<h2><SPAN name="DEATH_OF_A_SHIP" id="DEATH_OF_A_SHIP"></SPAN>2. DEATH OF A SHIP</h2>
<p>That sigh of displaced air was not as loud as a breeze, but it
echoed monstrously in Shann's ears. He could not believe in
his luck as that sound grew fainter, drew away into the valley
he had just left. With infinite caution he raised his head from
his arm, still hardly able to accept the fact that he had not
been sighted, that the Throgs and their flyer were gone.</p>
<p>But that black plate was spinning out into the sun haze. One
of the beetles might have suspected that there were Terran
fugitives and ordered a routine patrol. After all, how could
the aliens know that they had caught all but one of the Survey
party in camp? Though with all the Terran scout flitters
grounded on the field, the men dead in their bunks, the surprise
would seem to be complete.</p>
<p>As Shann moved, Taggi and Togi came to life also. They
had gone to earth with speed, and the man was sure that
both beasts had sensed danger. Not for the first time he knew
a burning desire for the formal education he had never had.
In camp he had listened, dragging out routine jobs in order
to overhear reports and the small talk of specialists keen on
their own particular hobbies. But so much of the information
Shann had thus picked up to store in a retentive memory he
had not understood and could not fit together. It had been as
if he were trying to solve some highly important puzzle with
at least a quarter of the necessary pieces missing, or with unrelated
bits from others intermixed. How much control did
a trained animal scout have over his furred or feathered assistants?<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></SPAN></span>
And was part of that mastery a mental rapport built
up between man and animal?</p>
<p>How well would the wolverines obey him now, especially
when they would not return to camp where cages stood
waiting as symbols of human authority? Wouldn't a trek into
the wilderness bring about a revolt for complete freedom? If
Shann could depend upon the animals, it would mean a great
deal. Not only would their superior hunting ability provide all
three with food, but their scouting senses, so much keener
than his, might erect a slender wall between life and death.</p>
<p>Few large native beasts had been discovered on Warlock
by the Terran explorers. And of those four or five different
species, none had proved hostile if unprovoked. But that did
not mean that somewhere back in the wild lands into which
Shann was heading there were no heretofore unknowns, perhaps
slyer and as vicious as the wolverines when they were
aroused to rage.</p>
<p>Then there were the "dreams," which had afforded the
prime source of camp discussion and dispute. Shann brushed
coarse sand from his boots and thought about the dreams. Did
they or did they not exist? You could start an argument any
time by making a definite statement for or against the peculiar
sort of dreaming reported by the first scout to set ship on this
world.</p>
<p>The Circe system, of which Warlock was the second of
three planets, had first been scouted four years ago by one
of those explorers traveling solo in Survey service. Everyone
knew that the First-In Scouts were a weird breed, almost a
mutation of Terran stock—their reports were rife with strange
observations.</p>
<p>So an alarming one concerning Circe (a yellow sun such
as Sol) and her three planets was not so rare. Witch, the
world nearest in orbit to Circe, was too hot for human occupancy
without drastic and too costly world-changing.
Wizard, the third out from the sun, was mostly bare rock and
highly poisonous water. But Warlock, swinging through space<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></SPAN></span>
between two forbidding neighbors, seemed to be just what
the settlement board ordered.</p>
<p>Then the Survey scout, even in the cocoon safety of his
well-armed ship, began to dream. And from those dreams
a horror of the apparently empty world developed, until he
fled the planet to preserve his sanity. There had been a second
visit to Warlock in check; worlds so well adapted to human
emigration could not be lightly thrown away. And this time
there was a negative report, no trace of dreams, no registration
of any outside influence on the delicate and complicated
equipment the ship carried. So the Survey team had been dispatched
to prepare for the coming of the first pioneers, and
none of them had dreamed either—at least, no more than the
ordinary dreams all men accepted.</p>
<p>Only there were those who pointed out that the seasons
had changed between the first and second visits to Warlock.
