed and crumpled ... the broken bodies of the men.

This limp, dead arm had done that....

It was more than human mind could take. Boone slumped to the ground and cowered there, shaking.

Nor would the seizure pass. It was as if he suddenly were chilling. Cold crept through his veins in icy tendrils to the very marrow of his bones.

Harder and harder he shook. Yet still no surcease came. His whole body was aching now and it dawned upon him, dimly, that no shock alone could leave him thus yet still alive.

Then, at long last, the chills and cold departed, driven out by a quick, fierce heat. His mouth grew dry. His tongue took on new thickness. Flowers, hills, wreckage--all seemed distorted. He burned as with a flaming fever....

Fever--?

He knew, then.

_Titan fever!_

What else could it be, here on Hyperion, but that strange pyrexia that mutated Man's gametes?

So there was no hope for him, no answer....

He never knew for sure what happened after that--how much was reality, how much fever-madness.

For delirium came, and in that state he wandered. The hills rolled down in lowering barriers of menace, and flowers talked to him, and he walked beside strange streams.

And then, sometimes, it seemed that Eileen stood beside him ... that he could hear her rippling laughter echo, and taste her lips, and smell the fragrance of her hair.

But Eileen was still a prisoner of the Helgae, sealed in a sphere somewhere within their weird, domed cities.

That meant he had to find her.

So he wandered on, babbling of mekronal and chandak ... precious chandak, the only remedy that could save him from his fate.

And Krobis was there, too, and Terral--all the others. Sometimes they mocked; sometimes they helped him.

Not that it mattered. For now, all at once, he could get away from his own body, floating cloud-like in space beneath three great green suns.

The monsters came, then.

* * * * *

The first was in the image of the Helgae--lumpish, mottled, but with a yawning orifice that he knew somehow was meant to be a mouth. Twice it tried to swallow him as he floated, then faded away again when he rolled away beyond its reach.

The second took the appearance of his own father. Its face pressed close, all clipped mustache and burning eyes and shiny skin.

He shrank before it.

But the face kept following him, pressing closer, and the feeling grew within him that if the tight grey lips should ever open, he would surely die.

So he surged away in utter terror ... fled through the green-tinged sky-sea around him.

But his muscles were all at once like water, his movements as inadequate and slow as only the responses in a dream can be.

Desperately, he tried to move faster ... faster....

The face rushed in. He screamed aloud.

Then he was falling. Head over heels, he pitched down into depths at once black as night and shining white and shimmering with weird iridescence.

The third monster rose out of the mists beneath him.

It was a thing of horror beyond the telling, with a body Boone sensed more than he saw.

But from that body rose a long and sinuously slender eyestalk, surmounted with a huge human eye.

It was the eye that held Boone; for as he stared into it in mute, numb fascination, he knew that it would draw him ever closer till at last the slime-mass that was the body could swirl out and suck him in.

A black wave of despair engulfed him. Of a sudden his palms, his whole body, were drenched with sweat. The feeling that he was falling faded. Vaguely, he became aware of roughnesses beneath him. A breeze washed over him and he chilled.

Slowly, painfully, he opened his eyes ... stared up into the murk of night.

But it was a night that was already dying. Far off to one side, a dim glow marked the coming of the day.

Cords of tension fell away. Once again, at last, he lived in a world of reality, not nightmare.

He hugged it to him; drew in the chill security of it with gusty, lung-expanding breaths.

The grey glow in the distance spread. Weakly, he sat up to look about him--and stared instead into the pale malevolence of a great, baleful, swaying eye!

He froze, not daring to move or speak.

For the thing before him was the monster of his fever-madness--the eyestalked horror from the dream.

Yet he knew--_he knew!_--that he had left delirium's valley. This was reality! Without question, the fever had waned and gone.

Then what--?

He had no answer. Not here; not now. He could only wait, and hope, and perhaps pray.

But while he watched, not daring to so much as flick an eye or move a muscle, the thing before him began to eddy slowly closer.

New sweat rilled down Boone's spine. A knot of tension drew tight within his belly.

