“What manner of trap?” he signed.
“You like here—happy—” Gorgol was plainly groping for signs to convey a complicated idea. “No go—want to stay—”
Storm sat up. “You no want to stay?” he asked.
Gorgol looked about him again. “Good—” He touched the remains of the fruit. “Good!” He drew an exaggeratedly deep breath of the perfume-laden air. “Feel good!” He gave an all embracing twirl of his fingers. “But—not mine—” He ran those fingers through the pine needles. “Not mine—” He flicked the fingers to include the other gardens about them. “No Gorgol place here—not hold Gorgol—” Again he was trying to make limited signs explain more abstract thought. “Your place—hold you—”
The Norbie had something! That alerting signal far inside Storm was clamoring more loudly. What better bait for a trap than a slice of a man’s home planet served up just when he believed that world lost forever? Even if a trap were not intended, it was here just the same. He got to his feet, tramped determinedly away from the pine.
“Where’s that built-up door of yours?” he demanded harshly over his shoulder, refusing to look back at that wedge of temptation set in familiar green.
“You think Gorgol’s right?”
“You don’t think about things such as that,” Storm answered out of the depths of experience, “you feel! Maybe those who built this place didn’t intend it for a trap—” He slapped Rain’s flank, making the stallion move from the grass to the roadway that separated the small piece of Terra from its neighbor.
“Surrraaaaa—” Storm shouted that aloud, an imperative summons that he had only had to use once or twice in their close comradeship. And his voice awoke echoes above and around the gardens, while birds flew and flower-colored insects floated, disturbed, to settle again.
Leading Rain by the head-stall, the Terran started down the path. The sooner he was away from that bit of his native earth the better. Already a new bitterness was beginning to fester in him and he turned it against the enemy outside. So the Xiks thought they had finished Terra? Perhaps—but they had not finished Terrans!
He hurried, deliberately twisting and turning from path to path, trying to muddle his own trail, so that he could not easily find his way back to that pine-roofed spot. Twice more he called the dune cat. Hing pattered along behind him, stopping now and then to sniff inquisitively or dig, but perfectly willing to move, while the other horses followed Rain. They threaded the narrow roadways between gardens—such gardens. Twice Storm saw foliage he recognized, and both times they were samples from widely separated worlds.
“Left through here”—Logan came up beside him—“around the end of this water place, then behind the one with the scarlet feather trees. I wonder what kind of a world those are from? See—now you’re facing it.”
Storm followed his directions. The scarlet plumes of the trees arched high against the duller red of the stone wall of the mountain interior. And the black path led directly to an archway that had been carefully bricked up with blocks about a foot square. The Terran could see none of the black sealing material, unless it was used as mortar to set those bricks. Under his hands the wall was immovable, and he examined it carefully, wondering what tool there was among their supplies that could best be used to attack it.
Would the points of their belt knives make any impression on those cracks? He could turn on the blaster, but he was loathe to use up the charge in the most potent weapon they had. Best try knives first.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, his hands slippery with sweat, his control over his temper hard pressed, Storm admitted that knives were not the answer. That left the blaster. It was not a disrupter, of course. But set to highest power it should act upon the blocks, if not upon the stuff that held them together.
Sending the rest of the party back, Storm lay on the path, resting the barrel of the Xik weapon on several stones so that its sights were aligned with a point in the middle of the wall, directly below the highest rise of the arch. He pressed the release button and fought the answering kick of the weapon, holding it steady as Xik-made lightning struck full on the blocks.
For seconds, perhaps a full minute, there was a flareback that beat at Storm with a wave of blast heat. Then a core of yellow showed at the center point of the beam, the yellow spreading outward in a circle. The color deepened. Harsh fumes spreading from that contact point made Storm cough, his eyes stream. But he held the blaster steady for another long moment before he started to depress the barrel slowly, drawing the yellow mark down in a line toward the floor.
As the light began to pulse, he knew that the charge was nearing exhaustion. What if he had guessed wrong and thrown away the blaster without achieving their freedom? Storm held the weapon tensely while those pulsations grew more ragged, until the pressure of his finger on the firing button brought no response.
To his vast disappointment the wall, save for that heat scar, looked as stanch as it had been on his first examination. He could not wait to know the truth. Reversing the blaster so its stock was a club, he ran forward in spite of the lingering heat, to thrust the butt into the scar with all the force of his weight and strength behind it.
There was a shock that made the Terran grunt as the metal stock met the blocks. But it wasn’t the blaster that gave. A whole section where the flame had licked moved outward—perhaps not very much. But he had felt it give. Heartened he struck again. The section of blocks broke apart, not along the joints where they had been mortared together, but in the middle of the stone squares themselves—proving once again that the building material of the unknown aliens was more enduring than the products of nature.
Before he attacked the second time Storm allowed the wall to cool. The fumes of the ray were gone, almost as if they had been sucked away or absorbed by some quality in the air of the garden cavern. A bush with a lacy covering quivered until its iridescent leaves shook, and Surra, her fur ruffled, her eyes glinting wild and feral, crawled from under it to the roadway and stood panting before Storm.
He rubbed behind her ears, along the line of her pointed fox jaw, talking to her in that crooning speech that soothed her best. She was excited, overstimulated, and he marveled that she had answered his call. One could never be sure with the felines, their independence kept them from being servants—companions, yes, and war comrades, but not servants to man. Each time Surra obeyed some order or summons Storm knew that obedience was by her will and not his. And he could never be sure whether his hold on her would continue. Now, under his gentling, she softened, purred, dabbing at his hands with a claw-sheathed paw. The alien trap had not taken Surra either.
They plundered the fruit gardens for another meal, filled their canteens with purified water from a miniature waterfall in one of the lake lands and waited. Until, at last, with the three of them working, they were able to handle the cooled blocks and break their way through the barrier.
Logan had been right in his surmise. No tunnel reached before them, only the mouth of another cave, and, beyond that, the light of Arzoran day. They led the horses one by one through that break, and Gorgol, who had gone out on a short scout, returned, his hands flashing in an excited message.
“This place I know! Here I slew the evil flyer when I went on my man hunt. There is a trail from this place—”
They came out in a valley so narrow that it was merely a ravine between two towering heights. And the cut was so barren of vegetation that the sun trapped within those walls made a glaring furnace of the depths, so that the contrast between this sere outer world and the delights of the cavern was even more pronounced. On impulse Storm turned back to rebuild the barrier they had broken through, piling the crumbling blocks of stone across the opening. Logan joined in, his healing lips no longer so puffed that they could not shape a smile.