Splinter in the Mind's Eye Page 12

  By now it was clear that the wandrella's nervous system was either too primitive to be instantly neutralized by energy fire, or too evenly distributed throughout its mass and thus devoid of any vital center.

  Ten meters of its front end lifted up, dropped like a great white tree falling in slow motion. Halla tried to dodge, and the crawler struck a thick, rotting stump. The first wheel climbed over with a jolt, sending them tumbling to the floor of the crawler cab, but the second did not. They were hung, the stump pinning them between first and second axle, as that nightmare torso plunged down at them.

  Opening wide, the black maw bit and clamped tight around the rear of the crawler. Its grip was devastatingly firm for so rubbery-looking a creature. No one had to give the order to abandon the vehicle. That was understood instantaneously.

  Kee was last off, lingering for a final shot down the partly opened throat. He barely leapt clear as the crawler rose into the air. Only his extra-long arms enabled him to retreat safely.

  Then they were sprinting for a hiding place, but there weren't any. No mountains to climb, no caves in hillsides here, and they had to be cautious or seemingly solid ground would devour them as efficiently as the worm behind them.

  Crumpling noises reached them. Looking back over a shoulder as they ran, Luke saw the wandrella chewing the swamp crawler as if it were some choice morsel plucked from a tree. The analogy was not lost on him. If any of them tried climbing a tree for protection, the same fate would befall them as the unlucky crawler.

  Their only chance was to find some kind of hiding place, secrete themselves out of sight, and pray that the hulking threat's sense of smell did not match its size.

  Possibly the creature belonged to so primitive a species that it would regard prey as out of sight, out of mind. If it could no longer see them, hopefully the dull-witted monstrosity would interpret that to mean they no longer existed.

  "This way!" Luke abruptly decided, turning and running to his left. Leia followed. Slightly ahead and sandwiched between the two Yuzzem, Halla didn't hear him. She and the two big aliens continued on the way they were headed.

  Several minutes passed before a tired Halla slowed and did think to glance behind her. When she did, she saw only the phosphorescent convoy of white worm sliding through the mist well behind them.

  She came to a stop, admonishing the two Yuzzem to do likewise. "It's gone off in a different direction," she exclaimed. Hin, panting like an engine, nodded affirmation. The trio squinted into the fog around them.

  "Luke boy, child," she called, "you can come out now. It's given up on us." Mist-sounds and peeps from the underbrush responded blankly. "Come on, Luke boy," she added, beginning to feel a little nervous, "don't be fooling old Halla like this."

  Trying to help, Kee let out a stentorian bellow. Halla had to jump to clap a hand over his mouth, then put her own hand over her own mouth and shook her head, pointing to the last bit of wandrella disappearing into the growth not far enough away. Kee nodded realization, called again more softly through his snoot for their missing companions. Artoo was whistling mournfully.

  "Luke," Halla called again, worried. Together, the three began searching the surrounding brush. When several minutes of this failed to turn up any sign of the Princess or Luke, Halla gathered up the two Yuzzem and glanced back the way they'd come.

  "I don't think it got them... not yet, anyhow. They were right behind us." She turned, and they started to retrace their steps in the hope that Luke and Leia had somehow managed to elude the beast.

  "They may be hiding under a tree somewhere," ventured Threepio hopefully.

  Neither assumption was correct. Luke and the Princess hadn't been devoured, but neither had they lost their lumpish pursuer. As they had deserted the crawler, the wandrella noted the movement unemotionally. Once the mangled swamp vehicle proved itself unappetizing, the leviathan had turned after smaller, and, it was hoped, more nutritious prey.

  But mysteriously, its food had split into two parts. In primitive wandrella reasoning, the nearer was the tastier. Ignoring Halla and the others, it swerved to follow Luke and Leia.

  "It's still behind us," Luke told her, breathing with difficulty. A massive circle lined with black dots was humping through bog and brush after them. Leia stumbled over a gnarled root and Luke fought to help her up.