Sinuously, the monster's eyestalk swayed. The huge orb atop stared at Boone unblinking.

Stiff-fingered, too fear-straught to even look away, he slid his hands out in arcs along the ground.

But they touched no stick, no stone, no clod, no debris. He remained as he had been, a warrior sore beset, without a weapon.

And still the monster eddied closer....

He could not even break and run. Weak as he was, he dared not even trust his muscles.

Spasmodically, his nails scraped at the dirt.

The dirt--!

He dug his fingers deep into it ... sucked a ragged breath to ease his hammering heart.

Like a serpent poising to strike, the monster paused. The horror that was its body drew together.

With a wild shout, Boone hurled the dirt square into the glaring eye.

* * * * *

The eyestalk whipped back, quivering and pulsing. Then, in an instant, recovering, the creature spilled forward in a rush.

But already Boone was twisting, scrambling, clawing his way along the ground.

Then there was a rock beneath his hands, big as a man's head. In spite of his weakness he clutched it, swung it up.

The monster swept down upon him as he pivoted.

Boone hurled the rock.

It struck at the base of the weird thing's eyestalk. With a snapping sound, the orb's stem broke.

Twitching, writhing, the body halted. Then, as with the giant arm, the other monsters, the creature's whole structure began to shrivel and ooze away in slime.

Panting, shaking, Boone slumped back to the ground, his brain a cauldron bubbling with inchoate thoughts.

Like a mosaic, then, the pieces fell into place.

This whole void-area--and this area only--seemed to crawl with mad phantasms ... lunatic life-forms like none that Man had ever seen before. Out of nowhere, they materialized aboard the Cartel's sphere-ships. Here, on Hyperion; Titan, too.

Those were the facts. Now, suddenly, they took on form and pattern.

For in his delirium, Boone knew he'd had nightmares of this specific slime-drenched horror.

Awakening, his fever gone, he'd faced the hideous thing on reality's plane.

And the Helgae could play strange tricks with human minds....

The Helgae--they were the correlating factor!

The Cartel had come and raped their silent cities for the sake of mekronal and chandak.

So lacking the power of discourse, words to protest, they'd struck back in their own dark way.

Somehow, they'd reached into men's deep subconscious and dredged up monsters--the paranoid delusions of fevered brains.

Then, as the mediums of another day had claimed to give spirits ectoplasmic body, so now the Helgae materialized nightmares into life!

What armor could turn aside such a weapon?

Yet beyond it lay the threat of Titan fever. For that, too, could be a blow struck by the Helgae--the main attack, designed to cripple the mass-mind of the whole, far-flung human race!

Boone shuddered.

Yet strength rose in him, not despair. For with knowledge, the fears he'd felt of the unknown vanished. He looked about in the growing light with new, fresh eyes.

The landscape had changed from that which he last remembered. This ground lay in altogether different contours.

Frowning, he turned.

Now, with a shock, he found himself staring out on a familiar scene: the arcs and domes and bubbles of the self-same sprawling Helgae city where he and Eileen had lain entombed.

... Where Eileen still might lie.

It was a thought to make his belly churn, his heart pound, wrenching cruelly at every atom of his being. He sagged, gripped his head between his hands.

* * * * *

The sleeve of his shirt fell across his face, ripped wide. Incredulously, he discovered that everything he wore hung in rags and tatters. Even his shoes were slashed and mud-caked.

How far had he strayed in his fever-wanderings? How long had it been since delirium struck?

He ran his fingers over cheek and chin: a three days' growth of beard at least ... maybe more.

Not that it mattered. For he was alive; and out of horror, hypothesis had been born. If, truly, the materializing monsters and Titan fever were weapons of the beleaguered Helgae, then a truce must somehow be arranged, even if it meant complete human withdrawal from all satellites of Saturn.

That called for action by the Federation: action which the Cartel's chiefs would fight with tooth and nail.

Yet IC might well defeat itself by its own opposition. All apart from any Helgae menace, the Independents would rally instantly to whatever cause should threaten to disrupt the Cartel's mekronal production.

But that could wait; Eileen could not. Here, now, somehow, he had to save her.

