Binder1, p.11
Binder1, page 11
Her face thinned and whitened under the light of the overhead lamp.
“A dead—”
She did not finish.
“That’s right,” he said. “One of our people, it could be—Wadjik, Shant, or Johnson.”
“How could a savage who knows only sticks and stones kill an experienced, armed man?”
Willy sounded outraged.
“All sorts of animals kill people.” He felt sick inside, hating himself for not having set up at least a trigger ;wire to guard the building area. “We’ve got to get out ;of here. We can’t spend another night in a building, ;anyway, without a shelter entrance.”
“Where’ll we go?”
“We’ll head towards Johnson,” Kiev said. “He isn’t digging so far away that we shouldn’t be able to make it ;before dawn—if he isn’t dead.”
They started out on the bearing Johnson had taken and soon left the city behind them. Fully risen moon-flowers—some of them giants over three meters high— ;surrounded them. They were lost in a forest of strange, ;pale beauty, where by day there would only be the ;bare, heat-blasted mountainside.
“Aren’t we likely to pass him and not even see him?” asked Willy.
“No,” Kiev said absently. “He’ll be following contours at a constant elevation. So are we. When he gets close enough, we’ll hear static in our earphones.”
He did not again mention the possibility of Johnson’s being dead—partly because he wanted to be easy on ;himself.
They tramped on in silence. Kiev’s mind was busy among the number of problems opened up by their ;present situation. After about an hour he heard the hiss ;of interference in his helmet phones that signalled the ;approach of another transmitting unit.
He stopped so suddenly that Willy bumped into him. He rotated his helmet slowly, listening for the maximum noise. When he found it, he spoke.
“Johnson? Johnson, can you hear me?”
“Thought it was you, Kiev.” Johnson’s voice came distorted and weakened by rock distance. “The girl with ;you? What’s up?”
“Somebody fired a gun into our building,” said Kiev. “I scraped together a sort of maintenance kit out of ;what was left—but I’m carrying all the salvage.”
“I see.” Johnson did not waste breath on speculation. “Stop where you are and wait for me. We better head ;back towards Wad’s and Shanny’s diggings as soon as ;we’re together. No point your burning energy trying to ;meet me hallway.”
“Right.”
Kiev loosened his pack and sat down with his back to the trunk of a moonflower. Willy sat beside him. She ;said nothing and, busy with his own thoughts still, he ;hardly noticed her silence.
By the time Johnson found them Kiev had already worked out the new compass heading from their present location to the diggings where Wadjik and Shant ;had planned to work. A little over three hours of the ;night remained.
“Do you think we can make it before dawn?” Kiev asked as the three of them started out on the new ;heading. “You’ve been through that area before, haven’t ;you?”
Johnson nodded.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’ll be faster going once the moonflowers are down.” He looked at Willy. “We’ll be ;pushing on as fast as we can. Think you can keep up?”
“Yes,” she said without looking at him. Her voice was dull.
“Good. If you start really to give out, though, speak up. Don’t overdo it to the point where we have to carry ;you. All right?”
“Yes.”
They continued their march. Soon the moonflowers had drawn in their petals until they were hardly visible ;under the hoods and begun their retreat into the ground. ;The men were now able to see, across the tops of the ;hoods, the general shape of the terrain and pick the ;most direct route from contour point to contour point. ;Willy walked between them. The moonflower hoods ;still stood above her head—tall as she was for a woman— ;but did not seem to bother her. She looked at nothing.
Johnson glanced at Kiev across the top of her helmet, and tongued off his helmet phones. He let her walk ;slightly ahead, then leaned towards Kiev until their ;helmets touched.
“I told you,” Johnson said softly through the helmet contact. “She didn’t understand or believe. We were ;something out of books to her—so were the Udbahrs. ;Now she’s trying hard to keep on not believing. You see ;why I told you yesterday to get out of here?”
Kiev said nothing.
Johnson pulled back his helmet, tongued his intercom back on, kept walking.
After a while the sky began to whiten ominously. The nearer moon was low and paling on the horizon behind. ;Johnson halted. Kiev and Willy also stopped.