  "I... don't know how much longer I can... keep this up, Luke."

  "Neither do I," he confessed tiredly, his frantic gaze hunting for someplace, anyplace, to conceal themselves.

  "What about a tree?"

  "Already thought of that," he informed her, as they stumbled on. "That thing could pull us out of the biggest tree here, or push it down."

  "It's getting closer," she exclaimed, with a backward glance. Her voice was starting to crack.

  Luke squinted, saw what appeared to be a regular line of rocks. "Over there," he urged.

  They staggered up to what turned out to be, not a natural formation, but an artificial construct. Each stone was shaped in a hexagonal pattern and fitted to its neighbors without any visible cement or putty. A peculiar tripod of wood and plaited vines decorated with paint or dyes was arranged above the circular wall.

  "Looks like some kind of ceremonial cistern," the Princess decided as they stumbled the last few meters toward it. "Maybe it holds water for a dry season." She looked back. The merciless pale horror continued remorselessly toward them.

  Luke started to put a foot over the wall, got a glimpse beyond it at the same time and recoiled in terror. The stone wall surrounded a pit a good nine or ten meters in circumference. Though the sunlight here was far from bright, filtered as it was through mist and rain, it was sufficient to indicate that the empty gulf yawning beneath him was of frightening depth.

  The Princess got a look at it too, sucked in her breath. "Luke, we can't..." But he was running around the edge of the abyss, calling to her.

  "Over here, Leia!" She hurried around the side, came up to him.

  "Luke, we can't stay..." He shook his head, pointed to something inside the wall. Leaning over, she saw the cause of his excitement.

  They were standing at a place where the wall had been cut away. A gateway covered with indecipherable alien scrawl framed the stoneless section. Attached to small stone pillars were two vines. They descended into the darkness, intertwining to form a strange spiral ladder.

  "Luke, I don't know..." she began.

  He dropped to the ground, grabbed one of the vines and tugged on it with all his strength. The vine didn't give. Behind them, the wandrella had approached to within fifteen meters. It opened its toothy maw. A low, lymph-curdling ululation issued from within.

  That made up Luke's mind. "We haven't got a choice," he insisted.

  "Down there, Luke?" The Princess shook her head. "We can't. We don't know what..."

  "I'd rather die in a dark hole," he said tightly, staring hard at her, "than be some monster's breakfast." Then he started down the vine ladder. "Come on," he urged her, yelling upward. "It'll hold both of us!" He continued his descent.

  A last look at the quivering mouth hunching toward her and the Princess swung both legs over the side of the pit and started down into nothingness. It was not quite black as night, but dark enough so that Luke had to feel for each succeeding rung. Once he moved too quickly and almost fell. With his right leg he felt around for the next rung.

  There was no next rung.

  He'd reached the bottom of the ladder.

  "Hold it!" he shouted softly up to Leia. The slight echo of the pit gave his voice a sepulchral quality. Above, he could barely make out her frightened face as she turned to look down at him.

  "What is it... what's the matter?"

  "End of the line." Beyond his feet he could see only unending blackness. It seemed as if they'd descended no distance at all. But as his eyes adjusted to the light, he thought he saw something a couple of steps above and to his right.

  Climbing, he soon made contact with the Princess' feet.
After calming her, he reached out, stepped off to one side. The ledge he'd spotted was barely a meter wide, but another of the tough vines had been attached to the wall above it, running parallel to the ledge about waist-high. Carefully, Luke hooked one arm over the vine. "There's a ledge, Leia," he explained, reaching out a hand for her. She stepped over, grabbed the vine with both hands and examined the rock underfoot.

  "Someone cut this out of the pit wall," she observed positively. "I wonder who, and for what purpose?"

  "I wish I knew," Luke admitted. "Too bad Halla's not here. I bet she could tell us."

