Perilous Planets Part 26

'You - Zor!' he demanded. 'Can you follow a trail in the sand?'

'I have hunted with you,' the man reminded him.

'Then let the ullas go, and follow as you can. We're losing ground.'

Silently they bent over the straining beasts, plucking at the straps that muzzled them. Then like living shadows, the crea-tures leaped out on the Star-Beast's scent.

'Come on!' shouted Karak, 'if you want to see the kill!'

Now they were running, with a stride that nearly matched the Star-Beast's - pace for pace on the track of the hunting beasts. As the darkness lightened and the dawn- cone thrust up before them, paling the watching stars, Korul saw that the character of the ground was changing and a fierce hope sprang up in him.

As the night pa.s.sed they had seen the ullas from time to time, far ahead on the crest of some dune, skimming like shadows over the pale sand. Gradually they had drawn ahead, until Karak was following the trail of their clawed paws. Now the sand was giving way to a hard, gravelly plain, naked and flat, where the beast's claws left no trace. What marks there were in the thin dust, that overlaid the ancient, sun-backed clay would be gone as the dawn-wind rose. By the gracious G.o.ds, they might escape!

With the first arc of the sun above the far horizon, Karak stopped to stare ahead over the red expanse. It sloped down like a saucer before them, but in all that great waste nothing living moved. He grunted and ran on, Korul at his side matching stride for stride.

As the sun climbed in the sky, the red plain came alive with flickering phantoms of the heat. Broad, s.h.i.+ning lakes spread over the desert, like the seas of which Jim- Berk told, bordered with monstrous vegetable shapes. Weird, ruined cities hung against the distance, walls and towers that melted and changed as they looked and faded into a wash of crimson light.

Looking back, Korul saw the long vanished dunes hung huge and inverted in the heavens, while over them crept two black dots - Karak's men - and far behind another moving line the reinforcements which the wounded man had sent. Then before them the plain suddenly swelled and rushed to meet them with awful speed, its every detail growing with incredible swiftness, cracks swollen into gorges, pebbles into phantom holders twice their height - and caught up by the mirage, the ullas, running low and tirelessly on the track of their prey!

Karak cried out and pointed: the ghost-land s.h.i.+vered and was gone. But somewhere out there the hunting beasts were draw-ing closer to Jim-Berk and to Thorana.

Slowly another shape began to take form in the red haze be-fore them, wavering, looming in moments of mirage, sinking again, yet steadier and more solid than the ghost-shapes of the heat. Ragged arms ran out from it on either side, closing out the horizon, then began to draw together, shutting them in.

Was this another trick of the desert and the heat, Korul wondered, or was it real?

He saw uncertainty growing on Karak's flat face. What were these crazy crimson towers, these shadowed crevices, these tottering spires of scarlet that flicker-ed like tongues of solid flame against the black sky? Were they another phantom swimming in their heat-warped brain? If so Karak saw them too.

Mirage or not, the heat in this rock-walled slot was terrible. Karak was tearing at his clothes, and his skin was beginning to redden and blister in the sun's fierce glare, Korul drew his own mantle closer about him.

The fine red dust that their plodding feet stirred up settled over them, sifting into the creases of their skin and between cloak and skin, setting their flesh on fire. Their sandals were thin: no protection for bruised and blistered feet. Remembering that other time, Korul knew what must come and hardened himself against it - but Karak ran tirelessly beside him along the wavering track of three-clawed feet.

Karak was a man!

A man - yes, but a man who had loved soft things, and taken them when he found them: good food from the Masters' cup-boards, wine from the Masters' flagons, women from the Masters' beds. As they came out of the broken land, into a place of packed white sand, white as the snow-cap at the pole, Korul saw that the other's steps were beginning to waver. His breath rasped in and out of his open mouth in great, dry sobs. Slowly Korul began to draw ahead. There was a strangled command, then a scuff of gravel and a thump as Karak fell sprawling. Korul did not look back.

He had become a machine like Karak now, tireless and un-feeling, that raced on and on along that s.h.i.+mmering track while the sun climbed higher and the white sands blazed about him with almost ponderable heat. He narrowed his eye to slits, but still the white fire burned into his brain. He felt the skin of his face tightening and cracking.

Then far ahead, where the white sands melted again into red and rose in a vast, slow wave against the inky sky, he saw the ullas running on the track.

