us not waste the minutes.'
They gathered up the things they had brought from the lifeboat, chiefly anything that would serve as gifts, along with sidearms, rations, capsules for purifying water…hopeful precaution!..and the contents of Boker's bottles transferred to canteens. They had also brought a minipak field radio, which Kettrick carried on his back; a slender link with the feverish activity going on far up in the sky.
They began the descent of the escarpment, along a steep path treacherous with loose rock and sliding sand, that led to the green floor of the sink something more than a thousand feet below. And as he went, Kettrick thought to himself that they…all of them, below and aloft…were going to need more than mere good luck. They were going to need a miracle.
Given time, there would be no problem. Reconnaissance techniques were so good that practically nothing escaped them. Given time. But there was no time.
The cruiser and the lifeboat between them would sweep the globe from daybreak to the edge of night, covering every mile of every latitude where human life might survive, with special attention to the high probability areas. They would use every aid possible for visual sighting and instrument detection. Yet their chances of spotting the launcher were very slight.
The powerful sunlight would drown the flare of a rising missile, unless it were very close. Vast clouds of sand, volcanic dust, and smoke made any kind of sightings difficult over large areas, and there were always the random distractions present everywhere to make things tough for the radarman. The small, ultra-high-velocity missiles would be difficult to detect unless they were ejected in a sufficiently steady stream to form a recognizable pattern, and the best guess was that they were not. Interval of delivery for the seeding warheads was estimated at slightly over an hour.
Given time, all these obstacles could be overcome. Careful scanning, endless streams of data running through the computers, endless comparisons, endless study of photographs…But there was no time for all this technical proficiency. They had, like savages or children, to do it the simple way.
There was one bright hope, and that was that Seri and his friends might have been sufficiently careless, sufficiently sure that they were safe, to neglect to camouflage the launcher. The glint of metal carries a long way, and on this metalless world would be an instant revelation.
Once or twice on the blistering descent Kettrick switched on the radio. The cruiser was out of his range now, away south over the bulge of the equator, but the lifeboat was still receiving her and Kettrick could hear the lifeboat. The talk was brief and negative. He switched it off quickly.
They passed into the heavier, moister air of the sink and there began to be vines and creepers along the path. Kettrick was watching for the Krinn, but it was Chai who saw them first, or smelled them. She growled and pointed.
There were trees below, tall things with shiny trunks and limber branches weighed down by leaves as big as carpets, all glossy green. There was movement underneath them, in the dim aisles that ran through a sweating undergrowth of ferns and saw-toothed grasses. A second later a wooden spear stuck quivering in the middle of the path ahead of them.
Kettrick went ahead of his companions. He stood by the spear and called out, in the grunts and clicks of a speech almost as primitive as Chai's, 'Djunn will make talk with Ghnak. He will give presents to Ghnak, and to the People of the River.'
He held up both hands, palms out, and waited. It was a long time since he had been here, and the Krinn had short memories. Ghnak might be dead and eaten long since. Or he might just be in a bad mood today and give the sign to spear them all.
He waited. And the sun appeared to race toward the zenith. The needle of his small counter had inched closer to the red. His skin prickled. He yearned, childishly, for the illusory shelter of the trees.
Ghnak stepped out into the path and retrieved the spear.
'We make talk,' he said.
They followed him into the shade of the forest.
The village of the Krinn was dirty. Rude shelters made of branches and the huge leaves kept off the rains after a fashion. They were scattered anyhow under the trees, but there was a wide central space with all the undergrowth cleared out and here the sacred fire burned in a pit and the god had a house of leaves with bones piled in front of it. The god was a log set upright, the top hacked into the suggestion of a head. It was daubed with bright colors and hung with heartstones. Kettrick had once counted fifty of them in its necklace and girdle. Few peoples in the Cluster had such a wealthy deity.
The men sat in the visitor's side of the clearing, farthest from the god's house, and Kettrick kept Chai close to him, forbidding her to growl. She was obedient, but her neckhairs stood up even so. There was a second fire here, and the Krinn crouched around it facing them, hairy, bristling, hump-shouldered creatures out of ancestral nightmare, or worse; the Krinn had kept their tails, and their antecedents were apelike only in that they were not birdlike or fishlike. The terms were relative to the worlds of their origin.
The Krinn had teeth, large and strong for tearing. Their hands were strong and clever for the making of weapons and simple tools. They stank with a vile, strong smell as human as it was animal. The hair that clothed their powerful bodies ranged in color from black to brindled red and they did not bother with other garments, except that the dominant males ornamented themselves with heartstones according to the order of their dominance. Ghnak had as many as he had fingers and toes, more than any other man but significantly less than the god. The others scaled down to a single gem. They had not the skill to pierce them. The women wove strands of tough fibre around them and made them fast to collars of hide, and even through the fibre webs and the dirt the stones burned with their beautiful inner light. They were the reason why the Krinn were so rigidly protected.
According to Krinn protocol, beginning with the one-gem men, Kettrick served out the gifts he had brought, a weird assortment raided from the lifeboat's supplies, anything that was shiny or important-looking. He was sick with impatience, but he knew it was no good trying to hurry. At the very last he handed Ghnak the showiest item, a spare helmet, and said, 'I give this to the god, who has called me.'
There was some astonished grunting. Ghnak took the helmet and laid it on top of the bones in front of the god's house, and came back again, peering very sharply at Kettrick.
'The god makes talk only to Ghnak,' he said.
'True,' said Kettrick. 'So he has told you why we come.' And he thought, Oh lord, you stupid apeling, I have to go through all this to get it into your bean-brained head that your sun is going to run amok and kill you.
'The god is powerful, like Ghnak. He can make his voice very loud. He can call across between the stars. He said to me, 'Evil spirits in the shape of men have come. They stand upon my high places. They make magic. Ghnak the great chief, my brother, has seen this. He knows the magic they make. He knows what they mean to do.''
Ghnak's small eyes were now very bright but also puzzled and uncertain. If the god had indeed said these things he did not wish to deny them, nor to admit to his tribe that he was ignorant of them. So he grunted and thumped his chest and said, 'Ghnak is brother to the god. He knows.'
Gracefully yielding him the ploy, Kettrick said, 'Ghnak knows that the man-things came to kill the sun.'
Ghnak's eyes opened wide. A burst of grunting ran through the males. Behind them and apart, the hairy women and the young made shriller noises. Automatically, every face turned upward.
'They kill the sun!' Kettrick shouted. 'They stab it with their magic.' He pulled Flay's knife from his belt and struck it into the dirt before him. 'They stab it as I stab the ground. They wound the sun with magic!'
He thrust the knife again and again into the ground, and because what he said was true, the conviction and the fear carried over to his audience. Ghnak stared at the blade, appalled.
Kettrick dropped it and sprang to his feet. 'Ghnak and his brother the god will save the sun. They have called us here to help, because we know the ways of the Tailless Ones and can use their own magic against them.' His voice rang in the hot green shadows under the trees, over the ranks of stunned, half-terrified, half-uncomprehending faces, snouted and toothed and hairy faces with perpetually angry eyes.
'Ghnak will save the sun! Lead us, strong chief! Make talk with all the People of the River, so the god can quickly tell you where to find the Tailless Ones and kill them.' He made the Krinn kow-tow before Ghnak. 'Lead us, Ghnak, to where the evil spirits make magic with flame and thunder, with big noises, with coming and going from the sky. Hurry, oh chief, and save the sun!'
Ghnak continued to stare at Kettrick, his mouth open like that of a man winded by a sudden blow. Kettrick held the pose. Behind him Boker, who understood the Krinn speech, nudged Hurth and Glevan and they bent their
