The partners agreed it would be good to get back to the Enterprise.
“Have you been able to keep track of him?”
Testily, O’Rourke replied, “May I remind you, sir, that Northrop is of doubtful loyalty? That he has already tried to abscond once? Maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about him.”
“Please be in less of a hurry to divest us of useful personnel, O’Rourke,” Krabbe drawled. “They’re hard to come by out here. See if you can find him.”
“Yes, sir.” O’Rourke’s voice was grumpy. “Though the trail will be cold by now. He was taken an hour ago. And the interferometric telescope isn’t tuned to infrared, so we won’t be able to start looking till the region rotates into daylight. Even then we would have to move the ship to do a proper job.”
He ended the last on an interrogative note, as if encouraging Krabbe to tell him not to bother. After a pause, he added, “I take it this effort should not be allowed to delay the main activity in any way?”
“Well, of course, the project is the main thing.” Krabbe yawned, resignedly aware that he had given O’Rourke the excuse he sought to do little or nothing to help Northrop. He was feeling tired. “You’d better tell Castaneda what’s happened.”
After O’Rourke had signed off he turned to Bouche, who was toying with his supper. “Why do you think those pesky desert-dwelling Barsoomians made off with our bondman? I thought the Tlixix had them well under control.”
Bouche shrugged. “Maybe they want to see if he’s any good to eat.”
He conveyed a morsel of reddish crustacean flesh to his mouth. He did not appear to relish it.
For some perverse reason, he had got the Enterprise to send down a whole crateful of lobster thermidor.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By the time he reached the camp of the Artaxa Roncie Northrop was very hungry, very thirsty, and near the end of his tether. He had tried to eke out the water, but it became so hot during the day! The canteen had less than a pint left in it now.
As for the food, he had starved himself at first, but as the water steadily disappeared down his throat he began to wonder what the point of that might be. Thirst would kill him before starvation did. So he had allowed himself half a sandwich a day.
Except that yesterday he had eaten only one quarter of a sandwich. So he had a quarter left.
During daylight he continually scanned the sky hoping to see a lighter from the Enterprise come curving down towards him. In that, he had been disappointed. But not really surprised. It wasn’t the done thing to leave a bondman in distress—not if you wanted to ensure the loyalty of your staff—but with the partners down on the ground that bastard O’Rourke was in charge, and in his eyes Northrop was a traitor anyway.
His entreaties to Karvass had been unavailing. The Artaxa had looked stonily ahead without answering whenever Northrop tried to explain that he must be taken back to the camp immediately, because of his daily need for water.
Northrop had begun to accept that he was doomed.
He had to admit that the sandboat was a marvellous construction, well adapted to the terrain over which it travelled. Its radium motor humming, it fairly skimmed over the soft yellow sand day and night. In a mostly featureless environment he could not easily estimate its speed, but if he had been told they were covering somewhere between one and two thousand kilometers per planetary rotation—about thirty hours—he would not have been in the least surprised.
It was yet one more similarity between Tenacity and the fictional Barsoom, he told himself: technical sophistication in a sparsely populated warrior culture (which in the case of the green Barsoomians had been nomadic to boot). In Burroughs’ stories that had been a contradiction. It was like expecting Genghis Khan’s Mongols to manufacture machine guns.
Yet here, it was a reality.
Then, when the sandboat wound among the hill formation and plunged down the underground bank to emerge into the huge cavern, he almost forgot his plight. Here indeed was a wonder not described in any of the Burroughs’ Martian books he had read. True, the Tlixix were said to live in domes which might be of comparable size, but they were not like the Barsoomians either. They were more like the hippopotamus-resembling masters of Pellucidar, the world within the Earth. And he doubted if the Tlixix boasted such numbers as he saw jostling on the floor of the great cavern.
Entranced, he gazed up at the mass of glowing crystal of which the roof was composed, turning the whole huge space into an eerie grotto.
Karvass nudged him from the sandboat and towards a line of Artaxa whose skin seemed rougher than his own. Perhaps, Northrop thought, that meant they were older. Their metal ornaments were more numerous, too. His mind went back again to Barsoom, where metal ornaments on otherwise naked bodies were like campaign medals or badges of rank, collected by killing someone.
A younger Artaxa came from somewhere to the side of the welcoming committee. He carried a small bucket-like container with a metal lid, which he offered to Northrop.
Holding it in one arm, Roncie removed the lid. The container held what looked like water, though it was dark and oily-looking.
He was puzzled. The Tlixix were supposed to have all the water on the surface of the planet. He dipped a finger in the liquid and tasted it. It was not salty, at any rate. It tasted like brackish water.
His thirst became overpowering. He lifted the container to his lips and drank, cautiously at first. The water had a strong mineral taste, but it was drinkable.
Gasping with relief, he put the lid back on. Holding on to the container, he turned to Karvass.
“Where did this come from?”
Karvass pointed a lank finger to a group of creatures who were neither Artaxa nor even humanoid. They were vaguely lizard-like, standing erect with a forward-sloping posture, but white as worms which never saw the light.
“Those are our allies the Sawune, who live in deep caverns, much deeper than this. There, they have found water.”
So! There was water which the Tlixix had not sequestered, though probably not much. Northrop tried to recall his brief look at the report on the species of Tenacity. Apart from the numerous dehydrate humanoids, there were also dehydrate lizard species, mostly subterranean. It was possible that a few pools of fresh water had survived evaporation in far-down pockets, also escaping detection by the lobsters’ enthusiastic water-searches.
A more far-reaching realization came to him, now that the long drink had cleared his mind. His captors had known in advance that he needed water. They had made provision for it.
He turned again to Karvass.
“Thank you. But what about food?”
The Artaxa’s facial membranes adopted a configuration. Northrop knew enough by now to interpret this as an expression display, but he didn’t know of what. Karvass’s verbal response, however, made it clear it was one of surprise.
“But have you not eaten? Surely you do not need to eat again?”
Northrop began to remember some biology. He looked at the compact bodies of the dehydrates. Since they did not have circulating blood, these creatures might not need homeostatic temperature control. It was the high-energy-using warm-blooded creatures that needed to feed every day. A mammal needed ten times as much food as a reptile. The dehydrates, with their bodily process of molecular migration through a gel, would have such fine temperature control, and their bodies would be so economical in the use of its resources, that they probably ate only a few times a year.