The pyropod squalled and hissed, but Hickson ignored it. "Hoped I could teach it to fly before I go," he said regretfully, "but I guess I won't make it. Boysie, your transportation ought to be here in an hour. Care to see what the pilot's gonna look like?" He thumbed an old-fashioned two-dimensional color print out of a button-down pocket in his ragged coat and handed it to Gann. It was a pretty, quite young girl, one hand resting on the head of a seal-like creature, before a background of a glowing purple and silver Reef. "Name's Quarla," said the old man affectionately. "Quarla Snow. Daughter of an old friend of mine. He treated me, couple years ago. Doctor, he is, and a good one. Don't know much about what ails me, though . . ."
The hermit seemed to realize he was rambling and caught himself up short. "Guess that's all," he said, smiling with a touch of embarrassment. "Swan bless you, Boysie. Give Quarla my love." And in a moment, before Gann could realize what he was about to do, the old man had turned, pushed aside the metal door that overhung the entrance to the cave, and stepped out.
Gann shook his head, half in rueful amusement, half in surprise. "Hey!" he called. "Hickson! Where are you going? Wait for me!" And he hurried to the door of the cave and out onto the sward the old hermit had so carefully cropped.
The man was not there.
His footprints were there, still visible in the faint bruises on the lichenous surface of the earth.
But Harry Hickson was gone.
Gann ranged the surface of the entire reef in the next few hours, shouting and searching. But there was no answer to his call, no sight of Hickson anywhere.
The man had simply vanished.
4
In the cave Machine Major Gann found the old man's laser gun—an ancient Technicorps model that must have been smuggled into space before the Spacewall was set up. It gave him a small feeling of confidence to carry it, though there was no visible enemy to shoot it at.
He needed that confidence.
No man can be alone. Each man has his place in the Plan of Man under the benevolent guidance of the Planning Machine. Each man serves the Plan, so that the Plan may serve all men . . .
That was doctrine, and Boysie Gann found himself foolishly repeating it as he clambered up the red-scaled rock to the point from which Hickson had signaled to Freehaven. It did not help very much.
No man can be alone . . . but Boysie Gann felt very much alone indeed, on that tiny floating islet of reef, under the blazing stare of a billion stars.
There was no reason for him to be on this point of rock, rather than anywhere else on the surface of the reeflet. He had no reason to believe his rescuer would come to look for him there. Had no reason to be sure there would be a rescuer at all, in fact, for what the half-demented hermit, Harry Hickson, had said could not be accepted as reliable . . .
Yet he stayed there, waiting, for hours. He leaned against a cairn of rock and scanned the skies. Only the distant, unfriendly stars returned his look. He sat, leaning against the rock, and drowsed. No sound or motion disturbed him. Then . . .
There was a faint blur of greenish mist in the low black sky, moving at the threshold of vision.
Gann sprang to his feet, eyes peering into the immense emptiness above him. The greenish blur was so faint that he could not be sure it was real. Yet . . . surely there was something there and, following it, a cluster of even fainter reddish sparks.
Gann raised the laser, checked the settings to make sure he was not firing a blast of destruction into the sky, and thumbed the trigger thrice, as he had seen Hickson do, pointing it toward the greenish blur.
A moment. . . then the green glow veered toward him.
It was his rescuer—he was sure of it. But what were the red sparks? Even as he watched, the tiny, distant coals veered too, following the greenish glow. Rapidly they grew nearer . . .
Then one of the red sparks dashed ahead of the rest, with a long blue trail of incandescence faintly visible behind it. It was like an ominous comet as it dived through the greenish cloud.
Noise smote Gann's ears abruptly: a sudden roaring, like the jet of an old-time rocket.
The things had come at last into the shallow atmosphere of his reeflet. He heard the shriek of their motion through the air—and something else.
Something was screaming.
The red spark thundered overhead, out of the green cloud, toward Gann like some deadly ancient missile homing in on a radar trace—then at the last moment rose up a dozen yards above his head, and as it passed he caught a sudden glimpse of nightmare.
Metal scales like broken mirrors. Enormous talons, dripping something that glowed and was golden, something that splattered to the ground near Gann like a soft, fitful rain. The red spark divided into two red, monstrous, blinking eyes, mirror-rimmed, in a head like a maniac dragon's. And the roaring blue flame was the tail of the thing.
"Pyropod!" breathed Boysie Gann aloud, transfixed.
He had never seen an adult before—had heard of them only as distant rumors, like the sort of ghost stories unplanned parents used to tell their children. The baby pyropod that had been Harry Hickson's pet had not prepared him for the huge, menacing reality that shrieked through the air above him now. He stood, stunned.
A pyropod is a living rocket, flame-footed and deadly. Their chemistry is not that of Earthly air-breathers; their primeval genesis came from the same noncarbon evolutionary strain that shaped the fusorians. On their plasma jets, nuclear in temperature, fired by fusorian symbiotes, they can outrun a Plan cruiser and outfight any Terrestrial beast in search of prey. And to the pyropods, anything that moves is prey. Their jets take enormous quantities of reaction mass. Their appetites are insatiable. Scavengers of space, they will attack anything.
Fortunately for the continuation of life on the inner planets and the Reefs of Space, atmosphere is a slow poison to the pyropods and gravity damages their reflexes. They are beasts of the interstellar void, ship-sized monstrosities at their hugest, big as cave bears even when barely mature. Standing in shock, watching the great beast, Boysie Gann stared at the red eyes pulsing in their telescopic mirrors, wheel and flash back toward him, imagined the black talons ripping metal or rock like bread . . .
And realized, almost too late, that he was the target of those monstrous talons now.
Instinctively he raised the laser gun and fired.
The charge was minimal, only the message setting; yet the great pyropod felt it, screamed, and soared away. Gann hurled himself to the shelter of the rock cairn, staring about. The torn green cloud of luminosity was dissolving in the night sky above him. Streamers of mist scattered and faded. And where the cloud had been, Gann could see what had brought it.
A spaceling. One of the warm-blooded, seal-like creatures that roam the space between the stars, natural prey to the pyropods, friend to man. It had brought the cloud—for it was the spaceling's ability to hold atmosphere about it, in a Ryeland-effect field, that permitted them, as oxygen-breathers, to live in space at all.
The spaceling had been grievously wounded. Even from so far away, Gann could see the hideous slash that ripped along the whole length of its sleek, golden body as it came tumbling down. Something was clinging to its fur—a rider? Gann could not be sure; but what he was certain of was that the end for both the spaceling and its burden was very near.
The pyropod that had attacked him had wheeled again and was diving on the wounded seal-like beast. A louder howling drowned out the spaceling's scream as the pyropod came out of the dark over a purple-scaled ridge, red eyes pulsing and dripping talons reaching again.