Hell's Gate

flesh, the way they had embraced in the darkness of their room; the way she smiled with her crooked tooth; the ease with which she accepted all of the frightening things about him. He felt a deep, bitter remorse that he might never see her again. For how would he return to the ship? And even if he did accomplish that feat, how would he reach the cart? And once having reached the cart, how would he know the method of operation to return to his own probability line? And, if he got home, would Lynda still be alive? Would the vacii have discovered her behind the second beam projector; would they have sent a detail of sucker-mouthed guards through to kill or capture her?
        His thoughts were abruptly wrenched away from Lynda and what problems she might have. Below, at the point where the alien compound took over from the forest, a search party of vacii were entering the trees. In ten or fifteen minutes, they might top the edge of the valley, be right up here on the first slopes of the mountain with him. He stood, took one last look, and started back through the trees, running now that the blanket of needles was thinner and more light seeped through to show him the way.
        Half an hour later, he stopped at a formation of rocks that marked the head of a second valley running perpendicular to the first. He had exerted himself to his outside limits; now his breath came hard, and the cold mountain air burned his lungs. He sat down to allow his quivering muscles time to settle and relax, and he leaned his head against a pillow of rocks.
        Five minutes later, he woke with a start, cursing himself for letting his weariness overcome him during so dangerous a time. Maybe he was growing even more human than the computer realized, for he was becoming increasingly susceptible to the foibles of a normal man. Then he stopped cursing and wondered what it was had wakened him.
        His nose brought him the first clue: a cloying stench of perspiration that was not his, a heavy animal smell like something one might run across at a large zoo on a humid summer day. He brought his head up quickly, though it seemed bolted to his chest, and looked into the coal black eyes of the beast-eyes set two inches deep under a shelved forehead. Its nostrils were wide and black, flared in a pebbly black, as the pug nose which trembled and blew steam at him. The enormous, dark-lipped mouth opened, showing yellow, square teeth. Salsbury guessed this was supposed to be a smile. But he remembered that he had often smiled at a good-looking dinner.
        The beast blew steam and blinked.
        Salsbury brought his gun out of his holster with a slickness that would have done well against Wyatt Earp. But even as he was depressing the trigger, the beast's stubby-fingered paw flicked at his wrist and knocked the weapon to the ground. He reached for it. The beast grabbed him by the back of the shirt before he could touch the butt, lifted him off the ground and held him at arm's length. He struggled but could not free himself. Sarcastically, he wondered where it would decide to bite first.

CHAPTER 16
        
        While the gorilla-thing with the slimy yellow teeth held Victor up for approval like a matron shopper inspecting a piece of meat, another one of the beasts came into view behind the first. It shuffled up to Salsbury, its heavy feet making surprisingly little noise, and stared, blinking its four-pound corrugated eyelids over its sunken, black eyes. It ran a thick pink tongue over its own rotting teeth, as if it enjoyed the taste of its own halitosis. It was fully as large as the first, a good eight and a half feet tall, even though slightly stooped and hunch-backed. Its long arms did not drag on the ground, but they were long enough so that it didn't have to bend to scratch its feet.
        The second gorilla made a hooing and hawing sound in Salsbury's face which made no sense to the man, though he could discern patterns to the speech. The smell that came from its mouth was bad enough to derail a train and corrode the locomotive into a pile of worthless scrap. He tried not to breathe until he saw the thing inhaling, then sucked in air before his atmosphere could be contaminated again.
        As the two Tarzan movie rejects hooted at each other, he began to understand what a butterfly must feel like when picked up to be examined for the beauty of its wings. He didn't like the feeling one bit. If they were planning to rip