leaping from his fingers and devouring the fugitives, longed to see them twisting, writhing, turning black as they died in extreme agony. And he yet might have the opportunity to enjoy that spectacle. They probably thought the copter had been totally demolished and that he had to wait for another. They would not be expecting him so close on their trail.
'They aren't here?' Banalog asked, descending from the helicopter.
Docanil did not respond. He looked up and down the twin steel railroad lines, speculating. He examined the rails with his superb vision, calculated from the brake markings which way the train had been coming from and which way it had gone after it had picked up its two new passengers. He could not conceive of who might be driving it. But he would soon find out.
He looked West, grinned tightly. If possible, his orders had said, he was to return Hulann and the human alive so that traumatists might examine them. Yet Docanil the Hunter knew it was going to have to be death for them. There was no other recourse to alleviate his fury. Death? It was just going to have to be
Inside the glass ball, floating in the darkness and heat above the pulsing mother mass, a naoli and a human boy, each no larger than a man's hand, danced through flickering orange flames. They were in intense pain as the Isolator increased the pressure in the globe to the point where their eardrums burst and their noses bled. Yet, far past the point where they should have been dead, they lived and suffered.
The Isolator saw to that.
The boy fell to his knees and curled into a foetal position to try to cradle the pain and make it easier to bear.
The Isolator jerked him erect.
The Isolator increased the pressure.
The naoli's eyes began to bleed.
The two creatures within the glass were screaming.
The Isolator changed the fire within the shell from flickering orange and red to the more intense and more acidic licking tongue of emerald. The flesh of the two miniature creatures took on a green glow. As the gnome had done before them, they began to melt
They clawed frantically at the glass.
The Isolator had given them intelligence and emotions of a sort, in order to make the torturing more enjoyable.
They dissolved.
They became quivering pieces of flesh.
The Isolator maintained their consciousness even to this point, thrusting them through wave after wave of excruciating horror and pain.
Then it abruptly dropped the ball into its mass and digested it. There was no fun in such games. Not really. It could not strike from its mind that it had failed on the real mission. But who would ever have expected a naoli to work against it? It had been expecting help from the lizard that was with the human-and had received only hindrance.
It burbled in the tank. It was restless.
A glass ball rose out of its pudding-like mass and hovered in the darkness. Inside was a gnome, dancing and gibbering on milky threads, laughing happily to itself.
Chapter Seventeen
When Hulann leaned over David's shoulder to watch the young man programming the train's complex computers on the simple keyboard, the human jumped in the command chair as if struck by a bullet, his entire body convulsing in what must have been, at least, a slightly painful spasm. His face drained to the color of dry sand bleached by the sun, and his eyes were circles stamped out by a die-press. Hulann stepped backwards, shuffling his large feet, then went to the side window to look at the passing scenery.
'I told you that he wouldn't harm us. He's our friend,' Leo said impatiently.
David looked sheepishly at Hulann's back; he swallowed hard. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
Hulann nonchalantly waved a hand to indicate that the incident had been of no import. He could hardly expect a grown man, conditioned by twenty years and more of anti-naoli propaganda, to respond to him as quickly and as easily as an eleven-year-old boy whose mind was still fresh and open to changes of every magnitude. He remembered how reluctant he had been to touch Leo in that cellar when the boy had needed his leg wound dressed. How much harder it must be, then, for one of the defeated race to get accustomed to the presence of one of those responsible for the death of his kind.
'Why don't you sit down?' David asked. 'I get jumpy; but it's the truth-when you're parading around behind me like that.'
'Can't sit comfortably,' Hulann explained.
'What?' David asked.
'His tail,' Leo said. 'Your chairs here don't have any holes in them to let his tail hang out. A naoli has a very sensitive tail. It hurts them just to sit on it.'
'I didn't know.'
'So he has to stand,' Leo said.
Confused, David returned to the keyboard and finished typing his instructions to the computer. Yesterday, such a short time ago, he had been serene, content to flee from the enemy in his swift-wheeled magic wagon; today, he was ferrying a naoli across the country and was no longer certain he could tell an enemy from a friend. It had begun yesterday when he had watched, from the corner of his eye, what seemed to be a shuttle pacing the train, yet attempting to remain concealed.
Near dusk, he came to a place where debris clogged the tracks and was forced to stop the Bluebolt and examine the disaster before trying to nose through it.
The blockage was a mangled trio of shattered shuttle-craft. On every side, the country was littered with dilapidated and decaying machines. People had congregated here as they had in all the 'wild' areas of the world, seeking to escape the burning, exploding, crumbling, alien-infested cities where the major battles roared. But the naoli had come here too. It had only taken a little longer. And in trying to escape at any cost, the shuttle drivers had collided as in this tangled despair. David did not look too closely at the mess, for fear he would see skeletons that had once been drivers, bony fingers clutching wheels, and empty eye sockets staring through shattered glass.
When he finally determined that he could move the wreckage with the engine's cowbumper and proceed on his way, he turned to board the Bluebolt again-and came face-to-face with a naoli!
His first instinct was to go for a weapon, though he had nothing lethal and was not the type to use a gun even if he had possessed one. The second instinct was to run; however, he saw the young boy then, and the boy showed no fear-he did not seem to be stupefied by drugs. Having hesitated this short moment longer, he found it was too late to run. They both babbled excitedly at him, trying to state their case and falling all over each other in their verbal confusion. He listened to them, numb, disbelieving at first, then being won over by the story of the Hunter-Spacer correlation. The naoli had thought spacers were typical of all humans. It was just absurd, just hideously comical enough to be true.
Their shuttlecraft was seriously depleted in power stores and had no way to recharge. They proposed that the three of them ride the Bluebolt since the train could make better speed anyway. They assumed David was going to the Haven-though he found it difficult to comprehend that Hulann's destination was the same.
Now they were into the province of California after a high speed, all night run. They could soon begin a quest for the Haven, for the final safety and a new life-if this Hulann did not betray them.
As the train's computer answered David's programming with brilliant blood letters on its response board, Hulann pressed palms against the side window, as if trying to push the glass away to get a better look at something. His four, wide nostrils were all open, and his breathing was more than a little ragged. Abruptly, his tail snapped and wound snakelike around his bulging thigh.
'What is it?' Leo asked, coming out of the command chair next to David.
'Docanil,' Hulann replied. He pointed to the sky, far above them. A coppery speck flitted along the bottom of
