He heard the sudden coming-to-life hum of the lift.
That should make an ambusher take position. Flammersfeld had a commanding view of the lettuce and cabbage patches. An ambusher there would have a clear field to the lift and the northern companionway hatch. No one moved there.
The lift stopped and the door slid open. Flammersfeld looked for some stir somewhere. The blaser quested in vain. No one lay in wait.
He hung there, his face reddening with anger and frustration; the tomatoes were large as his head, so that it might have been one of them. A wild-goose chase after all.
Grimacing, he stuck the blaser in the waistband of his shorts and let himself down the vine hand under hand. Once on deck, he headed for the work station.
He stepped into a loop of vine and made a mental note to clear away debris and undergrowth first chance he got. Before he realized the loop was a noose, it had tightened around his ankle. Before he could bend to loosen it, he found himself whipped high into the air, where he remained dangling bouncily by his foot from the noose whose other end was tied to a springy bough of the towering walnut tree.
Rolling his eyes way up to look way down, he spotted the peg and the severed end of another length of vine that had held the bough to the deck. Where below was the trapper who had cut the tie?
Flammersfeld pretended to be helpless. He thrashed about, twisting, twisting in the continuously maintained light breeze. He made his voice sound panicky. “Help! Let me down! Please!”
Still the damned stowaway-for Flammersfeld had perforce settled on possible explanation number two-did not show his or her face.
Flammersfeld could not wait like this much longer; even with the inconsequential gravity of Buck Two, the noose was cutting off the circulation to his caught foot.
He gave himself one painful minute more; then, when no foe appeared, he drew the blaser from his waistband and sliced the vine.
As he fell he aimed the blaser deckward and thumbed the retro stud. The gelled-light effect slowed his fall enough to let him land rolling.
He scrambled to his feet-and groaned as the numbed foot betrayed him. He put his weight on his good foot and looked around for another trap-or even an outright attack. He looked high up at the walnut tree’s branches and foliage, saw no figure or contraption above him, and put his back against the trunk. He bent to remove the noose from his ankle-and saw on the ground a few fragments of cabbage leaf.
His jaw dropped as the chilling realization hit him.
Then his lips thinned. Very well. He knew now what he was up against.
It was not any of the three possible explanations. It was a fourth-and it was probable and in a few minutes would be provable.
He laughed. To think of the poor miserable creature stalking him!
Then he grew grim. He had underestimated the creature. That it might have been responsible for the doggerel on the computer screen had not even occurred to him. Had to give the thing credit; lot more to it than he had thought. Still, now that he knew, he could handle the threat.
“All right, you bastard,” he muttered through his malicious grin, “you’re digging your own grave. “
He hobbled directly to the cabbage patch. He looked down at an empty space and nodded. There had been an uprooting, though some effort had been made to smooth the disturbed soil.
As if that could fool him! He knew perfectly well what had grown at this particular spot, what should still be growing here, what seemed now on the loose.
A closer look at the soil showed him a dotted line of milky green droplets running from the center of the empty space. He touched one. Sticky. He brought the finger to his nose and sniffed. His grin widened. The damned thing was truly damned. Did it know it had not long?
The trail was short; it ended abruptly at a nearby cabbage. A freshly ripped edge showed where a leaf had been tom off. His grin stretched to its utmost. The creature must be using the leaf to stem the flow.
The trail gone, Flammersfeld cast about for other signs.
He glanced at the nearby heap of mulch. He felt a twinge for having neglected it; he had let it decompose almost to compost. He stiffened. There seemed some difference in its makeup, some shifting of its components. It consisted half of tree limbs he had sectioned for study or trimmed and split into rough boards and half of discarded paper printouts. He thought the paper covered more of the heap than when he had looked at it last-more spread out, less neatly accordioned.
The creature might be hiding under there.
Flammersfeld held the blaser ready to fire.
