So the experienced warriors said, the men who had lived through such an experience.
Five hundred. He reached five hundred and, just to be on the safe side, still tense, still ready to run, counted another five hundred, up to the ultimate number conceived by man, a full thousand.
No hissing, no whistling sounds. No suggestion of danger.
He relaxed, and his muscles—suddenly set free—gave way. He fell to the floor of the burrow, whimpering with the release of tension.
It was over. His Theft was over. He was a man.
He had been in the same place as a Monster, and lived through it. He had met Strangers and dealt with them as a representative of Mankind. Such things as he would have to tell his uncle!
His uncle. Where was his uncle? Where was the band?
Suddenly fully aware of how much was wrong, Eric scrambled to his feet and walked cautiously back to the open doorway. The burrow was empty. They hadn’t waited for him.
But that was another incredible thing! A band never gave an initiate up for lost until at least two full days had gone by. In the chief’s absence, of course, this was measured by the sleep periods of the band captain. Any band would wait two days before giving up and turning home-ward. And, Eric was positive, his uncle would have waited a bit longer than that for him. He’d been away for such a short time! Then what had happened?
He crept to the doorway and peeped outside. There was almost no dizziness this time: his eyes adjusted quickly to the different scale of distance. The Monster was busy on the other side of the larder. It had merely been crossing the room, then, not pursuing and attacking. Apparently, it hadn’t noticed him at all.
Fantastic. And with all the noise he had made! All that rushing back and forth, that battering down of the door!
The Monster turned abruptly, walked a few gigantic steps and hurled itself at the structure in which Eric had met the Strangers. The walls, the floor, everything, shook mightily in sympathy to the impact of the great organism as it wriggled a bit and became still.
Eric was startled until he realized that the creature had done no more than lie down in the structure. It was a piece of Monster furniture, after all.
How had that felt to Arthur the Organizer and Walter the Weapon-Seeker and the others hidden in the base? Eric grinned. Those Strangers must be a little less haughty, a little less sober at this moment.
Meanwhile, he had work to do, things to find out.
He got his fingers under the slab of door and tugged it upright. It was heavy! He pushed against it, slowly, carefully, first one side and then the other, walking it back to the hole in the wall. A final push, and it slid into place tightly, only the thin, curved line suggesting its existence.
Now he could look around.
There had been a fight here—that much was certain. A brief, bitter battle. Examining the area closely, Eric saw nn mistakable signs of conflict.
A broken spear shaft. Some blood on the wall. Part of a torn knapsack. No bodies, of course. You were not likely to find bodies after a battle. Any people of the burrows knew that the one unavoidable imperative of victory was to drag the bodies away and dispose of them. No one might ever leave dead enemies to rot where they would foul the corridors.
So there had been a battle. He had been tight—his uncle and his uncle’s band had not just gone off and left him. There must have been an attack by a superior force: the hand had stood its ground for a while, sustained some losses, and then been forced to retreat.
But there were a few things which didn’t make sense. First, it was very unusual for a war party of Strangers to come this close to Monster territory. The burrows which were inhabited by Mankind, the natural goal of a war party, were much further back. At this point, you would not expect to find any group larger than a foraging expedition—a Stranger band at most.
His uncle’s men, fully armed, operating under battle alert, could easily cope with a single band of weavers, weaponsmiths or traders from the decadent back burrows. They would have driven them off, possibly taking a few prisoners, and continued to wait for him.
That left only two possibilities. The unlikely war party—a two- or three-band attack—and, even more unlikely, a band from another fierce, front-burrow people. But front-burrowers rarely went prowling at random near Monster territory; they would have their own door cut into it and would tend to feel hugely uncertain about one belonging to another people. They too would head for the inhabited burrows if they were on any business other than the important one of stealing for their tribe’s needs.
And another thing. Unless his uncle’s band had been wiped out to the very last man—a thought Eric rejected as highly improbable—the survivors were honor-bound, by their oath of manhood, after doing whatever the immediate military situation required, from pursuit to retreat, to return as soon as possible to the spot where an initiate was expected back from his Theft. No warrior would dare face the women if he failed to do this.
Possibly the attack had just come. Possibly his uncle’s band was a short distance away, still fighting their way from burrow’s end to burrow’s end; and, once they had gotten clear of the enemy, would make their way back to him.
In that case, he should be able to hear the battle still going on. And the burrows were dreadfully still.
Eric shivered. A warrior was not meant to be abroad without companions. He’d heard of tribeless Strangers—once, as a child, he remembered enjoying the intricate execution of a man who’d been expelled from his own people for some major crime and who had wandered pathetically into the neighborhood of Mankind—but these people were hardly to be considered human: tribes, bands, societies, were the surroundings of human creatures.
It was awful to be alone. It was unthinkable.
Without bothering to eat, though he was quite hungry after his Theft, he began walking rapidly down the corridor. After a while, he broke into a trot. He wanted to get home as soon as possible—to be among his own kind again.
He reached into his back-sling and got a spear for each hand.
A nervous business going through the corridors all by yourself. They were so empty and so quiet. They hadn’t seemed this quiet when he’d been on expedition with the band. And so fearfully, frighteningly dim. Eric had never before realized how much difference there was between the light you got from one forehead glow lamp and the usual band complement of a half-dozen. He found himself getting more and more wary of the unexpected shadows where the wall curved sharply: he picked up speed as he ran past the black hole of a branching burrow.
At any one of those places, an enemy could be waiting for him, warned by the sound of his approaching footsteps. It could be the same enemy which had attacked his uncle’s band, a handful of cruel and murderous Strangers, or a horde of them. It could be something worse: abruptly he remembered legends of unmentionable creatures who lurked in the empty burrows, creatures who fled before the approach of a band of warriors, but who would come noiselessly upon a single man. Big creatures who engulfed you, Tiny creatures who came in their hundreds and nibbled you to pieces. Eric kept jerking his head around to look behind him: at least he could keep his doom from taking him by surprise.
It was awful to be alone.
And yet, in the midst of his fears, his mind returned again and again to the problem of his uncle’s disappearance. Eric could not believe anything serious had happened to him: Thomas the Trap-Smasher was a veteran of too many bloody adventures, too many battles against unequal odds. Then where had he gone? And where had he taken the band?