We had artificial aids but we waited for our pupils to dilate naturally, then splashed through a cold stream, bubbling to a waterfall. We were still in the area of my previous expeditions. There was another ballroom, and several branching tunnels. We had erected a signpost there once, and a small depot with beacons and locators to help the lost. There was little left of it. Morlocks might have broken into the food stores, but electronics should not interest them. They could be all too cunning and intelligent for animals, but as far as we knew they had no real sapience in anything like the human sense.
We saw in our lights a human skull and bones on the cave floor at one point, not recent and all much gnawed and broken, possibly the property of some fool who had ignored the first rule of caving and gone in alone. I knew I had never lost a student, but…
There was a story to be written on humanity's relationship with great caves, I thought. On Earth in classical times and later they were thought to be the abodes of trolls and other monsters, yet tens of thousands of years before that our Cro-Magnon ancestors had penetrated them miles beyond the reach of daylight to create art galleries. Had something happened on Earth, deep below the light of day about 30,000 b.c. that had changed man's relationship with the underworld? Mankind could hardly have guessed then that one day it would find real trolls underground, in caves under another star.
Another star… and that reminded me why we were here, and that morlocks were very much not the only things we had to fear.
I thought of Geoffrey Household again, and wished I did not remember so clearly his words about another man in another cave: “He liked to have space and plenty of light around him and was continually turning round in case the unknown was following him. It was.”
Onward and downward. A long curving passage, through glades of glittering flowstone and rows of stone shawls, stone spears, trumpets, swords, flowers, and fans. There was an unmistakable stink. Our light showed a jumble of jagged holes with piles of bones and rubbish. A morlock “town.” We began to back away as quietly as we could, but nothing seemed to be moving.
Dimity grabbed my arm and pointed. There were eyes in the torchlight, close to the ground, staring, unblinking, unmoving. I spread the beam to flood.
A dead morlock. Very recently dead. And largely eaten. Looking farther, I saw bits of others, all very dead and scattered. So something had destroyed a community of the biggest and most intelligent carnivores that we knew of in the cave-system. And the morlocks themselves, like their fictional namesakes, could be dangerous enough for two humans.
We already had our weapons on full cock. I've been really smart bringing Dimity here, I thought. Well done, Professor Rykermann! Straight into the dragon's lair!
Get on or get out? Whatever was hunting here hunted by smell and sound. It would be silent, and if it was anywhere nearby it would be well aware of us.
The torchlight shone upon it could be a blinding weapon. A literally blinding weapon, I realized, for it had laser options.
“Back away,” said Dimity. “Back away toward the entrance. We can watch each other's backs.”
“Yes,” I said. I had never realized how slow a process backing away would be. Through the stony glades, with their myriad darknesses. There was the stream, the noise of the fall. Then there was another smell, a peculiar, gingerlike smell.
Eyes. Not morlock eyes. Much higher off the ground, two pairs, and the eyes of each pair farther apart. There was a snarling scream that hurt my ears and pale bodies moving. Had I not been keyed up for fight-or-flight, that scream would have paralyzed me.
Our strakkakers whirred. One mass fell, another came at me, hit. I jumped back, rolling under it, still firing, and it went over the fall with an indescribable cry.
Not dead. I heard it shrieking. I headed toward the fall ready to fire again, but it fired first. A bolt of colored light smashed into the cave roof, sending a shower of stone and crystal crashing down after it with a lot going down the fall. The screaming stopped. The creature must have buried itself.
There seemed to have been only two. I bent to examine the fallen creature. The strakkaker had left plenty of it. It was much bigger than a morlock or a human.
Not a cave dweller. The eyes, or eye sockets, were large and could be those of a nocturnal hunter, but they were not a cave dweller's eyes. And I knew what it was.
A big catlike thing, tiger-sized and orange, though with a shorter body and longer limbs than a terrestrial tiger. The bare skull, stripped by the strakkaker's needles, showed a brain-case bigger than a human's. Pseudofelis sapiens ferox.
I had known the theory of what a strakkaker could do, but had not seen the fact demonstrated at close range on a large living creature before. But I was used to dissections. This looked like the surplus material after a ham-fisted undergraduate class had been hacking at something for a week, though even then I thought the bare bones were odd: the ribs, for example, went all the way down, and there were bones that formed struts and braces in a manner that would, I thought, be immensely strong and had no Earth or Wunderland analog. What turned me suddenly sick was an unexpected detail.
It was wearing clothes. A wide belt holding tools and weapons, and a vestlike garment with webbing. That had turned the strakkaker needles and was intact.
“Get the belt,” said Dimity as she stood waving her light about the cave.
Maybe with steadier hands and more time I could have done more. As it was, the torso was sufficiently smashed for me to get free the belt, with weapons, a huge handgun and a knife, as well as some packages in the webbing. As I bent above it I saw spots of dark blood appear suddenly on the naked bone and realized it was dripping from my own chest. Four parallel cuts, not deep and only now starting to hurt, but made by claws that had sliced through modern explorer-gear fabric and which would have parted my ribs had they been deeper. Our belts contained basic first-aid packs. Dimity sprayed the cuts with a bandage, disinfectant, anesthetic, nu-skin combination.
“I should take some samples to study,” I said. “Tissues, organs…”
“I wouldn't worry about that too much,” she said. “I think we'll be seeing plenty more of them. If we get out.”
“What do you mean?”
She pointed with her light. The rock-fall had not all gone down to bury the alien. Our entrance tunnel was blocked.
“It'll take us hours to clear that,” I said. She cocked her head on one side, gazing at the great mass of shattered crystal. We soon saw it would be a huge job to clear it and probably not possible at all.
“It may not be too bad,” she said, “There must be other entrances that the aliens use. Otherwise, we'd have seen their transport and they would probably have moved on the modules at once.”
That was a less cheerful thought than it might have been, but it was something. She twitched her ears.
“The air's still moving. And you can still hear the stream. And we have the locators.”
The locators might be some use. They would tell us where we were in relation to the entrance cave and the modules in the labyrinth, but that was little use if we were cut off from them by tons of rock and they did not tell us what lay between. I did have some memories from previous expeditions. They were unreliable—I had depended on maps and instruments—but all we had now.
We set off, carrying the alien tools and weapons as well as our own. I also carved a few steaks from the carcasses to eke out our rations.
Morlocks tended to travel the caves in packs, and I knew they had a nasty habit of clinging to high stalactites and dropping down on prey from above. However, there seemed to be none around. Unfortunately they were among the least of our worries, and I could guess why they had disappeared.