Somewhere they must have lost the trail - in the soft sands, perhaps - in the broken land. They were tiring too, running slower, and a savage satisfaction woke in Korul's throat as his dazed mind cleared and the thud of his pounding feet came crisper and faster from the packed white sand.

The skimming shapes grew in his vision until he could make out every detail of their long, lithe forms, glistening with tiny scales as black as night itself.

They vanished over the crest of the first sand-wave. Korul toiled up the slope behind them. From the top he saw a distant line of red hills, the sand rolling against their base. Halfway up the next slope raced the slim black shadows of the ullas -and at the very crest, silhouetted for an instant before he drop-ped into the hollow beyond, was the Star-Beast with Thorana cradled in his mighty arms!

Up that long slope, and down, and up again - the Beast, the ullas and Korul far behind. As he topped each reaching wave, Korul could see that the hunting beasts were gaining steadily. Their prey in sight, their great legs had taken new strength. And the Star-Beast was stumbling - slowing - stopping!

The Star-Beast's Lair Where the red sand-waves broke, against the base of the first range of hills, a flat- topped ridge ran out into the plain. With a heave of his great shoulders Jim-Berk lifted Thorana to it top, then crouched with his back against the rock, waiting.

Far behind the racing ullas Korul raised one trembling arm and tried to shout. The Star-Beast saw him. His hand went up in a last salute; then the hunters were on him.

He had wedged his broad back into a crevice where they could not come at him from the back or sides. As the first beast sprang, his foot lashed out and caught it in the belly, hurling it back into the pack. Before he could recover, he swung a fragment of rock above his head and sent it smas.h.i.+ng into their midst, bowling two of the brutes end over end. One lay twitching, its flat skull crushed; the other writhed with a broken spine. Then, low under his guard, the other four closed in.

For a moment he towered over them, his red mane and flas.h.i.+ng eyes rising out of a heap of glittering black, then he was down and fighting for his life. One arm flung across his throat for protection, he fought them off with the other and with his feet.

He lay on his back, one of them striking at his throat, the others circling for an opening. Coolly he seized the ulla by its skull, his blunt fingers sinking into its gla.s.sy eyes, and as it struggled back in agony he plucked it from his body and swung it, hard, against the rock.

As the other beasts closed in, Korul flung himself, knife in hand, on the back of the nearest. The keen steel ripped out the monster's throat. Then he too had his back to the rock and was fighting for his life.

Berk was on his feet again, and as the first beast leaped he reached out with his long arms and caught it under the shoulders, thrusting it away. Hissing with fury it raked him with its long hind claws until the blood ran in stripes down his chest and thighs. Grimly he turned and drove it back against the ledge. There was a horrible crunching of bones and the thing went limp in his hands. Then, shouting encouragement, he pounced on the beast that had Korul down.

The Murian had wrapped his forearm in the folds of his cloak and thrust it between the ulla's ravening jaws. Striking under its grasping forepaws, he was stabbing at the creature's h.o.r.n.y belly, feeling for a vital spot between the armor-plates. Then the Star-Beast had the thing by its las.h.i.+ng tail and swung it in a great arc around his head, cras.h.i.+ng its life out against the rock.

Wearily Korul pushed himself to his feet. The ulla's fangs had cut through the thin cloak and lacerated his arm. Jim-Berk's huge hand came down on his shoulder with a hearty pat that nearly drove him to his knees again.

'You're a man, Korul!' the Star-Beast boomed. 'There's not one on Erth could run all day, then go for a beast like that.'

Stooping, he picked up a block of stone half Korul's size and smashed the skull of the crippled thing that lay hissing with a broken back. 'Dumb thing!' he muttered.

'Killing is all it's ever known. It tried hard to do what it was trained for.'

He turned back to Korul. 'Do you think you can give blood now? The girl had more than she could take, and I had to carry her. She doesn't have the strength you Givers have.'

'She should have water, too,' Korul said worriedly.

'She'll have water. It's the reason we went down into the tunnels in the beginning.

There's a flask up there on the rock with her, still half-full. You little people don't seem to have the need for water that we do on Erth.'

Laying Thorana in the shadow of the ledge where the heat was less, they gave her a little water and then blood until her strength came back. Scrambling to the top of the rock, Korul stared back over the dunes.

'Karak is out there,' he pointed out. 'By this time his men will have caught up with him, and they may have ullas with them. We can't stay here.'

