He thought of Ginny, and was comforted by the fact that she and the other castaways had realized there was a connection between the disabling of the Danae and the destruction of the stores they should have found on Carola. They'd fled when the Theban descended. There was a good possibility that, when they hid the treasure from the lifeboats, they'd hidden some foodstuffs too.
He dozed awhile, and awoke suddenly. There was a greyness overhead, and small, tentative, unfamiliar noises in the jungle. In a sense his situation was horrifying, though being afoot without food or water, and practically unarmed, in the jungle of an uninhabited planet was his own doing. The castaways he must join, too, would be deeply suspicious of anybody who'd arrived on the Theban. Any of them but Ginny, in fact, should try to kill him on sight because the nature of the Theban's errand was shown by Larsen's behaviour with the lifeboats.
He pushed his way on, ruefully trying to work out some way to meet this added problem. The jungle seemed to grow thicker as he went to lower levels and away from the ship. He followed a game trail; it was impossible to move except along these winding, meandering ways. They crossed each other from time to time, and at each such cross trail he examined the new one for signs of footprints. The ground became spongy underfoot. There was swamp somewhere nearby. He noted that the treetrunks had a uniformly muddied look up to about eight feet from the ground, as if there'd been a flood here not too long since.
Trees rustled in the wind that blew above them. There was one variety that creaked as it swayed, and for a long time Horn believed the sound to be the product of another kind of creature altogether. Far away there were occasional deep-bass bellowings, but they were minutes apart. For some reason Horn thought of the elephantine, thirty-foot-long monster he'd seen come out of the jungle on many legs to gaze raptly at the ship's floodlights. There were rare, musical noises which sounded like separate soundings of single notes upon a flute. They did not change pitch as bird calls do on planets which have been converted to human use.
And once, as he stopped to examine a crossing game trail, an animal came out of the jungle. It was the size of a small dog, and was sleek, smooth-furred and streamlined. Its paws were large out of all proportion, with widely separated fingers and webbing between them. It gazed at Horn with startled hazel eyes. He stirred, and it fled. It didn't look like a jungle animal, it seemed more like a water animal, devised for swimming.
He covered a mile, perhaps two. Once he saw a greenish-grey object lying on the ground. It looked like one of those somehow disgusting fungus masses one finds on rotting wood wherever earth-originated forests grow. It looked slippery and he went out of his way to avoid stepping on it. He saw a foot-high creature with pencil-thin legs trotting delicately along the game trail. It saw him, and darted out of sight.
Then he heard a human-made sound, a crashing of metal upon metal, and the squeal of metal being torn. It could only be someone attacking an already wrecked spaceboat, taking it apart to make sure the money from the Danae was not hidden in its innards. Horn had intended to make a circuit of the beacon's site, hunting for footprints, but he was getting too close to Larsen. He took the next of the branching game trails to go farther away and still make a circuit of the beacon.
He knew acute unease, now. If by any chance there were footprints leading directly towards the castaways' hiding place, Larsen and his followers could easily detect them at the edge of the clearing and reach the castaways before Horn could. He hurried, trying to complete the circuit of the beacon. He was in such haste that he almost stumbled over a tragedy of the jungle about him. There was another of the greenish-grey objects in this game trail. But it was no longer flat and flaccid, wet and slippery like some fungus. Now it seemed like a bag, a sack, in which a deerlike small animal the size of a fox terrier struggled desperately, only its head outside of the all-enveloping greenish stuff.
The seeming fungus was now a lump of writhing loathesomeness. It was not a disc but an animal, boneless and all gristle, which had separated its edge into writhing, clutching, constricting arms that quivered and tightened as it grew smaller to crush its prey. It was like a flattened octopus which lay in wait until some other creature trod on it, when what had appeared to be a disc became squirming arms that clutched and squeezed the life out of whatever had touched it. The tiny deer panted and struggled - its eyes agonized.
Horn used his stun pistol, without thinking. That was foolish. The noise was not too loud, but it was a human noise. The convulsive struggle stopped. The fumbling, writhing arms collapsed. The deerlike creature lay still. It lay insensible upon the grey-green mass, which had regained its appearance of being a disgusting fungus in the trail.
Horn rather squeamishly moved the little animal away. When it regained consciousness it was not likely ever to step on anything flat and glistening and greenish-grey again.
Then he heard a blaster let go in continuous fire. It was very near, probably on this same game trail. It seemed to Horn that he heard the roaring of steam, as it develops where a blaster bolt hits something soaked with water. Automatically he snatched out his quite nonlethal stun pistol. The bellowing roar continued. It did not sound like a blast rifle in normal use; blast weapons are fired in separate bursts of energy. A gun fired single-shot - one blaster bolt for each squeeze of the trigger - may fire a thousand times before its charge is exhausted. Used in rapid fire, it can empty itself in less than two minutes, but it will melt down a metal door or burn through feet of wood or plastic. This wasn't rapid-fire, though; it was continuous. No gun could be fired this way by the use of its trigger. It would be melted down by its own violence.
The tumult diminished, though it wasn't cut off. From a bellow it became a roar, from a roar a formless shout. Then it dwindled swiftly to a growling sound, and finally it was no more than disconnected rumblings and the sound of steam rising through water.
Then Horn heard somebody sobbing.
He recognized the voice, and the sound did not rouse his sympathy. He ground his teeth and made his way swiftly along the trail. He ran into a monstrous reek compounded of steam and scorched organic matter. It drifted slowly through the jungle in an offensive, spreading fog. Horn's face wrinkled in disgust, and he saw no reason to change his expression when he came upon the Theban's engineer in a limp heap on the ground, weeping.
"What the devil are you doing here?" demanded Horn, The little man goggled at him.
"I said, what the devil are you doing here?" snapped Horn.
"I'm - trying," said the engineer miserably, "to - to get to the people from the Danae."
"What for?"
"M - maybe they won't kill me," snivelled the engineer. "On the Theban they will. They're all scheming against each other -"
"Naturally!" said Horn. "How do you expect to find the Danae's people?"
"I went around the clearing," the little man said, uneasily, "and I found footprints. But I didn't tell Larsen! I didn't tell him! I followed them. I - thought if I warned them -"
"Go on," snapped Horn.
"I - thought they might protect me from him. But then I - heard a stun pistol. I thought it might be Larsen. So - I ran, and I tripped, and my blast rifle went ahead and fell in the water...."
Horn looked down at the bare soil underfoot. There were footprints, evidently coming out of a game trail that had joined the one he was on a little way back. Then he saw the glitter of water. The trail dipped down and vanished under feeble ripples. The footprints went into it and vanished.
Horn could not believe his eyes. This was no ordinary swamp of tussock grass and reeds, with sluggish streams here and there; this was a forest whose trees grew out of water, though a little way back they grew on dry land. Horn could see a liquid surface ahead for as far as the foliage let him look.