Captain Bymer's voice said from the communicator, "The reason for the delay is a malfunction in the ship lock to the shuttle launching deck. The lock won't open. Our engineers have been working on it for the past half hour. It can't be too serious a difficulty. I'll call you as soon as a shuttle is ready to start down."
"We'll wait for the call," Crowell said.
He turned off the communicator, grimaced at Ilken. "Let's say nothing about that at present. They're edgy enough here!"
There was fear on the Base that morning, something that went beyond uneasiness, and was strengthened, if anything, by the fact that no one seemed willing to voice it now. Evacuation personnel were gathered in their various sections. Herrick had designated the sequence in which the groups were to leave. The Base's guncars had been withdrawn to the side of their area to leave room for the shuttles. Defense teams had taken up positions; the locks were under guard. There was nothing to do but wait.
Fifteen minutes passed before another call came from the ship. "Yes?" Crowell said.
Captain Bymer's voice was strained. "I have no explanation for this," he said. "It's just been reported to me that there has been an explosion in the shuttle launch section."
Crowell glanced quickly at Ilken, said, "What's the damage?"
"Captain Witter, we don't know. The shuttle lock remains jammed. But the explosion appears to have been a fairly heavy one. I'm afraid we won't"
He broke off. There was a spluttering sound in the communicator.
"Captain Bymer?"
"A second explosion," Bymer's voice said thinly. "This one apparently in the engine room. I"
The communicator went dead.
Crowell and Ilken stared at each other. The shock in her face was replaced quickly by a cold set expression. "Another coincidence?" she said.
"Hardly! But what"
"Crowell, something got the ship! Something wasn't going to let the Base be evacuated. It'll be after the Base next!"
He nodded. "Come on! We'll get off a drone to Cencomlet them know what they'll be up against when they come back to Kulkoor. May not be much time left"
As they turned toward the door of the communicator room, there was the thud of explosion. The flooring shook. They ran out the door. Black smoke poured up from the far end of the Base.
Crowell caught Ilken by the arm.
"The drone storage area!" he said harshly. "They've started to show their handand now they don't want us to be sending messages to Cencom. Go backcall the Galestrals! Tell them the Base is under attack and they're to lift their ship off the planet while they can!"
Ilken turned back toward the computer room. Light blasted inside it. The shock of the explosion sent her stumbling backward toward Crowell, arms lifted to shield her face. As he caught and steadied her, screaming began all about the Base.
Kulkoor flowed by below the survey team's aircar. Flat tableland here, sparkling with pools formed by the recent rains. The mountains were gliding up, great snow-capped ranges enclosing chilled glacier lakes. To the south beyond the mountains lay the area of the Star Union Base.
Jill Hastings' gaze roved ceaselessly, methodically, over what was in view. Her fingers on the scanner scales adjusted magnification automatically. Her thoughts followed their own somber and apprehensive courses, which in no way diminished the effectiveness of her watch. If the scanners should pass over something that called for further attention, she'd be aware of it instantly. That ability was as practiced and reflexive as adjusting the instruments.
They'd dispatched a drone to the Galestral Company just before leaving the ship. It contained the information Crowell had given Grant by communicator, the fact that he had decided on a partial evacuation of the Star Union Base. It contained a detailed report on the unexplained malfunctioning of the team's ship computer. There'd been nothing, absolutely nothing, to show why the ship had failed to recognize their aircar as a non-hostile object after acknowledging their recognition signal. When they'd played back the scanner tapes, there'd again been nothing to explain the ship's use of defensive and offensive armament which they'd recorded previously in the aircar.
They'd moved the ship forty miles to the west then, left it stationed two miles above the ground. They'd entered its new location in the drone message, and the recognition signals by which it might be approached and boarded, with caution. They'd added finally that they were leaving for the Star Union Base to see what they could do there, dispatched the drone, and left.
All that, of course, was in case somebody else would be sent along by the Galestral Company presently to pick up the Kulkoor Problem at the point where they'd failed to solve it.
Failure had begun to seem quite possible.
Jill bent over the ground scanners, shutting the voices of her companions from her mind. Like most of those born on Galestral, she had few illusions about man's absolute superiority in the scheme of things. Their world had been an object lesson. Life was unpredictable; its possible final expressions seemed beyond all estimation. Man was a competitor who had remained in the lists until now. It could not be said safely that he was, or would be, anything else.
It seemed there might be a major competitor on Kulkoor. Was it the biped, the great brown-black ogre of this world, with its appearance of savage cunning and near-indestructibility?