  A loud, reverberant scraping sound from overhead killed further conversation. Pressing tight against the pit wall, they turned wide eyes upward. The sound wasn't repeated.

  Luke felt the warmth of the body next to him, lowered his gaze. Framed in the faint light from above, the Princess looked more radiant, more beautiful than ever. "Leia," he began, "I..."

  More scraping, louder, ominously so. Several rocks and pieces of wall fell from above and shot past them. They tried to bury themselves in the unyielding stone, tried to merge with the dampness dripping down its sides.

  A loud thunk sounded far below. It was one of the fallen stones finally hitting something. Luke wasn't sure it was bottom.

  Breathless, they stayed huddled together, eyes fixed on the circle of misty sunlight above. With infinite slowness, something slid into view. At first it looked like a sooty cloud obscuring the sun. Small sounds came from the Princess' throat. Luke was completely paralyzed.

  The massive worm-head eclipsed the opening. It swung back and forth like a horizontal pendulum, moving from side to side, searching with senses unimaginable.

  Looking around desperately, Lute spied what might have been an opening in the pit wall. It was at the far end of the ledge.

  "Follow me," he instructed the Princess. When she didn't move, he grabbed one hand and pulled. She followed him, her gaze still frozen on the monstrosity above.

  The opening turned out to be large enough to hold both of them. It was tall enough so that Luke hardly had to stoop to fit inside. Both stared up and out, relieved to be off the narrow ledge.

  Perhaps the creature above was sensitive to their relief. Something certainly attracted it, because the great skull abruptly ceased its weaving motion. It turned downward, facing them.

  "It sees us!" the Princess breathed, gripping Luke's arm so hard it hurt. "Oh, it sees us!"

  "Maybe... maybe it's just looking down the pit," Luke responded, more hopeful than sanguine.

  With a hunching movement that filed stone and rock from the upper edge of the chasm, the head drifted lazily down toward them. Its vast mouth was agape, framing a darkness deeper than that of the pit itself.

  "It's coming down," the Princess breathed. "It's coming for us, Luke."

  "It can't. It can't reach us," Luke insisted, feeling for his pistol. It wasn't there. He'd dropped it in the retreat from the crawler. His hand went around the hilt of his lightsaber.

  A ponderous groaning sounded. Larger chunks of dislodged stone fell past them, went crashing and booming off the walls below.

  "How long is it?" Luke wondered, indicating the worm-like creature.

  "I don't know. I didn't get a good look. It seemed to go on forever," she responded. The wandrella was less than a dozen meters above them, and still moving. There was no doubt that it saw them now. "Can it get a purchase on the wall? It's so slick."

  "I don't know," he mumbled dully. His fist tightened convulsively on the hilt of the saber.

  All at once the worm-thing seemed to leap down at them. The Princess screamed, her shriek echoing madly around the walls of the pit as Luke yanked the saber from his belt and activated it. In the plutonian confines of the well its clean blue light was small comfort.

  But the wandrella was not striking at them. Overextended even for its own incredible length, it was falling. It went rocketing past, a seemingly endless white waterfall of faintly glowing flesh. Leaning out, they saw it shrink to a dot, a pinpoint of brightness before it finally vanished into the abyssal depths. Echoes of the creature bouncing and bumping from wall to wall drifted up to them with steadily increasing faintness, dying memories of a massive death.

  Luke shakily deactivated his saber and reattached it to his belt.

  At the same time, the Princess grew aware of how tightly she was clinging to him. Their proximity engendered a wash of confused emotion. It would be proper to disengage, to move away a little. Proper, but not nearly so satisfying. She was utterly drained, and the comfort she derived from leaning against him was worth any feeling of impropriety.

  They stood like that for a timeless stretch. Luke slid his arm around her and she didn't resist. She didn't look yearningly up at him, either, but this was enough for him, for now at least. He was happy.

