This time, they accepted the necessity. Ike appeared on the edge of the ill-cleared area within minutes, clad in ochreous armor. Matthew watched while he spent a few minutes making sure of the lie of the land, testing the speed at which the giant slugs could move.

“Just kill the bloody things, will you,” Matthew shouted down to him. It wasn’t the sort of thing an ecologist ought to say, but the urgency of the situation overrode other considerations.

Ike had already taken an opportunity to begin delving in one of the ragged heaps of cargo, freeing the flamethrower. He carefully fitted the canister of propellant to his back and placed protective goggles over his eyes, while the tentacled slugs went contentedly about their business. When he eventually let fly, in a series of short but lethal bursts, he managed to roast more than twenty of the monsters without placing the boat or its cargo in the least danger. He had to pick off half-a-dozen more one by one, using more subtle but equally lethal instruments, but he completed the task as quickly as was humanly possible.

Only then did Lynn limp out of the purple backcloth. She had put on her own armor, but she was moving as freely as anyone could have expected, given her injury.

The stink was appalling. Matthew’s nasal filters had carefully screened him from those complex organic odorants to which he might have been allergic, but the cruder fumes of burnt flesh posed no threat of that kind, and he was permitted to experience the full measure of their unpleasantness.

Lynn set to work immediately. “It’s okay,” she said to Ike. “I’m fine as long as I don’t have to walk far. I’ll take care of the inventory while you find a way of getting up to the cliff top and freeing the cable. When that’s done, we can all pitch in. It’s about time Matthew started doing his share.”

“What if more of them come?” Ike asked.

“Matthew can drop the rifle down to me so that I can blast them at short range.”

“We didn’t come here to conduct a holocaust,” Ike said, sorrowfully. “This is getting way out of hand.”

“We’ll go back to being Mr. Nice Guys when we’ve got back to being Mr. Safe Guys,” she countered, grimly. “We’ll put a cosmetic gloss on the story when we relay it back to Tang if you like, but until further notice I’m the original devil-may-care shoot-anything-that-looks-at-me-sideways colonist, okay?”

“If you say so,” Ike conceded, a little stiffly. He raised his voice to say: “I’m on my way, Matthew. Just sit tight for one more hour.”

“Whatever you do,” Matthew shouted down “for heaven’s sake don’t fall.”

Ike’s only response to that was a gesture of contempt.

Having watched Ike do his painful work. Matthew now had to watch Lynn doing hers—but she didn’t have to call for the gun. The odor of cooked flesh was entirely alien to Tyre, and it seemed to function as powerfully as a deterrent as their spillage of the day before had functioned as bait.

It wasn’t obvious that the work of reassembling the boat could be completed that day, but Lynn seemed determined to do it on her own if need be. She was moving with the same quasi-mechanical stiffness and efficiency that Dulcie had demonstrated the day before. She paused occasionally to take a drink of water or a few mouthfuls of food, but she was so solidly locked into her trance of determination that Matthew made no attempt to converse with her.

He tried to call Dulcie, but she still wasn’t answering her phone. He hesitated over calling Tang Dinh Quan, but decided that it could wait until he had more definite news.

Instead, he continued thinking about possible correlations between nutritional versatility and exotic reproduction, and the reasons why intelligent bipeds might be favored by evolution on a world like Tyre, and the reasons why civilization might fail on such a world in spite of the fact that its walls had never been exposed to cannon fire or fire of any other sort. He thought too about the probable ecological impact that a species like humankind might have on a world like this one, given the scenes to which he had recently been witness.

This isn’t bad, he told himself. Not yet. If we’re lucky, it could be good. And we are lucky. We’re riding a streak, and we can ride it all the way. I can do this. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Shen was right. Leader or not, I can light the way, with just a little help from my friends.

THIRTY-THREE

Some of the equipment is definitely missing,” Lynn said, as soon as Ike had freed the cable and allowed Matthew to complete his descent to the sticky black ground. The downside of using the flamethrower to dispose of the tentacled slugs was that the enigmatically transfigured masses on which they had set themselves had been devastated. Only a handful of the bulbous protuberances remained intact. The probability was that their contents had been damaged, if not thoroughly cooked.

“What’s gone?” Matthew asked, tersely.

“Nothing absolutely vital to the reassembly, although we might be a couple of hull plates down and some leg elements are definitely gone. Some machetes are missing—three, unless one or two are still packed away where I can’t find them. Some rope. A bale of bubble-fabric. A canister of fuel oil—fuel for the inorganic motor, that is.”

Matthew’s heart leapt with exultation, even though he’d fully expected some such news. “Did they take Bernal’s artifacts?” he asked, swiftly.

“I don’t know,” Lynn confessed. “I can’t find them—but I don’t know where Dulcie packed them.”

“Can we get by without the hull plates and leg parts?” Ike wanted to know.

“We have patches to replace damaged hull plates,” Lynn said. “We weren’t carrying enough spares to fix all the legs, but the loss isn’t critical. It certainly wasn’t any kind of worm that mounted the raid. It couldhave been monkey-analogues, but …”

“It was the humanoids,” Matthew told her, firmly. “They know we’re here—and we know they’re curious. Maybe curious enough to …”

That was when his phone began to beep. His first assumption was that it was Tang or Vince Solari, impatient to know how the night had passed, but it wasn’t. This time his heart seemed to leap all the way into his throat.

“Dulcie!” he exclaimed, raising his voice to make sure that Ike and Lynn would respond without delay. They immediately picked up their own phones and tapped into the call.

“Can you hear me?” Dulcie asked, anxiously. She was whispering, but Matthew knew that wasn’t what was worrying her; she was afraid that she might have gone so far into the glassy forest that her signal could no longer get out.

“Yes,” he said, tersely. “Go on.”

“Sorry to worry you all,” she said. “I didn’t want my phone beeping in case it alerted them. I thought I could follow them without them knowing. It seemed plenty dark enough, and I felt sure they hadn’t spotted me when I first caught sight of them—but I guess they were stringing me along all the time. They probably wanted to lure me away from the bubble. I didn’t even know how many of them there were. Stupid.”

“What’s your situation now?” Matthew asked, as waves of nauseous fear stirred in his empty belly.

“Under observation, I suppose. They haven’t made a hostile move—yet. They seem to have quite a lot of our stuff, including some very wicked steel knives as well as Bernal’s things. They have spears of their own too. I can count twenty-two, but there might be a few I can’t see. If they do attack, I don’t stand a chance, but they still seem wary. They know I’m doing something now, but they seem more intrigued than alarmed. They know they have me surrounded, and they know that I know, but they’re holding back, still half in hiding.”

“ Which way?” Lynn demanded—then realized that the answer wouldn’t mean anything. “We’ll be there with the gun and the chain saws as soon as we can,” she added, ignoring the fervent gestures Matthew was making in the hope of shutting her up, “but you’ll have to guide us in—there’s no way we can triangulate your position until we spread out.”