Or something elsesomething that so far had manifested itself only indirectly?
They came speeding presently down the southern slopes of the mountains. The car crossed the area where they had ambushed the biped, and Jill saw the abandoned structure of Station Three to the left below.
"Grant!" she exclaimed suddenly. "There's somebody down there!"
"What? Where?"
"At the Station. I saw him just a moment . . . there he is again!" She twisted a dial. Her breath caught sharply.
"What is it?"
Jill, face quite white now, said in a low, strained voice, "Keep movingbut slowly! It can't be, of course . . . but that's Farquhar standing down there beside the Station. Frank Farquhar!"
"It can't be Farquhar," Grant said. "What is it? Are you having trouble keeping it clear in the viewer?"
"Yes," said Jill. The impossible figure down there seemed to blur slightly from moment to moment, then solidify again. It wasn't a matter of adjusting the scanners; the rocky ground around it remained unblurred.
She heard Ned Brock say, "Looks like somebody's playing ghost . . . Same sort of game as last night on the Base?"
"Probably," said Grant. "Let's start down."
Jill looked around at him. "That's what we're supposed to do!"
"Of course it's what we're supposed to do. But thiswhatever it isis Kulkoor showing its face. We'll take a look."
Jill didn't answer, kept her attention on the figure at the Station as the aircar swung about, went gliding down. Ned was at the communicator, signaling the Star Union Base to let Crowell know what they'd come across. Base comm hadn't responded so far. Something, Jill thought, had seen their car coming back over the mountains on the route they'd taken before. Something that knew it was their car, knew they were connected with Farquhar, knew it was they who had shot down and tried to collect a biped.
So an image of Farquhar had been produced near Station Three. Something knew they would see it, would come to it. It was a trap, but she didn't say that aloud. Grant and Ned knew it, too. And Grant was right; it was necessary to find out what this was.
The thought came again then: that mankind could not expect to win every round, and might already have lost this one.
Grant checked the aircar four hundred yards from the image, fairly close to the ground. To the left, the forest line lifted above the car, not much more than two hundred feet away. Ned had shut off the communicator, was crouched with his Suesvant at the opened car door, attention on the forest. If there were watchers nearby, they should be there. The only place of concealment on the rocky slopes below was the Station; and the Station supposedly had been sealed inside its force screen.
Grant was keeping a more general watch on the area. His hands remained on the car controls, ready to swing the car into full acceleration in any direction. The nose of the car was pointed at Farquhar's image, and Jill's attention was on that, as it showed in the scanners.
It appeared to be there not much more than twenty feet from her. Jill had experienced an increasing sense of revulsion as they moved down toward it from the sky. Most of that feeling was gone now; she was trying to define what this thing, this simulacrum of a dead man, one she'd known slightly in life, might be. It wasn't a perfect likeness; there were minor discrepancies and it didn't have the appearance of life, might be intended not to have it. There was no motion. The expression was frozen. The eyes seemed blind.
She reported tonelessly, "The figure appears to touch the ground only with one foot. If it had any weight, it should topple over in that position."
"You can't make out anything else about it?"
"Not a thing."
"Ned?"
"Nothing stirring in the shrubbery," Ned said briefly.
"I'll move in closer," said Grant.
Jill sighed softly. They meant to spring the trap. Perhaps it couldn't be avoided. The image, its mere presence, whatever its nature, already had made a number of things joltingly clear.
Her eyes remained on the viewer, but she was aware of the slope starting to move past on the left as the car slid slowly forward. Perhaps a minute passed. The image of Farquhar came steadily closer in the viewer. Suddenly, it vanished.
"It's gone, Grant!"
"I saw." He'd checked the car as Jill spoke. She switched the scanners to a wider view of the slope. They remained silent then, waiting. The disappearance of the image should have some meaning.
There was a sound about them. Not at all loud, but steady. It hung like a shivering in the air, neither grew nor faded.
"You hear that?" Grant asked.
Ned grunted. "You get a feeling that something's pulling at you?"
"Yes. An odd . . . Jill?"
Jill didn't reply. Grant swung around in the seat, felt the blood drain from his face, shouted at the top of his lungs: "Jill!"
In the seat behind him was a shape. It showed Jill's outlines, but they were a hazy gray, almost smokily unsubstantial. At his shout, the face seemed to turn toward him, her features still faintly discernible. He heard Ned's shocked gasp. Then the shape moved, turned solid, color flowing into it; and she was there again, blinking, startled.
