The searchers found money. Horn heard the noise as they bellowed boasts. But presently the men did not come back, and they didn't brag of their findings, either. There is a sum of money beyond which to boast is to invite robbery. There is another sum, and to boast of having it is an invitation to murder.
Horn moved away from the clearing's edge. The long stretch of money bait had been found first. It was now cleaned up. The quarter-mile section was found. He'd heard the noise there, too. He went carefully and cautiously to examine the hundred-yard strips he'd baited. The money itself was both bait and trap. A quaint side light, too, was that the men in the Theban would become desperately suspicious of each other, now, but no one would want to kill Horn. He was their only hope, and if he'd found the treasure he could give more of it.
He almost ran into two men on a hundred-yard bait trail, but he heard them squabbling and passed them by. There was another man.... It was the ship's cook. Horn heard him searching feverishly. He stepped quietly aside into the jungle and waited.
Presently the cook came by, half crazed by his good fortune. He'd found more money than he'd ever had before.
Horn coldly squeezed the trigger of his stun gun. Then he came out of hiding and picked up the cook, who'd fallen senseless as Horn had done at the gatehouse of the spaceport on Formalhaut. Horn carried the limp figure of the cook on his shoulder, trending gradually downhill towards the rising water. It had risen another foot during the night.
Horn fastened the unconscious cook to a tree. Then he went to the encampment of his followers. Ginny seemed about to faint with relief when she saw him. He drew the Danae's captain aside and explained. The captain was astounded, shocked and unwilling. Horn grimly offered to sign a statement acknowledging full responsibility.
The Danae's captain followed reluctantly when Horn went away from the encampment once more. The two of them, together, moved towards where Horn had left the cook tied up.
They heard him screaming from a quarter mile away. He shrieked as the Theban's little engineer had done when thrown out to space for a landing on the Danae. And he had reason for screaming. A five-foot constrictor beast swarmed over him. It seemed to embrace him, horribly. Its tentacles with their hungry, lipless mouths at the ends lapped at his flesh as if caressingly. His eyes seemed about to start out of his head as he shrieked.
It was necessary to get close, and Horn was almost repentant that he'd bound the cook for such a monster to find. But then he noticed something new; a new angle on the creature's natural history.
From a slit in the thickest part of the monster's central portion, little three-inch monsters squirmed and hitched their way out. They were miniatures of the full-grown beast. They were carried in a sack or pocket like an opossum, like a seahorse, like all monotremes and kangaroos, like many insects and a few fish. These infantile horrors squeezed their way to freedom, and they squirmed and writhed their way under their parent's constricting arms to feed on whatever the parent had captured.
Horn used his stun pistol carefully.
Just in time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AN hour later it began to rain. By that time the Theban's cook was on his way back to the tramp ship, half stripped of his garments which the constrictor beast had torn in the struggle of its mouths to feed. The cook was gashed here and there by the beast, and he'd been nibbled on by the infant monstrosities riding in their parent's pouch. But he was essentially unharmed.
Equally important, he was rich. Horn had given him such a large quantity of interstellar credit notes that he could not stuff them in a pocket. He could hardly carry the whole amount on board the Theban except a little at a time. The cook also had painstaking instructions for the astrogation of a lifeboat to the planet Wolkim. The Theban had spaceboats. With his written instructions, the cook could take one of the boats and have a really fair chance of making port. He'd have probably as good a chance as anybody could have in a spaceboat. And if he did get there, he'd be a free man with a pocket full of money. It looked as if Horn were insanely offering immunity and riches to a man who was at least accessory to piracy and the intended murder of the Danae people. But Horn had kept the cook's blast rifle. It doubled the armament of his followers.
"You," said the Danae's captain heavily, as they moved later along a flooded trail, "have assumed full responsibility for this, Mr. Horn!"
They waded nearly waist deep in water, surrounded by the trees of a jungle turned to swamp. There came a rumbling from the west.
"Of course," said Horn curtly. "It's the only thing to do."
"I have co-operated against my better judgment, Mr. Horn!" said the captain fretfully. "I fear it will be hard to explain."
"It's perfectly simple," Horn told him impatiently. "The cook's gone back to the Theban with fifty thousand credits in his pocket. If anybody finds it out, they'll kill him for it. Any one of them."
More rumblings from the west. Horn cocked an ear, but did not comment. He waded on. The Danae's captain considered solemnly. He looked as dignified as any man could when surrounded by water to his middle, plus the eccentric vegetation of the planet Carola.
"In that event," pronounced the captain, "he will keep it a secret. And nothing will have been gained. I fear I have made a mistake in consenting to this, Mr. Horn."
"Maybe he'll try to keep it secret," agreed Horn as impatiently as before, "but already the different crewmen have found different amounts of money, and those who have the least don't like it. Even those who have the most are suspicious that somebody else has more than they have. They're watching each other. The cook knows it. He can't act naturally. There's no natural way to act! He'll know they suspect him. He'll try to allay their suspicions, which will make them even more suspicious. Then he won't dare sleep. He'll go psycho from fear. He'll give himself away. Then the others will suspect each other more than ever! And there's the spaceboat bit."
The captain shook his head sorrowfully. "I doubt very much that he will attempt to make Wolkim in a spaceboat, Mr. Horn. A lifeboat journey is risky. We had no choice. We had to try it. But I do not think a common spaceman will do it for money. No, I do not think he will do it."
There was a sudden, angry growling in the west. It was thunder. Horn looked up and behind him. Clouds could be glimpsed above the jungle roof. There was a flash of lurid lightning, which doubled the brightness of the day. Horn shook his head annoyedly.
"He won't think of it as done for money," he observed. "If he does it, it will be because he thinks of it as his only hope of living. Which it may be! But like yourself, I doubt he will do it."
He turned into a branching jungle trail, towards a shallower part of the water. The Danae's captain followed him.
"Then I don't see what -"
"The Theban can't lift off without me," said Horn, "and presently they'll find out that the beacon has been telling all passers-by just exactly what's happening here. So if they stay here, money or no money they'll be caught and executed for various crimes. So they can't stay here. But they can't leave here via the ship without me, and I'm not available. But that does leave the boats. We've just reminded the cook of the boats by telling him how to use one. Presently all of the crew will be worrying that some of their number may get away in the boats and leave them behind. They'll all realize acutely that if Larsen has to choose between abandoning his crew and escaping, his crew will be in bad shape."