The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

and his eyes were again bright with reason.
    Vye found the strength to run the last few feet between them. He was fumbling with those ties about Hume’s wrists as he blurted out the news. The barrier was out—they could go.
    Then he was bringing one of those precious bulbs, raising it to Hume’s eager mouth, squeezing a portion of its contents between the man’s cracked and bleeding lips.
    Somehow they made that trip back to the valley gate. When they saw their goal, Hume broke from Vye’s hold, tottered forward with a cry not far removed from a sob. He rebounded to slip full length to the ground and lie there. Sobbing dryly, his gaunt face, eyes closed, turned up to the sky. The trap had snapped shut once again.
    “Why—why?” Vye found he was repeating the same words over and over, his gaze blank, unfocussed, yet turned to the woods of the lake.
    “Tell me what happened again.”
    Vye’s head came around. Hume had pulled himself up so that his shoulders rested against the rock wall. His plasta-hand was out-flung, slipping up and down what seemed empty air, but which was the barrier against freedom. And now his eyes seemed entirely sane.
    Slowly, hesitating between words, Vye went over the full account of his visit to the lake, his retreat before the beasts, his fortunate stumble through the gap.
    “But you came back.”
    Vye flushed. He was not going to try to explain that. Instead he said:
    “If it went away once, it can again.”
    Hume did not press the subject of his return. Rather he fastened upon the end of that action with the wounded beast, made Vye go through it verbally a third time.
    “There is just this,” he said when the other was done. “When you fell you were not thinking of the barrier at all—and your wits were working again. You had come out of the daze we both had.”
    Vye tried to remember, decided that the Hunter was correct. He had been trying to elude the charge of the beast, only, fear and that desperate desire had occupied his mind at that moment. But what did that signify?
    To test just what he did not know, he crawled now to Hume’s side, put up his own hand to the space where the plasta-flesh palm slid back and forth on nothingness. But he almost fell on his face, forward into the gap. Where he had been expecting the resistance of the unseen curtain there had been nothing at all! He turned to Hume with the expression of a man who had been stunned by an unexpected blow.
    CHAPTER 11
    “It is open for you!” Hume broke the quiet first. His eyes were very bleak in his bony face.
    Vye stood up, took one step and was on the other side of the curtain where Hume’s hand still found substance. He came back with the same lack of hindrance. Yes, to him there was no longer a barrier. But why—why him when Hume was still a prisoner?
    The Hunter raised his head so his eyes could meet Vye’s with the authority of an order. “Go, get away while you can!”
    Instead Vye dropped down beside the other. “Why?” he asked baldly. And then the most obvious of all answers came.
    He glanced at Hume. The Hunter’s head lolled back against the rock which supported him, his eyes were closed now, and he had the look of a man who had been driven to the edge of endurance and was now willing to relinquish his grip and let go.
    Deliberately Vye brought up his right hand, balled his fingers into a fist. And just as deliberately he struck home, square on the point of that defenseless chin. Hume sagged, would have slipped down the surface of the rock had Vye’s hands not caught in his armpits.
    Since he had not the strength left to get to his feet with such a burden, Vye crawled, dragging the inert body of the Hunter with him. And this time, as he had hoped, there was no resistance at the gap. Unconscious, Hume was able to cross the barrier. Vye stretched him as comfortably flat as he could, used a portion of their water on his face until he moaned, muttered, and raised his hand feebly to his head.
    Then those gray eyes opened, focussed on Vye.
    “What—”
    “We’re both through now, both of us!” The younger man saw Hume glance around him with waking belief.
    “But how—?”
    “I knocked you out, that’s how,” Vye returned.
    “Knocked me out? I crossed when I was unconscious!” Hume’s voice steadied, strengthened. “Let me see!” He rolled over on his side, threw out his arm, and this time the hand found no wall. For him, too, the barrier was gone.
    “Once through, you are