He paused and rubbed his hand across his face. “The other two of us, Widders and I, we didn’t know what to think. Dean and Zolti, they were the big brains. Both of them said we were in a place where there was something big from the old times. And Dean—we were all out of Rehab, you know.” He glanced almost furtively at Hosteen.
“For all Terrans there was Rehab—afterwards,” the Amerindian replied soberly.
“Well, Dean, he—somehow he didn’t want to go back, back to the way he had had it before the war, I mean. He’d been pretty important in the Service, and he liked that. Maybe he was able to cover up in Rehab, but after we landed here he was a different person, excited, alive. Then he just took over, ran us—He kept insisting it was our duty to learn all we could about this place, use it against the Xiks. And he swore Zolti was mistaken, that we had been off course of any settler planet when we dropped here.
“Then we found the place of the path.” Again Najar stopped and Hosteen thought he was trying to pick words to explain something he did not understand himself.
“You found this?” The Terran sketched with a finger tip in the dust the spiral and dot.
“Yes. You must have seen it too!”
“And followed it.”
“Dean said it was a way out. I don’t know how he knew that. He picked information out of the air—or so it seemed. One minute he’d be as puzzled as we were; then all at once he’d explain—and he’d be right! Funny though, he didn’t want to try that path first. Zolti did—walked around and around—then he just wasn’t there!
“Widders, he was out of his head a little by then. Kept saying over and over that things hid behind rocks to watch us. He threw stones into every shadow. When Zolti went like that, Widders started screaming. He ran around and around the coil, hit the center—and then was gone—
“Dean took the same orbit. And I—well, I wasn’t going to stay there alone. So I did it—ended up in a three-cornered box.”
“You saw the hall of the machines?” Hosteen asked.
“Yes. Dean was there. And he was crazy-wild, running up and down, patting them and talking to himself about how all this was the place he had been meant to find—that the voices in his head had told him and that now he held the whole world right in his hand. Listening to him was like being back in Rehab in the early days. I hid out and watched him. Then he ended up in a corner where there was a big hoop—got inside that and lay down on the floor, curled up as if he were asleep. There was a light and noise—I couldn’t watch—something queer happened to your eyes when you tried to. So I went to hunt Widders and Zolti. Only, if they came that way, they were gone again. I didn’t see them—not then.”
“But you did later?”
“Maybe—one. Only nobody could be sure—just bones that looked fresh.” Najar’s eyes closed, and Hosteen felt the shudder that shook his wasted body. “I didn’t stay there to hunt. Somehow I found this valley outside—”
He looked around, gratitude mirrored in his eyes.
“It was wonderful, after all those other places, to be out in the open with things—real things—growing, almost like home. And there was a way higher up to get out—down to where the natives were. I watched them. Then all at once more and more of them kept coming, and I guessed Dean was up to something. Thunder and lightning—not the normal kind—I tried to find out what was going on, mapped some of the ways in and out—”
“You didn’t think of trying to contact Dean again?”
Najar’s gaze dropped to his hands. “No—I didn’t. You may think that’s queer, Storm. But Dean, he’d been changing all the time since we landed here. And when I saw him so wild in that hall—well, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him again. He was raving about being picked to rule a world—it was enough to make you think you were crazy, too. I didn’t want any part of him.”
Hosteen agreed. The man he had fronted at the tunnel mouth had been removed from human kind, unreachable, unless a trained psycho-tech could find a channel to connect Dean again with the world.
“I’m pretty good at trailing”—Najar’s ordinary flat tone now held a spark of pride—“being a Recon scout, and I got around so that the natives didn’t suspect me. Of course, not many of them ever came far up the mountain, and when they did, they kept to paths. Then I saw a ’copter come over, and it was one of ours! That made Dean’s story about an Xik world nonsense, and I thought maybe our boys had moved in and cleaned up.
“So I went down to signal it. There was a flash just after the ’copter set down, and that fire cut around the whole landing area. I couldn’t get to it until afterwards—there was a dead man there, and all the rest burned up. And I’d been counting a lot on getting out—” Again he stared at his hands. “I was sick, straight through to my insides, sick enough to get at Dean. So I took to the mountain passages, hoping to meet him. Got to the machine hall twice, only he was never there. You don’t have any idea, Storm, about how big this digging really is—passages running through the mountains and under them, all sorts of caverns and rooms. I’ve seen things—strictly unhealthy.” Again shudders ran through him. “Sometimes I wondered if I weren’t as crazy as Dean—else I wouldn’t be seeing some of those things.
“But I never caught up with Dean—not until the night there was another fire along the mountain. And I saw this native here beating it ahead of the fire with a big cat and a bird swooping along over them. Dean was watching them come upslope, and he was aiming a tube at them. I cut in and signaled the native into a gap, and the cat and bird came along. The gap led in here, then—”
“Then?” Hosteen asked.
“Then,” Najar reiterated grimly, his features set, “one of those tame lightning bolts smashed down just as we were almost through it—sealed us in with a landslide and knocked us around some so we weren’t much use for days afterwards. Lucky there’s water in here and some fruit—The bird tried to get out, but the way it acted made you think there was some kind of lid up there over this whole place. Then one day the cat was gone, and we guessed she’d found a way out. We’ve been hunting for that ever since. Now you know it all—”
“Yes,” Hosteen replied somewhat absently. One piece of Najar’s story was enlightening—all of the survivors’ party had left the spiral path in the valley at the same time, but apparently not all had landed at the same terminal in the big hall when that beyond-time-and-space journey was completed. Logan—had Logan come out at some other point in the mountain maze? Hosteen turned upon Najar now with a sharpness born of renewed hope.
“There’s a way out—do you think you could find your way back to the hall once you were in the tunnels again?”
“I don’t know—I honestly don’t know.”
Hosteen signed to Gorgol across the castaway’s hunched shoulders.
“There is no way across the heights?”
“We can look but we cannot go. Come and see for yourself,” the Norbie responded.
They went on a rough scramble up the slope in which was the rock crevice of Surra’s door. Then they walked a ledge, which ended in a vast pile of debris.
“The mountain fell—” Gorgol indicated the slip. “And from here one can look—”
Another tricky bit of climbing and they could indeed look—a prospect that was enough to leave one giddy. Down—down—a drop no length of rope on Arzor, Hosteen thought, could dangle to touch bottom. And beyond that crack in the earth, well within sight but as far removed from them as if it existed on another world, uplands sere and baked under that sun, which on their side was so abnormally gentle. A window on the outer world but no door.