“I crawled over that ground inch by inch,” Ross said between set teeth. “Not so much as a worm or ant hole showing. He was there one minute—the next he wasn’t!”
Making fast their lines and leaving Renfry as lookout, they descended into the trampled and blasted area about the globe where the green was now withering under a late afternoon sun. Darkness would complicate their search. They had better move swiftly, find some clue before they were hampered further.
Ross took the lead, balancing along a fallen tree trunk to its crown of dropping fern fronds, now crushed and broken. “He was right here.”
Travis swung down into the crushed foliage. The sharp smell of sticky sap, as well as the heavy scents of flowers and leaves, was cloying. But Ross was right. The vegetation on the ground had been pulled away in a wide sweep, and there was no sign that the dank earth beneath had been disturbed. He sighted a round-toed track, but it was twin to the ones he was leaving in the mold and could have been pressed there by either Ashe or Ross. But, because it was the only possible trace, he turned in the direction it pointed.
A moment or two later, at the very edge of the clearing Ross had made during his search, Travis saw something else. There was another tree trunk lying there, the remains of a true forest giant. And it had not been brought down by the landing of the ship, but had lain there long enough for soil and fallen leaves to build up around it, to grow a skin of red-capped moss or fungi.
Across that moss there were now two dark marks, ragged scars, suggesting that someone or something had clawed for a desperate hold against irresistible force. Ashe? But how had he been captured without Ross’s seeing or hearing his struggles?
Travis vaulted the tree trunk. There was his confirmation—another footprint deep in the mold. But beyond it—nothing—absolutely nothing! And no living creature could have continued along that stretch of soft earth without leaving a trace. From this point it did appear that Ashe had vanished into thin air.
Air! Not on the ground but above it was where they would have to search. Travis called to Ross. There were tall trees about them now, trees with twenty feet or more of smooth bole before their first fern branches broke from the trunks. The wind rustled here, but they could sight no movement that was not normal, hear no sounds aloft.
Then one of the blue flyers came along, hovering over Travis, watching him with all four of its stalked eyes. The flyers—had they taken Ashe? He couldn’t believe that. A man of Ashe’s weight and strength, undoubtedly struggling hard into the bargain—at least the scraping on the moss suggested that—could not have been airborne unless by a large flock of the blue creatures working together. But the Apache believed as completely as if he had witnessed it, that Ashe had been taken away either through the air or along a road of treetops.
“How did they get him up?” Ross puzzled. He appeared willing to accept Travis’ idea, but the Apache, in turn, was forced to agree such a maneuver would be difficult. “And getting up,” the time agent continued, “where in the world did they take him?”
“This lies in the opposite direction from the three nearest buildings,” Travis pointed out. “To transport a prisoner might force them to travel in a direct line to their own quarters—speed would matter more than concealment.”
“Which means a direct strike out into the jungle.” Ross eyed the wilderness of trees, vines and brush with disfavor. “Well, there’s one little trick—let me have your belt. This was something they showed us in basic training—good old basic.” He took Travis’ belt, made it fast to his own, increasing its expansion to the last hole before he measured it about the tree. But the girth of the bole was too great. Ross untied his cord connection with the ship, slashed off a length to incorporate in the circle of belts. This time it served, linking him to the bole. With the belt to support him, he hitched up the trunk which overhung the signs of struggle.
The fronds shook as he forced his way between them. “Here’s your clue,” he called down. “There’s been a rope strung about this limb—worn a groove in the bark. And—Well, well, well—they’re not so bright, after all—or they don’t think we are. Here’s a way to travel, all right—by the upper reaches. Come and see!”
A line made of cord and belts slapped down the trunk and Travis caught at it, making the climb with less agility than Ross had shown, to join the other at his perch among the fronds. He found the agent folding up between his hands another rope, a supple green one which aped the vines native to this aerial place.
“You do a Tarzan act.” Ross flipped the rope end for emphasis. “Swing over to that tree, probably find another rope end there—and so on. I still don’t see how they boosted Ashe along. Though”—his eyes narrowed—“maybe they waited to go until I went back to the ship for you.”
Travis eyed the rope. “Leaving that here means one thing—”
“That they intend to return?” Ross nodded. “They may have some bright plans about scooping us up one by one. But who are ‘they’? Not those blue flyers . . .”
“Those might act as their hounds.” Travis tried not to glance at the ground, for his present perch inspired little confidence in him.
“And that fruit present was bait for a trap,” Ross agreed. “It fits. The fruit to get us out of the ship, the flyers to report when we came. Then—pounce!—one of us is snaffled! Only Ashe isn’t going to stay a prisoner.”
“This could be a trap, too,” Travis reminded him as he gave the rope a jerk and discovered Ross had been right, the line was very firmly attached to its tree anchorage.
“True enough. But we’ll find some way.”
“At night?” The sun was close to setting. Travis wanted to be on the trail just as much as Ross, but common sense would pay off better than a reckless dash to the rescue.
“Night—” Ross squinted at the patches of sunlight. “These things move around in the daytime. And they’re used to heights.”
