At various times, when drugs or delirium had dulled his conscious mind, Braun had ravingly relived his cold-blooded murder of Erica Arenstein well within the hearing of every man in the column.
A week or so of bedrest, injections of antibiotics and nourishing foods, combined with the solicitous care of the two troopers assigned to attend him, had almost restored Braun completely. Then, like a thunderbolt, Corbett and Gumpner discovered that the foot of the broken leg was becoming gangrenous.
As a group of troopers on a deer hunt had recently seen landmarks that told them they were but a few days’ ride from Broomtown Base—their home and the northernmost bastion of Center activities—Corbett decided to send Braun on ahead, mounted on a big mule and escorted by a Sergeant Cabell, Old Johnny Kilgore and a trooper, with led remounts and orders to get the scientist to Broomtown alive so that he could have his mind transferred into a whole, healthy body before his injured, diseased one died. Cabell, the trooper and Johnny were chosen because they and their charge were just then the only men in all the company who were not sudden victims of illness that left them infant-weak, feverish and racked with bone-rattling chills.
A few days along the trail, in a raging tantrum because Cabell would not immediately inject him with one of the last few dosages of opiates, Braun shot the well-meaning noncom out of his saddle. But as he turned his attentions and his smoking pistol on Old Johnny, the old cannibal sped a wickedly barbed wardart into the thigh of the scientist’s good leg and then, regretfully, put another into the chest of the trooper just as that man fired a rifle at him.
In the fresh agony of the sharp iron blade deep-seated in his flesh and grating on the femur, Braun dropped both pistol and reins, and the mule set off at a flat-out run toward the south, with the screaming man firmly strapped into the saddle.
Old Johnny had returned to the campsite in time to tend the stricken men and nurse some of them back to health, but it was long weeks before they were capable of marching on to the base. There they discovered that Dr. Harry Braun had, after everything, been dragged in alive by friendly natives and had reported that all of the remainder of the expedition were long dead, that he was the sole survivor.
It had long been an ill-kept secret that Dr. David Sternheimer had nurtured a deep and abiding love for Dr. Erica Arenstein for centuries, and when once he had learned from Jay Corbett the truth of her murder, his vengeance had been savage. Not only had Dr. Harry Braun been summarily stripped of all his privileges and rank, his mind had been forcibly transferred from the new, healthy body to another one—a body a good deal older and slowly dying of colonic cancer. Then he had been assigned menial, degrading duties in a place where Sternheimer could keep an eye on him.
For most of the following year, careful and meticulous preparations had been made both at the Center and at Broomtown Base. Then, in the spring, a large, well-armed and lavishly supplied force of Broomtown men had set out for the site of the buried pack train under the overall command of General Jay Corbett. Gumpner, now a major, was in command of the battalion of troopers and the civilian packers, while another civilian, Johnny Kilgore, led the scouts assigned to the new expedition.
They bore everything thought to be needful for retrieving the lost treasures. There were explosives to blast the huge boulders into movable sizes, sledgehammers, picks, shovels, crowbars, axes and other hardware, cables and strong cordage and chains, as well as collars and draft-harness sets for the big mules. A number of the troopers were trained experts in the use of the explosives, and not a few of the civilian packers had been drafted into the expedition from their normal occupation of stone-quarrying.
The memory of the vast hordes of bloodthirsty Ganiks had not faded from the minds of the planners, either. The men of the battalion were far better armed than had been the few who had defended that defile. In addition to the rifles and pistols, the sabers and axes and bayonets and dirks, there were machine guns, mortars, shotguns, and both hand and rifle grenades.
There were not just one but two of the big, long-range radio transceivers, each complete with its heavy, bulky battery pack and bicycle-powered generator for recharging. In addition to the regular once-per-day broadcast, Jay Corbett had Sternheimer’s carte blanche. He could call in to either Broomtown or the Center when and as he wished to do so.
Although he was almost the antithesis of a superstitious man, Sternheimer had grudgingly admitted to Jay that he had had several unexplainable dreams that made him think that Dr. Erica Arenstein was still alive somewhere up in that wild country, and he had almost begged the general to watch carefully for any signs of his lost love.
Privately, Corbett felt certain that the missing woman was long months dead, and he did not quite know what to make of the emotional pleas of the normally cold, distant, correct and objective Director, but he had finally agreed to keep his eyes peeled for a trace of Erica Arenstein, then had shoved the matter to a far recess of his mind.
It had been shortly after the first blastings that the first of the monsters of the ilk of that one now stinking and covered with feasting flies on the table had manifested itself. They averaged three and a half meters in length and a thickness of thirteen centimeters, were annulated and covered with a thick, viscous slime. Seen at a distance, they might have been taken for huge earthworms. But at close range, when their beady eyes and wide mouths filled with double rows of sharp teeth became evident, it was clear that this was no worm.
They were aggressive and vicious, could move as fast as most snakes and had jaws powerful enough to easily sever a finger or a toe or to tear off sizable amounts of flesh. No one had ever heard one of the creatures utter any sound, but they were unremittingly fierce and devilishly hard to kill. Even with most of its body blown loose from the head by explosive rifle bullets, one of them had still managed to propel the head close enough to a quarryman to clamp the dying, tooth-studded jaws down on his foot, shearing right through the tough hide brogans to the flesh beneath.
Aware of the Director’s long-held interest in unusual animals, Corbett had reported these creatures to the Center on his daily report and had suggested the dispatch of a trained man to properly examine them. Dr. Mike Schiepficker had been coptered up far enough for a mounted escort of troopers to meet him.
Actually, Corbett reflected, a large armed escort had really been unnecessary, this time around, and he could not conceive of any explanation for it, not one that made any sense. Nor could Johnny Kilgore, who had ranged farther afield and seen more.
Where, just bare months in the past, there had been a country aswarm with large and small mounted war or raiding parties of savage Ganiks, they had seen none, not one single living Ganik, and the one dead one they had chanced across had been many days’ trek southward of here, that one killed by a bear. Their woodland camps sat tenantless—some of them, according to Johnny, had been attacked and/or burned, the signs were there—and even the plateau which had recently been home to thousands of the cannibal raiders was now utterly deserted, now affording a habitat only to a herd of scrubby ponies and other wild creatures.
And, again according to old Johnny, not only had all of the bunches of outlaw Ganiks disappeared from their usual haunts, but all of the families of Ganik farmers were gone as well, their farms and farm buildings sitting empty and obviously unworked for many months.
So the machine guns and mortars reposed still in their crates and cases in the rear of the supply tent, and the only shots anyone had fired hereabouts had been at game or to dispatch specimens of these huge, wormlike beasts in and about the work site.