“It’s no good,” said Johnson, over the intercom to Kiev. “We’re going to have to take time to find a hole ;to crawl into before day. We’re going to have to quit ;and wait for night.”
Kiev nodded.
“A hole?” echoed Willy.
Kiev looked at Johnson. Johnson shrugged. The message of the shrug was clear—there were no caves in this area. But they hunted until Johnson called a halt.
“This will have to do.”
He pointed to a crack in a rock face. He and Kiev attacked the crack with mining tools and their guns.
Twenty minutes’ work hollowed out a burrow three meters in circular diameter, with an entrance two feet ;square. Above the entrance the crack had been sealed ;with melted rock. The trio crawled inside and fitted the ;breathing membrane in place against the opening.
Kiev waited until all were undressed and in their thermal bags before setting the light he had saved from ;the building in place against the rocky ceiling. The ;cramped closeness of their enclosure came to solid life ;around them. The den was beginning to heat up.
The place had no air-conditioning unit—the shelter had been a palace by comparison. Even Kiev had to ;struggle against the intoxicating effect of the heat and ;the claustrophobic panic of the enclosed space. Willy ;went out of her head before noon. Kiev and Johnson ;had to hold her in her thermal bag. Shortly after that ;she went into syncope and stayed unconscious until ;cool-off.
Haggard with exhaustion, Kiev leaned on one elbow above her, staring down into her face, now smoothed ;out into natural sleep. Teetering on the verge of irresistible unconsciousness himself, he felt in him the ;strange clear-headedness of utter weariness. She had ;been right, he thought, about that primitive part in him ;and all men—the Ancient Enemy. The prospectors did ;not so much fight the Udbahr males out here as something in themselves that corresponded to its equivalent ;in the Udbahrs. The lust for killing. A lust that could ;get you to the point where you no longer cared if you ;were killed yourself.
Kiev never finished the thought. When he opened his eyes the membrane was down from the entrance ;and outside was the cool and blessed moonlight.
He crawled out to find Willy and Johnson already packing gear.
“Got to move, Kiev,” said Johnson, seeing him. “If Wad and Shanny are alive and headed home we want to ;take out after them as soon as possible. One long night’s ;walk can put us back at the hotel.”
“The hell you say.” Kiev was astonished. “They didn’t come all the way out with us and then cut that far back ;to find a a digging area.”
“No,” Johnson said, “But from here we can hit a different pass through the border range. Going back ;that way makes the hypotenuse of a right triangle. ;Coming out we would have dog-legged it to reach this ;point like doing the triangle’s other two sides. You ;understand?”
Within half an hour they were on their way. And within an hour, as they were coming around a high ;spire of rock, Johnson put out his arm and stopped.
“Wait here, Willy,” Johnson said. “Come on, Kiev.”
The two men rounded the rock and stopped, staring down into a small open area. They saw the scattered ;remains of the working equipment and of Wadjik and ;Shant. At least one day under the open sun had mummified their bodies. Wadjik lay on his back with the ;broken shaft of a spear through his chest. But Shant had ;been pegged out and left to die.
Their outerwear and guns were gone.
"I thought I saw sign of at least half a dozen males back there,” Johnson said. “Hehog, all right—with help. He ;must be swinging some real clout with the other males ;to have kept them from eating these two right away.” ;He glanced hard at Kiev. “And all for you.”
Kiev stared.
“Me? You mean Hehog tied Shanny up and left him like that on purpose—just so I could come along and ;see it?”
“You begin to see what Ancient Enemy means?” he responded. “We’re in trouble, Kiev. Two guns missing ;and one of the local males grown into a real hoodoo. ;We’ll get moving for civilization right now.”
“You’re going to bury them first,” Willy said.
The men swung around. She was standing just behind them, looking at them. Her gaze dropped, fixed on the bodies below. For a second Kiev thought that ;the sight had sent her completely out of her mind. ;Then he saw that her eyes were clear and sane.
Johnson said, “We haven’t time—and, anyway, the Udbahrs would come back to dig them up again when ;they were hungry enough.”
