The copter angled down toward them, seeming to gain sped as it approached, although that was the illusion of their mutual rush toward each other. Behind the bubble window, the shapes of two naoli could be seen. One of them was Docanil, the other the traumatist Banalog. Even from here, Hulann fancied he could see the grin splitting the heavy features of the Hunter as the creature smelled its pry.
Closer
Hulann waited for the discharge of a missile that would blast the two of them and the shuttlecraft across a mile of bleached and arid sand.
Then, without apparent reason, the copter made a steep climb and a vicious turn to its right, up and away from them. Even as Hulann was puzzling over the manuever, the huge bat form swept over them, low, passing with a furious wind in its wake, and slid by the helicopter with too little safety margin. Had Docanil not rose and banked, the Isolator's second weapon would have struck him head-on. As it was, the blades of the Hunter's machine sliced into the pulpy flesh of the Proteus creature and stuttered to a complete halt. The helicopter listed, groaned as the Hunter attempted to start the engines again, and fell thirty feet to the desert floor.
In its anxiousness to get the boy before the shuttlecraft passed into lands beyond its control, the Isolator had carelessly bungled the Hunter's almost certain chance to destroy them. Now they slid out of the valley and into more desert, past the last of the beast's monitoring posts. Behind, the gigantic bat form glided back and forth in the sky, looking mournfully beyond the confines of its operating limits.
Leo began laughing heartily, bent over, his small face red, tears streaming down his face.
"It was very close," Hulann said.
Leo merely continued to laugh, and soon the sound of his mirth brought a twisted smile to the alien's features. They slid across the earth, punctuating the sound of the blades beneath them with bursts of their own hilarity.
Six hours later, Docanil debarked from his battered copter beside Hulann's abandoned shuttlecar. The fury within his mind was almost greater than he could contain. His fingers twitched, and he longed to see the flames leaping from his fingers and devouring the fugitives, longed to see them twisting, writhing, turning black as they died in extreme agony. And he yet might have the opportunity to enjoy that spectacle. They probably thought the copter had been totally demolished and that he had to wait for another. They would not be expecting him so close on their trail.
"They aren't here?" Banalog asked, descending from the helicopter.
Docanil did not respond. He looked up and down the twin steel railroad lines, speculating. He examined the rails with his superb vision, calculated from the brake markings which way the train had been coming from and which way it had gone after it had picked up its two new passengers. He could not conceive of who might be driving it. But he would soon find out.
He looked West, grinned tightly. If possible, his orders had said, he was to return Hulann and the human alive so that traumatists might examine them. Yet Docanil the Hunter knew it was going to have to be death for them. There was no other recourse to alleviate his fury. Death It was just going to have to be
Inside the glass ball, floating in the darkness and heat above the pulsing mother mass, a naoli and a human boy, each no larger than a man's hand, danced through flickering orange flames. They were in intense pain as the Isolator increased the pressure in the globe to the point where their eardrums burst and their noses bled. Yet, far past the point where they should have been dead, they lived and suffered.
The Isolator saw to that.
The boy fell to his knees and curled into a foetal position to try to cradle the pain and make it easier to bear.
The Isolator jerked him erect.
The Isolator increased the pressure.
The naoli's eyes began to bleed.
The two creatures within the glass were screaming.
The Isolator changed the fire within the shell from flickering orange and red to the more intense and more acidic licking tongue of emerald. The flesh of the two miniature creatures took on a green glow. As the gnome had done before them, they began to melt
They clawed frantically at the glass.
The Isolator had given them intelligence and emotions of a sort, in order to make the torturing more enjoyable.
They dissolved.
They became quivering pieces of flesh.
The Isolator maintained their consciousness even to this point, thrusting them through wave after wave of excruciating horror and pain.
Then it abruptly dropped the ball into its mass and digested it. There was no fun in such games. Not really. It could not strike from its mind that it had failed on the real mission. But who would ever have expected a naoli to work against it? It had been expecting help from the lizard that was with the human-and had received only hindrance.
It burbled in the tank. It was restless.
A glass ball rose out of its pudding-like mass and hovered in the darkness. Inside was a gnome, dancing and gibbering on milky threads, laughing happily to itself.
Chapter Seventeen
When Hulann leaned over David's shoulder to watch the young man programming the train's complex computers on the simple keyboard, the human jumped in the command chair as if struck by a bullet, his entire body convulsing in what must have been, at least, a slightly painful spasm. His face drained to the color of dry sand bleached by the sun, and his eyes were circles stamped out by a die-press. Hulann stepped backwards, shuffling his large feet, then went to the side window to look at the passing scenery.
"I told you that he wouldn't harm us. He's our friend," Leo said impatiently.
David looked sheepishly at Hulann's back; he swallowed hard. "I'm sorry," he said.
Hulann nonchalantly waved a hand to indicate that the incident had been of no import. He could hardly expect a grown man, conditioned by twenty years and more of anti-naoli propaganda, to respond to him as quickly and as easily as an eleven-year-old boy whose mind was still fresh and open to changes of every magnitude. He remembered how reluctant he had been to touch Leo in that cellar when the boy had needed his leg wound dressed. How much harder it must be, then, for one of the defeated race to get accustomed to the presence of one of those responsible for the death of his kind.
"Why don't you sit down?" David asked. "I get jumpy; but it's the truth-when you're parading around behind me like that."
"Can't sit comfortably," Hulann explained.
"What?" David asked.
"His tail," Leo said. "Your chairs here don't have any holes in them to let his tail hang out. A naoli has a very sensitive tail. It hurts them just to sit on it."
"I didn't know."
"So he has to stand," Leo said.
Confused, David returned to the keyboard and finished typing his instructions to the computer. Yesterday, such a short time ago, he had been serene, content to flee from the enemy in his swift-wheeled magic wagon; today, he was ferrying a naoli across the country and was no longer certain he could tell an enemy from a friend. It had begun yesterday when he had watched, from the corner of his eye, what seemed to be a shuttle pacing the train, yet attempting to remain concealed.
Near dusk, he came to a place where debris clogged the tracks and was forced to stop the Bluebolt and examine the disaster before trying to nose through it.
The blockage was a mangled trio of shattered shuttle-craft. On every side, the country was littered with dilapidated and decaying machines. People had congregated here as they had in all the "wild" areas of the world, seeking to escape the burning, exploding, crumbling, alien-infested cities where the major battles roared. But the naoli had come here too. It had only taken a little longer. And in trying to escape at any cost, the shuttle drivers had collided as in this tangled despair. David did not look too closely at the mess, for fear he would see skeletons that had once been drivers, bony fingers clutching wheels, and empty eye sockets staring through shattered glass.