Dane was startled by a crashing in the brush. His sleep ray-rod was out as he spun around. But it was Mura’s pleasant brown face which was framed in a circle of torn leaves. At Dane’s wave he came into the clearing. It was not necessary to point out the signs of battle—he had already noted them.
“They jumped him here,” Dane was convinced.
“But who or what are ‘they’?” was Mura’s counter. And seconds later he added the unanswerable question, “And how did they leave?”
“The tracks of the crawler went right through the wall of the cliff—”
Mura edged out on the carpet of muck. “No indications of any trap door here,” he observed, gravely, as if he had expected to find something of the sort. “There remains—” he jerked a thumb into the air where the purr of the flitter grew louder as Kosti circled back towards them.
“But we would have heard—have seen—” protested Dane, all the time wondering if they would have. He had been at the other end of the valley when Tau had caught that interrupted cry for help. And from this point the place where the Medic had been at that moment was hidden by at least two miles of broken ground.
“Something smaller than one of our flitters,” Mura was thinking aloud. “It could be done. One thing we may be sure of—they have collected Kamil and we must find out who they are and where they are before we can get him back!”
He ploughed away through the brush and Dane followed him out on a bare strip of ground from which they could signal to the flitter.
“Found him?” Kosti called as he brought the machine down.
“Found where some one scooped him up.” Mura went to the keyboard of the caster.
Dane turned for a last look up that sinister valley. But all at once his attention was drawn from the valley and its cliffs to a new phenomenon in evidence on a higher level. He had not noticed that the sun had disappeared while they had been making their search of the brush. But now clouds were gathering—and not only clouds.
The naked snow touched peaks of the range, which had been so sharp set against the pallid sky of Limbo when the ship out of space had swept over them, were gone! It was as if that milky, faded sky had fallen as a curtain to blot them out. Where the peaks had been swirled fog—fog so thick that it erased half the horizon as a painter might draw a blotting brush across an unsuccessful landscape. Dane had never seen anything like it. And it was moving so fast, visibly cutting off miles of territory in the few moments he had watched it. To be lost in that—!
“Look!” he ran to the flitter and jogged Mura’s arm, pointing to the fast disappearing mountains. “Look at that!”
Kosti spit out an oath in the slurred speech of Venus. Mura simply obeyed orders and looked. Another huge section to the north was swallowed up as he did so. And now they noted another thing. From the tops of the valley cliffs curls of greyish, yellow vapour were rising, to cling and render misty the outlines of the rocks. Whether this was all part of the same phenomenon they did not know, but the three Terrans insensibly drew closer together, chilled as much by what they saw as the cold apparent with the going of the sun.
They were shaken out of their absorption by the click of the caster summoning them back to the ship. The change in the mountains had been noted on the Queen and both the flitter searching for the wreck and their own were ordered to report in at once.
There was further change in the atmosphere, a speeding up of the mists. The swirls above the valley walls combined, formed banks and began to drop, cutting visibility.
Kosti watched them anxiously. “We’ll have to swing out—away from the valleys. That stuff is moving too fast. We can ride the beam in, but I’d rather not unless I have to—”
But, by the time they were airborne, the mist was down to the level of the valley floor and was puffing out in threatening tendrils on to the rough terrain of the burnt-off land. The mountains had vanished and the foothills were being fast swallowed up. It was uncanny, terrifying in a way, this wiping away of solid earth, the substitution of a dirty, rolling mist which swirled and spun within its mass until one suspicioned movement there, alien, menacing movement.
Kosti set the controls to full speed, but they had covered little more than a mile of the return journey before he was forced to throttle down. For the mist was not only spilling out of the valleys, it was also curling up from the land under them, each thread of haze spinning to join and thicken with others.
It was true that they were in no danger of being lost. The thin reed of sound humming in their ears provided a guide to bring the flitter back to the parent ship. But they were none the easier knowing that as they coasted above a curdling sea of mist.
The stuff rose about them forming viscid bubbles on the windbreak. Only the constant hum of the radar beam linked them with reality.
“Hope our boys made it down from the mountains before the worst of this hit,” Kosti broke the strained silence.
“If they didn’t,” Mura replied, “they will have to land until it clears.”
Kosti throttled down once more as the radar hum sharpened. “No use crashing into the old lady—”
Within the blanket of mist all sense of direction, of distance was lost. They might have been up ten thousand feet, or skimming but one above the broken surface of the rock plain. Kosti hunched over the controls, his usually good-humoured face pinched, his eyes moving from the mist to the dials before him and back again.
They sighted the ship—a dark shadow looming through the veil. With masterly precision Kosti brought the flitter down until it jarred against the ground. But he was in no hurry to climb out. Instead he wiped his face with the back of his hand. Mura leaned forward and patted the big man’s shoulder.
“That was a good job!”
Kosti grinned. “It had to be!”
They crawled out of the flitter and, on impulse, linked hands as they started for the dim pillar which was the Queen. The contact of palm against palm was not only insurance and reassurance, but it was also security of a type Dane felt he needed—and guessed that his companions wanted also. The menacing, alien mist pressed in upon them. Its damp congealed greasily on their helmets, dripped from them as they moved.
But ten paces took them to the welcome arch of the ramp and they went up, to stand a moment later in the pleasant light and warmth of the entrance hatch. Jasper Weeks teetered back and forth there, his pallid little face expressing worry.
“Oh—you—” was his unflattering greeting.
Kosti laughed. “Who did you expect, little man—a Sensor dragon breathing fire? Sure, it’s us, and we’re glad to be back—”
“Something wrong?” Mura interrupted.
Weeks stepped to the outer opening of the hatch once more. “The other flitter—we haven’t heard from them for an hour. Captain ordered them back as soon as he saw the fog closing in. Survey tape says these fogs sometimes last a couple of days—but they aren’t usual this time of year.”
Kosti whistled and Mura leaned back against the wall, unbuckling his helmet.
“Several days.” Dane thought of that. To be lost out in that soup for days! You’d just have to stay grounded and hope for the best. But an emergency landing in the mountains under such conditions—! Now he could understand why Weeks fidgeted at the hatch. Their own journey over the unobstructed plain was, under the circumstances, a stroll in a Terran park, compared to the difficulties those on the other flitter might be forced to face.
They went up to make their report to the Captain. But all through it he sat with at least half his attention given to the com where Tang Ya sat before the master visa-screen, his hand ready for the key of the caster or to tend the rider beam which might guide the missing flyer in. Somewhere out in the mystery which was now Limbo was not only Ali, but Rip, Tau and Steen Wilcox—a good section of their crew.