Through the evening and the moonless Kulkoor night, the Galestrals' aircar had continued to prowl. Its searchlight fingered the ground here and there, held sometimes on startled beast shapes staring up at unaccustomed brightness.
Toward morning, the car became almost stationary, drifting slowly back and forth along a rocky slope, rarely more than twenty feet from the ground. They'd made it clear, very clear, that they were in the area. It had been impossible to remain unaware of them. And now, if there was something around that resented their presence, had been watching from cover with anger and suspicion, it was time to give the watcher an opportunity to put an end to the nuisance.
The car lifted, floated over the crest of the slope, dropped into a grassy valley behind it.
They'd selected their site at first light an hour agothe open bowl of the valley. On the far side was a broad belt of forest; and beyond the forest was the area into which they'd followed the biped the day before, the stream where its trail had ended between mountain and lake. On this side rose overhanging cliffs.
The aircar stood in the approximate center of the valley. It was their primary bait. Jill Hastings leaned against a slanted rock beneath the massive overhang, Suesvant resting on the rock and pointed into the valley through the foliage of a lopped-off tree branch which concealed her. She was secondary bait and hunter both. The Suesvant controlled the valley bowl. If the thing they hunted came to investigate the aircar, it would have to move out of cover. They expected the car to draw it from hiding, though perhaps not for some hours. If it had been watching, it knew where they'd descended.
It might suspect the humans weren't in the grounded aircar but somewhere nearby. So it might stalk about the wooded fringes of the valley, searching first for them. Jill's view to left and right was limited by the curve of the cliff; but those approaches were covered respectively by the Suesvants of Grant and Ned, sitting in trees. She was in danger only if the biped could do what none of the great beasts of Galestral couldabsorb all the varied forms of violent death the Suesvant could spit out in fractions of a second, and still keep coming. They didn't believe it could. And if it could, then Grant and Ned, each dependent now only on his own senses to warn him of the creature's approach through the forest growth, were taking a greater risk than she.
So: a trap, doubly baited, with a good probability that in one way or the other, it would be sprung. The rest was a matter of waiting. The biped had shown it was good at the waiting game. So were they.
The minutes crept along. The morning brightened slowly, darkened again as black rain clouds massed overhead. There was a sudden heavy downpour, intermittent spatterings thereafter. Thunder rumbled along the mountains. Jill's gaze moved methodically along the far sides of the valley. Now and then she used the gun scope to study some area in magnified detail. Considerable animal life was astir; between rainfalls the air seemed full of small voices. Occasionally she saw more sizable creatures in the valley and along the forest's edge. Two long-legged striped brutes prowled about the car for several minutes, studying it with silent suspicion from every angle before moving off.
She had a clump of bushes directly across the valley from her in the scope when, quite suddenly, she was looking at a head. That was all she could see of the creature; the head had been raised cautiously out of the vegetation to peer into the valley. It was a big dark head with a short muzzle, silvery eyes, pointed black ears. A shivering went down her back. Anything with a head that size was too heavy to be supported by the undergrowth. The creature was standing on the ground . . . and it stood well above the height of a man.
That section of the forest's edge was out of the others' range of vision. Jill pressed the alert button on her wrist transmitter. Immediately her skin tingled twice under the transmitter band. All rightthe men were informed . . .
Now, patience. She could fire at the head, but if it didn't belong to what she was almost certain it belonged, that would spoil the whole plan. She made a minute adjustment to the Suesvant's sight. Ready, now.
The head sank back into the growth and disappeared. Jill lifted her eyes above the scope, waited. A minute passed, another. Then something moved slowly into view under the trees, a hundred feet from the place where she'd seen the head. At once, she had it back in the scopeand that was it. The biped. The Kulkoor Beast. Bulky overall build; weight perhaps approaching a quarter of a ton. Black-brown color with moss-green markings. The animal headnothing humanoid or apelike about that headwas set on a short thick neck. Oddly irregular ridgings, like deformities, on the great chest . . .
