It was the mottled ship of the Watchers, or one so much like it that he could not tell the difference. It was flying low over the pool below the waterfall, its sound magnified by the black walls surrounding him to a shout of distant thunder.
In sudden dread the boy realized he had been seen.
He turned in indecision, peering back into the cave behind the torrent. Would they take the tiny org away from him? Worse—he remembered the warning about the Watchman's eye; and he had thrown it away. Would they punish him?
The gaunt stranger babbled fresh gibberish and pointed again at the sky, and the boy saw that a gray fleck had separated from the ship. The ship flew on, up over the rim of the canyon and away; the fleck dropped toward the pool and in a moment spread great wings and circled gently down toward where they were standing.
Org Rider pushed the stranger back inside the cave, and ran to his org. Its jaws free, it had ripped the luminous membrane off, except for a few rags that still clung stickily. Its tail unfolded, wet and delicate. Its whole body burst out in a rich cloud of that parched- grain fragrance.
It was twice the boy's length, now that its full dimensions had unfolded out of the egg, but it was still an infant, and drained of strength by the struggle to hatch. Its short trunk lifted to sniff him, then it slumped to the damp rock floor of the cave.
The boy began to rub it down with his wadded shirt, drying it and warming it, crooning to it a song he had learned from his mother. Sleepily the org arched its thin body to meet the strokes of his hand, and it's voice seemed to echo the song.
It was out of the question to leave the org, and impossible to move it. It would be an hour or more before it could fly, and he could not carry it and his food, and still manage the tricky rocks around the falls. He stared desperately at the stranger, wondering how to get him to help.
And then beyond the stranger, in the luminous arch under the edge of the waterfall, another figure appeared.
It was not a watcher; it was human, tall, with a fire- red beard and keen green eyes.
"Redlaw!" the boy gasped.
"Young Org Rider," acknowledged the giant, grinning through die flowing beard. "I see you've got your org after all!"
The giant reached out for the boy's hand. Org Rider drew back instinctively, fingers leaping toward his knife, before he decided the gesture was friendly and allowed Redlaw to shake hands with him. "I followed you here," the giant boomed. "Saw two adult orgs looking more frantic than usual, and wondered if you were what they were worrying about. I see you were!"
The boy grinned, then said, "Followed me? But how? I got rid of the Watchman's eye—"
The giant's laughter boomed. "Clever about it, too, weren't you? We located it—inside an org! And the Watchers aren't going to like it if they see you again, so I recommend you don't let them. So you'll have to get rid of that!" And his finger shot out to point at the compass on the boy's wrist.
"But that was my grandfather's!"
"No doubt. But where he got it, or someone before him, was from the Watchers. It's trade goods, and they can trace you by it as easily as by a Watchman's eye. Made for that purpose."
"But—but," the boy said, "but if that's so, why didn't they come down and kill me?"
"Thank me, boy!" the giant boomed. "I convinced them you'd been eaten by that org. When it came to explaining how one telltale was inside the org and the other here, I really rose to the occasion! Said it had been excreted. But you'll have to take it off before you leave this place, of they'll know you're still alive; org excrement doesn't move from place to place by itself." He peered wonderingly at the stranger, then at the egg. "What's all this?" he demanded.
"My org!" the boy said proudly. "Look, he's hungry!" And ignoring Redlaw for the moment, he ran to slice strips from the water-snake remnants and offer them to the hatchling. It devoured them delightedly, great eyes fixed on the boy. It had preened itself and its external surface was now nearly dry. Most of its body became a pale gold, shading into white along the tips of its tail and its wings. Not yet scaled like the adult orgs, it was covered with a fine velvet that felt like fur but was in fact soft fleshy protuberances that would turn into chitin.
Org Rider fetched water in a seed-cone cup and doled it out to the infant, which slobbered its gratitude and demanded more of the watersnake.
While the boy was tending his org, Redlaw had discovered the stranger. Org Rider paid no attention until the giant called his name.
"We've got to move on, boy," he said. "Take off that compass. Don't break it; they'll know it if you do that. Just leave it here."
"Move on where?" Org Rider asked. "My org shouldn't travel yet—"
"No choice, boy," Redlaw boomed. "This fellow you've got here, he's what the Watchers are looking for. Says his name's Ben Yale Pertin"—he pronounced the alien syllables carefully—"whatever that means. And he's from outside the sky."
"That's insane," Org Rider said seriously. "There's no such place."
Redlaw nodded somberly. "Time was I'd have agreed with you, but the Watchers think there is. They spotted him somehow. It's not you they're looking for right now; it's him. And if we want to keep him alive we've got to get him where they won't look."
"Where's that?" the boy demanded bitterly, slipping the compass off his wrist and gazing at it. "They know where this is. They must know you are here—"
"Not necessarily," the giant boomed, but his voice was thoughtful. "I crawled out through a disposal hatch when they weren't looking. —But you're right about the telltale. When they miss me, they might come zeroing in on it. And I don't know, boy, if the three of us can travel fast enough to get out of range."
"Four of us!" The boy turned to look at the org, now sleeping. It stirred and crooned in its sleep, the pliant trunk lifting to sniff toward him. "There's Babe," he said. "I won't leave him."
"Is that his name, Babe?"
"It is now. And he can't travel yet."
"You mean he might travel right away from you, don't you?"
The boy held his ground. "I'm not taking that chance!" he said.
"I don't know, boy," Redlaw said at last. "Our friend here probably can't travel very fast anyway. But we can't just stay here. They won't just kill us, boy, they'll eat us right up, you and me and your org. This other fellow might not be that lucky; they'll want him to talk."
"Talk about what?"
"Where he came from. Weapons. What he's up to, him and his friends that pop up all over." Redlaw looked ill at ease, then suddenly he grinned. "I know! We'll use their own telltale to confuse them! I can move fast enough by myself; I'll take it a good long way down Knife-in-the-Sky and drop it off a cliff somewhere. Let them hunt it there! They won't have any reason to come back here then, and this is as cozy a spot as we'll find." He was already standing, beginning to strap his wings on again. "Keep our friend fed, boy," he said. "Stay out of sight! I'll be back in a thousand breaths or so—if I'm lucky!"
It was more than a thousand breaths. It became fifteen hundred, then two thousand.
Org Rider could have stayed in the cave forever, delighted with watching his hatchling grow stronger every breath; but the growth required food, and he had at last to steal out from under the waterfall and forage. Red- law had left his cleaver; the boy took it and bounded along the river course to the forest, where huge fat golden moths trailed gray wakes of sickly bittersweet fragrance. The boy despaired of catching one of them without exposing himself, but the trees themselves were sources of food; he leaped to hack off huge seed-cones with the cleaver, split them open and found them full of edible seeds as well as wriggling blind horned grubs, probably those of the moths.
When he came back to the cave behind the waterfall the stranger called Ben Yale Pertin was sleeping again. The boy regarded him with suspicion tinged with fear. He had not forgotten that he had seen this man die once; he did not understand how it was he was alive again, but something about it made the bristles at the back of his neck crawl.