That first scout had planeted in summer; his successors had
come in fall and winter. They argued that the final release <ins class="corr" title="Original reads 'of world'">of the
world</ins> for settlement should not be given until the full year on
Warlock had been sampled.</p>
<p>But the pressure of Emigrant Control had forced their
hands, that and the fear of just what had eventually happened—an
attack from the Throgs. So they had speeded up the
process of declaring Warlock open. Only Ragnar Thorvald
had protested that decision up to the last and had gone back
to headquarters on the supply ship a month ago to make a
last appeal for a more careful study.</p>
<p>Shann stopped brushing the sand from the tough fabric
above his knee. Ragnar Thorvald.... He remembered back to
the port landing apron on another world, remembered with
a sense of loss he could not define. That had been about the
second biggest day of his short life; the biggest had come
earlier when they had actually allowed him to sign on for
Survey duty.</p>
<p>He had tumbled off the cross-continent cargo carrier, his
kit—a very meager kit—slung over his thin shoulder, a hot
eagerness expanding inside him until he thought that he could<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></SPAN></span>
not continue to throttle down that wild happiness. There was
a waiting starship. And he—Shann Lantee from the Dumps
of Tyr, without any influence or schooling—was going to blast
off in her, wearing the brown-green uniform of Survey!</p>
<p>Then he had hesitated uncertainly, had not quite dared
cross the few feet of apron lying between him and that compact
group wearing the same uniform—with a slight difference,
that of service bars and completion badges and rank
insignia—with the unconscious self-assurance of men who had
done this many times before.</p>
<p>But after a moment that whole group had become in his
own shy appraisal just a background for one man. Shann had
never before known in his pinched and limited childhood, his
lost boyhood, anyone who aroused in him hero worship. And
he could not have put a name to the new emotion that
added so suddenly to his burning desire to make good, not
only to hold the small niche in Survey which he had already
so painfully achieved, but to climb, until he could stand so in
such a group talking easily to that tall man, his uncovered
head bronze-yellow in the sunlight, his cool gray eyes pale
in his brown face.</p>
<p>Not that any of those wild dreams born in that minute or
two had been realized in the ensuing months. Probably those
dreams had always been as wild as the ones reported by the
first scout on Warlock. Shann grinned wryly now at the
short period of childish hope and half-confidence that he
could do big things. Only one Thorvald had ever noticed
Shann's existence in the Survey camp, and that had been
Garth.</p>
<p>Garth Thorvald, a far less impressive—one could say
"smudged"—copy of his brother. Swaggering with an arrogance
Ragnar never showed, Garth was a cadet on his first
mission, intent upon making Shann realize the unbridgeable
gulf between a labor hand and an officer-to-be. He had appeared
to know right from their first meeting just how to make
Shann's life a misery.</p>
<p>Now, in this slit of valley well away from the domes, Shann's<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></SPAN></span>
fists balled. He pounded them against the earth in a way he
had so often hoped to plant them on Garth's smoothly handsome
face, his well-muscled body. One didn't survive the
Dumps of Tyr without learning how to use fists, and boots,
and a list of tricks they didn't teach in any academy. He had
always been sure that he could take Garth if they mixed it
up. But if he had loosed the tight rein he had kept on his
temper and offered that challenge, he would have lost his
chance with Survey. Garth had proved himself able to talk his
way out of any scrape, even minor derelictions of duty, and
he far out-ranked Shann. The laborer from Tyr had had to
swallow all that the other could dish out and hope that on his
next assignment he would not be a member of young Thorvald's
team. Though, because of Garth Thorvald, Shann's
toll of black record marks had mounted dangerously high and
each day the chance for any more duty tours had grown
dimmer.</p>
<p>Shann laughed, and the sound was ugly. That was one
thing he didn't have to worry about any longer. There would
be no other assignments for him, the Throgs had seen to that.
And Garth ... well, there would never be a showdown between
them now. He stood up. The Throg ship had disappeared;
they could push on.</p>
<p>He found a break in the cliff wall which was climbable,
and he coaxed the wolverines after him. When they stood on
the heights from which the falls tumbled, Taggi and Togi
rubbed against him, cried for his attention. They, too, appeared
to need the reassurance they got from contact with
him, for they were also fugitives on this alien world, the only
representatives of their kind.</p>
<p>Since he did not have any definite goal in view, Shann continued
to be guided by the stream, following its wanderings
across a plateau. The sun was warm, so he carried his jacket
slung across one shoulder. Taggi and Togi ranged ahead,
twice catching skitterers, which they devoured voraciously.