And while all this was registering, there was the slow, growing pressure of her finger on the trigger, cross-hairs centered on the thing's ridged upper torso. Then a great whip cracked, and the Suesvant had struck across the valley. Confined, the tremendous recoil would have lifted Jill from the rock, flung her back against the cliff with bone-breaking force. But the mechanisms dispersed it; what she felt, half consciously, was a momentary push on the shoulder. As the biped staggered backonly staggered back?she placed a second bullet a dozen inches below the first, a third one below that. By then, the creature was turning sideways, stumbling, jaws stretched open; and she pumped a fourth shot at the head. An explosive, that one; there was a spout of white fire as it struck. Then the biped was out of sight in the vegetation.
"It went down," she announced unsteadily, fingers automatically flicking four new shells into the chamber. "Can't see it now. Hit it four times, but"
"Just where was it?" Grant's voice from the transmitter.
Jill described the location. The Suesvant was pointed across the rock again, and her eyes kept scanning the forest. So far, the bipeds had appeared to be solitary hunters. But the maneuvers with the aircar might have drawn more than one to the area. However, nothing seemed to be stirring. The four reports had brought an outburst of startled animal sounds from the valley. That was fading now.
Jill concluded, "That creature is unbelievable! The first two penetrants only seemed to jolt it. It was the third one that started it down."
Silence for a moment. Grant said, "No signs of activity now?"
"None."
"We'll come down. Ned?"
"On my way," said Ned Brock.
Jill waited. Several minutes passed. Then Grant's voice told her, "We're in the open, Jill. Come on out."
She saw them as she walked out from under the overhang. They were moving down into the valley from either side. She pointed to the place where the biped had disappeared, and they angled toward it, Suesvants held ready. Jill went on as far as the aircar, waited there. Ned and Grant joined up, edged into the undergrowth and were gone from sight. After some seconds, Ned's voice said, "Jill?"
"Yes?
"You hit it all right. Heavy blood spoor . . . But it didn't stay down. It's gone."
She said incredulously, "The explosive took it in the headI saw it! It wasn't hauled off by others?"
"One set of tracks," his voice said. "Only one. But it may not get far. We'll follow. You get in the car and cut across the forest. Find out if Witter's got a guncar in the area that might help intercept."
She took a last look around, swung into the car and ripped it up out of the valley. She felt heavy with disappointment and apprehension. To be tracking something that had picked itself up off the ground after being hammered by a Suesvant wasn't pleasant work in forest growth! But the bipeds weren't invulnerable; she'd proved that much. As for herself, she'd be waiting with the car between forest and stream, to catch it in the open if it tried to retreat along its former route. It seemed reasonable to expect it would do that, if its strength didn't ebb out before it got that far.
She turned on the communicator, signaled the Star Union Base, and asked to be connected with Crowell.
The biped didn't appear in the open.
It vanished in the forest. The blood trail led to a narrow creek, deep and swift-moving. There it ended. They couldn't have been many minutes behind it, and if it had turned upstream, Ned's biotracker should have registered traces of its blood in the water. There were no such traces; so they checked both banks, then turned down the creek, again working back and forth across it to search both banks for an emerging spoor. There was none. Their previous experience in tracking the creature indicated it might be an expert swimmer, and there were deep pools in the creek, too deep to be probed visually in the dim forest light, and possibly caves under the rocky banks into which it could have withdrawn. But, again, there should have been traces of blood and scent in the water at such places, and the tracker registered none.
It was awkward time-consuming work. But eventually they came to the point where the forest ended and the creek ran into the stream which led down to the lake. Jill had long since been waiting there, the car hovering above a shallow section of the creek where the biped couldn't have passed without being seen by her. Three hundred feet away, Crowell's guncar, crewed by Crowell and Ilken, hung in the air.
The cars came down. Grant and Ned reported their experience. It remained unexplained. They hadn't passed overhanging tree branches strong enough to let so large a creature clamber up out of the water without touching the banks. "My best guess is," said Ned finally, "that it holed up in some deep tunnel under the creek banksup above the waterline. Then the creek could have carried away any indications of it before we got that far." He looked at Crowell. "The main point, aside from knowing that the things can be hurt and brought down, is that the biped Jill wounded isn't the one that broke into Station Three and carried off Farquhar. The tracker shows they were of the same species but distinct individuals."
Crowell said, "So there should be at least one living biped still in the area?"
