“Hoot,” I said, “I guess I owe . . .”
“No debt for you,” he hooted happily. “I the one who pay the debt. My life you saved before. Now I pay you back. We all even now. I would not tell you only that I fear great sin I had committed, maybe. Perhaps against some belief you hold. Perhaps no wish to have body tampered with. No need to tell you only for this reason. But you undismayed at what I do, so everything all right.”
I managed to get to my feet. The rifle fell from my lap and I kicked it to one side. The kick almost put me on my face again. I still was wobbly.
Hoot watched me brightly with his eyed tentacles.
“You carry me before,” he said. “I cannot carry you. But if you lie down and fasten yourself securely to my body, I can drag you. Have much power in legs.”
I waved the suggestion off.
“Get on with you,” I said. “Lead the way. I’ll make it.”
NINE
Tuck tried to play the man. He and Sara got me hoisted up on Dobbin’s back and then he insisted that Sara ride the second unladen hobby and that he lead the way on foot. So we went down the ramp and up the trail, with Tuck striding in the fore, still with the doll clutched against his chest, and with Hoot bringing up the rear.
“I hope,” Dobbin said to me, “you have failure to survive. I yet will dance upon your bones.”
“And the same to you,” I said.
It wasn’t a very brilliant answer, but I wasn’t at my best. I still was fairly shaky and it was about all that I could do to hang onto the saddle.
The trail led up a short rise and when we reached the top of it, we could see the tree. It was several miles away and it was bigger, even at that distance, than I had imagined it would be. It had fallen squarely across the trail and the impact of its fall had shattered the trunk from its butt up almost half its length, as any hollow tree might shatter when it falls victim to the axe. Pouring out of the great rents in the wood were crawling, creeping things, gray and even from that distance, with a slimy look to them. There were great piles of them heaped along the fallen trunk and more were crawling out and others of them were crawling down the trail, humping in their haste. From them came a thin and reedy wailing that set my teeth on edge.
Dobbin rocked nervously and whinnied with what might have been disgust or fright. “This you will regret,” he shrilled at me. “No other things have ever dared to put hands upon a tree. Never in all time have the tenants of the tree been loosed upon the land.”
“Buster,” I told him, “the tree drew a bead on me. There don’t nothing shoot at me that I don’t shoot back.”
“We’ll have to go around,” said Sara.
Tuck looked up at us. “Around that way is shorter,” he said. He swept his arm toward the left, where the stump of the free still stood, sliced diagonally by the laser beam.
Sara nodded. “Go ahead,” she said.
Tuck stepped off the trail and the hobbies followed. The ground was rough, strewn with rounded stones the size of a person’s head, studded with small, ground-hugging plants armed with heavy thorns. The ground itself was sand, interspersed with a reddish clay and mixed in both the sand and clay were shattered chips of stone, as if throughout millions of years busy little creatures had beaten rocks with hammers to reduce their mass to shards.
As soon as we moved off the trail to begin our detour around the tree, the heaving mass of gray and slimy creatures moved out convulsively in their bumping, hitching motion, to cut us off. They moved in a mass, a flowing sheet of motion with many tiny bobbing eddies, so that the entire group of them seemed to be in constant agitation. They looked very much, I thought, like an expanse of choppy water.
Tuck, seeing them move to cut us off, increased his pace until he was almost galloping, but stumbling and falling as he galloped, for the ground was most uneven and treacherous to the feet. Falling, he bumped his legs and knees against the rounded stones and his outstretched hands, flung out against the falls, smashed into the thorn-bearing vegetation that flowed along the ground. He dropped the doll and stopped to pick it up and blood from his thorn-torn fingers ran into the fabric.
The hobbies increased their pace as well, but slowed or came to a halt each time that Tuck, his legs entangled in his robe, came crashing down.
“We’ll never make it,” Sara said, “with him out there floundering around. I’m going to get down.”
“No, you’re not,” I said.
I tried to vault out of the saddle and I did get out of it, but it was an awkward operation and could by no stretch of imagination have been called a vault. I landed on my feet, but it was only with the utmost effort that I kept from falling on my face, right into a patch of the prickly vegetation. I managed to stay upright and ran ahead and grabbed Tuck by the shoulder.
“Get back and climb up on Dobbin,” I panted. “I’ll take it from here on.”
He swung around on me and there were tears of anger in his eyes. His face was all squeezed up and there was no question that he hated me.
“You never let me have a chance!” he screamed. “You never let anyone have a chance. You grab it all yourself.”
“Get back there and get on that hobby,” I told him. “If you don’t, I’ll clobber you.”
I didn’t wait to see what he did, but went on ahead, picking my way as best I could over the difficult terrain, trying only to hurry, not to run, as had been the case with Tuck.
My legs were wobbly and I had a terrible, unhinged sense of emptiness in. my gut; my head had a tendency to float lazily upward and take on a spin.
During all of this, the wobbly legs, the empty gut, the floating head, I still managed to keep plunging ahead at a fairly steady pace and at the same time stay aware of the progress of that flowing blanket of gray sliminess that poured out from the fallen tree.
It was moving almost as fast as we were moving and it was proceeding on what a military man probably would have called an interior line and I could see that no matter what we did we couldn’t quite escape it. We would brush against the outer edge of it; the creatures in the forefront of the mass would reach us, but we’d escape the main body of them.
The keening of the creatures, as the distance between us lessened, became sharper-an unending wail, like the crying of lost souls.
I looked back over my shoulder and the others were coming on, very close behind me. I tried to speed up a bit and almost came a cropper, so settled down to covering ground as rapidly as I could with safety.
We could swing a little wider on the detour, and have had a chance of outdistancing the wailing horde that humped across the land. But the chance was not a sure one and would lose a lot of time. As we were going, we would just graze the outer edge of them.
There was no way, of course, to figure out beforehand what danger they might pose. If they should prove too dangerous, we could always run for it. If the laser rifle had not been broken, we could have handled almost any danger, but the ballistics weapon Sara carried was all that we had left.
For a moment I thought that after all we would reach our point of intersection before they had arrived, that we would move on past them and be on our way and free of them. But I miscalculated and they came rolling up on us, the edge of that great humping carpet of them hitting us broadside as we cross their front.
They were small, not more than a foot or so in height and they looked like naked snails except that instead of snail faces they had a parody of human faces-the kind of ridiculous, vacant, pitifully staring faces that can be found upon certain cartoon characters, and now their keening wails turned into words-not into the actual sound of words, perhaps, but inside one’s head that sound of wailing turned into words and you know what they were crying. Not all of them were crying the same thing, but crying about the same thing and it was horrible.