minutes, hours. The experience was like being caught up in a giant’s hand, rolled into a conveniently sized ball, and tossed up in the air to be caught again. There was no thinking – no feeling – nothing but emptiness, with himself blown through it – on and on – and on –
And it was not wholly physical, that assault upon the stable foundations of his small portion of the planet. One part of Storm clung to the solid cave floor as an anchor for the part that whirled and flew. And inside he was torn because he so clung.
How long did it last? Was he unconscious toward the end of that weird struggle between substance and nonsubstance? Did the rocks about them keep them safe by turning the worst of the unknown radiation? He only knew that they did endure the backlash and lived.
Again he felt the warmth coming from Surra through the icy chill that blanketed the cave. He shrank from the scratching of King’s claws as she squirmed and kicked.
For a long moment he lay still, as an insect might cower beneath a rock if it could foresee that in a moment that shelter would be lifted and it would be exposed to unforeseeable danger. Then, in the midst of his blinding, unreasoning panic, a spark of resolution sprouted. The Terran lifted his head from his arm and for a terrified minute thought he was blind. For there was no more small slit of sky – nothing but thick darkness – a chill darkness filled with the dead air native to this place.
Storm sat up, feeling Surra rise with him. She growled and spat. And then, out of the dark, Logan spoke with determined lightness:
“I think somebody just slammed the door!”
13
Storm used the torch, aiming it at the mouth of the cave. His mind refused to accept what his eyes reported – there was no longer any opening there. It had been closed once by the landslip – but that had been a different matter, an affair of earth and stone. This was a black oozing over that same earth and stone, a thick stuff in drips and runnels forming a complete curtain across.
“What in the –?”
The Terran heard Logan’s amazed demand as he walked closer to that strange wall, focusing the torch on the widest of the black streaks. Storm could recognize the stuff now. It was the substance of that wedge rail the Survey party had trailed into the valley, the stuff that had walled the tunnel of the entrance gorge. Yet now it had been melted as tar might have softened and run from the breath of a blaster. Though he had not noticed it earlier, the building material of the long-ago aliens must have rimmed this cave, to be released by the backlash of the Xik weapon!
Storm handed the torch to Gorgol with a gesture to keep it trained on the widest of the surface streams. He rammed the stock of the blaster against that black runnel with all the strength he could put into a swinging blow. The light alloy of the butt gave off a metallic ring, rebounded with force enough to jar Storm back a step or two, yet the black stream showed no dent or mark.
The Terran reversed the weapon, set its dial to maximum and pressed the trigger. A point of vivid, eye- searing flame bored into the black stain for an instant, until Storm flicked the control. Again there was no impression on the alien coating.
“Nothing happened?” Logan limped around Gorgol to examine the wall for himself. “What is that anyway?”
Storm explained almost absently. He had taken the torch back from Gorgol and was pacing along the front of the cave. Some trick of chance – or could it be that the ancient owners had prepared a booby trap for the unwary? – had cemented the barrier all the way across. Those black streams had run in just the places where they could best weld together rocks and earth. Perhaps Hing might be able to dig her way to freedom, but no effort could clear a large enough space to release the rest of them.
Which left – the tunnel.
Storm traversed the new wall for a second time, hoping against the evidence of his eyes to find some break they could enlarge. He met Logan face to face as he turned back.
“I still don’t see what happened – or why!” The Arzoran studied the wall beside him. “If they had turned that little machine of theirs on us, yes. But the tube was facin’ the other way – and a mile off at that!”
“The Confed Lab men after the first experiment said the results were a matter of vibration. And this stuff has been moulded like plasta-flesh. Must have turned every bit of it in this valley fluid for a time –”
“I hope,” Logan stood away from the wall, “that it caught every one of those devils stickin’ in it tight! No chance of breakin’ through this?”
Storm shook his head. “The blaster was our best hope. And you saw what happened when I tried that.”
“All right. Then we’ll have to go explorin’. And I would suggest we move now. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, but there’s been a change in our air.”
That quality of staleness that Storm had met on his first imprisonment here was indeed very noticeable. And using the blaster had not helped to clear the atmosphere any. They would have to try the tunnel or face a very unpleasant death where they were.
Packing their supplies on the horses, with Surra padding in the lead beside Storm, they moved reluctantly into the tunnel. The Terran kept his torch on the lowest unit of its force. No use exhausting its charge when he had only one spare cartridge. And by its light they saw that they were out of the natural roughness of the cave into a cutting, which, if it had not been bored by intelligent beings, had been surfaced by them, for the walls changed abruptly from the red stone of the natural rock to the black of the alien material.
“Good thing your vibrations didn’t reach this far,” Logan commented and then coughed. “If this had been melted we would have been finished.”
Just as the period of the Xik attack had been lifted out of normal time for Storm, so did now this journey appear to take on the properties of a march through a nightmare. They must have been progressing at the rate of a normal walking pace, yet to the Terran the sensation of wading through some vast delaying flood persisted. Perhaps it was the inert quality of the air that affected his reactions, slowed his mind. Had it been minutes – or hours – since they had left the cave to enter this long tube where the flat black of walls, floor, roof sucked the air from a man’s lungs and the light from the torch?
Then Surra left his side. She was a tawny streak in the torch light, leaping ahead, to be absorbed utterly by the gloom. He called after her and was nearly sent sprawling as Rain nudged against him. The horses were as eager as the cat to hurry ahead.
“Air!”
Storm caught that hint of breeze also. And it was more than just fresh air to battle the deadness of the passage; that puff of wind carried with it its own freshness and scents – strange perhaps, but pleasant. Storm stumbled on at a half-run, hearing the others pounding after him.
There was a turn in the corridor, the first they had found. Then light shone ahead, squares of light. Storm snapped off the torch and headed for that goal. He squeezed past Rain, urged one of the mares aside and nearly stumbled over Surra, who was standing on her hind legs, her paws resting on a crossbar of a grill-like closing, her head blotting out one of its squares.
Storm steadied himself with a grip on the bars, looked ahead.
But not into the open day as he thought he would. Instead he was surveying a section of what might be a garden. Yet there was not one of the plants sprawling there that he could name, not among those in the first bed, at any rate.
In the next – No! Storm’s hands twisted tightly on the bar. He had been shaken when he had unrolled the package Na-Ta-Hay had sent him. But not as much as now. That small stretch of good clean green grass, the pine a little beyond – not a spizer, nor a candlestick gum, nor a Langful, but a true Terran pine!
“Pine!” He could make a song of that word, a song that would have power enough to pull the Faraway Gods across the void of space. His hands battered at the grill gate and then strove to find the release of its lock – let him through – out to stand beneath that pine!
“Storm – bar – other side –”
Somehow those words penetrated his excitement. There was a bar on the other side of the grid, the mechanism of its lock, as far as he could see through the holes, strange. But there was some way of opening it, there had to be!
The Terran worked his arm through one of the grill openings, pounded with his fist along the bar. His