'We won't - be sure of that,' the Star-Beast told him grimly. 'This is the way I came before, and my s.h.i.+p's not far away. We'll have food and shelter there, and if Karak and his lizrds haven't had their fill of me, there are weapons that will make 'em think again!'

Helping Thorana to her feet, Korul took her arm and step-ped out of the shadpw of the rock. As the sun struck him, a wave of sickness surged up through his vitals, leaving his leg weak and shaky. He took two steps, then the red haze swirled down on him and the world went black.

The hills rose high and rugged around them when Korul came to himself again.

They were old and worn, their slopes gentled by time. They swayed and rocked with a smooth, jogging rhythm, and suddenly he realized that the Beast was carrying him.

By all the G.o.ds, it was shamefull! Korul, First Man of Mur, carried like a child!

Jim-Berk only laughed.

'Be still about it.' he said. 'I'm only a beast by your standards, and on Erth we have beasts trained to carry us. You and this girl have trained me well enough. We were in a hurry, and she objected to leaving you there, so I brought you with us.'

Deeper they went and deeper into the red, worn hills, following a trail that not even twenty of Mur's years had erased from Jim-Berk's memory. From time to time he would point out landmarks - an oddly shaped pinnacle of rock that was like some thing of Erth - a parti-colored cliff- the opening of a cave. Legend had it that the ancients had a sense of direc-tion like this Erth-thing's, Korul knew, but it had long since been bred out of the race. Without Jim-Berk he and Thorana would never find their way back to the cities of their race.

At last they came to a cliff of deep red rock from which queer, lighter-colored, rounded k.n.o.bs protruded.

'We'll be there in a jifi,' Jim-Berk told them. 'This is the first place I found after I left the rokt. There's many a Searcher back home on Erth would be glad of a look at those bones. Your own kind too, I've no doubt.'

'What bones?' Korul demanded. 'I see nothing.'

'Maybe so,' the Star-Beast admitted, 'but no race would get where yours is without knowing about fossil bones. There's no time now to fool with them, but those k.n.o.bs and humps you're looking at are the dead bones of beasts that lived here before Erth had a moon, like as not, and that were buried and turned to stone. Come on, now - up through here to the top and we'll see what there is to see.'

They climbed a winding crevice in the rock to the summit of the cliff of bones. A broad plateau stretched out before them, haunted with grotesque monsters of wind- carved stone. Every-where lay the bones, bigger than a man and strangely shaped.

True enough, Korul found, some of them lay together in the shape of some gigantic ulla or ganak - but how could Jim-Berk be so sure that these things were not fantasies like the wind-shaped spires of the plain?

The Star-Beast was not concerning himself with bones. As he came out of the cleft, Jim-Berk took to his heels. Seizing Thorana's hand, Korul raced after him. A moment later they rounded a spur of rock, and there in a little hollow was the s.h.i.+p!

There had been nothing like it in all the long history of the people of Mur, Korul thought. Or had there been a time, long ago when the races were one people, when they too had wandered among the stars?

It was long and blunt-nosed, fas.h.i.+oned out of steel. Terrible heat had scarred and blackened it, and pined it like the stones that sometimes fell out of the sky. Here and there small, heavy windows were set in the steel. Jim-Berk was working at one of them. It swung open, and he squeezed through into the dark interior. For a moment the two Murians hesitated, then as bright white lights blazed from the ports they crept up to the open hatch and looked inside.

They looked into a room tipped over on its side. Furniture, instruments, books were tumbled together in confusion. In what was now a wall, a metal ladder disappeared into the base of the s.h.i.+p, where twelve huge tubular jets showed on the out-side.

Tottering precariously on a metal table, Jim-Berk was fumbling with the fastening on a door set in the thickness of the s.h.i.+p above his head. It opened suddenly, deluging him with little metal cylinders. With a growl he tried another.

Hanging in this compartment were a number of queer-shaped garments of coa.r.s.e cloth.

'I'll be with you in a moment,' he shouted. 'After forty years it's a great feeling to have on a pair of pantz again!'

Perched on the rim of the hatchway, Korul and Thorana watched him dress. Two layers of heavy cloth covered his hairy body from head to foot. A peaked blue cap went on his head, and on his feet he tried to pull queer, stiff boxes. After forty Erth years of nakedness, his feet were beyond the wearing of these shuz.

