Hosteen lurched away from the now solid wall and started along the other arm of the balcony, searching for a way down to the platform. In the end, he found the exit, an unobtrusive opening back against the hall wall, giving on a series of notched steps. He held the guard rail of that steep stair, noting with a fierce joy that the lack of feeling in his hand was ebbing—though to raise it was still like trying to raise a leaden weight attached to his wrist.
Now he was on ground level, picking a way among the machines to the platform. The majority of the installations were encased in block coverings, and these towered well above Hosteen’s head as he hurried down the aisle.
There was no dust here as there had been in some of the tunnels, no sign that this chamber had been in existence for eons, perhaps abandoned for centuries. Yet, he was sure all of this was a part of the vanished Sealed Cave civilization.
Hosteen had almost reached the platform when he paused, took cover. A hum came from ahead, rising from a low note, hardly to be distinguished from the general voice of the machines, to a sound more impressive than his own shouts on the balcony—as if this sound was normal here, the voice of man not.
On the tube encrusted board another design had glowed into life. First blue—then white, bright enough to make him cover his eyes. When he looked again, there was a man on the platform, facing the board!
“Logan!” His lips shaped the name, but luckily he did not call aloud, for that was not Logan.
The stranger was taller than Hosteen’s half-brother, and he was not wearing Norbie dress. In fact, those green coveralls were familiar. That was the Service Center uniform Hosteen himself had worn for over a year at the Rehab station, where the homeless forces of Terrans had been held until they could either be assigned to new worlds or put through pyscho-conditioning.
Slowly the Terran edged around the boxed installation. The LB had been transporting Rehab men when it had crashed out on the mountain. Could this be a survivor, driven into the maze as Logan and he had been? Yet, the actions of the man on the platform were not those of a lost and bewildered castaway; they were the assured motions of a tech on duty.
His head turned from side to side as if he studied the twists and turns of that web of tubing. Then he moved half face to Hosteen.
Unmistakable human features, but painted over with the patterns of a Norbie Drummer—red circles about the eyes, a complicated series of lines on each cheek—just as Hosteen had seen on the faces of the warriors of the Blue. And slung about the other’s neck was a small “medicine” tambour. An off-worlder who united in his person the make-up of a primitive medicine man and the actions of one understanding and tending the complex controls of a vanished civilization!
The stranger stretched out both hands and moved them across a line of small bulbs in a carefully governed sweep. To Hosteen’s watching, he did not actually touch any, merely passed the flat of a palm over them.
And the board answered. That line of yellow light bubbling in the vertical shaft broke through whatever barrier had controlled it and threaded up and out through a dozen, two dozen filaments, each branching and rebranching until the lighted whole was the skeleton of a leafless tree. The soaring light reached the very top of the board. And around him Hosteen was conscious of an ingathering of energy, a poising of power to be launched.
Far away, but still awesomely loud, there was a clap of thunder, pounding on in a series of receding rolls. Hosteen cowered against the machine.
He closed his eyes for a second and felt as if he stood in the center of a storm’s full fury. He could sense, if he could not see, the savage lash of lightning across a night-black sky under clouds as heavy as the rocks over which they clustered. And, small, weak man-thing that he was, he was, he could only seek shelter from elements to which man was nothing.
Yet, when he opened his eyes again, there was only a man in a faded coverall watching a light pulse through a transparent tube. The stranger’s hand swept again over the bulbs. And the tree began to die, the yellow shrinking, retreating along the filaments, leaving the tubes empty. Once more it was only in the trunk from which the branches arose.
The storm ended. But the stranger was still intent upon the board. He paced along it, sometimes pausing for long moments, inspecting this and that pattern of webbing. Once or twice he put out a finger to trace some loop of tube. And Hosteen thought that perhaps he was unfamiliar with the function of that particular hookup.
At last he came to the end of the platform nearest the Terran and stepped up upon a small dais. To his right now was another line of bulbs. Holding his hands a foot apart before those, the man brought palm against palm in sharp clap, as if applauding some triumph. Then—
Hosteen stepped away from the shadow of the machine that had sheltered him. The dais was empty, just as empty as if the man was as immaterial as that which had hunted them in the dry valley.
The Terran could accept his journey via the spiral path. But this was something else, more akin to the old magic that his grandfather had talked of before Terra became a roasted cinder.
He made himself mount the platform, go to the dais. There was no break in the flooring, no possible exit for a solid human body. Just as he had recoiled in spirit from the machines in the hall, so was he now repulsed by this device. Yet, as he had been impelled to follow the spiral path in the valley, so now his hands moved against his will. He copied the gesture the stranger had used, palm met palm in a half-hearted clap.
Again the terrible giddiness of being nowhere on earth, or in any dimension known to his species, held him. But a spark of triumph battled fear—again he had used one of the tricks of this place boldly.
Hosteen opened his eyes. Ahead was daylight—not the artificial light of a cavern but true and honest sunlight. He was in a mountain tunnel heading to the outer world.
A murmur of sound ahead, and Hosteen dropped to his hands and knees, making the rest of that journey with all the caution of his Commando training. Daylight—the hour was well into morning he believed. Yet, there was no glare as there had been in the valley of the wedge or that was common in the country outside the wall of the Blue.
Had the devices of the Sealed Cave people put some film of protection between this taboo world and the blistering Dry sun? Had the same knowledge that had bored the tunnels and the caverns also brought weather control to the open? But this was no time for speculations.
Hosteen lay belly-flat at the tunnel mouth, then chose a crab-like crawl to take him out into the open and behind one of the abutments guarding the doorway.
Norbies were drawn up downslope, not in serried rows but in small groupings, each fronted by a flagged truce pole, headed by a Chief and a Drummer. Such a meeting of clans and tribes would amaze any settler. There were Norbies standing clan next to clan down there between whom there had been ceremonial blood feuds from long before the first Survey scout ship had discovered Arzor for Confederation star maps. Only a very big medicine could bring about such a truce against all ancient custom.
Shosonna, Nitra, Warpt, Ranag from the south—even Gousakla, and they were a coastal people who must have crossed a thousand miles at the worst season of the year to appear here. There were other totems of both clan and tribe Hosteen had never seen or heard described.
Counting, Hosteen made that tally of different poles more than a hundred, and he knew he could not see them all without emerging from his hiding place. By rude reckoning, every tribe on this continent must be represented!
The Drummers were busy, the beat of their individual tambours blending into a rhythm that stirred the blood. Lean yellow bodies swayed back and forth, answering that call, though not a booted foot stirred. Hosteen could smell the fug of burned vegetation, could sight trails of smoke. Only recently the whips of lightning had again been laid about the shoulders of the mountain.