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14

Grant Gage stood, back against a tree trunk, shoulder-deep in shrubbery, big rocks to his right and left. A natural blind, just beyond the triggering range of the bipeds' projection trap. The device which controlled the projection was eighty yards away, down the slope on the left. It wasn't visible, wouldn't have been visible if he'd been next to it. They'd camouflaged it in some manner: But he had its position fixed mentally—two feet out from the tip of a patch of dark-yellow growth. He could put an explosive into it from where he stood.

Which he would do if whoever had set up the device didn't return within the next ten minutes to pick it up, now that its usefulness must appear to be over. That would be preferable. But Jill and Ned should have reached the Base, and Crowell Witter's message to Cencom might be about on its way. No reason to delay more than another ten minutes before giving them a prod by knocking out their machine.

Perhaps three of those ten minutes had passed then before he saw something . . . a haziness forming gradually above a flat, sloping boulder, twenty yards from the device, on the far side of it. Motionless, Grant watched. The haze could be only one thing, though as yet it had no recognizable shape or definite outline. It was like an upright patch of gray fog which stirred and shifted but stayed where it was. It was large enough to enclose a biped. Jill had said that, in the moment when she almost disappeared, sight and sound seemed to blur out in a kind of fog. The bipeds controlled the process. There was one there now—though also not quite there—on that slab of rock, peering out through its subjective fog at the objective details of the slope, possibly to make quite sure there was no human enemy near the device. They'd shown they were suspicious and cautious creatures in spite of their demonstrated ferocity.

The haze faded gradually again, vanished completely. Grant passed his tongue along his lips, wondering. He hadn't stirred; it didn't seem likely he could have been detected here. But he wasn't certain—

Something stirred on his left, close to the front line of trees. He shifted only his eyes. For an instant, he saw the biped—if it was the same one. No ghost shape now, at any rate, but quite substantial, standing in profile a hundred feet away, looking down the slope. An impressive creature, manlike in the way it stood and held itself. But the head was as Jill had described it, something like that of a short-faced bear or pig, except for the large pointed ears.

The figure blurred and disappeared at once. And that, Grant thought, had been no coincidence. If the biped had been merely conducting a preliminary survey of the area, it should have remained in sight longer. It might be trying to draw a reaction from him. It either suspected or knew he was here, perhaps even exactly where he was. They could have instruments which scanned through the shielding fog. He'd seen no instruments, but there'd been a kind of belt around the furred torso. Aside from that, the lack of visible trappings might have made it seem still an animal.

Perhaps a second or two had passed in these reflections. Grant's attention was now chiefly on the area at his right. So he saw the biped reappear. Abruptly in sight, some fifty feet away and slightly below him on the slope, faced toward him, half crouched, one great furred arm extended, giant hand holding a glassy tube pointed at the thicket where he stood—

Grant pitched sideways through the shrubs, down over the rock to his left, flattened out.

Fire exploded the thicket beyond the rock, surged furiously up the tree trunk against which Grant had been standing, flowed out down the slope.

A furnace of heat closed about him. He thrust himself forward, saw, through blazing vegetation, the biped still crouched on the slope, staring at the thicket, weapon held watchfully pointed. Grant rolled sideways, bringing the Suesvant around and forward in the motion, sighted and triggered. The second shot crowded the first, the third the second, reports merging into a howl of sound. The biped staggered backward along the slope, the glassy weapon arcing high through the air above it. Grant pumped three more shots into the big head, saw the creature strike the ground and begin to blur, got to his feet and leaped across the burning shrubbery.

The biped vanished. Then, as Grant stood still in a shock of disappointment, it reappeared—sprawled out in midair, a few yards above the ground, and a dozen feet from where it had last been. It fell heavily, struck the slope, vanished again—and reappeared again, almost in its previous position. Now it lay still.

Grant flicked a fresh set of shells into the Suesvant, watching the biped, then started downhill toward it. The fire's explosive fury had spent itself; it was making no more headway in the wet vegetation. His left hand went to the wrist transmitter on his right. He looked down, swore softly and fervently.

