“We don’t care how you do it, Mr. Claybourne, but we want the fed brought back alive and unharmed.”
Claybourne had accepted immediately. This job had paid a pretty sum-enough to complete his plans to kill Carl Garden.
The prints paced away, clearly indicating the beast was heading for refuge in the mountains. He studied the flat surface of the grassy desert, and heaved a sigh.
He’d been at it three weeks, and all he’d found had been tracks. Clear, unmistakable tracks, and all leading toward the mountains. The beast could not know it was being tracked, yet it continued moving steadily.
The pace had worn away at Claybourne.
He gripped the molasses-gun tighter, swinging it idly in small, wary arcs. He had been doing that-unknowing-for several days. The hush of the planetoid was working on him.
Ahead, the towering bleakness of Selangg’s lone mountain range rose full-blown from the shadows of the plain. Up there.
Twenty miles of stone jumbled and strewn piece on piece; seventeen thousand feet high. Somewhere in those rocks was an animal Claybourne had come halfway across the galaxy to find. An animal that was at this moment insuring Carl Garden’s death.
He caught another print in the beam.
He stooped to examine it. There was a faint wash of sand across it, where the wind had scurried past. The foot-long paw print lay there, mocking him, challenging him, asking him what he was doing here-so far from home, so far from warmth and life and ease.
Claybourne shook his head, clearing it of thoughts that too easily impinged. He’d been paid half the sum requested, and that had gone to the men who were now stalking Garden back on Earth. To get the other half, he had to capture the fetl. The sooner that was done, the better.
The fetl was near. Of that he was now certain. The beast certainly couldn’t go over the mountains and live. It had to hole up in the rocks somewhere.
He rose, squinted into the darkness. He flicked the switch on his chest-console one more notch, heightening the lamp’s power. The beam drove straight ahead, splashing across the gray, faceless rocks. Claybourne tilted his head, staring through the clear hood, till a sharply-defined circle of brilliant white stabbed itself onto the roc\class="underline" before him.
That was going to be a job, climbing these mountains. He decided abruptly to catch five hours sleep before pushing up the flank of the mountains.
He turned away, to make a resting place at the foot of the mountains, and with the momentary cessation of the tracking, found old thoughts clambering back into his mind.
Shivering inside his protection suit-though none of the chill of Selangg could get through to him-he inflated the foam-rest attached to the back of his suit. He lay down, in the towering ebony shadows, looking up at the clear, eternal night sky. And he remembered.
Claybourne had owned his own fleet of cargo vessels. It had been one of the larger chains, including hunting ships and cage-lined shippers. It had been a money-making chain, until the inverspace ships had come along, and thrown Claybourne’s obsolete fuel-driven spacers out of business.
Then he had taken to blockade-running and smuggling, to ferrying slaves for the outworld feudal barons, gun-running and even spaceway robbery.
Through that period he had cursed Carl Garden. It had been Garden all the way-Garden every step of the way-who had been his nemesis.
When they finally caught him-just after he had dumped a cargo of slaves into the sun, to avoid customs conviction-they canceled his commission, and refused him pilot status. His ships had been sold at auction.
That had strengthened his hatred for Garden. Garden had bought most of the fleet. For use as scum-ships and livestock carriers.
It had been Garden who had invented the inverspace drive. Garden who had undercut his fleet, driving Claybourne into receivership. And finally, it had been Garden who had bought the remnants of the fleet.
Lower and lower he sank; three years as a slush-pumper on freighters, hauling freight into shining spacers on planets that had not yet received power equipment, drinking and hating.
Till finally-two years before-he had reached the point where he knew he would never rest easily till he had killed Garden.
Claybourne had saved his money. The fleshpots of the Periphery had lost him. He gave up liquor and gambling.
The wheels had been set in motion. People were working, back on Earth, to get Garden. He was being pursued and harried, though he never knew it. From the other side of the galaxy, Claybourne was hunting, chasing, tracking his man. And one day, Garden would be vulnerable. Then Claybourne would come back.
To reach that end, Claybourne had accepted the job from the Institute.
In his rage to acquire money for the job of getting his enemy, Claybourne had built a considerable reputation as wild-game hunter. For circuses, for museums and zoos, he had tracked and trapped thousands of rare life-forms on hundreds of worlds.
They had finally contacted him on Bouyella, and offered him the ship; the charter, and exactly as much money as he needed to complete the job back on Earth.
Arrangements had been quickly made, half the pay had been deposited to Claybourne’s accounts (and immediately withdrawn for delivery to certain men back home), and he had gone out on the jump to Selangg.
This was the last jump, the last indignity he would have to suffer. After Selangg-back to Earth. Back to Garden.
He wasn’t certain he had actually seen it! The movement had been rapid, and only in the comer of his eye.
Claybourne leaped up, throwing off the safeties on the molasses-gun. He yanked off the inflation patch with stiff fingers, and the foam-rest collapsed back to flatness in his pack.
He took a tentative step, stopped. Had he actually seen something? Had it been hallucination or a trick of the weak air blanket of Selangg? Was the hunt getting to him at last? He paused, wet his lips, took another step.
His scarred, blocky face drew tight. The sharp gray eyes narrowed. Nothing moved but the faint rustling of the blue saw-grass. The world of Selangg was dead and quiet.
He slumped against the rock wall, his nerves leaping.
He wondered how wise it had been to come on this jump. Then the picture of Garden’s fat, florid face slid before his eyes, and he knew he had had to come. This was the ending. As he tracked the fetl, so he tracked Garden.
He quickly reviewed what he knew of the fetl’s appearance, matching it with the flash of movement he had seen:
A big, bloody animal-a devilish-looking thing, all teeth and legs. Striped like a Sumatran tiger, six-legged, twelve-inch sabered teeth, a ring of eyes across a massive low brow, giving it nearly one hundred and eighty degrees of unimpaired straight-line eyesight.
Impressive, and mysterious. They knew nothing more about the beast. Except the reason for this hunt; it was telekinetic, could move objects by mind-power alone.
A stupid animal-a beast of the fields-yet it possibly held the key to all future research into the mind of man.
But the mysteries surrounding the fetl were not to concern Claybourne. His job was merely to capture it and put it in the custody of the Institute for study.
However... It was getting to be a slightly more troublesome hunt now. Three weeks was a week longer than he had thought the tracking would take. He had covered most of the five hundred miles that comprised Selangg’s surface. Had it not been for the lessened gravity and the monstrous desert grasslands, he would still be searching. The fetl had fled before him.