'Where is it?' Leo asked.
Hulann scanned the sky, discovered the bird to their left, out in the open desert, flying fairly low and slowly along the parched earth. He pointed to it, then put his mind back to driving.
'Why doesn't it attack?' the boy asked, craning his neck to get a good look at the behemoth where it soared along the ground, rushing toward them with great wings flapping like blankets. It was watching them-or at least it had its milky blue-white eyes turned in their approximate direction-but its intent was unclear.
'I don't know,' Hulann said. 'I would feel much better if I did.'
'Do we have a weapon?'
'Nothing.'
Leo shrugged. 'I guess not much would be of use against it anyway.'
They drove on.
The rock fled by on their right.
The bat thing paralleled them on their left, moving in, closing the gap, but with less purpose than it had previously shown.
Hulann dared to hope that the sluggishness of the brute meant that they were near the border of the Isolator's influence and that they would soon break free into an area where it could not approach them.
But that was soon proven to be a false hope when the creature screeched a reverberating war cry that danced along the dry earth and rebounded from the rocks. A moment after the ear-piercing scream, it turned more directly toward them, paralleling them less, and swept in for the final kill
'Here it comes,' Leo said.
Hulann cursed the shuttlecraft, wishing there were some way he could milk more power from it, could push it faster than it wished to go. At the same time, he realized it was futile to try to avoid the beast, for it could summon more energy and more speed than any mechanical construction could ever muster. It transcended machine just as surely as it transcended naoli-at least in the art of destruction.
'Hulann!' Leo cried, grabbing the naoli by the shoulder, urging his attention through the window toward the oncoming bulk of the bat thing. 'Look! What's happen-ing?'
Hulann took his eyes from the way ahead and reluctantly looked at the Isolator's weapon. The bird was losing its shape. The wings were shrinking inward while the body was flattening out and losing its streamline shape. The face was mashed flat and the features were rapidly disintegrating-except for the eyes, which seemed only to be shielded behind thick crystal panels now. The clawed hands were gone altogether. In a moment, it had transformed itself from the bat thing into a pulsing mass of plasti-flesh.
And it was going to be carried these last hundred or so feet by its own momentum, was going to crash directly into the shuttlecraft and drive them into the rock wall.
Hulann tramped the accelerator.
There was nothing more in the machine's guts.
The huge ball of the Isolator's flesh crashed into them with a sickeningly soft thud that sent the craft tumbling onto its side, smashing the roof against the rock wall and stalling the blades. The Isolator surged around the machine, a colorful mass of rippling amber and emerald, the gray patches no longer in evidence-or perhaps muted by the sun in favor of the brighter hues.
Though the car was on its side, the seatbelts held them in place and kept Hulann from tumbling down the seat to crush Leo. The alien gripped the wheel, his body wracked with convulsive spasms of nervous shivering as the inhuman beast beyond the windscreen sought entrance. 'Are you all right?' he called out. There was little light in the craft, for the Isolator blocked the direct sun. Only an orange-tinted luminance penetrated its flesh and flushed dimly upon them.
'I'm here,' Leo said. 'What do we do, Hulann?'
The alien said nothing.
'Does fire hurt it?'
'No.'
Leo watched the stuff sliding along the glass, bubbling and gurgling, only an arm's length from them.
'What, then?' he asked Hulann.
'I know of nothing.'
'But there must be something we can do!'
Hulann had to fight a tendency for his overmind to withdraw into its nether-world sleep pocket. His body was reacting to the huge amounts of emotional stimulation washing it, and it wanted release from the inundation. Sleep would be very nice? And death
Except for the boy. He had come so far, gone through so much, lost everything that had made up his life to date. Was he now to be undone by something that was the creation of the engineers of his own race? Was there to be no dignity at all connected with this affair?
'Look,' Leo said quietly, his voice permeated with a subtle, whispering fear that Hulann understood at once, Along the seam of Hulann's door, the Isolator was pushing its way in, a thin gooey wad of it surging steadily, inexorably into their sanctuary? In the amber light, it was even sort of pretty
Bluebolt thundered along the rails. It was stormy where David now traveled, but he could not hear the thunder. The rails were not in the best condition, corroded dangerously, and the train's own noise cancelled out the uproar of the elements.
He watched the track ahead with interest, but with little fear. If he were to die now, it would not be exceedingly difficult to accept, for he had been living on borrowed time for quite a while.
Lightning flashed in the heavens, streaked downward and touched the earth only several miles distance. The resultant play of shadows on the desert and the rails was lovely. David grinned and relaxed even farther into his chair.
The doors of the French Alpine Hotel stood open, and the snow had found its way inside. It drifted into the great lobby, over a pair of chairs that faced each other over a magazine table. Long white fingers grasped at the rug and clawed toward the plush couches. In the rear of the establishment, the delivery room, behind the kitchen, was as hoary as Methuselah, with great icicles hanging from the waterpipes and a blanket of snow across most of the floor.
Everything was quiet.
In the depths of the place, a pair of cats snuggled in a cellar corner, licking each other, wondering for the thousandth time why there were no guests any more
Docanil the Hunter stood along the highway at the pass out of the desert valley. He had changed clothes to match the weather. Here was no place for a greatcoat He wore a light, porous suit of a fabric that resembled vinyl in appearance and cotton in comfort and to the touch. Between his shoulder blades was the clawed fist ringed with nails. He still wore gloves and boots, for the hands and feet of a Hunter are very sensitive.
'See anything?' Banalog asked from behind.
The Hunter did not respond.
'Perhaps they are already dead,' Banalog suggested.
'We will soon go in,' the Hunter said.
Banalog looked into the long desert beyond the rock pillars that flanked the highway at the end of the valley. He was almost selfish enough to hope that they were already dead. Alive, they might be forced to talk, to inform on him. And then the Hunter-Docanil or another, it hardly mattered-would be coming for him.
The tableau was broken as the lowering skies began to rip open and dump a fine sheet of rain on the thirsting land beneath. Docanil turned and hurried for the copter and the dryness inside. The rain was cold-and a Hunter is a sensitive creature.
High above the Earth, clouds of dust and debris, hurtled into the stratosphere by the nuclear blasts men had touched off in the last hours of the war, shifted and stretched into bands. The long streams of stones, dust, paper, wood chips, pottery shards, and other rubbish would circle the globe for weeks and possibly even months before finally settling onto the scorched surface of the planet from which they had come.
There were pieces of bone, too.
Circling above the earth.
Orbiting.
Slowly coming down again.
