Planet Of No Return

“Now you tell me! Let’s move.” She scrambled to her feet and started down the hill.

Brion broke into an easy jog so that he caught up and passed her within a few paces. “I’m going ahead,” he told her. “They’ll probably be able to see us once we are out on the plain, so I want to send for the lifeship as soon as possible.”

“Don’t stand there talking — move it out! I’m right behind you.”

She was running as fast as she could, but still could not match his speed. Brion loped out ahead of her in ground-eating strides, his course taking him directly to the crater. Lea kept looking over her shoulder as she ran, then she had to walk for a bit to catch her breath, before she was able to run again. She struggled her way up a small rise and when she reached the top she saw Brion, far ahead, climbing out of the crater — waving something that glinted in the sun. The controller was still there!

“The lifeship, it’s on the way down,” he said as she stumbled up to him. “And there is no sign of any pursuers as yet.”

“I’ve never been … so tired in my life.” She gasped out the words as she dropped to the ground. Brion put the controller at her side and started back towards the crater.

“Give me a shout if he starts to move,” he said. “I want to make another copy of the identification plate I found on the wrecked wing. The first one is gone, I had it scratched onto my waterbottle. When you are in the ship use the modem to put this copy into the record.” He slipped over the edge.

Lea looked at the necklace around the snoring man’s neck and shuddered. What animals these people were. Cutting a man’s finger off just like that. For what reason? It must have been an important reason for them, with a ritual meaning or something. And Brion’s hand, how it must have hurt, yet he had never mentioned it. He was an unbelievable man in every way. But the stump would have to be treated at once to prevent infection; a medkit must be high on their list of necessities. A new finger would be regrown eventually — but that was not going to stop the pain and discomfort now.

“I’ve copied the symbols as best I could, onto this piece of bark,” Brion said, when he had clambered back out of the crater. “Can you make any sense of them at all?”

She turned the bark around and around, then shook her head no. “It’s not any language that I am acquainted with. Though the alphabet has a familiar look. The memory banks may come up with something …”

Their grey-haired prisoner opened his eyes and began to tremble and scream hoarsely, scrabbling to crawl away from them. Brion reached out and seized him, then pressed his thumb hard against the side of the man’s neck below the ear. The prisoner flopped twice and was still.

“Did you see that?” Brion asked.

“The way you crunched him unconscious? I sure did. You’ll have to teach me that trick …”

“No, not that. What he was looking at when he started to wail. It was the radio controller.”

“Could he have known what it is?”

“I doubt that very much. But it must have some terrible significance for him that we will have to determine.” Brion turned his head sideways, listening. “The ship is on the way down. You must memorize the list now, of the things that we will need.”

The lifeship was on the ground for less than two minutes. Brion worried for every second of the time. Even when the ship had lifted off again with Lea aboard, the nagging concern continued. It had landed safely twice — which indicated that this location might not be under continuous observation. But each time it came down the danger of possible discovery increased. Yet they had to stay in this area because the hunters were the only key they had to the deadly problem of this planet. Since there was no choice he forced himself to put the danger from his mind and concentrate on setting up the HLP.

The small metal case of the Heuristic Language Programmer contained a wealth of sophisticated circuitry and design. It functioned through a holographic projector that formed a three-dimensional image — an image that apparently floated in the air above it. The first image that appeared was a tilted white surface with operating instructions printed upon it. Brion read this and punched into the controls the codes that he wanted. The instructions vanished and the teacher-image appeared in their place. This was an elderly man dressed in a plain grey outfit who sat, crosslegged, with a lidless box on the ground before him. Brion worked with the controls until he had replaced the man’s suit with a loincloth affair, and had managed to lengthen the image’s hair as well. Though their prisoner was much filthier, teacher and student resembled each other very much.

Brion looked at the frozen three-dimensional image and nodded. It was good enough. A touch of a final control caused the image to move backward in space so that it concealed the projection mechanism. When this happened it looked as though Brion’s arm had been plunged deep into the man’s naked thigh. He withdrew his hand, satisfied.