Together they forced the horses back into the mouth of the tunnel. Storm glanced back despairingly at that window on the outer world. But there was no time to close it.
“Get down!” He set the example, throwing himself flat on the floor, and saw Gorgol and Logan obey. “Your eyes! Cover your eyes!” He shouted that to Logan, signed it to the Norbie. Then he lay waiting, his face buried in the crook of his arm.
The heartlessness of the aliens was never more plain than in this move. They would wipe out the pocket of Nitras right enough—but they would also doom most of the living things in this valley into the bargain. The Terran grinned without mirth as he remembered those outlaws riding for their lives. If he knew Xiks they would hardly delay long enough to give their colleagues a good start to safety. The chance for those riders to survive was so slender as to be practically nonexistent.
Surra had flattened herself beside Storm, and Hing was endeavoring to dig her way under him, scraping fruitlessly at the rock floor and whimpering, until he reached out an arm and gathered her in between him and the cat. He heard the horses stamp, but they did not venture out of the tunnel mouth where Logan had driven them. It was as if they were as alert to the warning in Storm’s mind as the other animals.
He had nothing to guide him except those army reports. But those, using the terse language of such communications, had been circulated widely among all Commando outfits where the men or beast and man teams engaged in mopping-up activities might chance upon the new and horrific weapon. And service reports were not prone to exaggerate.
Why were the effects of the thing so much worse on non-Xiks? How long now before it would blow? Storm tried counting off seconds in the dark and was not aware he was doing it aloud until he heard a sound that could only be a chuckle coming from Logan’s direction.
“I hope you’re not makin’ us pull this burrow trick for nothin’,” the other remarked. “How long before the world comes apart?”
His words might have been a cue. For their world, dark and stuffy as it was, did come apart then. Storm could never later describe what happened to him in that space of time lifted out of the ordinary stream of seconds, minutes, hours. The experience was like being caught up in a giant’s hand, rolled into a conveniently sized ball, and tossed up in the air to be caught again. There was no thinking—no feeling—nothing but emptiness, with himself blown through it—on and on—and on—
And it was not wholly physical, that assault upon the stable foundations of his small portion of the planet. One part of Storm clung to the solid cave floor as an anchor for the part that whirled and flew. And inside he was torn because he so clung.
How long did it last? Was he unconscious toward the end of that weird struggle between substance and nonsubstance? Did the rocks about them keep them safe by turning the worst of the unknown radiation? He only knew that they did endure the backlash and lived.
Again he felt the warmth coming from Surra through the icy chill that blanketed the cave. He shrank from the scratching of Hing’s claws as she squirmed and kicked.
For a long moment he lay still, as an insect might cower beneath a rock if it could foresee that in a moment that shelter would be lifted and it would be exposed to unforeseeable danger. Then, in the midst of his blinding, unreasoning panic, a spark of resolution sprouted. The Terran lifted his head from his arm and for a terrified minute thought he was blind. For there was no more small slit of sky—nothing but thick darkness—a chill darkness filled with the dead air native to this place.
Storm sat up, feeling Surra rise with him. She growled and spat. And then, out of the dark, Logan spoke with determined lightness:
“I think somebody just slammed the door!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Storm used the torch, aiming it at the mouth of the cave. His mind refused to accept what his eyes reported—there was no longer any opening there. It had been closed once by the landslip—but that had been a different matter, an affair of earth and stone. This was a black oozing over that same earth and stone, a thick stuff in drips and runnels forming a complete curtain across.
“What in the—?”
The Terran heard Logan’s amazed demand as he walked closer to that strange wall, focusing the torch on the widest of the black streaks. Storm could recognize the stuff now. It was the substance of that wedge rail the Survey party had trailed into the valley, the stuff that had walled the tunnel of the entrance gorge. Yet now it had been melted as tar might have softened and run from the breath of a blaster. Though he had not noticed it earlier, the building material of the long-ago aliens must have rimmed this cave, to be released by the backlash of the Xik weapon!
Storm handed the torch to Gorgol with a gesture to keep it trained on the widest of the surface streams. He rammed the stock of the blaster against that black runnel with all the strength he could put into a swinging blow. The light alloy of the butt gave off a metallic ring, rebounded with force enough to jar Storm back a step or two, yet the black stream showed no dent or mark.
The Terran reversed the weapon, set its dial to maximum and pressed the trigger. A point of vivid, eye-searing flame bored into the black stain for an instant, until Storm flicked the control. Again there was no impression on the alien coating.
“Nothing happened?” Logan limped around Gorgol to examine the wall for himself. “What is that anyway?”
Storm explained almost absently. He had taken the torch back from Gorgol and was pacing along the front of the cave. Some trick of chance—or could it be that the ancient owners had prepared a booby trap for the unwary?—had cemented the barrier all the way across. Those black streams had run in just the places where they could best weld together rocks and earth. Perhaps Hing might be able to dig her way to freedom, but no effort could clear a large enough space to release the rest of them.
Which left—the tunnel.
Storm traversed the new wall for a second time, hoping against the evidence of his eyes to find some break they could enlarge. He met Logan face to face as he turned back.
“I still don’t see what happened—or why!” The Arzoran studied the wall beside him. “If they had turned that little machine of theirs on us, yes. But the tube was facin’ the other way—and a mile off at that!”
“The Confed Lab men after the first experiment said the results were a matter of vibration. And this stuff has been molded like plasta-flesh. Must have turned every bit of it in this valley fluid for a time—”
“I hope,” Logan stood away from the wall, “that it caught every one of those devils stickin’ in it tight! No chance of breakin’ through this?”
Storm shook his head. “The blaster was our best hope. And you saw what happened when I tried that.”
“All right. Then we’ll have to go explorin’. And I would suggest we move now. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it, but there’s been a change in our air.”
That quality of staleness that Storm had met on his first imprisonment here was indeed very noticeable. And using the blaster had not helped to clear the atmosphere any. They would have to try the tunnel or face a very unpleasant death where they were.
Packing their supplies on the horses, with Surra padding in the lead beside Storm, they moved reluctantly into the tunnel. The Terran kept his torch on the lowest unit of its force. No use exhausting its charge when he had only one spare cartridge. And by its light they saw that they were out of the natural roughness of the cave into a cutting, which, if it had not been bored by intelligent beings, had been surfaced by them, for the walls changed abruptly from the red stone of the natural rock to the black of the alien material.