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  Then he thought of spending the night in one of the Knackers’ processing plants, and the hard ledge seemed suddenly far more comfortable.

  When Cleery reached to tap his boot-heel, he said, “Well, Corp, looks as if we lucked out, this time. We have all the comforts of home...no Knackers. No cleavers and knives. No canning vats. But we’re not going to be turning over in our sleep. I hope you’re going to be able to rest.”

  Cleery spat. Joel heard the wad hit the rock on the cliff side. “Better than where we were,” he said. “I can sleep on a rock. In fact, I intend to.” And he said no more.

  After a while, Joel heard a rumbling snore, and he closed his eyes hastily. If he didn’t doze off quickly, the echoes of the corporal’s nightly snorts would keep him awake, no matter how tired he might be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Light sifting into the slot waked him. The cliff carried sound upward very efficiently, and he heard skittering footsteps that had to be made by the Knackers’ many legs and hairy feet on the gritty rock below.

  There was a blur of talk in their staccato tongue, and he noted with satisfaction that they seemed puzzled. They milled around for some time, and he heard several instances that he would have sworn were arguments between conflicting views.

  “Sarge, those varmints can’t go up; they got to run on the flat. If we just keep going, then we’re bound to catch up with them!” he imagined the deepest set of jabbers to be saying.

  Then, “The tracks don’t go on. They don’t go back. They don’t cut away toward the Rift. So they had to go up!” That would be the sergeant, or whatever the Knacker equivalent might be, livid with anger at the escape of two more gourmet menus.

  He edged deeper into the slot, wedging his shoulder and hip as tightly as could be done. Behind him, he heard Cleery doing the same. Something ran across his outstretched hand, and he had to endure it, for he couldn’t snatch it back.

  Then he saw a long, thick animal, shaped something like a snake yet covered with fur, on the edge of the cut, staring down the cliff. Its fur bristled as if in irritation.

  There was the sound of scritching against the cliffside. The Knackers were coming up...and there was nothing whatever he could do about it. His weapon was in the pack, but even if he worked it out, there was no room to activate it. The blowback of the blast would roast him and Cleery, even if he managed to fire it. He sighed and dropped his face into the grit again.

  A smell wafted into the crack, almost making him sneeze, for the Knackers had a dry and acrid odor. He held his breath, pushed his nose tightly against the stone, and almost blew his eardrums out with the confined pressure. They were almost up to the level of the ledge.

  The fursnake snarled and hissed, and three more crossed his hand to join it. Evidently they had more company than they wanted or needed. Their weasel-like heads thrust out over the edge into the dawn light, and he could see that they had tube-like fangs, revealed when they made their ferocious hisses. He hoped he would never learn what sort of poison those fangs might inject.

  The scritching stopped. There came a sudden jabber from just below his position, as well as from the bottom of the cliff. That other voice was muted with distance. Now they were arguing about something again. Was this tiny creature something that even the Knackers feared? Again he imagined a conversation.

  “There’s no way they could have got up here. There’s a bunch of whatsits in a crack, and you know they’d bite anything that came along.”

  “Check it out, anyway. You never know about animals, either these nasty little ones or those big tasty ones.”

  “But if I keep going, they’re going to bite me, and that’ll kill me. You won’t be any better off, and I’ll be a lot worse off!”

  Whether or not that was what the gabble of talk meant, the scritching feet retreated down the cliff. Joel found that he had pissed his pants. Behind him, he heard a soft curse from Cleery, and he suspected the same thing had happened to him.

  They waited for a long time, while the sun reached its early rays into their hiding place, before rising farther and withdrawing them again. There came a few sounds of passing Knackers from below, but in time all indication of activity stopped.

  Only the fursnakes moved about the cranny, slithering over and around the recumbent men in an irritated manner, yet without biting or even snarling.

  When the chronometer on his outstretched wrist had counted off three hours, Joel said, “Cleery, we’d better get moving. We want to reach the top of this thing before they decide to take another look around for us.”

  Cleery snorted. “Fine with me. I’m lying here in my own piss, cramped to the point of no return. Anything’s better, even that triple-cursed cliff.”

  It wasn’t easy to find a spot where there was enough of a handhold to haul himself out of the crack. When Joel found himself, at last, half out of the notch, holding to a bulge of rock with both hands and staring about for a route, he found they had climbed much higher than he thought.

  There were only a dozen yards more above them, and the jagged top of the escarpment seemed within reach, without too much danger. He inched along on his butt, fingering for notches that would let him climb again, not to mention allowing Cleery to survive the venture out onto the rock face.

  At last he reached a narrow chimney—more than he had ever dared to hope for, and managed to work his way into a semi-vertical position.

  “This is going to be a piece of cake,” he called quietly to his companion. “Watch where I am and come out right here. You can see my drag-tracks in the grit.”

  Cleery grunted, his tone skeptical. He might make a rock-climber yet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Before noon, they were on the top. They looked like remnants from a particularly dirty battle, cut and bloody and dirty, but they were alive. They also had the supply pack and their weapons.