  An eternity later a querulous voice bounced down the walls to them, so gently he wasn't certain he'd heard anything at all.

  "Luke, boy... are you down there?"

  They exchanged glances. Luke leaned uncertainly out of the little alcove they'd sought refuge in and stared upward. Four faces were staring back down at him from high above. Two were bewhiskered and furred. One was golden and metallic.

  "Halla?" An excited chittering came back to him. Hin, unmistakably. When the hysterical hooting finally died down, Halla called to him again.

  "Are you all right, Master Luke?" Threepio called down to them.

  "I think so," he shouted back. "It came down after us."

  "I thought you were behind me all the time," came Halla's reply. "I'm glad you're still alive."

  "So are we," exclaimed the Princess, her normal self-reliance flooding back rapidly. "We'll join you in a minute." She started out of the rock recess.

  "No we won't," countered Luke somberly, putting out an arm to stop her. "Take a look."

  Her gaze followed his pointing arm. Where the wandrella had fallen, the walls of the pit were scraped clean and chipped away as if scoured by some huge abrasive pad. The vine spiral ladder they'd climbed down was completely gone. So was more than half the ledge.

  "We've no way back up," he called out to the anxious watchers above. "The vine ladder we came down was torn away. Can you make another one?"

  Silence from above. For a few moments the faces moved out of sight. Luke found their absence worrying, but they finally returned.

  "I wouldn't trust any of the vines growing near here," Halla called down to them. "The ladder you used must have been made from vines brought from some distance away. But there might be another way out." Luke studied the smooth-sided interior of the pit.

  "Another way? What are you talking about, Halla?"

  "Where were you standing when the worm fell past you?"

  "There's a small recess in the wall here, at the end of a ledge," he informed her.

  "A ledge, too," she repeated, sounding satisfied. "How big is the recessed place?"

  "Big enough for both of us to stand in."

  "I thought so. You're in a Coway shaft, Luke boy."

  "A what?" the Princess called out, frowning.

  "Coway, child," Halla repeated. "I told you there are, and were, all kinds of races co-existing on Mimban. The Coway are related to the greenies of the towns, but they're not the least bit subservient. They live underground, which is why nobody knows a helluva lot about them. But they use the old Thrella wells for occasional access to the surface, in addition to natural sinkholes and other surface openings."

  "First Coways, now Thrella wells," mumbled Luke, studying the emptiness below them. "What's a Thrella well?"

  "A well bored by the Thrella," Halla replied, not unexpectedly. "They're just called wells. Nobody knows what they were really used for, just like no one knows much about the Thrella. Maybe they built a lot of the temples, too.

  "In any case, they're long gone and the Coway are here. If you go to the back of your recess, you'll probably find that it opens onto a passageway."

 
"If it does, we'll find it," Luke assured her.

  "The Coway don't try to conceal their surface exits," Halla went on. "If you can find your way out, we'll meet you there. I'm sure I can find the nearest Coway egress."

  "Sounds good," a hopeful Luke admitted, "except for one thing. What do we do for light? I've got an emergency luma on my belt, and I can always use the saber, but I don't want to use up the charges."

  "Just find the passageway," Halla told them confidently. "You'll have plenty of light, if it is a Coway passage. Take my word for it, boy."

  "We'll try it," Luke agreed. "We'll go through and meet you." He turned away, hesitated, then leaned back out and called upward again. "Halla?"

  A small face reappeared over the rim of the chasm.

  "Yes, Luke boy?"

  "What do we do if we meet any Coway?"

  "They're not very numerous, and they move around a lot," Halla told him. "It's not likely you'll run into any. If you do meet up with a couple, they'll probably be so startled they'll run from you. Remember, they're not domesticated like the greenies. They know as little about us as we do about them... I think. You hear lots of reports of them lingering around the towns, but they disappear if anyone goes after them. So that probably means they're shy and peaceful."

  "That's two very important probablys," he shouted uncertainly.