A shadow on a sun-baked rock sent the Terran skidding for
cover until he saw that it was cast by one of the questing<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></SPAN></span>
falcons from the upper peaks. But that shook his confidence,
so he again sought cover, ashamed at his own carelessness.</p>
<p>In the late afternoon he reached the far end of the plateau,
faced a climb to peaks which still bore cones of snow, now
tinted a soft peach by the sun. Shann studied that possible
path and distrusted his own powers to take it without proper
equipment or supplies. He must turn either north or south,
though he would then have to abandon a sure water supply in
the stream. Tonight he would camp where he was. He had
not realized how tired he was until he found a likely half-cave
in the mountain wall and crawled in. There was too
much danger in fire here; he would have to do without that
first comfort of his kind.</p>
<p>Luckily, the wolverines squeezed in beside him to fill the
hole. With their warm furred bodies sandwiching him, Shann
dozed, awoke, and dozed again, listening to night sounds—the
screams, cries, hunting calls, of the Warlock wilds. Now
and again one of the wolverines whined and moved uneasily.</p>
<p>Fingers of sun picked at Shann through a shaft among the
rocks, striking his eyes. He moved, blinked blearily awake,
unable for the first few seconds to understand why the smooth
plasta wall of his bunk had become rough red stone. Then he
remembered. He was alone and he threw himself frantically
out of the cave, afraid the wolverines had wandered off.
Only both animals were busy clawing under a boulder with a
steady persistence which argued there was a purpose behind
that effort.</p>
<p>A sharp sting on the back of one hand made that purpose
only too clear to Shann, and he retreated hurriedly from the
vicinity of the excavation. They had found an earth-wasp's
burrow and were hunting grubs, naturally arousing the rightful
inhabitants to bitter resentment.</p>
<p>Shann faced the problem of his own breakfast. He had had
the immunity shots given to all members of the team, and he
had eaten game brought in by exploring parties and labeled
"safe." But how long he could keep to the varieties of native
food he knew was uncertain. Sooner or later he must experiment<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></SPAN></span>
for himself. Already he drank the stream water without
the aid of purifiers, and so far there had been no ill results
from that necessary recklessness. Now the stream suggested
fish. But instead he chanced upon another water inhabitant
which had crawled up on land for some obscure purpose of its
own. It was a sluggish scaled thing, an easy victim to his club,
with thin, weak legs it could project at will from a finned and
armor-plated body.</p>
<p>Shann offered the head and guts to Togi, who had abandoned
the wasp nest. She sniffed in careful investigation and
then gulped. Shann built a small fire and seared the firm
greenish flesh. The taste was flat, lacking salt, but the food
eased his emptiness. Enheartened, he started south, hoping
to find water sometime during the morning.</p>
<p>By noon he had his optimism justified with the discovery of
a spring, and the wolverines had brought down a slender-legged
animal whose coat was close in shade to the dusky
purple of the vegetation. Smaller than a Terran deer, its head
bore, not horns, but a ridge of stiffened hair rising in a point
some twelve inches about the skull dome. Shann haggled off
some ragged steaks while the wolverines feasted in earnest,
carefully burying the head afterward.</p>
<p>It was when Shann knelt by the spring pool to wash
that he caught the clamor of the clak-claks. He had seen or
heard nothing of the flyers since he had left the lake valley.
But from the noise now rising in an earsplitting volume, he
thought there was a sizable colony near-by and that the inhabitants
were thoroughly aroused.</p>
<p>He crept on his hands and knees to near-by brush cover,
heading toward the source of that outburst. If the claks were
announcing a Throg scouting party, he wanted to know it.</p>
<p>Lying flat, with branches forming a screen over him, the
Terran gazed out on a stretch of grassland which sloped at
a fairly steep angle to the south and which must lead to a portion
of countryside well below the level he was now traversing.</p>
<p>The clak-claks were skimming back and forth, shrieking
their staccato war cries. Following the erratic dashes of their<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></SPAN></span>
flight formation, Shann decided that whatever they railed
against was on the lower level, out of his sight from that point.