"Grant . . . what"
"Just hang on! Stay here! Watch her, Ned!" Grant slapped in acceleration, swung the car around in a sharp arc, and upward.
"You were fading out like a ghost!" he said a minute later, face still white. "What happened to you?"
The car was circling half a mile above the Station and south of it. The image of Farquhar was again in sight down there. Apparently, it became invisible if the viewer moved close enough, reappeared as he withdrew.
Jill shook her head. "I'm not sure! There was a kind of fog. I mean a literal kind of fog. It was getting thicker. I seemed to be moving into it. Your voices began to go away. Then I heard you yelland I was back."
"Why didn't you do something?"
She shrugged helplessly. "Do what? I wasn't worried. I don't know why. I was aware of what was happening, but it didn't seem very real. More like a dream."
"The trap mechanism," Grant said after a moment. "It almost got you. And if we hadn't seen you going, it should have got us. We were feeling a pull"
"It fits in with other things," Ned said.
It did. The trails of the two bipeds they'd tracked had appeared to end in water. "They got picked up," Ned said, "bywell, whatever this is!"
Grant nodded. "They can focus the effect on some given spot. The second biped was hurthe yelled for help, and they lifted him out of the creek just ahead of us." As a man had vanished without trace from the Star Union Base during the night.
"And the ghosts, human and biped, they saw on the Base earlier," Grant went on. "It works both ways. A form of transportation. You fade out here; you fade in there. Hold the effect before you're all the way there, and you'll look like a ghost. As Jill did, sitting here."
"And defense screens are giving Witter's Base no protection at all," Ned added.
"Not a bit," Grant agreed. "Nowwhat will they do next?"
Jill said soberly, "They must be ready to come in for the kill! They've been trying to scare humans off the planet. They tried it first by pretending to be animals"
Cunning, savage animals, striking without warning, unharmed by human weapons, vanishing mysteriously when trailed. If the Star Union expedition's losses could be piled up to an intolerable extent, until the survivors fled in panic, humans might decide not to come back to so ferociously inhospitable a world.
"But then Jill shot one of them," Grant said. "Body screens. They'd turn an ordinary energy beam, but the Suesvant punched through. He may have been badly hurt, perhaps dying, when they got him back. That ended the invulnerable superbeast mythso, last night, they switched to supernatural effects. They'd already set that up by cleaning out the mining camp and letting it stand there to be found."
"If they planned to scare us off the planet, they must have reason to think our minds work pretty much like theirs," said Ned. "There's a civilization here. Underground? In mountain caves?"
Grant said, "Perhaps only while there are humans around. There may not be too many of them, but it has to be a pretty advanced civilization in some respects. Could they have gimmicked our ship yesterday?"
Ned said after a pause, "No need to assume that at present."
Jill said, "I think Farquhar figured it out! He'd been trying to work out a way to communicate with them. That's why he left Station Three. But they don't care about communicating. What do we do now? They saw us coming, set up a trap on the route we've used before. They must know we three had a connection with Farquhar. The trap hasn't worked, and maybe they already know it hasn't worked."
Ned said, "The Base still isn't responding to our signal."
There was silence for a moment. Jill said, "You're thinking there might be a problem on our ship again? The communicator linkup was operational an hour ago. We can find out quickly by going on to the Base . . ."
"And you two are going there," Grant said. "We have to let Witter know about this at once, so he can get out the information."
"What about you?" said Jill.
Grant tapped his viewer, said, "There's a machine down there, according to our metal scanners. Check it for yourself, Ned. I have it pinpointed. About a hundred and fifty yards from their Farquhar image. Copper, steel, other items. About eighteen by twelve inches across the top. We'll assume it's the image projector."
"What do you want to do?" Jill asked sharply.
"We'll go down, and I'll get out under cover. Then you two leave for the Base. After you're gone, I'll put a bullet in their machine. That should bring one of them here to find out what's happened. I'll be waiting for him."
"Grant, don't do it!" Jill said. "At least, let's stay together!"
"I'd rather we could stay together. There isn't time. They seem to know almost everything there is to know about us, and we still know next to nothing about them. Anything I learn here may be vital. When I'm in the clear, I'll call you by transmitter. Don't try to contact me before I do. You might give away my position."
"Jill, he's right," Ned said, as she was about to reply.
"I suppose so," Jill agreed forlornly. She didn't add that she had a strong conviction she wouldn't see Grant again.
