Warily he approached.
It seemed to be a sort of midden, and the blood began to pulse in his ears. It contained odd-shaped objects that might have resembled the bones and fangs and carapaces of animals like no animals that had ever lived on earth. He stood staring at it, every sense poised. Then, with infinite pain, he approached. There was no sound. There was no motion. Gently he poked the crystalline light into a gap in the tangle. But nothing moved and there was nothing revealed.
Ryeland moved back and considered.
Space had its own scale of time. The discarded bones and the claw-marks in the rock might look just as fresh after another hundred million years. Undoubtedly the cave had been abandoned.
He turned.
Something screamed behind him. He had only time to halt his turn, to start to move his head back.
And the heap of bones exploded.
What kept Ryeland from dying at once was the tiny scope of the cavern, compared to the scale of interplanetary distances. The pyropod, rocket driven, enormously strong, hadn't the room to maneuver or even to build up speed. But it blasted up at him with frightening speed. It was huge—as Earth animals go—larger than a horse, and armored with mirror-bright scales. It had a solitary eye, a wide mirror on a stalked central organ. It had a single, enormous claw at the end of a writhing, flexible trunk. It roared like a rocket at takeoff—which it was—and the great heavy-metal claw snapped violently.
But the trash in its way screened Ryeland for a moment; he was thrust back and out of the way, and the pyropod flew past to gouge great chips out of the wall of the cavern.
Ryeland took quick aim and fired.
Even in the roar of the pyropod's drive, he could hear his bullet scream away, and knew that it had hit that armor and ricocheted off. The pyropod did not turn to strike toward him again; it turned away, in fact, and its thin bright tail whipped toward him. White fire jetted out furiously. The tail! The tail was a more fearsome weapon than the claw —the mighty drive that could hurl it through space could char him in a second! But Ryeland was already moving, and the blast missed him entirely, though a backwash of flame from the wall caught his leg and (he discovered later) raised great angry blisters on his skin. Ryeland crashed into the wall, spun like a racing swimmer in a pool, raised the gun again and fired—rapidly—one, two, three!
And then his cartridges were gone . . .
But one of those bullets had struck a target. The stalk that held its eye was hit. The bulb exploded; the creature was blinded. It blundered about the chamber like a rocket gone mad, colliding with the walls, recoiling, plunging wildly again. The blazing jet licked perilously close—
And then the jet was screaming away, bouncing and roaring through the tunnel, out, out and away . . .
Ryeland was hurt badly, burned, bleeding, aching in every muscle; and he had no breath left at all after that quick violent encounter. But he did not pause. He leaped to follow the pyropod. Donna was up there!
He sailed throifgh dark space, his crystal torch long since lost, tried to see through the utter dark, tried to shield his head from striking against the wall. It was good, now, that the tunnel was so narrow; there was really only one way to go.
And after interminable moments there was light.
He drove toward it, rounded a bend, and saw Donna Creery hurrying toward him—alive! She bore a coiled branch of the vine with its moons of luminous fusorians.
"Steven! Thank God!"
She tossed a loop of the vine to him: he caught it, and they drew themselves together. Ryeland caught her roughly. "The pyropod! What became of it?"
"Gone," said Donna Creery. "It went right by, out into space. Not having a nucleonic harpoon, I let it go. I think we've seen the last of it."
"It was hiding in a pile of bones," said Ryeland, suddenly drained. "I-I think I hit its eye."
"Yes. At least, it acted blind. And-oh, Steven!"
He looked at her, not comprehending. Reaction? He tried to reassure her. "It won't be back, Donna. You said yourself—"
"No, no. It's Chiquita, Steven. I think she's dying."
He nodded, hardly hearing. "Poor thing. Well, we've avenged her, I guess."
"And what about avenging ourselves? Have you forgotten, Steve—if Chiquita dies, there's nothing to hold our air!"
The spaceling lay motionless in a little cave lined with vines.
Now and then she struggled restlessly—not to move, but to bring fresh air about her. She seemed both bloated and gaunt. And the great wounds along her side were now crusted with dirty ocher scabs.
"Poor Chiquita," the girl whispered, stroking the soft fur. Donna crooned at the creature, and its great dull eyes fastened on her.
Ryeland looked the spaceling over. Her belly was swollen angrily, but the flesh had shrunk from the rest of her body. Her fur was lusterless and unkempt. The flame-red brilliance was gone from her nose; it was cold, black, dry. He touched her: hot. Did she have a fever? Ryeland could not know, but surely she was hotter than when he had clung to her neck, fleeing the Body Bank. The spaceling seemed to know that he was trying to help. She licked her black tongue out at him feebly; it was all the effort she could make.
Ryeland said reluctantly, "I don't think there's anything we can do for her."
"The light seems to bother her."
"All right. That much we can do." But it wasn't easy, in this little world of luminous crystal and vine. They found some growths that glowed only faintly and tugged them into place, thicker and thicker, until the little nook where Chiquita lay became a dim green hiding-hole. Chiquita looked faintly grateful, but mostly she looked sick.
They left her and went out to the surface to look at the stars. It was maddening, it was utterly maddening, to be so helpless! Ryeland clung to the edge of the tunnel, staring out toward emptiness. Somewhere out there, invisible but sure, lay the other Reefs. The great outer Reefs where fugitive humans managed lives that were free of the Plan—where, above all, lived Ron Donderevo, the native spaceman who had been a student of the science of the Plan, a guest and a prisoner of the Planner. He had worn the iron collar of a Risk—the selfsame collar that choked Ryeland now, if Angela had told the truth. He had talked to the Planner about a jetless drive, had been consigned to the stockpile, had ridden Chiquita back to the Reefs.
But—was he superhuman?
Could he remove Ryeland's collar—here in the Reefs, without all the elaborate surgical facilities that had been available at the stockpile? Could he fill the gap in Ryeland's tormented memory—or was there really any gap to fill, except the time before the dissected scraps of a hundred salvaged enemies of the Plan had been assembled to make a thinking thing without a past?
By now Quiveras might have reached him. By now they might be on their way! Perhaps in a few days Quiveras and the stranger would come to the little Reef and look for Ryeland and the girl.
And what would they find?
Ryeland knew that the most probable answer was . . . death.
Time passed, and the spaceling stayed alive. But she was weaker and worse every day.
The Reef became a dream to Ryeland. He lost all sense of time. He had no watch and there were no celestial objects to mark days or years very conveniently. He thought of a calendar, and tried to construct one. The sun was bright enough to be visible, but the trouble was that their little Reef had no perceptible rotation. No force from another object had ever set it spinning, perhaps; the same stars hung always over the tunnel mouth. It could tell them nothing of time. Painfully Ryeland located winking Algol and began a star-watch; its period would be his clock.
Donna said gently: "It won't help. You don't know when the collar will go off."
And he realized that she had seen farther into his mind than he himself. It was the ticking year that he was trying to measure, the year which was in any event his maximum hope of life as long as that collar sat sullenly about his neck. Chiquita might not die, the Plan cruiser might not return, but his assassin was with him at every moment. At one of those moments it would strike. That was the ultimate deadly promise of the iron collar. You could flee the radar guns of the Plan Police and even outrun their cruisers. You could in the Reefs of Space perhaps even avoid the wash of pulsed radar which the Machine would flood through the system. But the timing element would not be stopped and would not be merciful. In less than a year it would go off . . .