A queerly human figure in his stiff, dark garments, with the little cap set on his s.h.a.ggy mane and his hands plunged into pouches in the sides of his pantz, the Star- Beast confronted his two guests.

'Well,' he asked, 'what do you think of me now? Less like an animal, eh? Welcome to Terra!'

'Terra?' Thorana questioned, puzzled.

'It's the name I gave the s.h.i.+p,' he explained. 'There are hundreds of different languages on Erth, and "Terra" means "Erth" in one of them. What do you call yourselves as a lot - Masters and Blood-Givers together, I mean - the whole race?'

'There is no such word in our language today,' Thorana said slowly. 'We haven't been so ready to admit that the two peoples came from one stock. But I have seen a word in the old books..."

'Murtas,' Korul told him. 'Sons of Mur.'

'It's a good name,' Berk said. 'Better than we have. Erth is a world with many races and many languages, and a different name in each one. Mankind we say - or men - or man - for the kind of animal we all are - but its different in every language.

'There's an old word, though, in the legends, that I've always liked. It's the name of a race of giants who were the sons of Erth. t.i.tans, they were called, and there were some great men among them. One of them showed men how to make fire.

'Now that we're finding our way out here into the emptiness where the planets are, and the sun and stars, that's a name I'd be proud to have used for men and men like me. t.i.tan!

Sounds big and powerful, doesn't it - and that's the way we men from Erth are and always will be. Do you like it, you two - t.i.tans? What do you say?'

'It is a good word,' Thorana agreed. 'Better than Star-Beasts. But for yourself, we must use your own name - Jim-Berk, the t.i.tan.'

'Not the whole of it,' he pleaded. 'Not Jim-Berk, run to-gether like it was a name out of the Good Book. Jim, my friends call me - only Jim. Will you do that?'

Little by little, the t.i.tan, managed to put the confusion of his s.h.i.+p into order. The two Murians were of little help. Korul was greatly interested in the apparatus with which the craft was propelled, while Thorana poured over his books. They were printed on a rough white fabric which the t.i.tan said came from the matted fibers from the stems of the huge plants of his world. Paypr he called it.

Some of the books had paypr covers, and in them Thorana found pictures more wonderful than anything she had seen outside the museums of the Searchers. All the teeming life and civilization of Erth was there - people like Jim, dressed a strangely and gaudily as the little creatures he called brdz -towering buildings of stone and steel - machines that carried hundreds of people from place to place, as their tlornaks carried one or two. Once there had been such machines on Mur, Thorana knew before the world grew dry and the People retreated to the gorges.

Erth was a world of beautiful strangeness to those two. They remembered what the Star-Beast had told them of the seas of Erth, and here they were in truth - seas, and deep blue lakes, and rivers that carved their way through mighty forested hills that raised snow-capped crests against the sky. To Thorana it was like opening the past, for all these things had been on Mur in ancient times. She begged Jim-Berk to leave these books behind, to show to the Searchers who knew about such things.

As the day pa.s.sed, Korul was sure that Karak must have turned back or lost their trail. Autumn Night had come and gone: had the Change come with it? Were the Masters only an ugly memory now, on all the face of Mur, save only here in the Star-Beast's lair where Thorana lived and regained her strength?

They would know soon.

Jim's rokt had to be made ready for his return to Erth. With spades and powerful explosives they opened a pit under its base and toppled it in until the s.h.i.+p stood upright, its open hatchway at the level of the ground. Across the mountains, only a short distance away, was the second gorge. Now that the sluices had been opened there should be water there. While Korul and Thorana kept watch at the rokt, Jim- Berk set out across the plateau to the east. A day later he was back, flasks of water slung all around him with the news that the gorge-city was deserted.

After six days Jim had enough water to fill his empty reser-voirs. He would never let Korul or Thorana accompany him. What he found in the abandoned city he did not say, nor did they ask him.'

The books from Erth were a never ending source of fasci-nation to Thorana. Jim showed them the key to his written language: twenty-six symbols which stood for twenty-six sounds in the tongue his people spoke. The same symbols, he said, could be used to write down the languages of other peoples, though not always as exactly as they would like. Some of them had symbols of their own. He drew a few from memory that seemed no more and no less arbitrary than the ones in which the books were written.

