Earth in Twilight, page 2
Looking offended, Pip said, “Why did you give me the wig if you have no faith in me?”
“I’m willing to take drastic measures even when the chances are so slim. Northeast, kid, and don’t think I’m letting you out of my sight for a second.”
Not disheartened in the least, Pip dropped from the leaf onto a thin limb that extended more than a mile through the dense foliage. In his experience people were generally like Kadooka, suspicious, disbelieving and quick to threaten, but they always relinquished their valuables in hopes that the fresh-faced newcomer would slice away their troubles with his keen confidence. Their suspicions remained at the fore, though, and they tried to follow the slim and agile salesman to the battleground. They always lost him in the green while he made tracks toward distant destinations with their wealth tied to his belt, or slapped on his head, in this case.
It went well for the time being, the events occurring as he anticipated until he realized that this time an essential ingredient was missing. This time he couldn’t lose his shadow or, in other words, Kadooka wasn’t falling behind. The course hadn’t been easy. Though not familiar with this particular tree, Pip chose the most difficult byways, the narrowest passages, the sheerest climbs.
A con man almost by virtue of his genes, he had never seen the day he couldn’t outrun someone as big as the man behind him, so he began climbing the tree faster than he ordinarily would. From one limb to another he swung and clambered, finally stopping to rest. Then he took a look behind him. He had done it, managed to outdistance the hairy hulk who was too cowardly to dispose of his ornad himself.
Pip breathed deeply of the sweet air and took the time to hit the tree limb with the side of his sword, thus discouraging a young snape in the act of climbing onto the perch. The creature pretended to be intent upon searching for parasites on its belly. It was furry and single of eye with four thin arms and two legs. After giving Pip several furtive glances, it climbed down to lower levels where small food could be found.
The air was damp and redolent and suited Pip just fine. His body absorbed moisture but not so much that he became too heavy to be active. At the first sign of rain he would immediately take shelter and not even Kadooka could pry him from concealment. Not that Kadooka liked too much rain either. Already he was gross without having soaked up a deal of water.
For some reason there were a great many braided vines on both sides of the tree limb along which Pip hurried. They looked peculiar, almost as if an intelligent hand had fashioned them, but that had to be impossible. Whoever heard of people entwining vines? Never had he seen so many braids and he didn’t like them because they were barriers that prevented him from taking an alternate route. This limb led straight out to a bridge and he wanted to get off it as quickly as possible.
He stopped where he was and began to perspire. What was it about those braided fences? Cocking his head to listen, he heard snapes, budgers, frallops, cremonts and all the other jungle fauna, but he didn’t hear any birds. Nor did he see any of those winged specimens, which meant they had all gone into hiding. On a day like this there ought to be flocks of them winging over and under the bridge and through the foliage, or at least they should be making noises in their nests.
Slowly he backed up. Not looking behind him, he cautiously retraced his steps along the limb. To his consternation his movements were inhibited by a laced fabric made of reeds and vines. Kadooka had crept up and tied another braided fence to the foliage so that it was impossible for Pip to get off the limb. It seemed he was in a closed corridor with only one way out.
The youth’s sweat ran in rivulets down his neck. Kadooka was a menace to a healthy young con man, especially one who desired to remain that way. All was at peace in the world save for one nervous insurance salesman who didn’t care how the wig on his head played with his pleasure centers. He was still scared. Hastily he removed the furry covering and stuck it in his belt.
“I can’t work under these conditions,” he said in a loud voice to the jumble of flora beyond the rear screen. No one responded to his words. “I’m as courageous as the next man but how do you think I feel being caged this way?” There was no reply from Kadooka. “If you keep hedging up my way I’ll have to cancel your insurance,” he said.
The limb beneath his sticky feet trembled. The sweat from his body had mingled with tree sap and now he couldn’t walk as rapidly as he wished. Not that there was any way to go except farther out on the limb where the trembling seemed more vigorous.
“I quit!” he said to the jungle. Where was Kadooka? “Hey, have you gone?” he yelled. Was he enraged or terrified? Why was the limb bucking under him and why had the traitor hemmed him in and then run away? Did he already know the answers to his questions?
Without asking for it or anticipating it, he had been duped. For the first time in his brief career he had met a sucker who hadn’t swallowed his practiced line. Instead of being permitted to play out a little fraud, he was going to be forced to perform the duty for which he had been paid.
In a frallop’s eye! First he climbed the fences to the sides and then he climbed the one behind him and overhead. There wasn’t anything underneath save for an empty space so sheer he didn’t want to look. In no way could he survive the fall if he left the limb.
With an unsteady step he walked forward to meet his fate, his sword in his hand, his eyes darting in every direction in search of a way out. In disgust he looked at his weapon. Made of a bird’s upper bill, it was sharp enough but he owned it primarily to peel fruit and to skin game, certainly not to kill ornads or anything else.
He approached the matter at hand with no curiosity. And then he saw it. An ornad turned out to be a hellion. That meant it was large, dangerous and full of hostility toward anything and everything. It lived on the strands and in fact helped string the bridge that dangled between two steeples. Omnivorous, it liked to drag its meal out onto its nest, devour all but the bones unless they happened to be soft, and decorate its home with them. The nest smelled to high heaven and presented a grisly sight to the timid man who poked his head from the foliage to see what Kadooka expected him to combat.