  Joel lay flat above a camp teeming with Knackers, who were so far below they seemed like ants, as they went about their orderly business of moving item a to spot b, or vice versa.

  Joel could make nothing of their activity, except to note with relief that no human beings seemed to be involved. From time to time, one of their roller-tracked vehicles would come out of a hole in the side of the mountain and load itself, before disappearing again into the subterranean mysteries from which it had come.

  They were creating a big-time base there, invisible from the moons, even with enhanced scanners. Once all those piles of equipment and masses of Knackers were out of the valley where they worked, nothing would be visible from above, no matter how closely it was observed.

  “You still have that Com unit?” he asked Cleery, who looked insulted at the question.

  The corporal sat behind the upthrust of rock sheltering them from observation from below and pulled the flexible antenna out of the seam of the pack. The squat unit, the size of a fist, came to life at once, when the sunlight touched the uncovered cell in its housing, and the antenna’s addition brought its signal to a hum.

  Joel squatted beside Cleery, as the corporal tapped out their message on the key set into the Com’s side. Human beings had found it impossible to conceal their most sophisticated transmissions from the Knackers’ sensitive detectors. Only the old Morse code, spark-activated, had proved to be safe for use on this world. The Knackers, as far as anyone knew, had no clue to the code, even if they happened onto the signal, which to those beings was completely alien.

  Their coordinates went through, together with information about and coordinates of the new Knacker base, followed by a brief report on the engagement of the afternoon before. Cleery tapped:

  REQUEST FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FOR CORPORAL CLEERY AND TECH KARSH. PRESENTLY ON CLIFF TOP ABOVE TARGET. VERY DANGEROUS POSITION, WHEN ATTACK BEGINS. REPEAT. REQUEST ORDERS.

  The Com hummed for a long moment. Then the light set into its housing began to blink, short
and long, in Morse:

  CALIBRATIONS SET. ATTACK TO BEGIN FIFTEEN HUNDRED HOURS. TAKE SHELTER. TAKE SHELTER. WAIT FOR ORDERS. OUT.

  And that was it. Joel stared down at his boots, and he heard Cleery’s curses with sympathy. They were alive. They could go back down the cliff and stash themselves in that cranny with the fursnakes.

  They could even, he thought, quite possibly make it back to the pickup point for Base, once the Knackers were sorting out their own disaster. But it wasn’t what he had hoped for, and that was a fact.

  With a sigh, he began reeling the antenna back into the seam of the pack, while Cleery put the Com into its padded section. Fifteen hundred hours—that gave them about an hour and a half to get back down to their hidey-hole. And then?

  He started down the steep, feeling with toes, gripping with fingers, trying to forget those fangs the fursnakes showed when they hissed. He hoped the little beasts would be gladder to see him than he would be to see them.

  “Steady on,” he said to Cleery, now above his head and pattering grit down onto his shoulders. “We’ll make it fine, Corp.”

  Cleery’s reply was profane but oddly cheerful.

  Joel felt again with a foot, reached with a battered hand and went on again with his duty. They were safe enough for now. After what had already happened, getting back to the drop-point through a bunch of angry Knackers seemed almost easy, and there just might be a bit of damage they could do along the way.

  Below, a fursnake hissed, but he found himself strangely untroubled by the sound. In a bit, that particular Knacker installation was going to go up in smoke.

  There was only one place they could reach in time, without running the risk of meeting Knackers. The slot with the fursnakes had to be it, Joel decided, with considerable reluctance.

  Cleery, clinging to the rock like a panicky lizard, crawled into the crack after him. Once more they found themselves waiting, cramped and chilled, for what might come next.

  The hissing of the creatures about them sounded fretful, but again they slid over and around the intruders without biting. On the contrary, they seemed relatively undisturbed by the presence of the men.

  Joel wondered if there was something about the Knacker scent that particularly irritated the things, for they had certainly not been happy at the approach of the Knacker climber the night before. That acrid tang—it just might be one the creatures couldn’t endure.

  But there was no way to solve that problem or any other. His task was to wait and then to find a way along the river back to the drop.

  To his intense disgust, Cleery began snoring cheerfully: the man truly had no nerves. Gumble had controlled his feelings, but except for a short time before beginning their climb, Cleery had shown no sign of discomfort whatsoever. Joel envied him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  He closed his eyes, but instead of growing drowsy he found himself remembering his home on Gyrfalcon. He had thought his work as a landscaper the most boring employment known to man. Now he would have given much to be back in the Long Garden at the Statehouse, planting abelias and Permesian roses and pulling out purple-weeds.

  His thirst for adventure had been pretty well quenched, but there was no way now to return to his former life. He knew from his months of service that only those returning as ashes to the Sleep-Gardens of their kin went back before their terms of conscription were up.

  He had a suspicion that some of those who had deserted early in his time on this ugly world had been dropped deliberately into the paths of Knackers. They probably were, even now, sitting in containers on their way to the Knacker worlds.

