CHAPTER II
The Other Peril
Someone was shaking me.
I sat up dizzily, meeting a stare that I recognized only after what seemed infinities of slow waking. Davidson, his pink face frightened, shook me again.
“What happened? What was it? Jim, are you all right? Wake up, Jim! What was it?”
I let him help me to my feet. The room began to steady around me but it reeled sharply again when I saw what lay before the ticker, the tape looping down about him—face down on the floor, blood still crawling from the bullet hole in his back....
Williams never saw who got him. It must have been the same flash that blinded me. I felt my cheek for the powder burn that must have scorched it as the unseen killer fired past my face. I felt only numbness. I was numb all over, even my brain. But one thing had to be settled in a hurry.
How much time had elapsed? Had that deadly message gone out while I lay here helpless? I made it to the ticker in two unsteady strides. The tape that looped the fallen Williams still bore its dangerous message.
Whoever fired past my cheek had fired for another reason, then, than this message. Of course, for how could anyone else have known its importance? There was a bewildering mystery here but I had no time to think about it.
I tore off the tape, crumpled it into my pocket. I flipped the ticker switch and sent a reverse message out as fast as my shaking hand could operate the machine.
FITZGERALD URGENT URGENT MEET ME AT RING POST 27 AM LEAVING HEADQUARTERS NOW DO NOTHING UNTIL I ARRIVE URGENT SIGNED J. OWEN.
Davidson watched me, round-eyed, as I vised for a helicopter. He put out his hand as I turned toward the door. I forced myself to stop and think.
“Well?” I said.
He didn’t speak. He only glanced at Williams’ body on the floor.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t kill him. But I might have if that had turned out to be the only way. There’s trouble at the lake.” I hesitated. “You were there too, Dave. Do you know what I mean?” I wasn’t quite sure what I was trying to find out. I waited for his answer.
“You’re the boss,” was all he said. “Still, it wasn’t any mutation that did—this. It was a bullet. You’ve got to know who shot him, Jim.”
“I don’t though. I blanked out. Something ...” My mind whirled and then steadied again with a sudden idea. I put a hand to my forehead, dizzy with trying to remember things still closed to me.
“Maybe something like a mutation had a part in it at that,” I conceded. “Maybe we’re not alone in wanting to—to keep the lake quiet. I wonder—could something from the Ring have blanked me out deliberately, so I wouldn’t see Williams killed?”
But there wasn’t time to follow even that speculation through. I said impatiently, “The point is, Dave, one man’s death doesn’t mean a thing right now. The Ring....” I stopped unable to go on. I didn’t need to.
“What do you want me to do?” Davidson asked. That was better. I knew I could depend on him, and I might need someone dependable very soon.
“Take over here,” I said. “I’m going to see Fitzgerald. And listen, Dave, this is urgent. Hold any messages Fitzgerald sends. Any! Understand?”
“Check,” he said. His eyes were still asking questions as I went out. Neither of us could answer them—yet.
The desolation spun past below me, aftermath of the Three-Hour War, ruined buildings, ruined fields, ruined woods. Far off I could catch a pale gleam of water beyond the seething edge of the Ring.
I’d been en route long enough to make some sort of order in my mind—but I hadn’t done it. Evidently more than time would be required to open the closed doors in my brain. I had been in the Ring today—I had seen something or learned something there—and whatever I learned had been of such vital and terrible import that memory of it was wiped from Davidson’s mind and mine until the hour came for action.
I didn’t know what hour or what action. But I knew with a deep certainty that when the time for decision came I would not falter. Along with the terror and the blackness in my mind went that one abiding knowledge upon which all my actions now were based. I could trust that instinct.
Fitzgerald’s copter was waiting. I could see his lead-suited figure, tiny and far below, pacing up and down impatiently as I dropped toward him. My copter settled lightly earthward. And for a moment another thought crossed my mind.
Williams! A man murdered, a man I knew and had worked with. A man I liked. That should have affected me much more deeply than it did. I knew why it hadn’t. Williams’ death was unimportant—completely trivial in the face of the—the other peril that loomed namelessly, in all its invisible menace, like a shrouded ghost rising from the lake beyond us.
