“Not with any of my crews or equipment you ain't, “ said Char.
Terl heaved his mammoth bulk off the seat and crossed the creaking floor to the berthing hatch.
“You're as crazy as a nebula of crap, “ said Char.
The two Chamco brothers got back into their game and intently laser-blasted the entrapped mayflies into smoky puffs, one by one.
Char looked at the empty door. The security chief knew no Psychlo could go up into those mountains. Terl really was crazy. There was deadly uranium up there.
But Terl, rumbling along a hallway to his room, did not consider himself crazy. He was being very clever as always. He had started the rumors so no questions would get out of hand when he began to put into motion the personal plans that would make him wealthy and powerful and, almost as important, dig him out of this accursed planet.
The man-things were the perfect answer. All he needed was just one and then he could get the others. His campaign had begun and begun very well, he thought.
He went to sleep gloating over how clever he was.
Chapter 2
It was a good day for a funeral, only it seemed there wasn't going to be one.
Dark, stormy-looking clouds were creeping in from the west, shredded by the snow-speckled peaks, leaving only a few patches of blue sky showing.
Jonnie Goodboy Tyler stood beside his horse at the upper end of the wide mountain meadow and looked with discontent upon the sprawled and decaying village.
His father was dead and he ought to be properly buried. He hadn't died of the red blotches and there was no question of somebody else catching it. His bones had just crumbled away. So there was no excuse not to properly bury him. Yet there was no sign of anyone doing so.
Jonnie had gotten up in the dawn dark, determined to choke down his grief and go about his correct business. He had yelled up Windsplitter, the fastest of his several horses, put a cowhide rope on his nose, and gone down through the dangerous defiles to the lower plain and with a lot of hard riding and herding pushed five wild cattle back up to the mountain meadow. He had then bashed out the brains of the fattest of them and ordered his Aunt Ellen to push the barbecue fire together and get meat cooking.
Aunt Ellen hadn't cared for the orders. She had broken her sharpest rock, she said, and couldn't skin and cut the meat, and certain men hadn't dragged in any firewood lately.
Jonnie Goodboy had stood very tall and looked at her. Among people who were average height, Jonnie Goodboy stood half a head taller, a muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his twenty years. He had just stood there, wind tangling his corn-yellow hair and beard, looking at her with his ice-blue eyes. And Aunt Ellen had gone and found some wood and had put a stone to work, even though it was a very dull one. He could see her now, down there below him, wrapped in the smoke of slow-roasting meat, busy.
There ought to be more activity in the village, Jonnie thought. The last big funeral he had seen was when he was about five years old, when Smith the mayor had died. There had been songs and preaching and a feast and it had ended with a dance by moonlight. Mayor Smith had been put in a hole in the ground and the dirt filled in over him, and while the two cross-sticks of the marker were long since gone, it had been a proper respectful funeral. More recently they had just dumped the dead in the black rock gulch below the waterpool and let the coyotes clean them up.
Well, that wasn't the way you went about it, Jonnie told himself. Not with his father, anyway.
He spun on his heel and with one motion went aboard Windsplitter. The thump of his hard bare heel sent the horse down toward the courthouse.
He passed by the decayed ruins of cabins on the outskirts. Every year they caved in further. For a long time anybody needing a building log hadn't cut any trees: they had just stripped handy existing structures. But the logs in these cabins were so eaten up and rotted now, they hardly even served as firewood.
Windsplitter picked his way down the weed-grown track, walking watchfully to avoid stepping on ancient and newly discarded food bones and trash.
He twitched his ear toward a distant wolf howl from up in a mountain glen.
The smell of new blood and the meat smoke must be pulling the wolves down, thought Jonnie, and he hefted his kill-club from where it dangled by a thong into his palm. He'd lately seen a wolf right down in the cabins, prowling around for bones, or maybe even a puppy or a child. Even a decade ago it wouldn't have happened. But every year there were fewer and fewer people.
Legend said that there had been a thousand in the valley, but Jonnie thought that was probably an exaggeration. There was plenty of food. The wide plains below the peaks were overrun with wild cattle, wild pigs, and bands of horses. The ranges above were alive with deer and goats. And even an unskilled hunter had no trouble getting food. There was plenty of water due to the melting snows and streams, and the little patches of vegetables would thrive if anybody planted and tended them.
No, it wasn't food. It was something else. Animals reproduced, it seemed, but man didn't. At least not to any extent. The death rate and the birth rate were unbalanced, with death the winner. Even when children were born they sometimes had only one eye or one lung or one hand and had to be left out in the icy night. Monsters were unwanted things. All life was overpowered by a fear of monsters.
Maybe it was this valley.
When he was seven he had asked his father about it. “But maybe people can't live in this place, “ he had said.
His father had looked at him wearily. “There were people in some other valleys, according to the legends. They're all gone, but there are still some of us.“
He had not been convinced. Jonnie had said, “There's all those plains down there and they're full of animals. Why don't we go live there?”
Jonnie had always been a bit of a trial. Too smart, the elders had said. Always stirring things up. Questions, questions. And did he believe what he was told? Even by older men who knew a lot better? No. Not Jonnie Goodboy
Tyler. But his father had not brought any of this up. He had just said wearily, “There's no timber down there to build cabins. “
This hadn't explained anything, so Jonnie had said, “I bet I could find something down there to build a cabin with. “
His father had knelt down, patient for once, and said, “You're a good boy, Jonnie. And your mother and I love you very much. But nobody could build anything that would keep out the monsters. “
Monsters, monsters. All his life Jonnie had been hearing about the monsters. He'd never seen one. But he held his peace. The oldsters believed in monsters, so they believed in monsters.
But thinking of his father brought an unwelcome wetness to his eyes.
And he was almost unseated as his horse reared. A string of foot-long mountain rats had rushed headlong from a cabin and hit Windsplitter's legs.
What you get for dreaming, Jonnie snapped to himself. He put Windsplitter's four hoofs back down on the path and drummed him forward the last few yards to the courthouse.
Chapter 3
Chrissie was standing there, her leg being hugged as always by her younger sister.
Jonnie Goodboy ignored her and looked at the courthouse. The old, old building was the only one to have a stone foundation and stone floor. Somebody had said it was a thousand years old, and though Jonnie didn't believe it, the place sure looked it.
Even its seventeenth roof was as sway-backed as an overpacked horse. There wasn't a log in the upper structure that wasn't gaping with worm holes. The windows were mainly caved in like eyeholes in a rotted skull. The stone walkway close to it was worn half a foot deep by the bare horny feet of scores of generations of villagers coming here to be tried and punished in the olden days when somebody had cared. In his lifetime Jonnie had never seen a trial, or a town meeting for that matter.