“He’s right, Willy,” said Kiev. “We’ve got to go— fast.” He thought of something else and swung back to ;Johnson. “That pass you talked about—they’ll be laying ;for us there, Hehog and the other males he’s got together. It’s the straightest route home, you say, and ;they know prospectors always head straight out of the ;mountains when they get into trouble.”
Johnson shook his head.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “You’re his Ancient Enemy, looking for that one spot where you and he come face to face and one of you gets the word to kill the ;other. He’ll be right around this area, waiting for us to ;start hunting for him. If we move fast we’ve got as good ;a chance as anyone ever had to get out of these mountains alive.”
Johnson set a hard pace. Several times—before the nearer moon was high in the sky and the moonflowers ;were stretching to full bloom—Willy tripped and would ;have gone down if Kiev had not caught her. But she ;did not complain. In fact, she said nothing at all. Shortly ;after midnight, they broke out from under the umbrellas of a clump of moonflower petals and found themselves in the pass Johnson had talked about.
“We made it,” said Johnson, stopping. Kiev also stopped. Willy, stumbling with weariness, blundered ;into him. She clung to him like a child—and at that ;moment a thin, bright beam came from among the ;trunks of the moonflowers behind them.
The side of Johnson’s outerwear burst in dazzle and smoke.
Johnson lunged forward, Kiev and Willy ran behind him. Three more bright beams flickered around them ;as they lurched over the lip of the pass, took half a ;dozen long, staggering, tripping strides down the far ;side and dived to shelter behind some waist-high chunks ;of granite.
Male Udbahr voices began to sing on the far side of the pass.
Johnson coughed. Kiev looked at him and Johnson quickly turned his helmet away, so that the face plate ;was hidden.
“Move out,” Johnson said, in a thick voice, like that of a man with a frog in his throat.
“Are you crazy?”
Kiev had his sidearm out. He sighted around the granite boulder before him and sent a beam high into ;the rock wall beyond the lip of the pass, on the other ;side. The rock boomed loudly and flew in fragments. ;The singing stopped. After a moment it started again.
“I can’t help you now,” Johnson said, still keeping his face turned away. “Move out, I tell you.”
“You think I’m going to leave you?”
Kiev sent off another bolt into the rock face beyond the lips of the pass. This time the singing hardly paused.
“Don’t waste your charges,” Johnson said hoarsely. “Get out. An hour puts you—hotel.”
He had to stop in mid-sentence to cough.
“Forget it, partner,” said Kiev. “With my gun and yours I can hold that pass until morning. They can’t ;come through.”
Johnson gave an ugly laugh.
“What partner—” he asked. “This partnership’s dissolved. And what’ll you do when dawn comes? Cook? You’re still a good hour’s trek from the hotel.”
Kiev became aware that Willy was tugging at his arm. She motioned with her head for him to follow her. ;He did. She slid back down among the rocks until they ;were a good four meters from where Johnson lay, head ;towards the pass.
Willy tongued off her intercom and touched her helmets to his.
“He’s dying,” she said to him through the helmets.
“All right.”
Kiev stared at her as if she were Hehog himself.
“You couldn’t get him to the hotel in time to save his life even if there weren’t any Udbahrs behind us. And ;we’ll never make the hotel unless he stays there and ;keeps them from following us.”
“So?”
She took hold of his shoulders and tried to shake him but he was too heavy and too unmoving with purpose.
“Be sensible.” She was almost crying. “Don’t you see it’s something he wants to do? He wants to save us—”
Kiev stared at her stonily.
“Shanny’s dead,” Kiev said. “Wad’s dead. You want me to leave Johnson?”
She did begin to cry at that, the tears running down her pale face inside her helmet.
“All right, hate me,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I want to live? This is all your fault—not mine. I didn’t kill ;your partner. I didn’t make Hehog your special enemy. ;All I did was love you. If you were back there I wouldn’t ;leave you, either. But that wouldn’t make my staying ;sensible.”
“Go on if you want,” he said coldly.
“You know I can’t find the hotel by myself!” she said. “You know I’m not going to leave you. Maybe you’ve ;got a right to kill yourself—maybe you’ve even got a ;right to kill me. But have you got the right to kill me ;for something that’s got nothing to do with me?”