Fitzgerald was a big blond man with blue eyes and a scar puckering his forehead, souvenir of our last battle with mutated marmosa in the Atlanta Ring. His transmitter-disc vibrated tinnily as I got out of the copter.
“Hello, chief. You got my second message?”
“No. What was it?”
“More funny stuff.” He gestured toward the Ring. “In the lake this time—signs of life. I can’t make anything out of it.”
I drew a deep breath of relief. Davidson would have stopped that message. It was up to me now to find a way to keep Fitzgerald quiet.
“We’ll take a look at the lake, then,” I said. “What’s your report?”
“Well....” He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, glancing at me through his face-plate as if he didn’t quite expect me to believe him. “It’s a funny place, that lake. I got the impression it was—well, watching me.
“I know it sounds silly but I have to tell you. It could be important, I suppose. And then when I was making a second turn over the water I saw something, in the lake.” He paused. “People,” he added after a moment.
“What kind of people?”
“I—they weren’t human.”
“How do you know?”
“They weren’t wearing lead suits,” he said simply, glad of a chance to pin his story down with facts. “I figured they were either not human or else insane. They heard my ship. And they went into the lake.”
“Swimming?”
“They walked in. Right under the water. And they stayed there.”
“What did they look like?”
“I didn’t get a close look,” he said evasively, his eyes troubled as they avoided mine.
I was aware of a strange, mounting excitement that swelled in my throat until I could hardly speak. I jerked my head toward the lake.
“Come on,” I said.
There lay the blue water, moving gently in the breeze. The cliffs like folded curtains rose beyond it. There was no sign of life in sight as we crossed the bare, pitted rocks. Fitzgerald eyed me askance as we clumped toward the water in our heavy lead-lined boots. I knew he expected doubt from me.
But I knew also that he had told the truth. The lost memory of danger sent its premonitory shadows through my mind and I believed, dimly, that I too had seen those aquatic people, sometime in that immediate past which had been expunged from my brain.
We were halfway across the rocks, our Geiger-counters clicking noisy warning of the death in the air all around us, when the first of the lake people rose up before us from behind a ledge of rock.
He was a perfectly normal looking man—except that he stood there in khaki trousers and shirt, sleeves rolled up, in the bath of potent destruction which was the very air of the Ring. He looked at us with a blankness impossible to describe and yet with a strangely avid interest in his eyes.
When we were half a dozen paces away he raised his arm and, without changing expression, in a voice totally without inflection, he spoke.
“Go back,” he said. “Go back. Get away from here, now!”
It was all returning to me ... I knew why he looked so strange, why he spoke so flatly, why that interest watched us from his eyes....
I didn’t know. The knowledge brushed the edges of my awareness and withdrew. I stumbled forward, Fitzgerald beside me excited and eager, calling out a question to the man.
He made no answer. He took one last look at us, blank, intent, impersonal, his eyes as blue as the water in the lake. And then he dropped straight downward, without stooping, without seeming to move a muscle. He vanished behind the knee-high ledge of rock.
We reached it together, shouldering one another in our eagerness. We bent over the ledge. The man had disappeared, leaving no sign behind him. Nothing but a little hollow in the rock where he had stood, a hollow no bigger than a saucer, in which blue water swayed. We stood there half stunned, for the time it took the water to gurgle downward and vanish in the hole and surge up again twice from some action of subterranean waters.
Memory was battering at the closed doors of my mind.
I knew the answer. I knew it well—but the door stayed shut. The time to remember was not yet.
They were watching us from the edge of the water by the time we had come within hailing distance. One by one we saw them wade up from the blue depths and take their stand in the edge of the water, ankle deep, rivulets running from their hair and clothing—drowned men and women, watching us.
They weren’t drowned, of course. They looked perfectly healthy and there was more intelligence and animation in their faces than had looked at us from the vanished man of the ledge.
