The Women-Stealers of Thrayx Part 8

And suddenly he thought of the empty ships behind them, and Cain's abrupt uselessness to his Thrayxite employers. Then--

But the gamble was too great. Cain might not double back, but instead plunge headlong further and further into the concealing mora.s.s before him. No, Cain would not double back. Not now. For in Kriijorl he had met an even match, and now he was afraid!

Fully an hour had pa.s.sed when, his tunic torn and the exposed flesh bleeding, Mason caught up with Kriijorl.

"He was nearly within my hands for a moment--" the giant whispered hoa.r.s.ely. He breathed with difficulty, and there were long slashes gleaming redly in the darkness across his great muscles.

Mason stood silently for moments, toying with a thought that nagged insistently at the edge of his brain. He knew Cain. He knew the man.

Then suddenly his thoughts were interrupted by the m.u.f.fled sound of a rocket blast, and within moments there was a vertical trail of fire above them as a Thrayxite ship hurtled skyward.

"By Jhavuul--"

"No!" Mason exclaimed. "The blast was from in front of us, he didn't double back! Must be another colony near our own, and he stumbled out of this overgrown mess and right into it. There was simply an empty ship--"

"Then the traitor has won!" Kriijorl's face was tilted upward, and in the faint glow of the planetesimal belt that girdled Thrayx, it seemed more than ever that of an heroic Viking king of ages gone.

"There's a chance he hasn't!" Mason breathed. He had the thought now, pinned down, clear in his head. "If there has been no alarm back at our own camp we may still have the mentacom to ourselves. We'll signal Ihelos as you planned and then--then there is something else you will say. Something else that I think will, as the saying goes on Earth, kill two birds with a single blast."

Mason had lost track of time; perhaps it was as many as two hours before they had fought their way through the clutching undergrowth back to the mentacom at the fringe of their own camp. Several times they had had to stop, for there had been sounds in the jungle other than those they had made themselves. Animals, Kriijorl had said, who had got the scent of their blood. But the noises had not been fast and crashing--more those of stealth, as were those of their own steps. A single animal, perhaps, with the scent of their blood; or that of the breeder guard they had slain. And stalking.

The dome was still silent, and the stiff corpses outside it lay undisturbed in the thick undergrowth. In the clearing the six empty Thrayxite ships towered in the sleeping quiet, star-shine glinting faintly from their polished hulls.

Wordlessly, they entered the dome, and it was as they had left it.

Kriijorl again adjusted the headset, and the orange glow pulsed and waned as Mason watched.

And then at length, "If they are to know, they know now," Kriijorl said. "And the Thrayxite host as well. What was there you wished to add, Lieutenant?"

Mason spoke quickly. "Say that you have discovered that the priceless--and you must say _priceless_--Book of the Saints is in the Forest of Saarl on Thrayx. Say that we have discovered it to be less well protected than is generally believed. Then give the location of the subterranean vault as precisely as you can!"

"But my people are well aware--"

"I realize that, but our friend Cain doesn't!"

The Ihelian's face was still puzzled, but he projected the thought-message Mason had dictated.

And then in seconds the Ihelian had hastily but thoroughly wrecked the mentacom, and the two men left its silent dome for the empty ships that beckoned so tantalizingly a scant quarter-mile distant.

They had run perhaps a dozen steps when the undergrowth behind them ripped and tore, and Mason spun.

There was a m.u.f.fled cry, and he had barely time to catch Judith's bleeding body as she fell in exhaustion into his arms.

VI

The muscles in his arms and legs trembled with fatigue as he lifted the semi-conscious girl up to Kriijorl, and then with what seemed an impossible effort, hauled himself through the deserted ship's stern airlock.

The Ihelian seemed to carry Judith as though she were a feather as he climbed the narrow ladder above Mason, infinitely upward, the Earthman thought ... an infinite distance to the ship's forehull, to its control banks.

There was only the sound of his own hoa.r.s.e breathing in his ears as he climbed, rung after rung, and the hollow echo of Kriijorl's boots as they mounted resolutely above him.

Then they had made it, and were strapping Judith into a hammock, were taking their own shock-seats before the control-banks of the Thrayxite shuttle-craft.

The Ihelian did not hesitate. His fingers deliberated for only a moment above the firing studs in the blue-green glow of the banks, and then they flicked home, and engines muttered, roared into terrifying life.

Within moments, saying nothing, moving the swift, silent movements of desperation, they had freed themselves of the grasping snare of the jungle beneath them; were once more strong, liberated things in the vast freedom of s.p.a.ce.

"And now Ihelos!" Kriijorl cried as they broke swiftly from the ecliptic of the great spangled ring of Thrayx. "If we can but escape their fleet. Any moment they should be on the scanner, forming to meet the onslaught of Ihelian squadrons--"

"No!" Mason said, and his voice was like a solid thing clogging his throat. "No, not Ihelos--not yet!" His eyes burned, and the red welts that covered his body had begun to sting, to pain, and it was hard to think.

He saw the frown forming on Kriijorl's face.

"Thrayx, and the Forest of Saarl," he bit from between teeth clenched against the creeping agony in him. "The Book of the Saints, Kriijorl.

It is the key, don't you see. Key to all this, your feud."

For an instant the Ihelian said nothing, but groped in hidden pockets of his battered s.p.a.ce harness. His long fingers quickly produced a tablet, thrust it into Mason's hand. The Earthman swallowed it and almost at once energy coursed as though from some hidden well in his body through his flagging muscles and nerves.

Then Kriijorl spoke. "I do not understand, Lieutenant. I know only that it would be almost certain death. Intrusion near the vault would bring a flight of guard ships within minutes."

"I know that," Mason said. "But perhaps not down upon us! And we must have that Book. I've been thinking about it, comparing it with similar writings in Earth's own past. Such books are not new, such motives, such methods. Your Book is priceless in a way that even you don't know, Kriijorl. I'm certain of it. For it must contain the reason that you fight."

"And that reason?"

"A reason, if I'm right, that would end your feud once and for all. A nasty bit of logic which the people of Ihelos and Thrayx were quite deliberately kept from knowing from the beginning. I'd make book on it that at one time both planets were very hungry places--"

"But if you are wrong, Lieutenant?"

Mason fastened his gaze straight before him on the diamond-studded scanner, and saw that some of the smaller diamonds were moving in a tiny echelon.

"Then I guess we die young," he answered the Ihelian. "Want to try?"

The Ihelian's face loosened into a wry smile. "Sometimes you ask rather foolish questions, Lieutenant! I've been bred to such business, and not given my life so much thought before this! But--"

"Yes. Judith."

And then they heard a woman's voice speaking behind them. "Thrayxite acceleration hammocks could stand improvement," it said. "And when we leave the Forest of Saarl, I think I'll just lie on the deck instead."

Kriijorl's knowledge of the spot's location in the great forest was far more accurate than he had given Mason reason to hope. And with a deftness that matched that with which he had eluded the screens of the Thrayxite fleet hurtling to protect its breeder planetoid, he brought the ship to rest at Mason's direction, little more than a quarter-mile from where the Book of the Saints lay entombed.

It was marked by two spires. One was of hewn stone, as Kriijorl had said, immobile, with ancient symbols carven from its base to its pinnacle.

And the other was smooth, and of metal; its gaping airlock testimony to the haste with which it had been landed, unhidden by the natural camouflage of the soaring trees with which the gra.s.s-carpeted clearing was surrounded.

"Who--"