Or was that hopeless?

Only time and fate could give the answers. Meanwhile, the least that he could do was try.

Unsteadily, Boone rose. He cursed the fever that had drained his strength.

It was then he heard the crashing blaster bolt beyond the ridge, off to his right, away from the Helgae city.

Again, his heart leaped. Blasters spoke for men, not Helgae--human help, here on Hyperion with him!

Lurching, stumbling, he dragged himself up the hill.

At last, the crest.

Below, the hull of a ramped Independent carrier, scarlet and silver, came into view.

Now strength surged through Boone. He broke into a staggering run, straight down the slope.

Only then, as he careened too fast past a brushy thicket, something thrust out between his flying feet. He spilled forward in a bruising, sliding fall.

A voice rasped, "Don't move! I've got you covered!"

Painfully, Boone twisted.

A man stood in the shadow of the thicket--a man with a blaster, a man who wore the blue-grey field outfit of an Interplanetary Cartels guard.

The other's lean face split in a mirthless grin as he stalked forward. "You're Boone, aren't you?" And then: "Krobis had you figured. He said you'd come in if you spotted an Independent ship."

"Krobis--?" Boone's lips went stiff. "You mean, he's here?"

"Of course he's here." The guard chuckled. "You told him about this Helgae city underneath the ice-shell yourself, didn't you? So he set up a base but pronto, with manpower enough to fight off monsters. He plans to start blasting the domes before next cycle, get a mekronal unit into production, and claim Hyperion for the next Cartel."

He broke off; gestured to Boone with the blaster. "Get up! We're going in. The way Krobis feels about you, catching you's good for Earth leave and a sergeant's rating."

* * * * *

Numbly, Boone heaved himself to his feet, stood swaying.

Was this to be the end of all his sufferings--back where he started, a prisoner en route to a cell in Venus Barracks? Was the Cartel to go on butchering the Helgae till opposing life-forms clashed in full-scale war?

Above all, was he never to know the truth as to Eileen's fate? Did this mark the end of his last dim chance to save her?

For all illusion had died in him. Whatever else might be, there was no mercy in Martin Krobis. Ego, vengeance, ambition--those were the man's three key dynamics. Nothing else mattered to him; not truth, nor justice, nor even the life of Eileen Rey. He'd laugh at theories ... gloat over his triumphs ... sacrifice the rest of the human race if need be for the sake of the Cartel and his own fame and power.

"Get moving," the guard clipped. "We're going in."

Wearily, Boone turned and stumbled down the slope through the brush towards the ramped carrier.

But for all despair, fatigue, a spark still burned within him.

Krobis must not win! He must not!

Ahead, the ground fell away more sharply; and there were trees and bushes, saplings.

With cold deliberation, Boone tripped--pitched forward--let himself fall headlong.

But as he fell, he caught the limb of a slender treelet.

It bent almost double.

Prone now, Boone clung to it.

The guard ran to him, blaster ready. "Get up, you!" Face a mask of wary menace, he stepped closer.

Too close.

Boone let go of the limb.

The treelet snapped back. Branches slashed into the guard's face.

Out of reserves he had not known existed, Boone drew strength to hurl himself into spasmodic action. He twisted, kicked for the guard's legs with all his might.

The man went down with a hoarse, choked shout.

Boone lurched down upon him. His elbow smashed at the other's temple.

The guard sagged, glaze-eyed and groggy.

Snatching up the blaster, Boone hit his adversary with the butt, a savage blow.

The guard went limp, unconscious.

Sick, sobbing for breath, Boone slumped beside him.

But only for a moment.

Then, rallying, he fumbled the rations from the other's belt-case, gulping down the concentrates in great, gagging, half-chewed bites.

His protesting stomach writhed. For long seconds he thought he was going to vomit.

But that, too, passed. The sugars, the ectoids, began to reach his bloodstream.

Strength came with them.

Tight-lipped, clutching the blaster, Boone began the long, weary climb back up the hill.

... Back, and beyond, to the strange, domed city of the Helgae ... and to Eileen Rey....