When he hooked his fingers over the flat roof of the two story building, the search party that had been following him was directly below. The vacii stood talking with members of the other search party that had been scouring the connecting alleyway. They whined and wheezed and cackled, finally split up again, each continuing down its own corridor. When Salsbury could no longer hear the slapping of their feet and only an occasional screech of their conversation, he risked kicking up over the rest of the wall and rolling onto the roof.
He stretched out, catching his breath, and looked at the stars which shown so brightly overhead. After a moment, there was a nagging in his mind that something was terribly wrong. In an instant, he saw what it was.
There were two moons.
One of them was the size and color of the moon as he had been used to it, the moon of the Earth he had come from. The second, hanging close to it was about half as large and of a shimmering greenish tint much darker than the regular moon. He watched them for a long time, fascinated. This was, of course, an alternate probability and would have differences-like the two moons. That was a strange and somehow delightful difference. But he wondered what the other deviations would be like. Perhaps, even if he escaped the vacii compound, he would find this Earth uninhabitable, a desert, a no-man's-land. Or perhaps dinosaurs roamed it yet.
When he grew tired of frightening himself, he went across the roof to the far edge and looked at the top of the next building. It was two stories, but it was four feet away. He tensed, jumped the gap easily, landed on his toes to keep from making excessive noise. The rest of the escape was boring. He moved from roof to roof, almost like an automaton. He could not move in a straight line, for not all the buildings were two stories, and he could not leap to the side of a ten story structure and expect to hold on. At last, he reached the end of the complex. Beyond was the wall of a valley, sloping upward, crowded with the dark, looming shapes of pine trees. It looked much like a virgin forest.
He dropped off the roof, crouched in the shadows beside the building and looked across the twenty feet of bare earth, checking the forest for signs of vacii sentries. It was difficult to see, much of anything against the monolithic pitch of that intense growth, but when he was relatively confident there were no guards, he moved out, crossed the barren space quickly, and moved into the trees, effectively disappearing from sight had any vacii happened to look his way now.
The deeper he walked into the wood, the surer he was that the forest was a virgin place, relatively unchanged through several thousands of years, certainly untouched by civilization, even this close the compound. The trees were enormous, towering monsters that blocked the sunlight out during the day so that little or nothing grew beneath them. The floor was unlittered, as perfectly kept as a living room carpet Just a few odds and ends of rock to pick his way around, otherwise easy going.
The land began to rise as the base of the mountain insinuated itself on the gentle hills he had met at first Trying to keep to places where some of the moonlight managed to filter through the heavy blanket of pine needles overhead, he went upward with the land. Once he fell climbing a short rock face and skinned his shin badly. However, the bleeding ceased within moments, and the pain was gone shortly thereafter.
When he reached the top of the valley wall, he sat down and stared over the trees into the alien complex. The starship was the center of it, and for the first time, Salsbury had some idea of the true size of that piece of machinery. He estimated it at three-hundred feet in width and fifteen-hundred feet long. The remainder of the complex was made up of connecting, various-sized buildings which stretched from valley wall to valley wall and two-thousand feet from both ends of the starship.
But being able to look down on it did not make him able to feel superior to it.
He was still seventy-six probability lines away from his own world Away from Lynda,
Lynda. He thought about her, about the smooth warmness of her flesh, the way they had embraced in the darkness of their room; the way she smiled with her crooked tooth; the ease with which she accepted all of the frightening things about him. He felt a deep, bitter remorse that he might never see her again. For how would he return to the ship? And even if he did accomplish that feat, how would he reach the cart? And once having reached the cart, how would he know the method of operation to return to his own probability line? And, if he got home, would Lynda still be alive? Would the vacii have discovered her behind the second beam projector; would they have sent a detail of sucker-mouthed guards through to kill or capture her?
His thoughts were abruptly wrenched away from Lynda and what problems she might have. Below, at the point where the alien compound took over from the forest, a search party of vacii were entering the trees. In ten or fifteen minutes, they might top the edge of the valley, be right up here on the first slopes of the mountain with him. He stood, took one last look, and started back through the trees, running now that the blanket of needles was thinner and more light seeped through to show him the way.
Half an hour later, he stopped at a formation of rocks that marked the head of a second valley running perpendicular to the first. He had exerted himself to his outside limits; now his breath came hard, and the cold mountain air burned his lungs. He sat down to allow his quivering muscles time to settle and relax, and he leaned his head against a pillow of rocks.
Five minutes later, he woke with a start, cursing himself for letting his weariness overcome him during so dangerous a time. Maybe he was growing even more human than the computer realized, for he was becoming increasingly susceptible to the foibles of a normal man. Then he stopped cursing and wondered what it was had wakened him.
His nose brought him the first clue: a cloying stench of perspiration that was not his, a heavy animal smell like something one might run across at a large zoo on a humid summer day. He brought his head up quickly, though it seemed bolted to his chest, and looked into the coal black eyes of the beast-eyes set two inches deep under a shelved forehead. Its nostrils were wide and black, flared in a pebbly black, as the pug nose which trembled and blew steam at him. The enormous, dark-lipped mouth opened, showing yellow, square teeth. Salsbury guessed this was supposed to be a smile. But he remembered that he had often smiled at a good-looking dinner.
The beast blew steam and blinked.
Salsbury brought his gun out of his holster with a slickness that would have done well against Wyatt Earp. But even as he was depressing the trigger, the beast's stubby-fingered paw flicked at his wrist and knocked the weapon to the ground. He reached for it. The beast grabbed him by the back of the shirt before he could touch the butt, lifted him off the ground and held him at arm's length. He struggled but could not free himself. Sarcastically, he wondered where it would decide to bite first.
CHAPTER 16
While the gorilla-thing with the slimy yellow teeth held Victor up for approval like a matron shopper inspecting a piece of meat, another one of the beasts came into view behind the first. It shuffled up to Salsbury, its heavy feet making surprisingly little noise, and stared, blinking its four-pound corrugated eyelids over its sunken, black eyes. It ran a thick pink tongue over its own rotting teeth, as if it enjoyed the taste of its own halitosis. It was fully as large as the first, a good eight and a half feet tall, even though slightly stooped and hunch-backed. Its long arms did not drag on the ground, but they were long enough so that it didn't have to bend to scratch its feet.