Thorona soon learned the sounds of these twenty-six sym-bols. She liked to sound out the words under the pictures, while Jim-Berk gave her the meanings in her own tongue. In a little time she was able to talk to him in his own rough Inglis.

Korul felt much neglected during these little colloquies. He would see a broad grin creeping over Jim-Berk's bearded face as he listened to Thorana stumbling through one of his uncouth phrases, then the t.i.tan would burst into a great roar of laughter that rocked the s.h.i.+p and call her some outlandish name in his own tongue that brought the blood to the girl's face in confusion. Or they would talk about him - Korul both of them laughing, until he brought the fire to Thorana's eyes and Jim- Berk's thunderous laughter roaring through the s.h.i.+p by using the secret code-talk of the Elders.

Thorana seemed content to ignore the revolt and what might be happening across the mountains and the desert, in the gorge cities of her people. Family ties meant very little to the Masters, except as an index of social position, and the girl had been a monster to most of her kind. Such children, Korul knew, were often killed at birth to save their parents from em-barra.s.sment when they grew up with legs and the other stig-mata of atavism.

It was a pleasant life, there in the t.i.tan's sky-s.h.i.+p, but it could not last. Berk and Thorana worked over the books and diagrams which told him when he must leave Mur. He brought out a small telescope, such as some of the Searchers had, and showed them Erin, his planet, a silvery, shadowed crescent against the night. Erth was Ulra - star and G.o.ddess of love to all the generations of Mur, Masters and Givers alike. To Korul it seemed an omen for good.

When the Erth crescent was of such-and-such a thinness Jim-Berk must leave Mur, they decided. That would be very soon. And he knew, as they knew, that without his help they would never reach the pole alone.

The books and instruments which he would not need were hidden in a crevice near the s.h.i.+p, where Korul could find them again. Food and water for five days were put into Berk's big pack. He wanted the Murtas to carry no more than their own weight, or at most a little water. They would travel fastest that way, he a.s.sured Korul.

A few days before they were to leave, he gave Thorana blood again. She objected, but Jim-Berk insisted. She would need all the strength her woman's body could hold.

The Polar Sluices Jim-Berk seemed to know the way, and the going was easy after they left the hills.

They went down to the nearer gorge, along the route he had followed in getting water. An ancient road followed the edge of the crevice from city to empty city, straight to the polar sluiceways. By common consent, they did not go down into the cities except at night, when they went far enough into the empty upper levels to protect themselves from the cold.

'It's an end to fighting that both our worlds need most, Korul,' the t.i.tan said wistfully one night. 'With this trouble of yours done and over, and young men and thinkers making good laws to replace the bad old ones Mur can dig up what it has forgotten and fit it to the little bit of news that I've left you. You'll be a great, wise planet as we've always dreamed of you' back on Erth. Not that you're not good enough for me as you are, but there's a lot you can learn and be the better for it.

'Then some day you'll see us dropping out of the sky again - me or my sons or their sons - real men you can talk to, and trust like you do me. There'll be the two of you here to spread the word about us, and I'll do as much for you back on Erth. This time there'll be no cages, and in no time at all there'll be great s.h.i.+ps coming and going like bees between us, carrying the richness and sweetness of the one world to the other.

'Ah, the star-gazers I've known in my life that would give their souls and the taxpayers' riches a dozen times over for one of your clear, bright nights - and there'll be poets and painters among you who have longed down through the years for the rumble of the sea-waves on the rocks or the singing of the wind high up in the tall pines. Ah, there's a thousand things will bring them flocking down out of the skies to you, and you to us! It's the dream that was in my head all the years ago - and now I'm going back again, to see human faces and hear human voices, and to be under a blue sky with a bit of green under my feet.'

'There will be someone waiting for you on Erth, Jim-Berk?' Thorana asked gently.

'After forty years? Small chance of that. I had a father and a mother there who thought me wild and a bit mad, and a girl who was sure I was touched in the head.

For all that, they were mine and they'd wait and watch for me for a year, or maybe five - but then the days would come creeping on, and the hope in them would begin to fade.

'The girl would go first, I'm thinking. She was a sensible piece, for all she'd taken up with me, and she could have her choice of the men once she'd made up her mind it was the thing to do. As for the others - well, what's twenty of your years are close to forty back on Erth, and it's not likely they'll be alive. You've taken good care of me in your infernal cage and the years have laid a light hand on me here, but better than sixty years is good living for one of our race on Erth.