“Which suggests there may be good reasons for not travelling on the ground or in the dark.” Travis was growing a little tired of talking. “Our friend in the red house may be one of those reasons. What is your solution?”
“We go back to the domed place—up to the top. There is a balcony around the dome itself, and we can take our bearings from there.”
Travis could agree with that. But they had to argue down the protests of Renfry. The technician’s demands to accompany them Ross was able to overcome by pointing out crisply that alone of their party Renfry possessed the knowledge, or fraction of knowledge, which might mean their eventual control of the ship, and so of their future. And the need for a scouting party before dark urged the necessity of speed in their try to locate landmarks which might guide them on a hunt for Ashe.
They trod the path they had cut that morning. Travis glanced now and then at the sky when they crossed small glades. He half expected to find the blue flyers on the lookout. But none appeared.
Ross took the inner ramp under the dome at a rapid trot. His pace, however, slowed as they wound their way up past five levels, then six, seven, eight, nine and finally ten. There was no sound in the building, nothing to break the echoing emptiness of the fantastically beautiful shell.
They reached the balcony, a narrow walk curving completely around the bulk of the dome, protected by a breast-high parapet of the carved lace. The wind, now rising in intensity, pulled at their hair, sang weirdly through the openwork. Ross took the lead. He hurried to the vantage point from which they could obtain an unrestricted view in the direction they thought Ashe’s captors had headed.
There were other buildings, or the remains of buildings, rising out of the jungle. Some of them were smaller than the dome, with three or four—at a greater distance—taller. And the taller ones had a certain similarity of outline which suggested that they must have had a common architectural origin.
It was one of those which Ross indicated now. “If they were headed for the nearest building across the treetops—that must be it.” He sighted along his pointed finger as if it were a rifle barrel.
Travis was listing all possible landmarks—though from ground level three-quarters of them would not be of much use. “To the right of that funnel-shaped turret, and the left of the pile of blocks. It may be several miles from here.”
To cut a trail along the ground was possible—using their weapons. But such action would certainly advertise their coming. If they wanted to locate the enemy—provided, of course, that the enemy was roosting in the structure Ross had just chosen—the process must entail a more complicated bit of trail craft. And that kind of scouting could not be done at night.
“There’s one way of checking,” Ross said, as if he were thinking aloud. “If we stay here until dark, we’d know.”
“How?”
“Lights. If we see any lights out there—they would be proof.”
“Slim chance. They’d be fools to use lights.”
“Could be trap-setting again,” Ross demurred. “More bait to pull us in.”
“That’s just guessing. How can we tell what makes their minds tick? We don’t even know what they are. You didn’t like the type who first wore this uniform.” Travis plucked at the blue fabric crossing his chest. “If this was their home planet, wouldn’t they be able to play games with us the way they did with you—by mental control?”
“Look out there!” Ross’s sweep of hand included half the landscape, the sea of untroubled jungle, the buildings rising in isolated islands out of it. “Whatever they had—it’s dead now—long dead. And maybe they’re dead, too—or back at the primitive stage. If they’re primitives, Ashe can handle them to a point; he’s been taught to do just that. I’ve seen him in action. Give me an hour up here past sundown. Then if we see no lights—I’ll go . . .”
Travis drew his weapon. Dark, or even heavy dusk, here might unleash things to lurk in the shadows along their trail. But he could understand Ross’s point, and they had a well-marked path to the ship.
“All right.”
They walked slowly around the dome waiting for the murk of evening to gather. And so they counted at least fifty more fantastic buildings, all different, some even appearing to defy the laws of gravity. Beyond them were those others, tall, thin, of a common mold. Were those the native structures and these others embassies, examples of trans-galactic architecture as Ashe had suggested? If not all of them were stripped, what a wealth of knowledge lay—
Travis was jerked out of speculation by a cry from Ross. There was still a reflection of sunlight in the sky at their backs. But—Murdock’s hunch had paid off. A wink of light flashed across the green from the first of the distant tall towers. Flashed on—off—on.
Was it meant to be an enticing signal?
They held a council of war in the ship, the outer hatch closed against the night, that simple precaution taught them by the desert world.
“It’ll be difficult to go straight through the tangle in that direction,” Renfry observed. “They’d be waiting for you to try it.”
“Sometimes the fastest way is around, not straight,” Ross agreed. He had a map drawn on a sheet of material from the aliens’ stores, the crosses and squares on it marking the various buildings they had sighted. “See here—they bunch, those tall towers. But here, and here, and here, are other buildings. Suppose we head for this one which looks like an outsized oil can, then beyond that there’s a pile of blocks. The one we want is between them. So—move to the funnel top, then start beyond to the block pile—and cut back. If we can make them believe we’re just searching everything in that direction, it’ll buy us time. Reach a point about here”—his forefinger dug into the surface of the improvised map—“and then do a right-about-face and go at top speed.” He looked up challengingly. “Anybody got a better idea?”
Renfry shrugged. “This is your party, you’ve had the training for this type of thing. But I’ll go along.”