His throat was parched with thirst. And he felt hungry.
In those packs, just inside the cage door, there was a pig bladder of water. There was some cooked pork, if it hadn't spoiled. And there were hides he could rig for shade.
At first he had just been trying to get out.
The very idea of being caged made him feel ill. Sicker even than the lack of water and food.
It was all so unknown. The last he really remembered was starting to charge the insect and being blown into the air. Then this. No, wait. There was something after he was first stunned.
He had started to come to, lying on something soft and smooth. He had seemed to be inside the insect. He had seen a huge something next to him. And then there was a sensation like breathing fire straight into his lungs that pulled every nerve short and threw him into a convulsion.
There was another glimpse of an occurrence. He had flickeringly regained consciousness for a few moments. He seemed to be tied to the top of the insect speeding across the plain. And then the back of his head bumped and the next he knew he was in here– in this cage!
He put it together. He had hurt the insect, but not fatally. It had eaten him, but then spit him up. It had carried him on its back to its lair.
But the real shock was the monster.
It was true, he knew now, that he had always been “too smart.” He had doubted his elders. He had doubted the Great Village and there it had been. He had doubted the monsters and here one was.
When he had come to and found himself looking up at that thing, his head had reeled. He felt himself literally bending the bars behind him to get away. A monster!
Eight or nine feet tall, maybe more. About three and a half feet wide. Two arms. Two legs. A shiny substance for a face and a long tube from the chin down to the chest. Glowing amber eyes behind the shiny front plate.
The ground shook as it approached. A thousand pounds? Maybe more.
Huge booted feet dented the earth.
And it had furry paws and long talons.
He had been certain it was going to eat him right then. But it hadn't. It had tied him up like a dog.
There was something strange about this monster's perceptions. Every time he had tried to get untied and out of the cage, the monster had shown up again. As though it could see when it wasn't around to see.
Possibly those little spheres had had something to do with it. The monster held them in its paws like small detachable eyes. One was up there now, glittering, way up in the corner of the cage. Like a little eye. The other one was out there stuck onto a nearby building side.
But the monster had caught him trying to get out before it planted those eyes.
What was this place? There was a constant rumble from somewhere, a muted roar similar to the one the insect had made. The thought of more of those insects chilled him.
There was a big stone basin in the middle of the cage, a few feet deep with steps up one side. Lots of sand was in the bottom of it. A grave? A place to roast meat? No, there were no charred sticks or ashes in it.
So there were monsters. When he stood in front of it, his face was just above the level of its belt buckle. Belt buckle? Yes, a shiny thing that held a belt together. It suddenly dawned on Jonnie that the monster was wearing a covering that wasn't its own skin. A slippery, shiny purple substance. It wasn't its own hide. Like clothes you'd cut out of a hide. Pants. A coat. A collar. It wore clothes.
Ornaments on the collar. And a device of some sort on the belt buckle. That device was stamped on his mind's eye, right now. It was a picture of ground on which stood small square blocks. Vertical shafts were going up from the square blocks. Out of the shafts seemed to be coming clouds of smoke, and smoke in curls lay all over the top of the picture. The idea of clouds of smoke stirred some memory in him, but he was too hungry and too thirsty and too hot to wrestle with it.
The ground under him began to shake in measured tread. He knew what this was.
The monster came to the door. It was carrying something. It came in and loomed over him. It threw down into the dirt some soft, gooey sticks of something. Then it just stood there.
Jonnie looked at the sticks. They weren't like anything he had ever seen.
The monster made motions, pointing from the sticks to his face. That failing, the monster took up a stick and squashed it against Jonnie's mouth, saying something in a rumbling roaring voice. A command.
Jonnie got it. This was supposed to be food.
He worked a bit of it around in his mouth and then swallowed it.
Abruptly and immediately he was violently ill. He felt like his whole stomach was going to rush back out of his mouth. Before he could control them, his limbs went into the beginning of a convulsion.
He spat. Too thirsty to have much saliva, he tried to get rid of the stuff, all of it, every bit of it, every tiny piece of the acid taste of it.
The monster just backed up and stood there staring at him.
“Water,” pleaded Jonnie, getting control of his shaking limbs and voice. “Please. Water.” Anything to wash this horrible stuff out.
He pointed to his mouth. “Water.”
The monster just went on standing there. The eyes back of the faceplate were slitted, glowing with an eerie fire.
Jonnie composed himself stoically. It was wrong to look weak and beg. There was such a thing as pride. He drew his face into stillness.
The monster leaned over and checked the collar and the flexirope, turned around and went back out, closed the gate with a firm clang, wired it shut and left.
The evening shadows were growing long.
Jonnie looked at his packs by the gate. They might as well be on the top of
Highpeak!
A cloak of misery settled over him. He had to assume Windsplitter was gravely injured or dead. And he had to assume that in a few days he himself probably would die of thirst or hunger.
Twilight came.
And then with a shock he realized
Chrissie's promise to find him would wind up in her certain death. He caved in.
The little bright eye, up in the corner of the cage, stared down unwinkingly.
Chapter 3
The following day, Terl probed around the disused quarters of the old Chinkos.
It was unpleasant work. The quarters were outside the pressurized Psychlo domes of the minesite and he had to wear a breathe-mask. The Chinkos were air-breathers. And while the quarters had been sealed off, a few hundred years of neglect and weather leaks had left their marks.
There were rows and rows of bookcases. Lines and lines of filing cabinets full of notes. Old scarred desks, rickety and frail to begin with, collapsing into themselves. Piles of junk in lockers. And everything filmed over with white dust. Good thing he didn't have to breathe it.
What funny beings the Chinkos had been. They were the Intergalactic
Mining Company's answer to some protests by more warlike and able worlds that mining was wrecking planetary ecologies. And, the company being plush and profitable at that time, some knothead of a director in Intergalactic's main office had created the culture and ethnology department, or C and E. Maybe it was originally named the ecological department, but Chinkos could paint, and some Intergalactic director's wear-the-claws wife had begun to make a private fortune selling Chinko work on other planets and got the name changed. There was very little that didn't show up in the secret files of the security department.
It was the strike the Chinkos had invented, not the corruption, that caused the final wipeout. Corruption at director level was very paws-off for security. A strike was not.
But the Chinkos here had been gone long before that, and this place looked it. What, after all, was worth culturing on this planet? There weren't enough indigenous populations left to bother with. And who had cared anyway? But like any bureaucracy, the Chinkos had been busy. Look at those hundreds of yards of cabinets and books.