The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

could not see. The crevice through which they had entered was now closed with a curtain they could not pierce or break. Hume tried his ray tube. They watched thin flame run up and down that invisible barrier, but not destroy it.
    Hume relooped the tube. “Their trap is sprung.”
    “There may be another way out!” But Vye was already despondently sure there was not. Those who had rigged this trap would leave no bolt holes. But because they were human and refused to accept the inevitable without a fight, the captives set off, not down into the curve of the cup, but along its slope.
    Tongues of brush and tree clumps brought about detours which forced them slowly downward. They were well away from the crevice when Hume halted, flung up a hand in silent warning. Vye listened, trying to pick up the sound which had alarmed his companion.
    It was as Vye strained to catch a betraying noise that he was first conscious of what he did not hear. In the plains there had been squeaking, humming, chitterings, the vocalizing of myriad grass dwellers. Here, except for the sighing of the wind and a few insect sounds—nothing. All inhabitants bigger than a Jumalan fly might have long ago been routed out of the land.
    “To the left.” Hume faced about.
    There was a heavy thicket there, too stoutly grown for anything to be within its shadow. Whatever moved must be behind it.
    Vye looked about him frantically for anything he could use as a weapon. Then he grabbed at the long bush knife in Hume’s belt sheath. Eighteen inches of tri-fold steel gleamed wickedly, its hilt fitting neatly into his fist as he held it point up, ready.
    Hume advanced on the bush in small steps, and Vye circled to his left a few paces behind. The Hunter was an expert with ray tube; that, too, was part of the necessary skill of a safari leader. But Vye could offer other help.
    He shrugged out of the blanket pack he had been carrying on his back, tossed that burden ahead.
    Out of cover charged a streak of red, to land on the bait. Hume blasted, was answered by a water-cat’s high-pitched scream. The feline writhed out of its life in a stench of scorched fur and flesh. As Vye retrieved his clawed pack Hume stood over the dead animal.
    “Odd.” He reached down to grasp a still twitching foreleg, stretched the body out with a sudden jerk.
    It was a giant of its species, a male, larger than any he had seen. But a second look showed him those ribs starting through mangy fur in visible hoops, the skin tight over the skull, far too tight. The water-cat had been close to death by starvation; its attack on the men probably had been sparked by sheer desperation. A starving carnivore in a land lacking the normal sounds of small birds and animal life, in a valley used as a trap.
    “No way out and no food.” Vye fitted one thought to another out loud.
    “Yes. Pin the enemy up, let them finish off one another.”
    “But why?” Vye demanded.
    “Least trouble that way.”
    “There are plenty of water-cats down on the plains. All of them couldn’t be herded up here to finish each other off; it would take years—centuries.”
    “This one’s capture may have been only incidental, or done for the purpose of keeping some type of machinery in working order,” Hume replied. “I don’t believe this was arranged just to dispose of water-cats.”
    “Suppose this was started a long time ago, and those who did it are gone, so now it goes on working without any real intelligence behind it. That could be the answer, couldn’t it?”
    “Some process triggers into action when a ship sets down on this portion of Jumala, maybe when one planet’s under certain conditions only? Yes, that makes sense. Only why wasn’t the first Patrol explorer flaming in here caught? And the survey team—we were here for months, cataloguing, mapping, not a whisper of any such trouble.”
    “That dead man—he’s been here a long time. And when did the Largo Drift disappear?”
    “Five—six years ago. But I can’t give you any answers. I have none.”
    * * * *
    It began as a low hum, hardly to be distinguished from the distant howling of the wind. Then it slid up scale until the thin wail became an ululating scream torturing the ears, dragging out of hiding those fears of a man confronting the unknown in the dark.
    Hume tugged at Vye, drew the other by force back into the brush. Scratched, laced raw by the whip of branches, they stood in a small hollow with the drift of leaves high