The car turned down, made a wide, wary circle about the Farquhar image, paused above the forest, then slipped down among the trees. If there were watchers about, the idea was to create the impression the Galestrals were searching the forest for them. The car rose back up through the canopy some minutes later, lifted into the air, and sped off in the direction of the Star Union Base. Grant was no longer in it.
"Where's Gage?" Crowell asked.
"He's busy," said Ned.
"On your ship?"
"No. Trying to ambush a biped."
Crowell made a snorting sound. "He could do that here!"
"You've been under siege obviously," Ned said.
"We're still under siege," Crowell told him. "There's a lull right now. Five minutes ago we had some action. They'll be back. We've lost something more than forty people here on the Base. It's hard to keep track. And they got to our sentinel ship. A few of them could have gone up there on the shuttle yesterday. No one would have spotted them."
"What happened?"
"The ship blew up a short while ago. I was talking to Bymer at the time. He reported two preliminary explosions but couldn't give any details."
The Base's guncars were dispersed and grounded in the installation's central open square. The guns were manned. Ned saw Ilken at one of them. She gave no notice to him or to Jill, still in the Galestral car which hovered beside Crowell and Ned. Her eyes shifted about in quick, flicking glances; her hands stayed on the handles of the gun. Several dozen men, armed with a variety of weapons ranging from energy handguns to semi-portables, were stationed along the edges of the square. Some six or seven held shock guns, as did Crowell.
The rest of the Star Union personnel was present but not armed. They were scattered about the square between the guncars, sitting down, singly or in small groups. Some lay facedown, but Ned saw none that looked injured. There was hardly any movement.
"How did you lose your people?" he said.
Crowell jerked his head at the nearest building.
"Around a dozen are lying behind that," he said. "What's left of them. We didn't get them out here in time. They were blasted with some kind of fire. The crew in the south tower saw the biped that did it. They cut loose on him, knocked in the side of the building. But he'd simply disappeared . . . And the rest of the people we've lost have also disappeared. There's a kind of sound"
"We've heard it," said Ned. "They nearly got Jill that way."
"You look around, and another three or four seem to be gone, eh? Fade out . . . Well, we've fixed thatprobably!"
"How?"
"Figured the sound might have something to do with the fading," Crowell said. "When it starts now, we cut in with the siren. Haven't lost anyone since. This defense arrangement"he indicated the area around them"is to stall their other approach. We've got everybody out here, covered by the guns. The guns cover one another. When the things start to materialize in the air, they get chopped with a short-beam blast and vanish again. They don't get time to use their weapons."
"They haven't tried materializing elsewhere on the Base and attacking from there?" Ned asked.
"Not after the first time. We got three as they came out. Killed them, I think; but the bodies had faded along with their weapons before we could reach them. They could try it again, but apparently they don't intend to get hurt. Of course, they don't have to take losses." Crowell indicated the north end of the Base. "One explosion back there! Just one. Placed exactly where it would cut through our last contact to Cencominside the safe-storage section where the navigational units of the message drones were kept. Nothing salvageable left."
He shook his head. "You get the picture. They could blow up the whole Base any time they like. There's nothing we could do to stop it. But they don't want it that way. They want to clean it out almost as neatly as they cleaned out the mining camp. When investigators arrive, there'll be a new mystery, a much bigger one. What happened? What hit the Base? Where did the sentinel ship go? All our reports mentioned so far were problems with a bipedal animaland hallucinations. Beautifully timed! You know, it could work. It should drive the Cencom computers crazy." He added, "If you can still get to your ship, you'd better do it, get off the planet. That's the only sure way anybody outside is going to find out what's really happened."
"We don't know if we can still get to the ship," Ned said. He looked over at Jill. "Want me along?"
She shook her head quickly. "I'll travel light! As soon as I'm clear of the Base, I'll jettison everything I can, including spare fuel blocks. Might make it to the ship in thirty minutes then. They can use you here. I'll get a drone off, come back with the ship. Luck, Ned!"
"Luck, Jill! If Grant calls, we'll go get him with one of these cars."
She nodded, gave them both a small scared smile, slammed the car door shut. The car soared quickly back toward the open overhead lock, disappeared beyond the bluish glimmer of the screens.
"She shouldn't bring your ship here," Crowell said disapprovingly.
"She should," said Ned. "It's a damn good ship, and it fights itself. I was never trained to handle them, but Jill was. The bipeds may get more of an argument than they're counting on."