"Why are you in such a big hurry to leave, chief? We only got here and it looks like a pretty good vacation spot to me." Ross raised his head a little to eye the dome where opal lights played under the sun's rays.
"That is just why," Ashe replied quietly. "There are too many temptations here."
Travis understood. To Ashe the appeal of those waiting buildings, of the knowledge which they might contain, must be almost overpowering. They could postpone work on the ship, delay and delay, fascinated by this world and its secrets. He knew the same pull, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Before it trapped them all, they must struggle against that enveloping desire to plunge into the green jungle, slash a path to the opal dome, and see for themselves what wonders it housed.
Ashe was sorely tempted. And because he was the man he was, he must be fighting that temptation now, believing that if he once plunged wholeheartedly into exploration, he might not be able to stop. Also, Renfry was offering them an excuse to do just that by wishing for some aid in the problem of the tape.
An hour later the three of them did leave the ship, Renfry remaining in charge there. Using the lowest beam of the weapons, they cut a path into the woods. Travis picked up a flower head. Five wide petals, fluted, crinkled a little at the tips, were a deep cream in color, shading orange at the heart. Resting on his palm, those petals began to move visibly, closing until he held a bud instead of a flower. He could not toss away the blossom. Its color was too arresting, its spicy scent too appealing. He worked the short stem into one of the latches of a belt pouch, where, the heat of his hand removed, the flower opened once again. Nor did it fade or droop in spite of the shortness of its stem.
Now, out of the direct rays of the sun, the humans found the air cool, moist, heavy with the odor of luxuriant vegetation. Not that those odors were unpleasant—in fact, they were overpoweringly good. Spicy scents warred with perfumes and the sharper smell of earth as their feet scuffed through the mass of dead leaves.
"Whew!" Ross waved his hand back and forth in front of his face as if to set up a reviving current of air. "Perfume factory—or what have you! I feel as if I were burrowing through about a ton of roses!"
Ashe appeared to have lost some of his somberness since they had left the ship. "With another of carnations thrown in," he agreed. "I think I can detect"—he sniffed and then sneezed—"some cloves and maybe a few nutmegs into the bargain."
Travis breathed shallowly. He had welcomed the mixture of perfumes minutes earlier. Now he found himself wishing instead to face a wind with a burden of sage and piñon in place of these cloying scents in their thick abundance.
The jungle grew clear up to the base of the opaline building. And the structure itself loomed far higher from ground level than had appeared true from the port of the ship. They worked their way along, hunting the entrance which must exist somewhere, unless the inhabitants had all worn wings. Oddly enough—though there were windows in plenty of stories above, many opening on small airy balconies—the first story showed no openings at all. Here were panels set in carved frames alternating with solid blocks of the opal material. And each panel was clad in gleaming mosaic, not forming any recognized design but merely wedding color to color in vivid shades.
The humans cut their way through underbrush and reached the end of the wall. This was a large building occupying the space of a normal Terran city block. But around the corner they found the door, at the head of a curling ramp. The portal extended almost the full height of the first story and it was open, a carved archway. The frame was like frozen lace, with here a curve and there a point cracked and gone.
They hesitated. Save for the sighing of the wind, the sound of leaf against moving leaf, and some small twitters and squeaks from the unseen inhabitants of the green world surrounding the foot of the ramp, there was quiet—the quiet of the forgotten.
Ashe stepped onto the ramp, his soft-shod feet making not the slightest noise. He climbed the gentle slope almost reluctantly, as if he did not really want to know what waited within.
Travis and Ross came behind. There were pockets of dead leaves caught in the curves of the ramp, and more drifted inside the open portal. They shuffled through them, to come into a hall which was breathtaking in its height. For it went up and up, until they were dizzied when they tried to follow its inner spiral with their eyes. And covering this expanse was the great opaline dome. The sunlight shone through it, painting rainbows on walls and on the ramp which climbed in a coil along the walls, serving other lacy archways on every floor level.
