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Dowland stood briefly in scowling indecision. The next hour or two could also
see him nearly down the side of the mesa, depending on the difficulties of the
descent . . . but there was no real choice. It was a gamble either way again;
if Trelawney didn't awaken, the other gamble remained. . . . How long, at
most, could he afford to delay?
Leaving YM out of the calculation, since it couldn't be calculated, he had
only the arrival of the Freeholder Troopers to consider. There was no apparent
possibility that any sizable party could appear before daybreak, but there was
an even chance they would be there around that time. When they came, he must
either be in communication with the
Solar Police Authority or far enough away from Lion Mesa to be able to avoid
detection. . . .
Four hours should be enough to give him a reasonable safety margin. He had
till midnight, or a little later.
Dowland pulled a chair up to the side of the couch and sat down. The night
wasn't quiet.
The hogs squalled occasionally, and the wind still seemed to be rising. In
spite of his efforts to avoid unsettling lines of thought, the nightmarish
quality of the situation on the mesa kept returning to his mind and wasn't
easily dismissed. The past the past of over half a million years ago had moved
close to the present tonight. . . . That was the stubborn, illogical
feeling and fear which he couldn't entirely shake off.
* * *
Half an hour later, Miguel Trelawney began breathing uneasily, then stirred
about, but lapsed again within seconds into immobile unconsciousness.
Dowland resumed his waiting.
His watch had just told him it was shortly before eleven-thirty when he heard
the shots. They were three shots
clear, closely spaced cracks of sound, coming from a considerable distance
away. Dowland was out of his chair with the second one, halfway down the dark
entry hall as he heard the third. He opened the door at the end of the hall
just wide enough to slip through, moved out quickly, and closed the door
behind him to keep the glow of light from the living room from showing
outside.
As the door snapped shut, there were three more shots. A hunting rifle.
Perhaps two miles to the north . . .
* * *
Dowland stood staring up toward the wind-tossed line of the forest above the
ranch area. Who was up there on the mesa and why the shooting? Had the
Troopers managed to get some men in by air? What would they be firing at?
Signal shots, he thought then. And a signal to the ranch, in that case . . .
Signaling what?
With that, another thought came, so abruptly and convincingly that it sent a
chill through him.
Doctor Paul Trelawney . . .
Paul Trelawney, not in the laboratory building as Jill had surmised. Gone
elsewhere, now returned. And, like his brother, returned to a point other than
the one from which he had left.
A man exhausted and not sure of where he was on the big tableland, an injured
man or perhaps one weakened by radiation sickness such a man would fire a gun
in the night to draw attention to himself. To get help.
Minutes later, Dowland was headed in the direction from which the shots had
come, carrying one of his own rifles, along with the police gun. It was very
unlikely he could get close enough to Trelawney if it was Trelawney to be
heard approaching; but once he reached the general area of the shots, he would
fire the rifle, and wait for a response.
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In the forest, the wind was wild and noisy, and the going was as rough as he
had suspected it would be. Moonlight flowed into the open rocky stretches
occasionally, and faded again as clouds moved on overhead. Among the trees he
could barely see his way and had to advance more slowly.
He came presently to a wide, smooth hump of rock shouldering up through the
timber, and stopped to check the time. Twenty-five minutes had passed since he
left the area of the house. If he had calculated correctly, the shots should
have come from approximately this point. He moved somewhat cautiously into the
open a man waiting for help would think of selecting a place where he could be
easily seen; and this could be the spot Paul Trelawney had chosen. And
Trelawney, armed with a gun, might react rather abruptly if he saw a stranger
approach.
But the ridge lay empty under the moon, stretching out for over a hundred
yards to right and left. Dowland reached its top, moved on among the trees on
the north side, and there paused again.
A feeling came, gradually and uneasily, of something wrong around here. He
stood listening, unable to define exactly what was disturbing him; then a
fresh gust of wind whipped through the branches about him, and the wrongness
was on the wind a mingled odor, not an unfamiliar one, but out of place in the
evergreen forest, on this rocky shelf. A breath of warm darkness, of rotting,
soft vegetation of swamp or river-bed. Dowland found his breathing quickening.
Then the scent faded from the air again. It might, he was thinking seconds
later, have been a personal hallucination, a false message from nerves
overexcited by the events of the night. But if Paul Trelawney had returned to
this point from a distant time, the route by which he had come might still be
open. And the opening not far from here. It was a very unpleasant notion.
Dowland began to move on again, but in a slow and hesitant manner now.
Another five minutes, he thought. At the end of that time, he certainly must
have covered the distance over which the wind had carried the bark of a
rifle and should, in fact, be a little to the north of Trelawney on the mesa.
If there were no further developments by then, he would fire a shot himself.
The five minutes took him to another section of open ground, more limited than
the previous one. Again an outcropping of weathered rock had thrust back the
trees, and Dowland worked his way up the steep side to the top, and stood
looking about. After some seconds, the understanding came suddenly that he was
delaying firing the rifle because of a reluctance to reveal his presence in
these woods. With an abrupt, angry motion he brought up the barrel pointing it
across the trees to the north, and pulled the trigger.
* * *
The familiar whiplash of sound seemed startling loud. An instant later, there
was a series of unnerving crashing noises in the forest ahead. Apparently some
large animal had been alarmed by the shot. He heard it blundering off for a
few hundred yards; then there was silence, as if it had stopped to listen. And
then there was another sound, a deep, long cry that sent a shiver through his
flesh. It ended; and the next thing that caught his attention was a glimpse of
something moving near the edge of his vision to the left, just above the
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