Even in his mad haste, Org Rider took time to look at it, and to feel his heart catch at the sight. Smooth ball, mottled bronze and blue, it was too large for his arms to close around it. The surface felt warm and elastic, yielding slightly when he touched it. It had a friendly feel.
But the yells of the distant parents were not friendly. Gasping with his haste, Org Rider wound and knotted his rope to make a sling for the egg. Its weight was almost nothing, not much greater than his own. He slung it over his shoulder, scrambled to the rim of the nest, and leaped away.
A breeze had freshened, sliding down the mountain; it was at his back, and it made each leap half again as long as before. At the second leap he craned his neck around. Neither orgs nor the queer slamming machine were in sight. He could hear the distant angry baying, but it seemed less furious now. That was not advantageous; it meant the adult orgs were calming down, presumably having destroyed the machine. It would not be long before their fierce parental pugnacity drove them back to the guarding of the nest—and when they found it empty their rage would become incandescent, and all directed at him.
If they could find him.
His life depended wholly on making sure that they did not. He came to the edge of the tableland and leaped straight out, not even looking back.
It took all his skill to guide his descent into the best hiding place he could see. The bulk of the egg was a sail that unbalanced and tumbled him; the one free hand he had for air-swimming was not enough to make much difference. But in the slow, gentle gravity of his home falling could seldom be dangerous, although he was concerned about the safety of the egg. He hit hard when he hit. At the last moment he had thrown himself around to cushion the egg with his own body.
He was—for the moment, at least—safe.
And the egg was his!
He had landed in a vale of boulders, half buried in banks of gray, mossy stuff. A mountain stream purled and cascaded languidly down the slope. Org Rider had chosen the spot for that reason; as soon as he could regain the breath that had been smashed out of him and move he scratched and leaped his way to where a thin, bright ribbon of water leaped out from a sill of rock, and slid and scattered behind it.
What he had hoped for was there—a dry place behind the waterfall. It would do. The sound would drown out any noise he made, even from the keen hearing of the orgs. The spray would carry scent away. The curtain of lazily falling water would screen them from the vision of the parent orgs . . .
"Them."
With a start, Org Rider realized he was already thinking of the egg as if it were grown and mature. He let himself grin with wolfish joy; the worst part was done, that dream would yet come true!
But now he had work to do. Cautiously he ventured out and, one eye on the sky and both ears alert, tore armloads of moss out of the hidden sides of the boulders and carried them back to make a nest for his egg. When at last it lay safe, he took time to rock back on his haunches and inspect it.
It was there, real and true, and truly his. He studied every inch of its blue, bronze-speckled surface, so smooth and warm. It had no crack or flaw. It had not been harmed by the abduction; and, best of all, from its warmth and certain mysterious sounds of movement inside it, it showed every indication of being very near to its hatch time.
His heart filled to bursting with joy and pride, Org Rider sat back and rested for a long moment, planning what next to do.
As near as he could tell, he had come down somewhere near where the cartwheeling figure from the slamming machine had fallen, but a long, long way from where he had left his weapons and supplies. He was in a sort of great natural chimney, with steep rock on all sides. He drank his fill of water from the falls, and it was cold and sweet. He found nuts with queer paperlike shells growing nearby, and though they tasted faintly unripe and he did not want to eat very many of them, they stilled his hunger.
His first step was to try to get his cache.
He crept to the edge of the falls and looked up.
As soon as he was away from the gabble of the falling water, he heard the distant agonized screams of the orgs. They had learned of their loss now, it was clear. The long moaning bellows sounded of rage and the promise of revenge.
But they were far away, perhaps as far as the other edge of the tableland where they had built their nest.
There was a cluster of bee-trees nearby. Org Rider regretted that; the creatures who hived in the trees were dreadful enemies when aroused, and it was known that they had some chemical loathing of orgs. This would perhaps make the adult orgs approach only reluctantly, which was good. But what if they should smell out and attack his egg?
He could not guard against every contingency, he decided with a pang of worry and regret; it was the first lime in his life that he had felt like a parent.
Reluctandy (but he had no choice!) he turned his back on the egg, and started out to hunt for better food, his cache, and a good way out of the giant chimney in which they lay.
The boy was gone a long time, longer than he planned, for at one point in his search the adult orgs came wheeling and shrieking overhead and he had to hastily bury himself in the undergrowth beneath a stand of flame-trees. Small creatures like red insects shared his hiding place with him and, although they did not sting, their crawling over his flesh was maddening; but he dared not leave. He lay motionless, half drowsing, for a long, long time, not even able to lift his head to see what was happening when the bellowing screams of the orgs were so close that it seemed certain they had spied him. They had not; of this he was sure, because he was still alive. When they were more distant he dozed again, and he dreamed a frightful dream in which his cherished egg hatched and turned into a black- winged Watcher that stank of death-weed and came at him with a throttling-noose that bore a watchman's eye . . .
He woke trembling, and found the orgs were gone.
He had not located his cache or a way out, but there was food of a sort, succulent stalks from a purple bush that tasted sweet and meaty, some torpid red water- snakes that were dull enough to allow themselves to be caught. He returned to his waterfall feeling cheered and expectant, looking forward to seeing his egg, touching it, listening for its tiny slow heartbeat and the stirring sounds inside it.
With a wary eye out for the orgs he ducked under the lazy waterfall, and shouted with astonishment and anger.
The egg was there, luminously blue in the half-light under the falls. But a creature was crouching over it—a squat man-shape, blfck-haired and nearly naked, smashing at the egg with a red-smeared rock. The man looked up in fear and astonishment at Org Rider's yell.
And then, for almost the first time in his life, Org Rider felt the creeping terror of ru^erstitious fear. He knew that man; it was the stranger from the small Watcher. He had seen him dead.
SEVEN
Some tens of thousands of light-years away from Cuckoo, on the inner curve of one of the spiral arms of the Galaxy toward which Cuckoo was hurtling, there was a GO-type star of no great intrinsic interest that had in orbit around it the planet Earth.
Earth and its dominant race, humans, were new among the galactic races. They were fully accepted as equal members. The streets of cities like Chicago and Peking were already used to the sight of darting Sheliaks, glittering Scorpian robots, and a hundred other races. Every major city had its own tachyon- transmission center, through which flowed the traffic of many worlds. All the buildings were alike in that they were huge, new, towering over the structures around them, filled with the enormous mass of hardware that met the power requirements of tachyon transmission. Each wore proudly the gauzy spiral that was the emblem of the Galaxy.