CHAPTER 16

Summertide minus seven

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” Graves said. He was walking on ahead, slow and steady. With his hands clasped behind him and his relaxed manner, he was like a thoughtful skeleton out for a midday stroll. “The old party game. You remember?”

Max Perry stared after him. He had grown up on a world too harsh and marginal to permit the luxury of children’s games and children’s parties. Food had been his best treasure. And the best game that he could think of at the moment was survival.

“You get clues,” Graves went on. “First the beacon. Then the pointer, then the mystery caves. And then — if you’re lucky — the treasure!”

The aircar had landed on a crumbling and eroded plateau in the wilderness area between the Thousand Lakes and the outer boundary of the Pentacline Depression. In that no-man’s-land the soft rock had been eaten away into deep tunnels and smooth-sided sinkholes, like soft putty that an aged giant had kneaded and poked with bent, arthritic fingers. The meters-wide holes ran haphazardly at all angles from the surface. Some dived almost vertically; others sloped so shallowly that they could be walked down with ease.

“Be careful!” Perry hated Graves’s casual attitude. “You don’t know how shaky the edges might be — and you don’t know what could be at the bottom! This whole area is an estivation zone for Quake wildlife.”

“Relax. It’s perfectly safe.” Graves took a step closer to the edge of one of the holes, then had to jump smartly backward as the rock crumbled and slid away beneath his feet. “Perfectly safe,” he repeated. “This isn’t the hole that we want anyway. Just follow me.”

He led the way forward again, skirting the dangerous area. Perry followed at what he hoped was a safe distance. Expecting another car, perhaps a crashed one, at the site of the distress call, both men had been surprised to find nothing there but an isolated radio beacon. Next to it, marked as a black line in the chalky white rock, was an arrow. It pointed straight toward the dark, steep tunnel on whose brink Graves was currently poised and leaning precariously forward. Alongside the arrow, in an ill-formed scrawl, were the words “In Here.”

“Fascinating.” Graves leaned farther. “It seems to me—”

“Don’t go so near!” Perry exclaimed when Graves moved forward again. “That edge there, if it’s like the other one…”

“Oh, phooey.” Graves jumped up and down. “See, solid as the Alliance. And I read the report before I came to Dobelle — there are no dangerous animals on Quake.”

“Sure, you read the report, but I wrote the damned thing. There’s a lot we don’t know about Quake.” Perry advanced cautiously to the brink of the tunnel and peered down. The rock seemed firm enough, and quite old. On Quake that was a good sign. The surface here at least had a certain permanence, as though it had avoided the turmoil that hit the planet at Summertide. “Anyway, it’s not just animals. Mud pools can be just as bad. You don’t even know how deep this hole is. Before you start charging down there, at least take a sounding.”

He picked up a fist-sized chunk of chalky stone and lobbed it down the line of the tunnel. Both men leaned forward, listening for an echo where it struck the bottom. There was a two-second silence, then a thud, a whoof of protest, and a surprised whistle.

“Ah-ha! That’s not a rock or a mud pool.” Graves snapped his fingers and started to scramble on his bottom down the steep-sided hole. He had a flashlight, and he was shining it along in front of him. “That’s the Carmel twins down there. I told you what to expect, Commander — the beacon, the arrow, the cave, and then the—” He halted. “And then… well, well, well. We were wrong.”

Perry, a few steps behind, craned to see past Graves. The narrow beam of the flashlight reflected from a line of bright black eyes. As Graves held the light steady a small body, its black fur dusted to gray by a coating of fine powder, moved slowly up the incline. The Hymenopt was rubbing her tubby midsection with a foreleg, and while they watched she shook herself like a drenched dog and threw off a cloud of white dust.

There was another whistle, and a click-click-click of jointed hind limbs.

“Kallik offers respect and obedience,” a familiar, sibilant voice said. J’merlia was emerging from around the curve of the tunnel. He, too, was completely coated with fine talc. “She is a loyal slave and servant. She asks, why do you throw stones at her? Did her master command it?”

The Lo’tfian’s narrow face was not equipped to register human emotions, but there was a puzzled and worried tone in his voice. Instead of answering, Graves slithered farther along the tunnel to where it leveled off as a small cave whose floor was covered with powdered gypsum. He stared at the cleared area, and then at the little pile of objects standing in the middle of it.

“You were here in the dark?”

“No.” J’merlia’s compound eyes glittered in the flashlight beam. “It is not dark. We can both see here fairly well. Do you need our assistance?”

Perry, who had followed Graves down the tunnel at his own pace, pushed past the other man and reached up high to touch the tunnel’s roof. “See those? Cracks. Recent ones. I’m sure we shouldn’t stay any longer. What are you doing down here, J’merlia?”

“Why, we are waiting. As we were instructed to do.” The Lo’tfian offered a rapid set of whistles to Kallik, then continued. “Our masters brought us here and told us to await their return. Which we are doing.”

“Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda?”

“Of course. Owners never change.”

“So Nenda didn’t fly home in a huff. When did your masters leave?”

“Two days ago. We stayed at first on the surface, but we did not like conditions there — too hot, too open, too hard to breathe. But here, snug underground—”

“Snug, while the roof is ready to fall in. When did they say they would be back?”

“They did not say. Why should they? We have food; we have water; we are safe here.”

“Don’t bother to ask any more, Commander.” Graves, done with his inventory of the little cavern, sank to his knees and began rubbing at eyes irritated by the fine dust that flew up at every movement. “Atvar H’sial and Louis Nenda would not have provided their itinerary, or anything else, to J’merlia. Why should they, as J’merlia says? To make it easier for you or me to follow them? No.” His voice dropped to a stage whisper. “If they ever intended to come back for them at all! Maybe they have abandoned them. But even that is not the right question. The real question, one that I ask myself and do not like the answer to, is this: Where did H’sial and Nenda go? Where did they go, on Quake near Summertide, where they could not or would not take J’merlia and Kallik with them?”

As though answering his question, there was a tremor through the floor of the cave. The minor quake left the roof intact, but a cloud of fine white powder flew up to cover all of them.

“I don’t care — ough! — where they went.” Perry had trouble holding back his coughs. “I care about us, and where we go next.”

“We go to find the Carmel twins.” Graves rubbed the white powder away from his eyes again and looked like a circus clown.

“Sure. Where? And when?” Perry was aware of the running clock, even if Graves was not. “It’s only fifty-five hours to Summertide.”

“Ample time.”

“No. You think, fifty-five hours, and you imagine that you’ll be all right until then. That’s totally wrong. Anybody who is still on the surface of Quake five hours or even fifteen hours from Summertide is probably dead. If we don’t find the twins soon — in the next ten to twelve hours — they’re dead, too. Because we’ll have to give up the search and head back to the Umbilical.”