The Fury Out of Time (26 page)

There was something disturbingly reptilian about them.

They wore no clothing, and their brown bodies had a soft, leathery texture. A ripple of movement ran incessantly about their abdomens, just below a band of mottled white, and Karvel guessed that this was somehow connected with their breathing. They took in air all around their bodies in a continuous, circular motion.

Another band encircled their bodies near the top, this one a darker brown, irregularly marked with large, blackish spots. There was no face, not even a suggestion of eyes, nose, or mouth. The terminal membranes were not the only weird feature of the six swiveling, multiple-joined limbs. Karvel found it impossible to look at them without staring. He wondered if all of them were, in some eyeless manner, staring back at him.

The spokesman made another wheezing statement of fact. “Messenger. . .die.” Its abdominal movement stopped when it spoke. It could not produce sounds while it was breathing, which accounted for the frequent pauses.

The spokesman gestured at the devastated hillside. “Many. . .die.”

“Many died,” Karvel said quietly. “Many more than needed to die. There was a misunderstanding that would be difficult to explain to you. We feared—do you have another U.O.?”

“Only. . .this.”

“Your messenger was dead, so of course he couldn’t tell us anything. We drew the wrong conclusions.”

“We. . .regret. . .” It flapped four limbs futilely.

“You would not have sent it if you had known about the damage. I understand.”

“You. . .know. . .we. . .need. . .fuel.”

“But we didn’t,” Karvel said, puzzled. “Your messenger died before he arrived, so of course he couldn’t tell us about your fuel problem. I brought extra fuel in case I didn’t find you on the first try, and had to search further.”

That produced another lengthy silence. “See. . .fuel,” the spokesman said finally.

Karvel nodded, and went to the U.O. They trailed after him, and waited anxiously around the hatch while he climbed inside. The Bribs had fashioned a duplicate of the U.O.’s spherical tank, and protected it with two concentric outer shells. Karvel knew nothing about handling the liquid uranium fuel, and hadn’t wanted the trouble of learning.

When the tank was empty, he simply intended to replace it. The spare tank held little more than a gallon, but it was unbelievably heavy. He removed the protective shells and managed to roll it up the U.O.’s curving side, although the weight staggered him.

A cluster of groping membranes was waiting to receive it and lower it to the ground. Karvel climbed out.

“No. . .more?” Even in the spokesman’s tinny, inhuman voice there was a note of very human incredulity.

“That’s all,” Karvel admitted. “We didn’t think about having to supply a spaceship, you see. We were just thinking in terms of the U.O. I take it that you need more than that.”

“Cannot. . .leave. . .planet.”

A pathetic, four-limbed gesture. “Cannot. . .leave. . .horrible. . .planet.”

They drew back dumbly. Whatever their equivalent for weeping was, that was what they were doing, and Karvel felt like weeping himself. He had built up their hopes by announcing that he’d brought fuel, and then he’d handed them a driblet that would barely suffice to get their ship off the ground.

And he did not dare to go after more.

Chapter 2

They called themselves the Hras, with an r that fluttered unbelievably and an
s
that dissolved in a long, gargling hiss. Karvel was unable to learn whether the name referred to their species, the world of their origin, their expedition, or an involved family relationship. All of them were Hras, and each of them was a Hras.

Their spaceship lay on a long, slender hump of land deep in the sprawling swamp. Bringing its hulk to rest there after the freak explosion ruptured it had been a masterful feat of skill and resourcefulness. An error of a few yards, and both ship and Hras would have been swallowed up in the slimy ooze that bubbled around the narrow island. For that matter, moving the heavy U.O. and its beacon to a suitable launching site had been no mean feat of engineering.

From the spaceship the Hras had constructed trails in two directions, each of them crossing a mile or more of the swamp and its network of slow-moving streams. They secured the stout cables of their suspension bridges to infrequent protuberances of solid ground, and where there was no ground for support they anchored the bridges to huge disklike pontoons that rode high on the ooze of the swamp. Across the larger, lushly overgrown islands they cut roads forty feet wide.

They risked no halfway measures with the U.O., their only chance for escape. They moved it and its beacon far from the menacing swamp. They laboriously collected the dregs of fuel remaining to them, and scraped whatever film of fuel still adhered to their rent tanks, and launched the U.O. Then they repaired their ship and waited for their messenger to return with the fuel that would lift them away from this raging nightmare of an environment.

And waited.

And waited.

Finally, through another vagary of the U.O.’s instrumentation, Karvel arrived nearly a year after the messenger set out, bringing a mere crumb of nourishment for their ship’s enormous engines. He marveled that they reacted so stoically to what was nothing less than a final, irrevocable disaster.

Karvel had ample fuel to return the U.O. to the future. In two trips, by eliminating his supply cylinders and carefully packing the U.O.’s interior with fuel containers, he could bringing them an ample supply to take them to a star system where they had already found uranium. What were the chances that Force X would strike another population center? One in a thousand? One in a million?

The Hras vetoed the idea emphatically. However slight the risk, they would endanger no more human lives to save their own.

Karvel agreed with them. The screams of Galdu still haunted his dreams, and not a few of his waking moments.

Dawn the next morning found Karvel huddled in silent meditation at the top of the spaceship’s ramp. The swamp’s deafening night chorus was fading, but strange slaps and gurgles still arose from it. As the growing light chased the huge nocturnal insects to cover they were replaced by other, equally grotesque swarms, and amid the lush tangle of vegetation brilliantly hued blossoms opened their petals to the sun.

Day had never seemed more welcome to Karvel, for he had just passed the most unpleasant night of his life.

The Hras insisted on bringing him to their ship. He argued futilely that he would be safe in the U.O. There were dangers, they said. Many dangers.

