This went on for hours. Then Horn saw where a monster tree had fallen. It was hollow at its base and with an entrance to its rotten heart like the doorway of a cathedral. The hollow side was down. It formed a roof of sorts, with side walls and a floor. It was a shelter. Horn halted his followers and went to examine it. The others waited, drooping in the flood from the sky, till Horn came back and waved them in. The tree had been a full twenty feet in diameter, vastly larger than the average and huge even among the others of its thick-barked kind.
It seemed strange to be in shelter. There was a curtain of dripping water across the hole by which they'd entered, and inside was darkness, but once within they could smell ancientness and decay and, of course, the overwhelming wetness from without. But in the fallen monster tree it was actually dry. Horn even found rotted punk which, with sufficient encouragement, would smoulder without flames and might be shielded so no light would invite nocturnal beasts after nightfall.
Horn made the fire and the castaways settled themselves. They had, of course, left no footprints on the torrent-drenched game trail. They'd marched at random among the winding, crisscrossing paths. Under the conditions of their flight, they could not keep track of compass directions. Horn didn't know where he was, except that he was somewhere on the upraised spur of land on which the beacon stood. They might be half a dozen miles from the beacon and the Theban. On the other hand, they might be very near.
When that thought occurred to him, Horn prepared to post himself on guard. He got a blast rifle ready. It was warm to the touch. Despite its wrappings and its safety, moisture, which might have been the mere wetness of the air, was developing heat. On the trail he could have done nothing. Here he wiped the rifle, but everything was damp. He needed something dry.
He got interstellar credit notes out of a sealed parcel and used them for drying rags. He dried his own blaster and the other, then returned the notes gravely to the Danae's captain, who had watched him with an expression of as much alarm and shock as he could permit himself.
"Even money," said Horn, "has its uses occasionally."
The captain said with dignity and some reproach, "I am not sure, Mr. Horn, that I should have agreed to your measure. It was bad enough to attempt to cause dissension by the use of credit notes planted for those pirates to find, but that had some reason. This action has none."
"But it has," said Horn. "It keeps us armed a few days longer. Now that the rains have come, I can't spread any more money or manna for your would-be murderers. In two days or three we'd have won them over. They'd have begun to desert to us because it was too dangerous to be on the Theban, and safe and restful and happy to be with us. That was what I hoped for. But the rains have come. We have to start over."
He casually placed himself on guard, looking out into a grey semidarkness with curtain after curtain of falling water. He could see really close trees with fair clarity, but those twenty yards away were mere outlines in a mist. Beyond a hundred feet he could not see at all.
Ginny came to sit beside him. She looked at his expression. "It's bad?"
"Very bad," said Horn. "I've got to think of something new to do. If the rain had held off just a couple of days more, or if that poor devil could have gone a little longer without a drink.... But he'll have told Larsen everything he knows about us. Everything. That's bad!"
Ginny watched his face intently. "Do you - really think we're going to - get out of this?"
"Of course!" said Horn. "It's just going to take longer than I thought. If none of us gets sick, we'll make it. Larsen can't take frustration. We're frustrating him. If the rain keeps up, he can't hunt us. If he can't hunt us, his men will realize that they can't leave in the ship. Presently they'll realize that they can't leave at all except in the boats. Then they'll see that when the Danae's only a few days overdue, some sort of ship will make routine calls on all the beacons along her route.
"If they stop at Hermas they probably won't find the Danae, but the smashed food and fuel caches will tell them something's wrong. When they come on to Carola they'll find the Theban, and the wreckage of the Danae's boats. But before that they'll have picked up the beacon signal, which will post them pretty thoroughly on what's happened. All this, of course, is assuming that no ship comes along the space lane earlier and picks up the modified signal the beacon's broadcasting now to blow the whistle on Larsen."
He was deliberately encouraging. It sounded very promising indeed. Ginny said reflectively. "It really looks -"
"I could end our troubles tomorrow," said Horn sombrely, "if I were willing to let Larsen get away. But he tried to murder you, Ginny. He was willing to have you die just so he could steal some filthy credit notes to spend on beastliness!"
Ginny said, "But how -"
"I could give him the money he's after," said Horn sourly. "I could dump it out in the clearing for him to find. He would, or he'd know instantly if anybody else found it. And then he'd set his men to murdering each other, maybe with a little help from himself. Ultimately he'd leave with the money in a Theban lifeboat. And we'd be in pretty good shape."
"We're going to try to get the children dry," Ginny said. "That rotted wood you found burns a lot like charcoal."
Horn nodded. He continued to watch out of the opening of the hollow tree.
The rain stopped rather more suddenly than it began. One instant all the world was filled with the drumming sound of water pouring down in masses, the next instant the drumming noise retreated. There remained only the sounds of water running here, and dripping there, and pouring furiously downwards at another place.
In minutes the sky could be seen, and the clouds were visibly less dark grey and less menacing than before. The giant tree in whose trunk they'd taken shelter had pulled down much of the jungle roof in its collapse. Masses of vapour overhead could be seen to twist and writhe as if struggling not to retreat from the area they'd overwhelmed. But they'd emptied themselves for the moment. In three hours they'd sent twenty-some inches of rain down to the ground around the castaways' retreat. Thunder still rumbled over the jungle. Now and then, not too often, lightning flashed. And wetness glistened everywhere. Leaves still dripped. Treetrunks still drained away water from their trunks. And the trail by which they'd come here remained a babbling rivulet.
Horn continued to regard the world outside this shelter with a certain weariness. Presently he saw animals again. At first they were mere flickerings of motion, too small and too quick to be identified. Then something writhed across the game trail. It was greyish green, and it seemed to be a disc of flabby and unwholesome mould or fungus. Presently a deerlike creature with large, soft eyes appeared and went away again.
The women attended to the children. Some of the men wrung out their garments. The Danae's captain supervised the operation. He moved about the shelter, confidently surveying the scene and the matters about which he was qualified to give orders. Ginny came back to Horn.
"I don't like sitting still," said Horn annoyedly. "I think it's unwise to give Larsen time to make plans of his own. We've kept him busy with what we were doing to him, after a fashion, but with the rains coming things tend to turn his way. It's time he got a shock. He's had several, but he needs a few more. Frustrating shocks. We need to keep him off balance."
Ginny looked uneasy, but she waited. After a moment Horn said, frowning, "Every game trail has had all its spoor washed away. My guess is that Larsen may start patrolling between rains, to try to find man tracks and locate us that way. It would be wholesome for him to find he can't."