"That's what we think," Grant said. "And if the wounded one doesn't die, it isn't going to stay holed up indefinitely. Our trick isn't likely to work again around here, so we'll pull out for the rest of the day to let things settle down. We'll come back early in the morning and start working through the forest on foot. If we don't hit fresh spoor, there should be old trails the tracker can pick up, and under the trees they'll be less washed out by the rain. They might lead us to where one of the bipeds is hiding out, or draw another attack."
Crowell nodded. "By morning I can have most of the Base's guncars cleared of other duties and stationed around this part of the country. They'll keep watch on the open areas."
They discussed it further. A joint operation could be successful now. If the biotracker indicated points where a biped might be holed up, the heavy energy beams of the guncars could blast through forest cover, soil and rock, to force the creature to view. With luck, they'd have their specimen tomorrow.
They got back into the cars and left. Crowell was having the stations cleared systematically of records and other significant and movable project material during the day, for storage or use on the Base. The survey team would return to its ship.
The Galestral aircar was still an hour's flight away from the ship when it signaled an alert from the ship computer. Something that wasn't a recorded species of the local fauna was skirting the ship's defense perimeter. "Better check!" said Grant quickly.
Jill slid into her seat at the communicator console. The alert was no longer being indicated. She cut in a report order, said after a moment, "Unidentified Disturbance . . . Now it's recording again . . .
Ned said, "Some of Captain Witter's planetbound swimmer friends? We might be on their schedule."
It seemed the most likely explanation, but it remained puzzling. The ship scanners could identify an aircar almost as far as they could sense one. But the report tape kept reiterating that the disturbance was of unidentifiable nature. They had the impression of something moving about the defense zone, touching it and withdrawing again. The alert indicator went on and off.
Then, perhaps five minutes later, the tape registered a brief blast of ship armament. After that, there were no more alerts, and the report tape showed Condition Normal.
Ned shook his head. "Wouldn't stay warned off! We may never know who it was."
They continued toward the ship at high speed, saw it presently suspended above the plain ahead. The aircar's scanners were in action, but there was nothing to suggest the presence of intruders in the area. Grant took the car several times in a wide circle about the ship, then said, "Check condition, Jill."
Jill said after a moment, "Condition Normal. I'm calling for ultimate sensor scan."
"Good idea."
"Condition Normal," Jill said presently again. "If there was something around, it isn't around now, Grant."
"If there was something around?"
"Systems failures aren't unheard of."
"No," Grant acknowledged. "But they haven't happened to us before. And it wouldn't be the best time for problems of that kind to develop." He turned the car in toward the ship. "Well, we'll soon find out!" He tapped the recognition signal.
"Acknowledged," Jill said.
The aircar drove on another three hundred yards toward the ship.
And a glare of brilliant blue light suddenly appeared about the ship, englobing itits projected defense screens.
Grant whipped the car about, almost end for end, sped back from the defense perimeter. The light winked out.
"Unidentified Disturbance!" Jill read from the report tape, an instant later. "That was us!"
"Must have been." Systems failure? The faces of all three had paled. At normal approach speed, they should have triggered ship armament. Grant said, "Let's repeat the procedure . . ."
They did. The results were the same. The ship recognized the aircar's signal, but prepared to attack when the car came up to the defense perimeter. For the computer mind in there, they remained an Unidentified Disturbance.
"See if you can find out what the problem is," Grant said.
Jill shook her head, ran through the standard checks twice. "As far as I can tell from here, there is no problem," she said then. She thought a moment, added, "Let's try riding in on continuous recognition signal. If it's forced to keep acknowledging, that may cancel its alerting sequence."
They moved in slowly. The defense screens came on. Jill said, "At this point, it refuses to acknowledge. The sequences do cancel each other! Pull back and try again, Grant."
On the fifth attempt it worked. The defense screens remained off, and the ship continued to acknowledge the aircar's approach as a non-hostile one. Grant checked the car on the safe side of the attack zone, said, voice absent, "Continue standard procedure!"
Jill cut the recognition signal. The ship stopped acknowledging. Nothing else happened. She gave the "Lock Open" order, said, "It confirms." Her voice was a little shaky.
Grant nodded, said, "Lock's opening! Well, hold your breath, people! Everything looks all right, and we can't expect it to give us a direct invitation."
He edged into the attack zone, turned the car toward the open lock.