“No animal life –?”
“Birds, insects – no animals, except that cat of yours. We caught her rolling in a big patch of grey mossy stuff and acting as if she were wild. Ran away from us as if we were Xiks stalkin’ her with one of those pop guns of theirs.”
“But how could all this keep growing without any attention for years, maybe centuries?” marvelled Storm. “You are right, it is, it must have been intended as a botanical garden of specimens gathered from all over the galaxy. This’ – he pulled a curl of flame-orange rind between his fingers – “was an Astran “golden apple”. And the black and white berries were from Sirius Three. But you’d think the place would have grown into a wilderness when it was left. Something continued to control it, kept the growth right, nourished everything properly –”
“Maybe the light is part of it,” Logan suggested. “Or the atmosphere. I’ve noticed one thing.” He held out his hand. The bandages were gone and the wounds and burns Storm had tended were not only closed, they were almost healed.
“Show him your arm,” Logan signed to Gorgol and the Norbie presented his wounded forearm for inspection. The arrow tear was only a reddish mark, and the native used the limb freely with no sign of discomfort.
“How do you feel?” Logan demanded of Storm.
The Terran stretched. He had not really noticed before but, now that Logan had drawn the matter to his attention, he was aware that the weight of exhaustion that had ridden him into this Eden was gone. In fact Storm had not awakened so contented with life for a long time – for years. Like Surra he wanted to roll on the ground and purr his pleasure aloud.
“See?” Logan did not seem to expect an articulate answer.
“It’s in the air here, all around us. Growth – making us feel alive and vigorous, healed of our hurts, too. Perhaps this place was designed for other uses besides just botanical display.”
“Does it also have a door out?”
“We found three doors,” Logan returned. Two are grills, but the third looks the most promisin’.”
“Why?”
“Because it has been walled up. The legends of the Sealed Caves suggest it might be an outlet to the outside –”
Storm supposed he should get up and go to inspect that doorway. But for the first time in years a kind of languorous laziness held him in its grip. Just to lie here under the pine, to watch Rain and the other horses at their ease, Logan and Gorgol beside him as relaxed as himself, none of them driven by a need for immediate action – it was wonderful, perfect! He and the others had found a small section of Paradise, why be in a hurry to leave it?
Gorgol sat up, brushed the pine needles from the fringes of his belt. He turned his head, gazing about him with a slow measurement and within Storm a faint, very faint apprehension awoke.
The native’s yellow-red fingers moved in short sweeps, with pauses between, as if the importance of what he had to say was making the Norbie doubly careful of his choice of signs.
“This – trap – big trap.”
14
“Trap?” repeated Logan without much interest. But the languor that held Storm was pierced by a fast- growing doubt. Perhaps because he had known a variety of traps – and very ingenious ones – in the past, the Terran did not only listen but was receptive to such a warning.
“What manner of trap?” he signed.
“You like here – happy –” Gorgol was plainly groping for signs to convey a complicated idea. “No go – want to stay –”
Storm sat up. “You no want to stay?” he asked.
Gorgol looked about him again. “Good –” He touched the remains of the fruit. “Good!” He drew an exaggeratedly deep breath of the perfume-laden air. “Feel good!” He gave an all embracing twirl of his fingers. “But – not mine –” He ran those fingers through the pine needles. “Not mine –” He flicked the fingers to include the other gardens about them. “No Gorgol place here – not hold Gorgol –” Again he was trying to make limited signs explain more abstract thought. “Your place – hold you –”
The Norbie had something! That alerting signal far inside Storm was clamouring more loudly. What better bait for a trap than a slice of a man’s home planet served up just when he believed that world lost forever? Even if a trap were not intended, it was here just the same. He got to his feet, tramped determinedly away from the pine.
“Where’s that built-up door of yours?” he demanded harshly over his shoulder, refusing to look back at that wedge of temptation set in familiar green.
“You think Gorgol’s right?”
“You don’t think about things such as that,” Storm answered out of the depths of experience, “you feel! Maybe those who built this place didn’t intend it for a trap –” He slapped Rain’s flank, making the stallion move from the grass to the roadway that separated the small piece of Terra from its neighbour.
“Surraaaaa –” Storm shouted that aloud, an imperative summons that he had only had to use once or twice in their close comradeship. And his voice awoke echoes above and around the gardens, while birds flew and flower- coloured insects floated, disturbed, to settle again.
Leading Rain by the headstall, the Terran started down the path. The sooner he was away from that bit of his native earth the better. Already a new bitterness was beginning to fester in him and he turned it against the enemy outside. So the Xiks thought they had finished Terra? Perhaps – but they had not finished Terrans!
He hurried, deliberately twisting and turning from path to path, trying to muddle his own trail, so that he could not easily find his way back to that pine-roofed spot. Twice more he called the dune cat. Hing pattered along behind him, stopping now and then to sniff inquisitively or dig, but perfectly willing to move, while the other horses followed Rain. They threaded the narrow roadways between gardens – such gardens. Twice Storm saw foliage he recognized, and both times they were samples from widely separated worlds.
“Left through here” – Logan came up beside him – “around the end of this water place, then behind the one with the scarlet feather trees. I wonder what kind of a world those are from? See – now you’re facing it.”
Storm followed his directions. The scarlet plumes of the trees arched high against the duller red of the stone wall of the mountain interior. And the black path led directly to an archway that had been carefully bricked up with blocks about a foot square. The Terran could see none of the black sealing material, unless it was used as mortar to set those bricks. Under his hands the wall was immovable, and he examined it carefully, wondering what tool there was among their supplies that could best be used to attack it.
Would the points of their belt knives make any impression on those cracks? He could turn on the blaster, but he was loathe to use up the charge in the most potent weapon they had. Best try knives first.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, his hands slippery with sweat, his control over his temper hard pressed, Storm admitted that knives were not the answer. That left the blaster. It was not a disrupter, of course. But set to highest power it should act upon the blocks, if not upon the stuff that held them together.
Sending the rest of the party back, Storm lay on the path, resting the barrel of the Xik weapon on several stones so that its sights were aligned with a point in the middle of the wall, directly below the highest rise of the arch. He pressed the release button and fought the answering kick of the weapon, holding it steady as Xik-made lightning struck full on the blocks.
For seconds, perhaps a full minute, there was a flareback that beat at Storm with a wave of blast heat. Then a core of yellow showed at the centre point of the beam, the yellow spreading outward in a circle. The colour deepened. Harsh fumes spreading from that contact point made Storm cough, his eyes stream. But he held the blaster steady for another long moment before he started to depress the barrel slowly, drawing the yellow mark down in a line toward the floor.
As the light began to pulse, he knew that the charge was nearing exhaustion. What if he had guessed wrong and thrown away the blaster without achieving their freedom? Storm held the weapon tensely while those pulsations grew more ragged, until the pressure of his finger on the firing button brought no response.
To his vast disappointment the wall, save for that heat scar, looked as staunch as it had been on his first examination. He could not wait to know the truth. Reversing the blaster so its stock was a club, he ran forward in spite of the lingering heat, to thrust the butt into the scar with all the force of his weight and strength behind it.
There was a shock that made the Terran grunt as the metal stock met the blocks. But it wasn’t the blaster