The spaceship had not been designed to accommodate the proportions of an adult human. Karvel had to stoop to enter, and remain stooped as long as he was upright. His private quarters were a cramped, cylindrical room. The bed, an ingenious form of hammock, was designed to hold a sleeper in comfort regardless of the ship’s position. Its ends ran in a track around the cylinder’s circumference, and it contained an elaborate suspension system to cushion its user against the forces of acceleration or deceleration. The contraption intrigued Karvel, and he obtained some entertainment from performing acrobatics on it, and attempting to outwit it and tumble out; but it was at least twelve inches too short for his minimum requirements, and he could not sleep on it.

The ship’s atmosphere was unearthly. Alien smells assailed him with every breath. They penetrated even when he held his nose and breathed cautiously through his mouth, a nauseous blending of cloying sweetness and acidity and pungent stench.

A few hours of such olfactory horrors convinced Karvel that even the moist, fetid air of the swamp had been deliciously fresh and exhilarating. He was up and prowling about long before dawn, looking for a Hras to show him how to open the air lock. He found none in the dim, tunnel-like corridors, and the diaphragm-type doors of their sleeping quarters were closed. Finally he solved the mystery of the air lock by himself and escaped.

The sun stood well above the swamp when the air lock whirred open behind him. Hras boiled out of it, the first nearly falling over him. They had discovered his absence, and they were alarmed.

“You. . .must. . .not. . .go. . .out. . .alone,” one of them wheezed, in the posture of a parent lecturing an errant child.

“I only wanted a breath of air,” Karvel said. “I haven’t left the ramp.”

“Dangers! Many. . .dangers!”

Karvel grinned, and patted his rifle. “I’m pretty dangerous myself.”

During the return to the ship their tedious progress through the swamp had both irked and amused him. If there really were dangers, his own inclination was to get past them as quickly as possible. The Hras moved at a crawl, alert to the stirring of the smallest leaf along the path. Their weapons were the poles he had noticed, some of them nearly twenty feet in length, all of them with a short crosspiece at the end. They held them ready for action as they edged forward. Only at the bridges did they hurry; but they observed the slow waters for a long time before they ventured onto them, and when finally they did cross it was in a frenzied rush of small groups of four or five. On the wide island roads they moved in single file, keeping strictly to the center.

And Karvel had seen no dangers, none at all. He reminded himself that the Earth had spawned unspeakable horrors in its past, but even a moderate danger might seem terrifying to an unarmed alien. He understood their apprehension without feeling the least apprehensive himself.

“Do. . .you. . .begin. . .your. . .day. . .with. . .food?” one of them asked.

They had mastered his language with incredible rapidity. He was certain that they plucked it out of his mind—he had only to think a word they were groping for, and they seized upon it instantly—but they did so with a touching discretion, almost with a reluctance, as though this invasion of another’s mentality was justified only by pressing circumstances, and even then must be managed with caution and respect. They took what lay on the surface, but they would not probe; and when one of them had a word it did not forget it. None of them forgot it.

But all of their voices vibrated with the same metallic wheeze, and they spoke always with the panting pause after every word. As eager as Karvel was to talk with them, he dreaded the tedious ordeal of listening to widely spaced fragments of a lengthy explanation.

“Will. . .you. . .share. . .our. . .food?” the Hras persisted.

“Thank you, no,” Karvel said. He was hungry, but his taste of their food the night before had not encouraged him to try it again. A fragment of a thin wafer had puckered his mouth and brought tears to his eyes, and his effort to swallow it had gone for naught.

He still had all of his emergency rations, but he was determined to save them for a genuine emergency. “I’d like to try to find food for myself,” he said. “Are there fish in these streams?”

“Fish. And. . .other. . .
things!”

“I don’t know about the other things. I don’t even know about the eating qualities of a fish’s ancestors, but it seems like a logical place to start. I’d need some equipment.”

A hook, a piece of line, and a pole. They gave him one of their shorter T poles, which he examined carefully. The crosspiece had been mortised to the shaft and glued. The joint was solid, the workmanship impressive. For a line they offered a length of amazingly flexible wire; the hook, when he had explained its function, they manufactured for him. It was three times the size he wanted, and when he objected they expressed doubt that it was large enough.

“I’ll have to catch something for bait,” Karvel said. “Earlier this morning I heard plenty of frogs, so it shouldn’t be difficult.”

“Dangerous!” they wheezed, in a foreboding chorus.

“Frogs? Dangerous?”

“Other. . .things. . .”

“I doubt that even those other things are immune to rifle bullets,” Karvel said lightly.

“We. . .will. . .come. . .with. . .you.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

They insisted on converting his simple fishing trip into a major expedition. Some two dozen of them accompanied him, and their progress was as tedious as it had been the previous day. When Karvel pounced upon a small lizard for use as bait—narrowly avoiding being slashed by its vicious teeth—the Hras immediately formed a circular defense around him until he had secured it.

At the first stream he took up a position at the end of the bridge, baited his hook, and dropped it into the water. For a short time nothing happened, and then something struck with a force that very nearly jerked him into the water. As he struggled he felt at least six arms holding him securely, and two of the Hras moved up beside him to help with the pole.

Karvel’s two arms and their eight barely sufficed to hold it. The fish fought viciously, and the water around it soon churned with other fish. When finally they hauled the catch ashore its tail had been bitten away, and awesome chunks of flesh torn from the soft underpart of its body. What was left was more than ten feet long, with an enormous head and protruding, multiple-toothed jaws that continued to snap dangerously.

Karvel clubbed the head with his pole, but it continued to snap.

“Do. . .you. . .require. . .more?” one of the Hras asked.