With his free hand he jerked lengths of dank and moldy continuous-fold printouts away in long fluttering banners. He did not find his creature but did unearth what appeared to be a crude catapult, a thing of branches and vine and a ball of compacted soil held together with some vegetable glue. He also found a winding drum fitted with a crank-a winch; this also was fashioned of sectioned tree limbs and vine.
Both contraptions looked as if a child might have put them together-but they had worked. The catapult had shot the weighted end of a length of vine over a bough and the winch had pulled the bough down.
He rooted around a bit more and found something else-half a walnut shell big as his cupped palm. The size he was used to; what it held was-something else.
The creature had used the empty half-shell as a mortar to pound something vegetable into a resinous black sticky substance that had an aromatic tarry smell. A crude preparation, showing foam of spit.
Visions of amylase danced in Flammersfeld’s head. What would the idiosyncratic enzymatic action be in this case-on, what he felt sure he would find when he analyzed it, green pepper? Seemed clear that the creature had in mind a curare, an arrow poison. That was just what this substance appeared to be.
Flammersfeld found himself asweat. He needed a relaxant-but not this kind. This kind could relax him to death.
Better get the hell out of here. The creature was sure to bleed to death-but how soon? Flammersfeld found himself not so sure any more about a lot of things concerning the creature.
How could he not have seen its intelligence waken, its hate turn on him?
Still crouching, he faced about. For the first time, he looked around at this small world from another’s point of view.
From the cabbage patch, the computer screen was in plain sight. How much the creature must have learned simply by watching and listening to the work and the play!
This was not the time to wonder about that. This was the time to beat it before a small arrow flew or a small lance thrust.
Flammersfeld straightened and hobbled double-time to the open lift.
He breathed a sigh at having made it, and reached to punch the door shut and the lift down.
The killer must have slipped into the lift while the noose held Flammersfeld adangle.
From the left near corner of the cage, where the killer had crouched unseen behind the door that did not slide flush, a frail arm thrust the sharpened and poison-tipped twig into the soft tissue of Flammersfeld’s left ankle.
Flammersfeld stared down at the sadly wise and wearily savage face.
“God damn you,” he said.
“You damn you.”
It was the first and last time he ever heard the rusty piping voice.
But he was not thinking about that. He was thinking about getting to the dispensary in time to work up an antidote. His heart pounding, he punched the lift shut and down.
His eyes were glazing and he did not look at the creature again until the lift stopped and the door opened. Then he kicked the creature out of his way and took two stumbling steps forward before he sprawled his length on the deck.
The killer could not stanch the flow of green blood and soon followed Flammersfeld across the dark threshold into the abode of the dead. But the killer had won what he wanted-vengeance and oblivion.
Inspector H. Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation had expected to see anything but an inverted detective. Yet that was just what he walked in upon.
Dr. Wendell Urth, the Terran extraterrologists’ extraterrologist, had sounded strange when he voiced Davenport in. Davenport had caught a note of strain in the thin tenor delivery of “Enter!”
But Davenport had not dreamed that was due to Dr. Urth’s attempting a headstand. At least, that was what the learned ex-officio consultant to the T.B.I. appeared at first glance to be doing.
Second glance showed him that Dr. Urth was really engaged in rolling a hologram sun along the baseboards. And that he was doing so to light up the floor under the overhanging book-film shelves.
The blood rushing to Dr. Urth’s head made his naked eyes look even more hyperthyroid. That the eyes were naked and that the good doctor’s shirttail hung out told Davenport what was up-or down-or toward. Without taking another step, Davenport scanned the floor.
He spotted them not on the floor itself but on a bottom shelf they had bounced to. He took two steps and made a stretch and picked up what Dr. Urth was hunting for.
“Here you are, Dr. Urth.”
“Here I certainly am,” Dr. Urth wheezed. “Embarrassingly so.” Then he apparently replayed Davenport’s words and tone. He twisted the upside-down half of his body to face Davenport, squinted, and apparently made out what Davenport was holding. “Ah.” He straightened with a huff and a puff, and placed the solar-powered hologram sun on a pile of papers-it was evidently loaded to serve as paperweight as well as to help light the vast dim cluttered room.