He closed his eyes against the sight of her face. After seconds he opened his eyes, looked away from her, and ;began to crawl back up the slope until he once more lay ;beside Johnson.
“It’s Willy,” he said, not looking at the other man.
“Sure. That’s right,” said Johnson hoarsely.
A flicker of dark movement came from one side of the pass and his gun spat. The pass was clear of pursuers ;again.
“Damn you both,” Kiev said, emptily.
“Sure, boy,” said Johnson. “Don’t waste time, huh?”
Kiev lay where he was. The nearer moon was descending in the sky a little above and to the right of the pass.
“I’ll leave my gun,” Kiev said at last.
“Don’t need it,” Johnson said.
Kiev reached out and took Johnson’s gloved hand in his own. Through the fabric the return pressure of the ;other man’s grip was light and feeble.
“Get out,” said Johnson. “I told you I figured on ending out here. ”
“You told me not for some trips yet.”
“Changed my mind.” Johnson let go of Kiev’s hand and closed his eyes. His voice was not much more than ;a whisper. “I think instead I’ll make it this trip.”
He did not say any more. After a long minute Kiev spoke to him again.
“Johnson—”
Johnson did not answer. Only the gun in his hand spat light briefly into the wall of the pass. Kiev stared a ;second longer, then turned and went sliding down the ;hill to where Willy crouched.
“We go fast,” said Kiev.
They went away without looking back. Twice they heard the sound of a gun behind them. Then intervening rocks cut off whatever else they might have heard. ;They walked without pausing. After about an hour Willy ;began to stumble with exhaustion and clung to him. ;Kiev put his arm around her; they hobbled along together, leaning into the pitch of the upslopes, sliding in ;the loose rock of downslopes.
The moon was low on the stony horizon behind them. Ahead came the first whitening in the sky that said ;dawn was less than two hours away. Willy staggered ;and leaned more heavily upon Kiev. Looking down at ;her face through the double transparencies of both helmets, Kiev saw that she was stumbling along with her ;eyes tightly closed, her face hardened into a colorless ;mask of effort. A strand of hair had fallen forward over ;one closed eye and his heart lurched at the sight of it.
Not from the first had he ever thought of her as beautiful. Now, gaunt with effort, hair disarrayed, she ;was less so than ever—and yet he had never loved and ;wanted her more. It was because of the mountains, he ;thought. And Hehog, Wad, Shanny—and Johnson. Each ;time he had paid out one of them for her, the worth of ;her had gone up that much. Now she was equal to the ;total of all of them together.
She stumbled again, almost lost her footing. A wordless little sound was jolted out from between her clenched teeth, though her eyes stayed closed.
“Walk,” he said savagely, jerking her upright and onward. “Keep walking.” They were on the Track, now, ;the curving trail that all the prospectors took out of the ;valley of the Border Hotel. “Keep walking,” he muttered to her. “Just around the curve there—”
A bolt from a gun behind them boomed suddenly against the cliff-base to their right. Rock chips rained ;down Willy’s knees. She lurched towards the shelter of ;the nearest boulder.
He jerked her upright.
“Run for it, run—”
Jolting, stumbling, they ran while bolts from the gun boomed.
“They can’t shoot worth—” Kiev muttered through his teeth.
He stopped talking. Because at that moment they rounded a curve and saw the sprawling concrete shape ;of the Border Hotel and its grounds—and saw Hehog, ;holding a sidearm, stepping out from behind a rock ;twenty feet ahead.
In that instant time itself seemed to hesitate. Kiev’s weary legs had checked at his sight of Hehog. He ;started forward again at a walk, half-carrying Willy. Her ;eyes were still closed.
He thought, She doesn't see Hehog.
He marched on. Hehog brought up the gun, aimed it—but he, too, seemed caught in the suspension of ;time. He wore the helmet he had taken from Kiev two ;years before and now he also wore the white jacket of ;Shant’s outerwear suit—which almost fitted him. He ;stood waiting, one sidearm in a jacket pocket, one in his ;hand, aimed.
