“Take over here,” I said. “I’m going to see Fitzgerald. And listen, Dave, this is urgent. Hold any messages Fitzgerald sends. Any! Understand?”
“Check,” he said. His eyes were still asking questions as I went out. Neither of us could answer them—yet.
The desolation spun past below me, aftermath of the Three-Hour War, ruined buildings, ruined fields, ruined woods. Far off I could catch a pale gleam of water beyond the seething edge of the Ring.
I’d been en route long enough to make some sort of order in my mind—but I hadn’t done it. Evidently more than time would be required to open the closed doors in my brain. I had been in the Ring today—I had seen something or learned something there—and whatever I learned had been of such vital and terrible import that memory of it was wiped from Davidson’s mind and mine until the hour came for action.
I didn’t know what hour or what action. But I knew with a deep certainty that when the time for decision came I would not falter. Along with the terror and the blackness in my mind went that one abiding knowledge upon which all my actions now were based. I could trust that instinct.
Fitzgerald’s copter was waiting. I could see his lead-suited figure, tiny and far below, pacing up and down impatiently as I dropped toward him. My copter settled lightly earthward. And for a moment another thought crossed my mind.
Williams! A man murdered, a man I knew and had worked with. A man I liked. That should have affected me much more deeply than it did. I knew why it hadn’t. Williams’ death was unimportant—completely trivial in the face of the—the other peril that loomed namelessly, in all its invisible menace, like a shrouded ghost rising from the lake beyond us.
Fitzgerald was a big blond man with blue eyes and a scar puckering his forehead, souvenir of our last battle with mutated marmosa in the Atlanta Ring. His transmitter-disc vibrated tinnily as I got out of the copter.
“Hello, chief. You got my second message?”
“No. What was it?”
“More funny stuff.” He gestured toward the Ring. “In the lake this time—signs of life. I can’t make anything out of it.”
I drew a deep breath of relief. Davidson would have stopped that message. It was up to me now to find a way to keep Fitzgerald quiet.
“We’ll take a look at the lake, then,” I said. “What’s your report?”
“Well. …” He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, glancing at me through his faceplate as if he didn’t quite expect me to believe him. “It’s a funny place, that lake. I got the impression it was—well, watching me.
“I know it sounds silly but I have to tell you. It could be important, I suppose. And then when I was making a second turn over the water I saw something, in the lake.” He paused. “People,” he added after a moment.
“What kind of people?”
“I—they weren’t human.”
“How do you know?”
“They weren’t wearing lead suits,” he said simply, glad of a chance to pin his story down with facts. “I figured they were either not human or else insane. They heard my ship. And they went into the lake.”
“Swimming?”
“They walked in. Right under the water. And they stayed there.”
“What did they look like?”
“I didn’t get a close look,” he said evasively, his eyes troubled as they avoided mine.
I was aware of a strange, mounting excitement that swelled in my throat until I could hardly speak. I jerked my head toward the lake.
“Come on,” I said.
There lay the blue water, moving gently in the breeze. The cliffs like folded curtains rose beyond it. There was no sign of life in sight as we crossed the bare, pitted rocks. Fitzgerald eyed me askance as we clumped toward the water in our heavy lead-lined boots. I knew he expected doubt from me.
But I knew also that he had told the truth. The lost memory of danger sent its premonitory shadows through my mind and I believed, dimly, that I too had seen those aquatic people, sometime in that immediate past which had been expunged from my brain.
We were halfway across the rocks, our Geiger-counters clicking noisy warning of the death in the air all around us, when the first of the lake people rose up before us from behind a ledge of rock.
He was a perfectly normal looking man—except that he stood there in khaki trousers and shirt, sleeves rolled up, in the bath of potent destruction which was the very air of the Ring. He looked at us with a blankness impossible to describe and yet with a strangely avid interest in his eyes.
When we were half a dozen paces away he raised his arm and, without changing expression, in a voice totally without inflection, he spoke.
“Go back,” he said. “Go back. Get away from here, now!”
It was all returning to me … I knew why he looked so strange, why he spoke so flatly, why that interest watched us from his eyes. …
I didn’t know. The knowledge brushed the edges of my awareness and withdrew. I stumbled forward, Fitzgerald beside me excited and eager, calling out a question to the man.
He made no answer. He took one last look at us, blank, intent, impersonal, his eyes as blue as the water in the lake. And then he dropped straight downward, without stooping, without seeming to move a muscle. He vanished behind the knee-high ledge of rock.
We reached it together, shouldering one another in our eagerness. We bent over the ledge. The man had disappeared, leaving no sign behind him. Nothing but a little hollow in the rock where he had stood, a hollow no bigger than a saucer, in which blue water swayed. We stood there half stunned, for the time it took the water to gurgle downward and vanish in the hole and surge up again twice from some action of subterranean waters.
Memory was battering at the closed doors of my mind.
I knew the answer. I