Here there was none of the brilliance of the outside mosaics. The spread of color was sharply reduced to soft, faded shades, dusky violet, pallid green, dusty rosy, pale cream . . .
" . . . forty-eight—forty-nine—fifty! Fifty doors up and down that ramp at least." Ross kept his voice to a murmur and yet that echo of a whisper carried eerily back to them. "Where do we start?" Now his tone was definitely louder in challenge to that echo and the stillness which deadened it. Ashe left them and crossed the expanse of hall, stretching out his hands to a niche. When they hurried after him they discovered he was holding a small statuette carved of a dusky violet stone. Like the blue flyers, the subject bore baffling resemblances to living things they knew, and yet its totality was alien.
"Man?" Ross wondered. "Animal?"
"Totem? God?" Travis added out of his own knowledge and background.
"All or any," conceded Ashe. "But it is a work of art."
That they could all recognize, even if the subject still puzzled them. The figure was posed erect on two slender hind limbs, both of which terminated in feet of long, narrow, widely separated, clawed digits. The body, also slender but with a well-defined waist and broad shoulders, was closer to the human in general appearance, and there were two arms held aloft, as if the creature was about to leap outward into space. But it would have a better chance of survival in such a leap than those now passing the statuette from hand to hand. For the arms supported skin wing-flaps, extended on ribs not unlike those possessed by bats on Earth.
The head was the least human, almost grotesque in its ugliness to the time agents' eyes. There were sharply pointed ears, overshadowing in their size and extension the rest of the features which were crowded together in the forepart of the face. Eyes were set deep within cavities under heavy skull ridges, the nose was simply a vertical slit above a mouth from which thin vestiges of lips curled back to display a frightening set of fangs. And yet its ugliness was not repulsive, nor horrifying. There was no clothing to suggest that it represented an intelligent being. Yet all of them were certain, the longer they examined the figure, that it had not been meant to portray an animal.
To the touch the violet stone was smooth and cool, and when Travis held it out into a patch of light from the dome, the statuette sparkled gemlike. The careful detail of the figure contrasted with the abstraction of the murals on the outer walls, more akin to the carvings on the dome and about the doorways.
Ross drew his finger along the interior of the niche where Ashe had found the image. Dust piled there dribbled out to the floor. How long had the winged one stood there undisturbed?
Ashe carried it in the crook of his arm as they went on—not up the spiral of the ramp, but into the first of the open doorways on ground level. But the room beyond was empty, lighted through slits high on the wall. They wandered on. More empty rooms, no trace of those who had once lived here—if this indeed had been a dwelling place and not a building for public use. It was as if the inhabitants had stripped it bare when they had at last withdrawn, forgetting only the little statue in the hall.
As they came from the last bare chamber, Ross sighed and leaned against the wall.
"I don't know how you feel about it," he announced. "But I've swallowed more than my share of dust this past hour or so. Also breakfast was a long time back. A coffee break right now—providing we had coffee—might be heartening."
They didn't have coffee, but they had come provided with the foam drink from the ship. So, sitting in a row across the ramp, they sucked in turn from containers of that and ate some of the "corn" cakes they carried for trail rations.
"Be good to have some fresh food," Travis said wistfully. The rather monotonous diet from the ship's stores satisfied hunger but did not appeal to his taste. He allowed himself the luxury of visualizing a sizzling steak and all that would accompany it back at the ranch.
"Maybe some on the hoof—out there." Ross, his hands full, pointed with his chin toward the riot of greenery they could sight from their present perch. "We could go hunting . . ."
"How about that?" Travis roused and turned to Ashe eagerly. "Dare we try?"
But the older agent did not warm to the suggestion. "I wouldn't kill—until I knew what I was killing."
For a moment Travis did not understand, and then the meaning of the rather ambiguous statement sank in. How could they be sure that the prey was not—man! Or man's equivalent here? But he still wanted that steak, with a longing which gnawed at him.
"Do we climb?" Ross stood up. "This'll be an all-day job right here, if we stick to it. I'd say the cupboard's bare, though."