Should he simply withdraw, since the disturbance was not
near him? Prudence dictated that; yet still he hesitated.</p>
<p>He had no desire to travel north, or to try and scale the
mountains. No, south was his best path, and he should be very
sure that route was closed before he retreated.</p>
<p>Since any additional fuss the clak-claks might make on
sighting him would be undistinguished in their now general
clamor, the Terran crawled on to where tall grass provided a
screen at the top of the slope. There he stopped short, his
hands digging into the earth in sudden braking action.</p>
<p>Below, the ground steamed from a rocket flare-back, grasses
burned away from the fins of a small scoutship. But even as
Shann rose to one knee, his shout of welcome choked in his
throat. One of those fins sank, canting the ship crookedly,
preventing any new take-off. And over the crown of a low hill
to the west swung the ominous black plate of a Throg flyer.</p>
<p>The Throg ship came up in a burst of speed, and Shann
waited tensely for some countermove from the scout. Those
small speedy Terran ships were prudently provided with
weapons triply deadly in proportion to their size. He was sure
that the Terran ship could hold its own against the Throg,
even eliminate the enemy. But there was no fire from the
slanting pencil of the scout. The Throg circled warily, obviously
expecting a trap. Twice it darted back in the direction
from which it had come. As it returned from its second
retreat, another of its kind showed, a black coin dot against
the amber of the sky.</p>
<p>Shann felt sick inside. Now the Terran scout had lost any
advantage and perhaps all hope. The Throgs could box the
other in, cut the downed ship to pieces with their energy
beams. He wanted to crawl away and not witness this last
disaster for his kind. But some stubborn core of will kept him
where he was.</p>
<p>The Throgs began to circle while beneath them the flock
of clak-claks screamed and dived at the slanting nose of the<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></SPAN></span>
Terran ship. Then that same slashing energy he had watched
quarter the camp snapped from the far plate across the
stricken scout. The man who had piloted her, if not dead
already (which might account for the lack of defense), must
have fallen victim to that. But the Throg was going to make
very sure. The second flyer halted, remaining poised long
enough to unleash a second bolt—dazzling any watching eyes
and broadcasting a vibration to make Shann's skin crawl
when the last faint ripple reached his lookout post.</p>
<p>What happened then the overconfident Throg was not prepared
to take. Shann cried out, burying his face on his arm,
as pinwheels of scarlet light blotted out normal sight. There
was an explosion, a deafening blast. He cowered, blind, unable
to hear. Then, rubbing at his eyes, he tried to see what
had happened.</p>
<p>Through watery blurs he made out the Throg ship, not
swinging now in serene indifference to Warlock's gravity, but
whirling end over end across the sky as might a leaf tossed in
a gust of wind. Its rim caught against a rust-red cliff, it rebounded
and crumpled. Then it came down, smashing perhaps
half a mile away from the smoking crater in which lay
the mangled wreckage of the Terran ship. The disabled scout
pilot must have played a last desperate game, making of his
ship bait for a trap.</p>
<p>The Terran had taken one Throg with him. Shann rubbed
again at his eyes, just barely able to catch a glimpse of the
second ship flashing away westward. Perhaps it was only his
impaired sight, but it appeared to him that the Throg followed
an erratic path, either as if the pilot feared to be
caught by a second shot, or because that ship had also suffered
some injury.</p>
<p>Acid smoke wreathed up from the valley making Shann
retch and cough. There could be no survivor from the Terran
scout, and he did not believe that any Throg had lived to
crawl free of the crumpled plate. But there would be other
beetles swarming here soon. They would not dare to leave
the scene unsearched. He wondered about that scout. Had<span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></SPAN></span>
the pilot been aiming for the Survey camp, the absence of
any rider beam from there warning him off so that he made
the detour which brought him here? Or had the Throgs tried
to blast the Terran ship in the upper atmosphere, crippling it,
making this a forced landing? But at least this battle had cost
the Throgs, settling a small portion of the Terran debt for the
lost camp.</p>
<p>The length of time between Shann's sighting of the
grounded ship and the attack by the Throgs had been so
short that he had not really developed any strong hope of
rescue to be destroyed by the end of the crippled ship. On the
other hand, seeing the Throgs take a beating had exploded
his subconscious acceptance of their superiority. He might
not have even the resources of a damaged scout at his command.
But he did have Taggi, Togi, and his own brain. Since
he was fated to permanent exile on Warlock, there might just
be some way to make the beetles pay for that.</p>
<p>He licked his lips. Real action against the aliens would take
a lot of planning. Shann would have to know more about
what made a Throg a Throg, more than all the wild stories he
had heard over the years. There <i>had</i> to be some way a Terran
could move effectively against a beetle-head. And he had a
lot of time, maybe the rest of his life to work out a few answers.
That Throg ship lying wrecked at the foot of the cliff
... perhaps he could do a little investigating before any rescue
squad arrived. Shann decided such a move was worth the
try and whistled to the wolverines.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><SPAN name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></SPAN></span></p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />