But the men from the Queen knew the score, there would be no rash exploration of the ship if they did locate it. And its smash-up might have been a thousand miles away, well out of the range of the flitter. Tau was there— and of all men a Medic was the last to take any chances with a plague.
“Ali—he has disappeared?” Kosti brought them back to the business at hand.
Dane, not overlooking his own carelessness, reported in detail what had happened in the valley. To his relief neither of the newcomers made any comment on his part in the affair but centred their attention on the task at hand. Mura was the first to suggest a plan of action.
“Let Kosti take up the flitter and cruise above us. Then you and I shall search the ground. There may be some trace left which you could not easily sight from the air.”
So it was arranged. The flitter, cut to its lowest cruising speed, circled slowly around, never venturing too far ahead. While Dane and Mura on foot, having to swing bush knives in places against the thick mat of vegetation, made their way into the sinister valley. They found the place where the track of the crawler came from the rock of the burnt-off land to bite into the soft soil of the healthy area.
Mura turned there and stared back, over the plain. They could not sight from this point the blotch of brightly coloured ruins. But they were certain that the crawler had come out of the blasted area, to be driven with intelligent purpose towards the mountains—until it vanished into the solid rock of a cliff wall!
“Dr Rich’s party—?” Dane aired his suspicions.
“Perhaps—perhaps not,” was Mura’s ambiguous reply. “Did you not say that Ali thought this machine was not of the usual type?”
”But—” Dane gaped, “you can’t mean that the Forerunners survived—here!”
Mura laughed. “They say that all things are possible in space, do they not? But no, I do not think that those ancient rulers of the lanes have here left their sons to greet us. Only they may have left other things—which are now being put to use. I would like to know more about those ruins—a great deal more.”
Perhaps that guess Rip had made days earlier—that on some planet might lie, waiting to be discovered, possessions of the legendary Forerunners—was close to the truth. Had such a cache been discovered by parties unknown here on Limbo? But with that marched the grim warning voiced by Ali that Forerunner material in Terran hands might be a threat to all of them.
Slowly they combed the mouth of the valley, reassured by the flitter cruising above. Dane broke open his field rations, chewing as he went, on a cube of rubbery, tasteless stuff which was supposed to provide his lank young body with all it needed in the way of balanced nourishment—and yet which was so savourless and far removed from real food.
He hacked at a mass of prickly shrubs and stumbled through the clutch of longer branches to come into a pocket-sized clearing entirely ranged with thorn-studded greenery. Underfoot was a thick mat of decaying leaves through which not even the spears of grass could grow.
Dane stopped short. The brown muck of the mat had been disturbed. He was conscious of an unwholesome reek of decay which came from scuffed patches where a green slime had been recently uncovered.
He went down on his hands and knees, circling that ploughed up patch. He was no tracker, but even to his inexperienced eyes this had been the site of a scuffle. And since the slime was still uncrusted, that event had taken place not too long ago. Dane surveyed the brush which walled in the tiny area. It was just the place for an ambush. If Kamil had come through—over there—
Taking care not to disturb the churned muck, Dane made his way to the opposite side of the clearing. He was right! The cut of a bush knife showed where a branch had been lopped away.
Someone, armed with regulation Terran field equipment, had come through here.
Come through here—to find some one, or something, waiting for him!
The globe creatures? Or those who had used the strange crawler and burnt the globes in the valley?
But Dane was certain that he had discovered where Ali had been surprised—not only surprised but overpowered by a superior force. Overpowered—to be taken where? He subjected the walling shrubs to a careful scrutiny. But in no other place did he see any suggestion of disturbance or break. It was almost as if the hunter, having made certain of his prey, had vanished into thin air, transporting the prisoner with him.
Dane was startled by a crashing in the brush. His sleep ray-rod was out as he spun around. But it was Mura’s pleasant brown face which was framed in a circle of torn leaves. At Dane’s wave he came into the clearing. It was not necessary to point out the signs of battle—he had already noted them.
“They jumped him here,” Dane was convinced.
“But who or what are ‘they’?” was Mura’s counter. And seconds later he added the unanswerable question, “And how did they leave?”
“The tracks of the crawler went right through the wall of the cliff—”
Mura edged out on the carpet of muck. “No indications of any trap door here,” he observed, gravely, as if he had expected to find something of the sort. “There remains—” he jerked a thumb into the air where the purr of the flitter grew louder as Kosti circled back towards them.
“But we would have heard—have seen—” protested Dane, all the time wondering if they would have. He had been at the other end of the valley when Tau had caught that interrupted cry for help. And from this point the place where the Medic had been at that moment was hidden by at least two miles of broken ground.
“Something smaller than one of our flitters,” Mura was thinking aloud. “It could be done. One thing we may be sure of—they have collected Kamil and we must find out who they are and where they are before we can get him back!”
He ploughed away through the brush and Dane followed him out on a bare strip of ground from which they could signal to the flitter.
“Found him?” Kosti called as he brought the machine down.
“Found where some one scooped him up.” Mura went to the keyboard of the caster.
Dane turned for a last look up that sinister valley. But all at once his attention was drawn from the valley and its cliffs to a new phenomenon in evidence on a higher level. He had not noticed that the sun had disappeared while they had been making their search of the brush. But now clouds were gathering—and not only clouds.
The naked snow touched peaks of the range, which had been so sharp set against the pallid sky of Limbo when the ship out of space had swept over them, were gone! It was as if that milky, faded sky had fallen as a curtain to blot them out. Where the peaks had been swirled fog—fog so thick that it erased half the horizon as a painter might draw a blotting brush across an unsuccessful landscape. Dane had never seen anything like it. And it was moving so fast, visibly cutting off miles of territory in the few moments he had watched it. To be lost in that —!
“Look!” he ran to the flitter and jogged Mura’s arm, pointing to the fast disappearing mountains. “Look at that!”
Kosti spit out an oath in the slurred speech of Venus. Mura simply obeyed orders and looked. Another huge section to the north was swallowed up as he did so. And now they noted another thing. From the tops of the valley cliffs curls of greyish, yellow vapour were rising, to cling and render misty the outlines of the rocks. Whether this was all part of the same phenomenon they did not know, but the three Terrans insensibly drew closer together, chilled as much by what they saw as the cold apparent with the going of the sun.
They were shaken out of their absorption by the click of the caster summoning them back to the ship. The change in the mountains had been noted on the Queen and both the flitter searching for the wreck and their own were ordered to report in at once.
There was further change in the atmosphere, a speeding up of the mists. The swirls above the valley walls combined, formed banks and began to drop, cutting visibility.
Kosti watched them anxiously. “We’ll have to swing out—away from the valleys. That stuff is moving too fast. We can ride the beam in, but I’d rather not unless I have to—”
But, by the time they were airborne, the mist was down to the level of the valley floor and was puffing out in threatening tendrils on to the rough terrain of the burnt-off land. The mountains had vanished and the foothills were being fast swallowed up. It was uncanny, terrifying in a way, this wiping away of solid earth, the substitution of a dirty, rolling mist which swirled and spun within its mass until one suspicioned movement there, alien, menacing movement.
Kosti set the controls to full speed, but they had covered little more than a mile of the return journey before he was forced to throttle down. For the mist was not only spilling out of the valleys, it was also curling up from the
