The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

advanced, before their eyes the impossible happened. Those gaping wounds closed, the head straightened on the almost invisible neck, the eyes glared once more with life, and slaver dripped from the swine snout.
    Jellico caught up the needler Nymani had dropped. With a coolness Dane envied, the captain shot. And for the second time the rock ape collapsed, torn to ribbons.
    Nymani screamed, and Dane tried to choke back his own cry of horrified protest. The dead thing put on life for the second time, crawled, got somehow to its feet, healed itself, and came on. Asaki, his face greenish-pale, stepped out stiffly as if each step he took was forced by torture. He had dropped his needler. Now he caught up a rock as large as his own head, raised it high with arms on which the muscles stood out like ropes. He hurled the stone, and Dane heard as well as saw the missile go home. The rock ape fell for the third time.
    When one of those taloned paws began to move again, Nymani broke. He ran, his screams echoing thinly in the air, as the thing lurched up, the gory mess of its head weaving about. If his feet would have obeyed him, Dane might have followed the Khatkan. As it was, he drew his ray and aimed it at that shambling thing. Tau struck up the barrel.
    The medic’s face was livid; there was the same horror in his eyes. But he moved out to front that monster.
    A spot of shadow coalesced on the ground, deepened in hue, took on substance. Crouched low facing the rock ape, its haunches quivering for a deadly spring, narrowed green eyes holding on its prey, was a black leopard.
    The tiny forward and backward movements of its body steadied, and it arched through the air, brought down the ape. A pitting, snarling tangle rolled across the slope—and was gone!
    Asaki’s hands shook as he drew them down his sweating face. Jellico readied a second clip in the needler mechanically. But Tau was swaying so that Dane leaped to take the shock of the other’s weight as he collapsed. Only for a moment did the medic hang so, then he struggled to stand erect.
    “Magic?” Jellico’s voice, as controlled as ever, broke the silence.
    “Mass hallucination,” Tau corrected him. “Very strong.”
    “How!” Asaki swallowed and began again. “How was it done?”
    The medic shook his head. “Not by the usual methods, that is certain. And it worked on us—on me—when we weren’t conditioned. I don’t understand that!”
    Dane could hardly believe it yet. He watched Jellico stride to where the tangle of struggling beasts had rolled, saw him examine bare ground on which no trace of the fight remained. They must accept Tau’s explanation; it was the only sane one.
    Asaki’s features were suddenly convulsed with a rage so stark that Dane realized how much a veneer was the painfully built civilization of Khatka.
    “ Lumbrilo! ” The Chief Ranger made of that name a curse. Then with a visible effort he controlled his emotions and came to Tau, looming over the slighter medic almost menacingly.
    “How?” he demanded for the second time.
    “I don’t know.”
    “He will try again?”
    “Not the same perhaps—”
    But Asaki had already grasped the situation, was looking ahead.
    “We shall not know,” he breathed, “what is real, what is not.”
    “There is also this,” Tau warned. “The unreal can kill the believer just as quickly as the real!”
    “That I know also. It has happened too many times lately. If we could only find out how! Here are no drums, no singing—none of the tricks to tangle a man’s mind that he usually uses to summon his demons. So without Lumbrilo, without his witch tools, how does he make us see what is not?”
    “That we must discover and speedily, sir. Or else we shall be lost among the unreal and the real.”
    “You also have the power. You can save us!” Asaki protested.
    Tau drew his arm across his face. Very little of the normal color had returned to his thin, mobile features. He still leaned against Dane’s supporting arm.
    “A man can do only so much, sir. To battle Lumbrilo on his own ground is exhausting and I can not fight so very often.”
    “But will he not also be exhausted?”
    “I wonder.…” Tau gazed beyond the Khatkan to the barren ground where leopard and rock ape had ceased to be. “This magic is a tricky thing, sir. It builds and feeds upon a man’s own imagination and inner fears. Lumbrilo, having triggered ours, need not strive at all, but let us ourselves raise that