The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

free,” he added wonderingly. “Maybe they never foresaw any escapes.” He struggled up, sitting with his hands hanging loosely between his knees.
    Vye turned his head, looked down the trail. The length of distance lying between them and the safari camp now faced them with a new problem. Neither of them could make that trek on foot.
    “We’re out, but we aren’t back—yet,” Hume echoed his thought.
    “I was wondering, if this door is open—” Vye began.
    “The flitter!” Again Hume’s mind matched his. “Yes, if those globes aren’t hanging around just waiting for us to try.”
    “They might act only to get us here, not to keep us once we’re in.” That might be wishful thinking, they wouldn’t know until they tried to prove it.
    “Give me a hand.” Hume held out his own, let Vye pull him to his feet. Weak as he was, he was clear-eyed, plainly clear-headed once more. “Let’s go!”
    Together they went back through the gap, then tested the absence of the barrier once more, to make sure. Hume laughed. “At least the front door remains open, even if we find the back one closed.”
    Vye left him sitting by that entrance while he made a quick trip to the cave to pick up the small pack of supplies left them. When he returned they crammed tablets into their mouths, drank feverishly of the lake water, and, with the stimulation of the new energy, set off along the cliff face.
    “This wall in the lake,” Hume asked suddenly, “you are sure it is artificial?”
    “Runs too straight to be anything else, and those projections are evenly spaced. I don’t see how it could be natural.”
    “We’ll have to be sure.”
    Vye thought of that attacking water creature. “No diving in there,” he protested. Hume smiled, a stretch of skin far too tight over his jaw now.
    “Not us, at least not us now,” he agreed. “But the Guild will send another survey.”
    “What could be the reason for all this?” Vye helped his companion over the loose debris of a cliff slide.
    “Information.”
    “What?”
    “Someone—or something—picked our brains while we were out of our heads. Or—” Hume paused suddenly, looked directly at Vye. “I have a vague feeling that you were able to keep going a lot better than I was. That so?”
    “Some of the time,” Vye admitted.
    “That checks. Part of me knew what was going on, but was helpless while that other thing,” his smile of moments earlier was wiped away, there was a chill edge in his voice, “picked over my brains, sorted out what it wanted.”
    Vye shook his head. “I didn’t feel that way. Just thick-headed—as if I were sleep walking and yet awake.”
    “So it took me over, but didn’t go all the way with you. Why? Another question for our list.”
    “Maybe—maybe Wass’ techs fixed it so I couldn’t be brain-picked, as you call it,” Vye offered.
    Hume nodded. “Could be—would well be. Come on.” He pressed the pace now.
    Vye turned to look down the slope suspiciously. Had Hume another warning of menace out of the wood? He could sight no movement there. And from this distance the lake was a topaz sheet of calm which could hide anything. Hume was already several paces ahead, scrambling as if the valley monsters were again on their track.
    “What’s the matter?” Vye demanded, as he caught up.
    “Night coming.” Which was true. Then Hume added, “If we can reach the flitter before sunset, we’ll have a chance to fly over the lake down there, to make a taping of it before we go.”
    The energy of the tablets strengthened them so that by the time they reached the crevice door they were moving with their former agility. For a single second Hume hesitated before that slit, almost as if he feared the test he must make. Then he stepped forward and this time into freedom.
    They reached the ledge where the flitter perched just as they had seen it last. How long ago that had been they could not have told, but they suspected that days of haze hung in between. Vye searched the sky. No globes winking there—just the flyer alone.
    He took his old seat behind the pilot, watched Hume test the relays and responses in the quick run down of a man who has done this chore many times before. But the other gave a little sigh of relief when he finished.
    “She’s all right, we can lift.”
    Again they both looked aloft, half fearing to see those malignant herders wink into being to forbid flight. But the sky was as serenely clear of even a drifting