These were real people. The other had not been. I thought that much must be evident even to Fitzgerald, though it was a subterranean knowledge running through my mind that told me so.
“Wait, Jim,” Fitzgerald said suddenly, catching my elbow. “I—don’t like ’em. Stand back.” He was watching the silent people in the water.
I let him stop me. Now that I was here I wasn’t certain what came next. The terrible urgency still rang its alarm in the closed room of my brain but until I could gain entry into that room I wouldn’t know what was expected of me.
Fitzgerald waved to the people in the water, a beckoning gesture. They stared at us.
Then they turned and talked briefly together, glancing at us over their shoulders. Finally one of the women came up out of the lake and picked her way toward us over the lava-like rock.
Finally one of the women came up out of the lake and picked her way toward us
She had long fair hair sleeked back from her face by the water and hanging like pale kelp across her shoulders. Her blue dress clung to her over a beautiful, supple body, water spattering from the dripping cloth and the dripping hair as she came.
Belatedly I remembered that crashed air-liner and its vanished people. Were these the passengers and crew? I thought they were. But what had induced them against all reason to come this far into the deadly air of the Ring? The lake? Up to that point the thing was possible, but it was sheer madness from the moment I imagined them entering the water.
The lake, then? Was there something inexplicably strange and compelling about the lake itself that had drawn them in and sent them out again like this, alive, unharmed in the singing air that made our counters clatter?
I looked out over the waters for an answer, and—
And I got my answer—or part of it.
For out there on the rippling blue surface a shadow moved. A long, coiling shadow cast not from above but from below. Deep down in the lake something was stirring.
I strained my eyes and in the sealed deeps of my mind terror and exultation moved in answer to that coiling darkness. I knew it. I recognized it. I ... The recognition passed.
The vast shadow moved lazily, monstrously, moved and coiled and drew itself in under the cliffs.
Slowly it disappeared, coil by coil, shadow by shadow.
I turned. The fair-haired woman was standing before us; gazing into our faces with a remote, impersonal curiosity. It was as if she had never seen another human creature before and found us interesting but—disassociated. No species that might share relationship with her.
“You’re from the liner?” I asked, my voice reverberating in my own ears inside the helmet. “We—we can take you back.” I let the words die. They meant nothing to her. They meant no more than the clatter of our belt-counters or the patter of drops around her on the rocks.
“Jim.” Fitzgerald’s voice buzzed in my earphones. “Jim, we’ve got to take her back with us. She’s out of her head. They all are—don’t you see? We’ve got to save them.”
“How?” I tried to sound practical. “We haven’t got room. There’s a full liner load here.”
“We can take this one.” He reached out and took her arm gently. She let him, her eyes turning that remote, impersonal gaze upon his face. “It’s probably too late,” he said, looking at her with compassion, “but we can’t leave her here, can we?”
I was watching his hand on her arm and a thought came to me out of nowhere, a fact that seemed to slip through the closed doors in my mind as they opened a tiny crack. This girl was flesh and blood. A hand closed on her arm met firm resistance. But I knew that if I had touched that first man my hand would have closed over the smooth instability of water.
I looked at the girl’s face where a passing breeze brushed it, and a shiver went down my back. For it was a warm breeze, drying her hair and cheek where it blew—and I saw dark, wrinkled desiccation wherever dryness touched her skin. The sleek fair hair lost its silkiness and turned brown and brittle, the satiny cheek darkened, furrowed....
I knew if she left the lake she would die. But it didn’t matter. I knew there was no actual danger, either way. (Danger to what? From what? No use asking myself that yet—the door would be open in its own time.)
I took her other arm. Between us she went docilely toward the waiting copters, saying nothing. I don’t think Fitzgerald noticed what that drying breeze was doing to her until we were nearly at the edge of the Ring.
By then it was too late to take her back even if he had understood what the trouble was.
I heard Fitzgerald catch his breath but he said nothing and neither did I.
We lifted her into his copter. I took off behind him and the visors were silent between our ships as we flew back toward Base. What could we have said to each other then?