"Maybe." Ashe cradled his bat-thing in his arm. "We can take a quick look through the ground floor of that big red block to the north."
They fought their way through the thick wall of brush, grass, tree and vine to the monolithic building. Here again they faced an open door, this one narrow as the window slits, as if grudging any entrance at all.
"I'd say the guys who built this one didn't like their neighbors too well," Ross commented. "This could make a pretty good fort if you had to have one. That domed place is wide open."
"Different peoples . . ." Travis had been a little in advance, lingering for a moment before he took the step which would bring him over the threshold. Once inside he froze.
"Trouble!" His weapon was out, ready to fire.
There was a wide hall before him, as there had been in the dome building. But where that had been clean and bare, this one was different.
A series of partitions some five or six feet high cut back and forth, chopping the floor space into a crazy quilt of oddly shaped and sized spaces, with little chance to see from one to the next. But that did not bother Travis so much as the message recorded by his nose.
The odor of the night creatures had been something like this. It was the taint of a lair—a lair long in use. It smelled of decay, alien body reek, dried and rotted vegetation, and animal matter. Something denned here and had used this place freely for a long time.
It was the eagerness of the strange hunter which betrayed it. A low, throaty murmur, such as a cat might utter when intent upon unsuspecting prey, carried across the shadows.
Travis spun around. He saw the hunched shape balancing on top of a partition, knew it was about to launch straight for him. And he pressed the firing button of the weapon as he brought it up.
The attacker was caught in mid-air. A terrible yowl of rage, and pain, echoed and re-echoed about the massive walls. A flailing limb, well provided with claws, raked across Travis' body from the waist down, sending him reeling from the door into the greater gloom. Just then Ross and Ashe burst in, to center the full beams of their weapons on the rolling, caterwauling thing making a second attempt at Travis.
Whatever it was, the creature possessed abnormal vitality. It was not until their blast rays met and crossed in its body that it lay still. Travis scrambled to his feet, shaken. He knew that if he had not had that split second of warning, he would be dead—or so badly mauled he would have longed for death.
He limped back toward the door, his thigh and leg feeling numb from the force of that smashing stroke. But under his questing hand the fabric of the suit was untorn, and there seemed to be no open wound.
"Did it get you?" Ashe came to meet him, pushing aside his hands to look at his body. Travis, still shaken, winced under the exploring probe of the other's fingers.
"Just bruised. What was it?"
Ross arose from a gingerly inspection of the remains. "After the blasting we gave it, your guess is as good as mine. But it is sure sudden death on six legs—and that's no overstatement."
The weapons had not left too much to identify, that was true. But the thing had been six-legged, furred, and carnivorous—and it was about eight feet long with fangs and claws in proportion to the size.
"Sabertooth, local variety," Ross remarked.
Ashe nodded to the outside world. "I suggest we make a strategic withdrawal. These may be nocturnal, too, but I'd rather not tangle with another in the jungle."
"Did you think we'd find no nasty surprises?" Ross drummed on the mess table with his scarred hand, his eyes showing amusement, even if his lips did not curve into a smile. "Let me share with you a small drop of good common sense, fella. It's just when things look smoothest that there's a big trap waiting ahead on the trail."
Travis rubbed his bruised thigh. The other's humor grated. And since he had had time to consider the late battle, he began to suspect that he
had
been a little too sure of himself when he had entered the red-walled building. That didn't make him more receptive to Ross's implied criticism, though—or what he chose to believe was criticism.
"You know"—Renfry came in from the corridor talking to Ashe—"those blue flying things came back twice while you were gone. They flew almost up to the port, but not inside."
Travis, recalling the claws with which those were equipped, grunted. "Might be just as well," he commented.
"Then," Renfry said, paying not attention to his interruption, "just before you came back I found this—inside the outer lock."
"This" was clearly no natural curiosity left on their doorstep by some freak of the wind. Three green leaves possessing yellow ribs and veins had been pinned together with two-inch thorns into a cornucopia holder, a holder filled with oval, pale-green objects about the size of a thumbnail.