The face of the little device was crushed, mashed into uselessness against some rock surface in his dive for safety. No way now to contact the others.

* * *

A few things became obvious almost at once. The biped wore a kind of vest, made of a material which so closely matched its own shaggy hide in appearance that Grant became aware of it only as he began to investigate the fallen creature. The vest ended at the broad belt he'd seen when the biped first appeared. There were sealed pockets in it, and he could feel various devices in the pockets.

The next discovery wasn't unexpected. The biped's skin was no natural armor; it was enclosed in a personal energy field. Grant prodded here and there at the giant, found the protective field seemed to cover everything but the hands and feet. Vest and belt were fastened over it. The field yielded slightly to a steady push but could not be depressed enough to touch the flesh immediately beneath. Obviously it couldn't hamper either the wearer's breathing or his motions, but it seemed almost impervious to forces from without. All Grant's bullets had pierced it; but the body within could have experienced only a fraction of the Suesvant's monstrous jolting effect. Still, that had been enough to kill.

Grant found what turned out to be the field switch on the side of the belt, fumbled at the fastening, got it unlocked, and pulled the switch down. The field went off; and the fur vest, which had seemed to be seamless, opened along the center of the chest. Grant pulled it free of the belt and stared down at the cause of the lumpy deformity of the chest area in these creatures.

They were four-armed. The second pair of arms was set forward on the chest and, while sinewy and well muscled, was much smaller and relatively shorter than the principal pair, in fact barely the size of the arms of an average adult human male. The hands had long, thin, deft-looking fingers. In spite of its bulk, the biped should have been capable of doing very delicate work. The secondary arms had been carried folded on the chest; and one of the hands was closed on something. Grant lifted the arm, and the hand unfolded in the limp submission of death, releasing the object.

Grant picked it up without immediate interest, still staring at the dead biped.

Six-limbed . . . The dominant pseudo-mammalian fauna of Kulkoor, to which the bipeds had appeared to belong, was four-limbed. He was looking at the explanation of the Kulkoor Mystery.

No hidden civilization here! The bipeds weren't part of the native life. They'd come from another world, almost certainly for the same reason men had come—to work the planet's heavy metal deposits. They hadn't been here long, or evidence of their mining operations would have been detected. They had a concealed base somewhere; but there might be no more of them on Kulkoor at present than there were humans.

And they'd been trying to drive away a competitive civilized species without revealing what they were . . . 

However technologically advanced they might be, they must feel vulnerable here.

Grant looked down at the object that had been clasped in the biped's hand. Apparently, it had been of value to the biped—it might be of value to him. About three inches long, gray, smooth, pear-shaped with a shallow indentation at the narrow end, rather heavy for its size. A personal amulet, without other significance? Creatures which tried to play on superstition in others should have their own share of it.

He glanced at the lifelessly open hand of the biped. The thick end of the gray pear had been enclosed by the palm. He laid it in his own palm. At its touch, he felt a faint tingling which immediately faded. And now his interest had increased sharply. The thing was powered—powered for some purpose.

He looked at the hand again. It seemed to him that the ball of one of the fingers had been clasped against the top of the pear, pressed into the indentation. He placed his own finger in that position. The tingling resumed briefly, faded again.

His vision misted over.

He blinked, shook his head—and realization came suddenly of what was happening. He almost dropped the gray object, then, instead, lifted his finger away from the tip. At once, the foggily dimming air about him cleared again.

Grant sucked in a quick breath, looked at the biped. So he was holding one of their transportation devices! He was quite sure now that when he first saw it, the biped's finger had still been clamped over the indented tip. But that had produced no effect on the device. While shortly before, immediately after being shot, the giant had twice vanished for an instant. Consciously or not, Grant thought, it had been trying to escape back to wherever it had come from, and hadn't quite made it. It was dying then. Dead, it was solidly here.

The device needed contact with a living body in order to function.

Did it need the direction of a living mind to tell it where to go?

 

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