If the situation hadn’t been so fraught with menace it might have been amusing. The sound he made when he first glimpsed the creature wasn’t at all like a laugh but was more a scream. Never had he deliberately done anything to hurt anyone and here he was being treated like a gangster.
The ornad heard the cry, gave off exploring the inside of a skull with its tongue and turned to stare at the tree a quarter-mile away. It plainly had keen hearing. Now and then a portion of it sagged onto the particular string running directly through the part of the tree where Pip crouched and stared.
The monster was green and yellow, beautifully reticulated, if one cared for that sort of artistry. Hound-dog ears adorned the sides of the long head, large and green like bundy leaves and capable of standing straight up in the air whenever the beast grew alert. He had sixteen legs and a stingered tail but his most formidable weapons were his teeth. He somewhat resembled a caterpillar of old, blown thousands of times to a size greater than the original.
Alarmed and sweaty but not yet panicked, Pip hid in the tree and looked in awe at the grisly character doing away with the carcass of a full-grown budger. The nest was large and oval in shape, made of vines, tree limbs, straw, moss, reeds and the bones from past meals. In the center of it lay the ornad, sucking the skull, occasionally glaring at the tree, once in a while coiling its long body and then dropping its rear end onto the strand running through the thickest part of Pip’s sanctuary.
Kadooka had to be crazy to think anyone in his right mind or out of it would face the titan out there on the nest! Crazy or evil! Dry of mouth, Pip began again to inch backward along the limb. With an oath he realized that the traitor had dropped another fence behind him! While he wasn’t paying attention Kadooka cut away the rear fence, crept near to the youth and set up another barrier. Now Pip was stuck on the end of the limb, wondering what kind of man it was who could handle vines inches in diameter as if they were tiny grass blades.
No matter, there had to be an escape route. Always there had been one and this time would be no different.
The ornad was in a bad mood. Perhaps the budger hadn’t satisfied his hunger. In a rage he flung the skull into the emptiness on every side of him. It fell two thousand feet into a hidden lake.
It had never happened this way before. Always Pip was able to slip away from danger or outrun the victims of his scams. There had been plenty of times when indignant suckers took to his trail but no matter how intense their dedication they eventually gave up. People had a tendency to grow soft and lazy in their middle years and they were usually the target of Pip’s interest. The fact was he had never been near peril. It was easy to avoid if one was intelligent and alert. Now he crouched and felt of the trail behind him without taking his eyes off the horrendous ornad who sat on its nest flinging bones at the sky.
His probing fingers touched the limb behind him and then he touched something soft and furry. There was a large snape sitting looking at him while the sun gleamed off its teeth. Kadooka had been doubly treacherous, removed the rear fence and prodded the beast into the enclosure.
Pip would have been better off had he remained silent. Possibly the snape might have blundered out onto the strands in an attempt to get away, he could have been seen and apprehended by the ornad and during the activity Pip could quietly sneak away. It didn’t happen that way. The snape was an adult with big teeth, and its single eye wasn’t the normal dark color. It was light blue, almost white. Added to that, another curiosity made him more menacing. He had no scalp, only a scarred dome that looked like a wrinkled face. The sum of his unattractiveness caused Pip to leap backward and cry out.
He landed on the strands, left the limb altogether and fell on the smelly strings of material fashioned by the uglies who lived high above the world. The snape considered the situation and his alternatives and packed it in by clambering across the man and climbing hand over hand along the underside of the limb. There were plenty of knots and bumps to afford him all the holds he needed. The last Pip saw of him he was swinging down to safety and invisibility.
Alerted, the ornad sat balanced on his lower end with the rest of him poking several feet into the air. His ears were pointed straight up and his hideous eyes had already spied Pip sprawled on his front path. With an ear-splitting shriek he prepared for battle by wrapping his lower body around a sagging strand. Clouds of dust arose while half a ton of debris fell in bits and pieces all the way to the ground.
There was time for Pip to think about getting up and following the snape. He didn’t have the climbing ability of the limber creature but at times such as this he possessed unlimited energy. That was all the time there was, though, and he couldn’t make a plan to save himself. The maniacal ornad wasn’t running across the bridge toward him as he had anticipated but instead whizzed through space while clinging to a dangling strand. It would be upon him in a matter of seconds. Its little feet reached for him and so did its toothy mouth. It didn’t hang down headfirst. The powerful muscles in its lengthy torso allowed it to hold onto the strand and stand up almost upright. In fact it needn’t have coiled its rear around the string but could have gripped with its many feet. But then it couldn’t take the victim in its teeth right away. It would have to let go its support and it plainly didn’t want to do that.
Panting in terror, Pip watched the monster speed his way. He stood on a thick string just short of the tree limb. He hadn’t many choices. Certain that he was about to die, he thought of jumping out into space. His fumbling fingers touched his sword, picked it up from where it had fallen, and then he crouched and hacked at the strands.
