Pertin did not need to hear more; he had encountered the Watchers. They were the ones who had shot his ship out of the sky of Cuckoo. In any other world they would have killed him, for he had fallen more than a mile to earth; but in Cuckoo's gentle surface gravitation he had survived with only cuts and bruises—and would have missed those if he had been less panicked and in better shape, he knew.
That kind of knowledge was no comfort. Pertin feared the Watchers. He feared dying, even when he welcomed it; there was no kind of future that looked good to him, unless by some miracle Zara should appear and offer a new life here. That was fantasy. Reality was that he would die here, and he would hate it.
The boy, ignoring the danger from the sky, was splitting and skinning the body of the golden-furred creature like a moth, spitting it over the fire. The yellow dust from the creature's fur gave Pertin a fit of sneezing, but soon the aroma of its roasting meat reconciled him to the dust. When it was done, Pertin humbly waited his turn. The best bits went to the org. Redlaw had second choice, then the boy; then last came Pertin. But there was still plenty left, and it was delicious.
By the time they had finished it had begun to rain, great fat slow drops that touched the fire and extinguished it. Gray clouds came dropping in to the tops of the trees.
The red haired giant bounded chuckling and happy over to him, and whistled something that the Pmal translator rendered as: "Rain clouds hide us from Watchers. Now we go! Youth has seen your ship, we find it, get weapons to kill Watchers!"
"But you have been to the wreckage of my ship," Pertin objected, perplexed. "I had no weapons—"
"Not your ship, like-your ship!" the Pmal crackled in response to the giant's squeals. Pertin gave up the struggle to understand; it did not matter. What mattered was that they were to move again. This time the boy did not need to worry about his org, who flew on above them, so he and the giant, unfettered, made very fast time. It was all Pertin could do to keep up with them. They kept on, and kept on. They did not stop even to eat, only paused long enough to pass Pertin a handful of hard roasted moss nuts, now cold and almost tasteless; he munched them as best he could while they went. Three times they ate, pausing once to drink at a vine-covered stream and to relieve their bowels and bladders, each time hurrying on.
Then Redlaw and the boy stopped and waited for Pertin to struggle up next to him.
"There!" the giant crowed. "Look! Beyond the gray moss, between the boulders. See! What do you see?"
Dizzy with Weariness, Pertin tried to focus his eyes. See? Yes, there was something there, something bright that caught his eye.
The glint of light was metal. He glanced at the others, then joined them in a stumbling, hopping run up the gentle slope, and there, half-hidden by purple- flowered moss, was the wreck of a machine.
It was not his ship. It was smaller, and it dearly had been there for a long time. The moss had overgrown it completely, except for a few lengths of metal ...
Metal? Yes, clearly it was metal. But there was something strange about it. The color was not clean silver, but stained with a watery bluish radiance that look unfamiliar, but vaguely ominous.
He scurried toward it. It must have been a man- carrying machine. Perhaps the machine one of his predecessors had used? He could not say. It was so torn and broken that he could not be sure. He tore at the moss, peering inside through a dark opening rimmed with shattered crystal. A sharp scent stung his nostrils; it did not seem to be coming from the moss, but from the bluish coating on the metal itself. Now that he touched it, it felt slick, slippery, moist—quite repellent ...
A shrill squeal came from behind him, and his Pmal rapped out: "Do not touch! Not! Not!"
Confused, he stood up. Redlaw and Org Rider were coming toward him, anger and concern on their faces. "What's the matter?"
They looked at him—curiously, they were looking mosdy at his hands, it seemed—then at each other. They did not speak for a moment, then Redlaw spoke, his voice oddly gentle. "Clean hands," the Pmal translator rapped. "Wipe on moss. No! No! Do not touch metal!"
He shrugged, not understanding. He seemed to have got some of the blue slime on his fingers. Obediently, he bent and rubbed his hands on the soft gray moss—
What he was rubbing against, he suddenly realized with a heart-stopping sensation of nausea, had the shape and texture of a human skull.
He clawed at the moss. It was a skull! A whole skeleton, in fact, the flesh rotted away, but the bones still queerly dressed, under the moss, in the imperishable plastics of an explorer's jungle garb, red top, orange- and-yellow pants, great white gauntlets, and on the shrunken forearm bones the coils of translator, recorder, direction-finder, timekeeper, and all the other instruments one wore.
The giant spoke, and the Pmal chattered: "Danger! Do not touch stranger bones. Serious! Be warned!"
Pertin looked up at them, aware of the bluish radiance that clung to the bones, aware that it still befouled his fingers, in spite of his efforts to rub them clean.
"Danger?" he repeated dully. "Yes, I suppose so, if you say so. But you're wrong about one thing. They're not a stranger's bones. I know those bones very well, and I know the clothes they wear, too. I ought to. They're mine."
ELEVEN
Far away, around the great bulk of Cuckoo, the orbiter was preparing to transmit its observer along the tachyonic path FARLINK had charted to the source of the interfering transmission in the Galaxy. They still didn't know how far it was, exactly. Roughly in die direction of Earth, yes; but at extragalactic distances, that could mean anywhere from Rigel to Canopus, and farther than that in the line of flight from Cuckoo.
And that was only one of the things they didn't know. Would the transmitted duplicate find breathable air and bearable temperatures when he stepped out of the receiving box?—or sphere, or inflatable bag, or whatever sort of enclosure might contain an uninvited guest; it was only a convenience that made all the intercommunicating galactic races use essentially the same sort of equipment. This wild card might take any form.
"I'm glad I'm not going," Ben Line Pertin announced gloomily. He didn't sound very glad, even to himself. He found precious little to be glad about these days, and could look forward to not much better.
Venus chimed softly, "I'm glad for you too, Ben Line. It is less hazardous for an edited form like myself."
Ben Line Pertin in quick confusion said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I was just thinking—"
"That it was dangerous and unsure, yes. But less so for me. In any event," she continued melodiously, "FARLINK has chosen me and I have consented."
He said miserably, "I am sorry, Venus. I've been into my own troubles and not thinking about yours. I know how it tears you up to send a self away to suffer or die somewhere; I've done it often enough."
The silvery girl looked at him curiously, "That is so, Ben Line. But—forgive me—in this form it is less painful. If I were in my own true form I would feel there was more to lose."
"Wait!" the sentient ape named Doc Chimp II said, holding up a hand that contained a banana. "There's a message—"
It was FARLINK. In the recreation room where they were awaiting Venus' time for the Tachyon transmitter there were no screens, but the wall speakers sang out with the computer's electronic voice. "Stand by," it signaled, the Pmal of each being translating the words automatically into its own language.
"Wonder what that is," Doc Chimp mused. "Well, cheers!" And he held up his banana in a sort of toast. Pertin responded with his tumbler of Scotch and water, while the silvery girl sniffed at cloudlets of luminescent mist she sprayed out of an atomizer.