BLIND HUNT
Once more Dane put on his field equipment, making a fervid promise to himself as he adjusted his helmet that this time his com would be on—all the time. No one had said anything to him about his slip-up in the valley. He had thought that his carelessness would condemn him to the side-lines. Yet here he was being given a second chance, merely because he had been lucky in the drawing. And no one had challenged his right to go out. So it was up to him to prove that their confidence was not misplaced.
Since the fog was as heavy as ever there was no day or night outside. They ate a hot and nourishing meal before they tramped into a gloom which their watches told them was mid-afternoon.
With the weight of the blaster resting unfamiliarly against his thigh, Dane followed Rip as Shannon tagged Wilcox’s heels down the ramp. Kosti and Mura were already busy at the crawler.
There was room for one man, two if they crowded, on the flat surface of the small vehicle. But since the platform had no sides and there was nothing to cling to in order to keep from sliding from its fog-slick surface on the rough terrain, the party was content to be infantry, attaching themselves to the guide by lengths of rope.
Kosti triggered the starter and the crawler ground forward, its treads crushing gravel and bits of porous stone. The pace was that of a walk and none of them had any difficulty keeping up.
Dane looked back. Already the Queen had vanished. Only a radiance high in the mist marked the searchlight which under ordinary conditions could be seen for miles. It was then that he realized what it would mean to lose touch with the crawler, and his hand tugged the rope which tied them together, testing its safety.
Luckily the ground was fairly even and only once did they have to slip and scramble over one of the rivers of slag. The man who had piloted the crawler across the waste on its first trip to the ruins had chosen the best path he could find.
But they became aware now of another peculiarity of the fog—the noises. Whether those were the sounds they made, flung back and magnified, or some other natural change, they could not tell. But several times they paused, Kosti snapping off the crawler, and listened, sure that they were surrounded by another party moving confidently through the murk, that they were about to be the focus of an attack. But when they so halted the sounds ceased, and it was only when they plodded on once more that the sensation of being dogged by unseen travellers grew strong again. After those two stops, by mutual and unspoken consent, they ignored the noises and pushed on, seeing each other as shadows, the ground under their boots visible only for inches.
The moisture which trickled down their helmets and clothing was an added discomfort. It had, at least to Dane’s sensitive senses, an unpleasant smell and it left the skin feeling slimy and unclean. He tried wiping his face vigorously, only to discover that such motion apparently smeared it deeper.
Nothing interfered with the steady advance of the crawler. Though the men who followed it could no longer see the ship, nor sight the ruins for which they were bound, the machine’s electronic memory guided them unerringly. They were about three quarters of the way across the waste when they heard a new noise—not raised as an echo of their own passing.
Someone or something running!
And yet that thudding was not the pound of space boots, the rhythm was oddly different—as if the creature who passed had more than two feet, Dane thought.
He faced into the gloom, trying to gauge the quarter from which that sound came. But in the mist the compass points were lost. It could have been speeding towards them or away. Then his guide rope tautened and pulled him on.
“What was that?” the voice was muffled, but it was unmistakably Rip’s.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Dane could no longer hear that pattering. Had it been one of the globe things?
A dark object rose out of the fog and then Dane was startled by a shout. His boots rasped from gravel and sand to smoother flooring. He was standing on a square of pavement and that shadow to the left was a jaggered wall of ancient ruin. They had crossed the waste!
“Thorson! Dane—!”
Rip’s summons was imperative and Dane hurried to answer it. Kosti must have stopped the crawler for his rope did not tug him forward. Then he came upon the astrogator-apprentice bending over a sprawled form.
It was Rip’s own chief, Wilcox, who had taken that misstep and now lay partly in the crevice which had clamped knee high on his leg.
In the end it took all four of them to pry the astrogator loose. And it was at least a half hour before he sat on the crawler, nursing his leg where the tough material of the age-old building had punched a jagged hole through the calf of his high boot and drawn blood. They applied first aid, but from now on Wilcox would have to ride.
They closed in a tight escort about the crawler as it moved on. Wilcox sat with a drawn blaster balanced on his good knee. The scraps of ruin became whole walls, sections of oddly shaped structures. And yet they saw nothing which had any signs of a Terran camp.
Here among the relics of an older and alien life Dane felt again that sensation of being spied upon, that just beyond vision limited by the fog lurked something else, something to which these drifting mists were no sight barrier. The treads of the crawler crackled on rock and an eerie silence wrapped them about. The smooth walls ran with dank water, it gathered in puddles here and there. But the liquid was tainted, noisome, with an evil metallic smell clinging about it.
They came into a region where the buildings appeared to be untouched, with roofs and walls still guarding pitch dark interiors. The last thing Dane wanted to do was to explore any of those fetid openings.
But the crawler was not pausing anywhere along the street, instead crunching on over buckled strips of pavement. Perhaps the walls banked off some of the fog, for Dane now found it possible to see not only the forms but the faces of his companions. And all of them, he saw, had a tendency to look over their shoulders, and to stare into the interior of every structure they passed.
It was Rip who made the first find. He had taken out his hand torch and was using it at pavement level. Now he centred that ring of light on a dark splotch which marked a wall a little above ground surface. He tugged a signal to halt and went down on one knee beside his find as Dane joined him.
The cargo-apprentice found the other smelling that splotch, sniffing as if he were some hound on a muddled trail. But to Dane it was only a dark blot.
“What is it?”
Rip’s light swept from the stain on the wall to move over the pavement as if in search. Then it centred on a brownish wad. But though Rip inspected that with care he avoided touching it.
“Crax seed—”
Dane had been stooping. Now, in instant reaction to those words, he straightened. “Sure?”
“Smell it.”
But Dane made no move to follow that suggestion. The less one meddled with crax seed the safer one was.
Rip got to his feet and hurried on to the crawler. “There’s a cud of crax seed been spit out here. Fairly fresh —maybe this morning—”
“Told you—poachers!” Kosti broke in.
“So—” Wilcox gripped his blaster more firmly. Crax seed was one of the Galaxy wide outlawed drugs. Those unwise enough to chew it had—for a period of time—an abnormal reaction speed, a heightened intellect, a superman control. What occurred to them later was not pretty at all. But to come up against a crax chewer was to face an opponent who at his peak was twice as wily, twice as fast, twice as strong as yourself. And it was not an assignment to be lightly undertaken.
Save for that betraying wad of crax seed, in spite of the search they now made in the vicinity, they could find no other indication that any life but themselves had walked this way since the forgotten war had blasted the city. If Dr. Rich had begun any archaeological excavations, the site of the investigations was still to be found.
Wilcox set the crawler on the lowest speed and started on. Nor was he the only one to travel with his blaster ready. All four of the rest took the same precaution.
“I wonder—” Dane had been surveying the broken line of roofs. “The fog,” he added to Rip, “doesn’t it appear to be thinner ahead?”
“It’s been thinning out ever since we made that last halt. Good thing, too. Just look at that, man!”