The cutting edge was sharp and he was lucky. The strand supporting the ornad gave way just as the animal was about to reach for its target. As the green killer fell away into emptiness one of its claws raked Pip’s face. The man fell unconscious onto the bridge while the ornad swung back the other way, down and ever downward for many yards, until the string ran out and he collided with a tree stump growing on a hillside on the ground.
Chapter 3
Ferrer Burgoyne thought he was on the ground. It didn’t occur to him that a machine would malfunction at such an important and hazardous moment in his career. In reality the elevator was temporarily jammed by a nest something had built in a corner of one of the girders. Little by little the debris seeped inside and became a tough wad that slowed the vehicle and made Ferrer believe he had arrived at his destination.
Some destination. Seen from the sky the planet didn’t look so forbidding, being vividly green and soft in appearance. Like a lovely lap; the bosom of nature; the birthplace of his forefathers; home. As soon as he stepped out onto what he thought was solid ground, the elevator door shut and continued on down without him. At true ground level it would begin the long trip back up to the ship, empty and uninhabited, without him. He wanted nothing more to do with it. Another confrontation with the blue monster in the sky and he would have to commit suicide. Better that than insanity.
He wanted to weep or at least sniffle. He wore a spacesuit that caused him to swelter as soon as he stepped into the hotbox of Earth. Onto the hotbox; beneath terrible, malodorous strands of vegetation where carbon dioxide, oxygen, heat and fear were perpetually captured. It was the heat that made him perspire, not the suit, or perhaps it was his imagination. It was a good suit, not really constructed to keep him cool in an inferno but rather to keep him warm in a vacuum.
He blew against his visor and laughed. Who was he kidding? He could never go back up to the ship because Satan in the form of a multi-legged hellion sat up there waiting for him. It had already killed Carpall, crunched and munched him like Crackerjacks and it would love to add little Ferrer to the junk in its stomach.
He felt little. He also felt stupid, unlucky, persecuted, hated and victimized. What else could he do but locate the signal station somewhere down there on the ground? During the attempt he would probably be snatched by one of the predators dotting the upper and lower landscapes of this loathsome place.
With loving hands he stripped off the suit and stuffed it into the strands so that it couldn’t be seen. He had changed his mind. If it was the last thing he did, he would come back for it and go up there and face that blue hellion again. One of these days. If he could. Never mind how dumb the idea was. All he needed to do was get into the ship or into the communication station in the steeple.
All at once he felt like smacking himself in the forehead. He could have tried the communications station while he was up there but he hadn’t even thought about it. Paramount in his mind had been the need to get lower and away from the creature. Why had he even left the el at all? He didn’t know; or rather he did know. Scared out of his wits he had behaved witlessly.
Wondering how far he was from the ground he stepped across the strands and looked down. Immediately stricken with vertigo, he staggered backward. All he could see down there was a gray cloud speeding toward him like an ocean. Any minute he expected it to break over him and carry him to his death.
Naked, perspiring, he began walking across the bridge. He might as well, having nowhere else to go and being unable to climb down the steeple. The girders were too large to be handled by anything but giant monsters.
The strands had been built to support huge creatures, so he had no trouble finding solid footing. As he walked he marveled at the strings. Some of them were feet or inches in diameter while others were millimeters thick. Who or what had built the first bridges between steeples? Birds. That’s what they said. That’s what they had told him. Ordinary birds. What bird could carry one of these fat threads?
What about the blue monster at the top of the steeple? Reports indicated that undesirable but minor mutations had occurred on Earth, for what reasons no one was really sure. The reports themselves were vague, too sketchy, and as a matter of fact very little information was available from any source. What of the blue monster? Ferrer Burgoyne and his co-astronaut had never dreamed such a horror existed. To be certain they were aware that mutations were on the planet, which was why Project Deep Green had been put into the works in the first place. Ferrer and Carpall were supposed to have used a small flying craft to make a map of the immediate vicinity. Later they would have come back from Laredo and drawn another map of the terrain around another steeple. Their mission had been peaceful, although they didn’t comprehend the end results of their labor. Not exactly.
Ferrer was sick almost unto death with his fear and his hatred of this world. It was like a grisly spawn of itself, hostile and inhospitable to its own offspring. Step by step he moved out onto a no-man’s land two thousand feet above a body of water that had eaten away at a continent for billions of years.
It didn’t matter to him how ancient Earth was. He had never been particularly fond of old things anyhow, except that he loved Laredo which was much older than this place. There was a scratch on the brown skin of his belly, grass in his long yellow hair and a pain in his gut. He didn’t want to be Earthy.
By and by the bridge began to sway and he realized he was approaching some foul and cumbersome entity moving around and around on a patch of strands like a dog getting ready to lie down. This entity had the ears of a dog but it was no canine. Or, to be more accurate, it had a single hound-dog-like appendage, the other having been sheared off when the ornad collided with the stump after its meeting with Pip. Bruised, battered but a stranger to remorse, it prepared to settle down for a recuperative period. From the corner of one eye it saw Ferrer but considered him to be no more than a reed swaying in the wind.
