still in early stages, steps are made to limit the emotions its brain is capable of. Things like love and sympathy are, naturally, excised! Duty remains. A Hunter must have a sense of duty. Hate is left in too. That always helps. But perhaps, most important of all, a Hunter is permitted to feel humiliation. And when once humiliated, he is relentless. He pursues with a dogged determination that rules out all possibility of escape.
Docanil the Hunter had just been humiliated for the first time in his life
Chapter Thirteen
It was three o'clock in the morning when Docanil the Hunter found the abandoned groundcar that Hulann and the human child had used to escape. He would have discovered it sooner (they had only driven it twenty miles before leaving it) but he had been forced to wait for a replacement helicopter to arrive in reply to his Phasersystem summons. Now, when it was the time to sleep and store energies, he was toiling more vigorously than ever. Though naoli preferred to sleep on much the same schedule as humans, they could go as much as five days without rest and still function properly. A Hunter, it was rumored, could perform his duties well for up to two sleepless weeks.
Banalog, on the other hand, was beginning to drag. He followed Docanil about the groundcar as the creature explored it for every thread of evidence left clinging to it. Then the search pattern widened, taking in the rest of the cluster of buildings that made up the little town of Leimas near the base of the mountain, at the opposite side of the hotel.
Docanil stopped before a squat building to their right, turned and carefully approached it. He started to take off his gloves, then ceased as he more fully interpreted the data supplied to his oversensitive system.
'They aren't here?' Banalog asked.
'No. They were.'
'Oh.'
Docanil turned from his examination of the premises and stared openly at the traumatist with an intensity common only to Hunters. 'You seem relieved.'
Banalog tried to remain expressionless. A Hunter might have the talent to see deeper, but a traumatist had the talent to increase the depth of his facade. 'What do you mean?'
'Relieved. As if you were glad they have still managed to avoid me.'
'Nonsense.'
Although he tried to maintain a self-righteous look, tried to keep his lips from drawing tightly over his teeth, tried to keep his whiplike tail from lashing around his thigh, Banalog was certain that the Hunter had seen the crack in his facade, had seen the festering doubt that he ' held concerning the value, morality, and wisdom of the naoli- human war. After an uncomfortably long while (which could actually be no more than one or two Earth-length minutes) the Hunter looked away.
And he had seen.
Yes…
Banalog was certain Docanil had found that crack in his false front, had peered through it and had seen the turmoil within the traumatist's mind. He would report what he had seen to higher officials. There would be a Phasersystem probe of him some morning soon, during the psychological conditioning periods. Enough would be found for him to be sent to a session with the Third Division traumatist. If his guilt index was as high as he sometimes thought, he would soon be boarding a ship for the home system and a stretch in a hospital for therapy. Maybe they would wash and restructure his tainted mind. Wipe out his past. That was possible. Was it desirable? Well, it would allow him to start fresh. He did not want to be a detriment of the naoli race. He did not want to be always plagued with these stirrings of self-disgust and displeasure with the doings of his people. The idea did not hold as much terror for him as it had for Hulann. True, his children would be denied his past, would have to found their homes on only scraps of history. And he had far more children than Hulann. Yet he did not mind the idea of washing and restructuring so much-for he had sent so many people to have it done. And in justifying all those cases, he had pretty much convinced himself that the process was desirable and beneficial, not only to society, but to the individual in question.
'You see?' Docanil the Hunter asked, interrupting the other naoli's reveries.
'I'm afraid not.'
A mixture of disgust and pleasure crossed the Hunter's face. Disgust at the traumatist's lack of powers of observation; pleasure at his own superior powers. A Hunter felt pleasure in a limited number of situations. He could not enjoy sex. He loathed it. Hunter's did not reproduce, but were made from normal foetuses. He had little interest in food beyond supplying himself with a well-balanced diet. He felt nothing when administered sweet-drugs. His system burned alcohol so fast that the drug could have no effect, ill or beneficial. He did have an ego, for the ego is the motivator for all good work. When anything fed this intangible portion of his overmind, he felt comfortable, happy, and warm as he could in no other way. His ego was subjugated only to the Hunter's Guild; it fed triumphantly on all other naoli 'Look,' Docanil went on. 'The drifts about the buildings on this street.'
Banalog looked.
'Compare them to the drift before this building.'
'They are deeper,' Banalog said.
'Yes. This one has been disturbed and has had to rebuild itself during the last several hours. There was a shuttlecraft within, most certainly.'
Inside the structure, they found three shuttlecraft- and a space between two of them where another had been parked until quite recently. Docanil knew the fourth had been moved only hours earlier, for a brown mouse had made a nest in the undercarriage of that long-stilled vehicle and had been chopped to bits when it had started and the big blades had stuttered to life without warning. Though the flesh and blood were frozen, the eyes were not solidly white as they would have been had the incident occurred more than a day ago.
They went back into the night and the snow, which was finally beginning to taper off. The wind whipped what had already fallen and blew that around, stinging wet clouds of it that cut their range of vision as thoroughly as if the storm had still been in progress.
'Do you know which way?' Banalog asked.
'West,' Docanil said. 'So they went that way.'
'What are the signs?'
'There are none. No physical ones. The snow has obliterated their passage.'
'Then how-'
'The Haven is to the west, is it not?'
'That's mythical, of course,' the traumatist said.
'Is it?'
'Yes.'
'So many of their leaders have not been found,' Docanil said. 'They must be hiding somewhere.'
'They could have died in the nuclear suicides. Or been carried away in the general holocaust. We have probably already disposed of them, thinking them only part of the common people.'
'I think not.'
'But-'
'I think not.' There was no argumentative tone in the Hunter's words. His opinion was stated in the same voice a scientist might use to set forth an established law of the universe.
They boarded the new chopper.
Docanil lifted it into the night, after connecting himself to the patch-ins. Banalog saw that the copper needles had a film of dried blood on them.
Docanil flew, watching. Banalog, resigned to the unrelenting pace of the search, settled into his seat, freed his overmind from his organic brain, set a time alarm in his subconscious, and slipped into simulated death
It was dawn, and Hulann had driven the shuttlecraft far enough south to leave the snowline and enter a place of leafless trees and cold, clear skies. The naoli thought the weather was now comfortable, though Leo told him it was still somewhat chilly by human standards. They kept to secondary roads, simply because it would be easier for