  He must have dozed, for he dreamed of Venna. It seemed she was there with him in that cranny, waiting for the strike, when the third moon reached the proper spot in the sky. She was moving with her usual sureness through the garden ahead of him, pointing out the places where plants must go in or come out.

  The Herbarium, which was her own particular responsibility, loomed ahead of her, and as she reached its circular hatch she turned and looked into his eyes. “You be careful, Joel. This isn’t a picnic you’re going to, and I want you back in one piece. We’ve got a farm we want to buy with the money we’re going to save from your danger bonus and my pay, so keep that in mind.” Her weather-beaten face was glowing with color, and her eyes shone dark and compelling.

  He yearned with sudden intensity to be with her on their farm, perhaps with children growing up and his parents coming to visit. Then he woke, as the rock beneath him shuddered.

  The fursnakes began rustling about him, hissing and complaining and rubbing their plushy sides against him as if for comfort. Cleery snorted and coughed.

  “Karsh, I think they’ve begun,” he yelled, above the creaking and crackling of the stone and the deep reverberations from the distant explosions. “And I think they’re giving the Knackers back a bit of what they’ve been dealin’ out for so long.”

  Joel hugged the rock and found the soft touch of a fursnake against his neck strangely pleasant. Anything alive was good, in the middle of this bedlam of destruction and death. He felt the small one against his side pushing its triangular face into one of the pockets of his Combats. It slid into the space, tight against his leg, and lay there, shivering.

  “I think the fursnakes are scared to death!” he roared, but now the noise was so great Cleery didn’t hear him. There was nothing in all the universe except the tumult that rang and rattled and shuddered through the stone, shaking down pebbles about his ears, sending slabs of rock thundering down the cliffside. What it must be like in that cupped valley where the Knackers worked he didn’t like to think. Even a Knacker was to be pitied in such a situation.

  Even when the bombardment stopped, the crackle of splitting formations, seething from the intensity of the energy beams, still sounded through the cliff. The beam cannon heated anything in its path to incandescence, and metal ran, rock melted or split and crumbled. Flesh, Joel knew too well, disappeared with a stink and a bit of greasy smoke. Teeth sometimes survived to rain down on the smoking soil.

  He had turned the dreadful nozzle of one of the field versions on a troop of Knackers once. And, far worse, he had been on a hilltop directing fire when a troop of the Force had been caught by accident in its path. He hated thinking about that, and he tried to turn his mind away, grinding his nose into the grit and stopping his ears with two fingers.

  The cliff seemed to rock for a long time after the worst of the tumult died away. Half deafened, he was able, at last, to hear the hissing of the furry creatures huddled about his length, pressing their long bodies against his.

  Cleery spoke through a series of sneezes. “Never—choo!—thought I’d like to—choo!—have these little buggers around. Kind of nice, now. Ahhhh-choo!”

  Joel agreed. He wriggled sideways and peered out of the slit into space. Dust was thick, and the sun was now down behind the mountains, but he could see dimly. The flat ground below the cliffs was invisible in the thickness, but the stark line of the Rift, there where the river had cut its path for thousands of years at the foot of the anticline, showed black against the paler cliffs beyond it.

  “We’d better shift, while we can see how to climb down,” he said. “If there are any Knackers ranging the low country, they’re going to come swarming up here to see what has happened to their buddies.”

  “Think I’ll take a couple of our own buddies with me,” said Cleery. “You ’member how they hissed at them Knackers tried to climb up here? They might just be a sort of Knacker early warning system. You think?”

  Joel felt the furry shapes, now relaxed up and down his sides and even on his back. There was no threat in them—not to his kind, it was obvious. But the Knackers were afraid of them, he was sure. Or else why hadn’t that climber kept coming right on up and found its quarry?

  “That’s a good idea, Corp,” he said. “Though if they object to going with
us, I’m not about to quarrel with them about it. Let’s see what happens to the ones in my pockets, when I start to move. That should tell the tale.”

  He moved sideways and forward. Then he felt along the edge, searching for a handhold that would let him make his way out onto the face. The creature in his pocket lay quietly, not even wriggling when he pinched it against the rock, though he worried about that more than a bit.

  Then he was out on the cliff-face, clinging to the scanty hand and footholds, as Cleery came after him and put his head out of the slot that had sheltered them. Blindly, he felt downward with a searching toe, found a crack, and moved out of Cleery’s way.

  It was far worse going down than it had been coming up. Before, he had seen where he was going. Now every movement was a risk, for he never knew if the foothold he found would hold him. Several times, rotten stone crumbled beneath his toe, and only the desperate grip of his fingers on knobs or in crannies kept him from plunging to his death.

  Cleery, above him, was in better shape, for Joel directed his downward steps, watching until his feet were securely placed.

  It took hours of desperate effort, and twice they had to retrace their route to find a passable way. But at last both stood on the gravel at the foot of the cliff, staring up at the sheer wall down which they had come.

  “Think they got the base?” Cleery asked. He sneezed again.

  “I hope they got the base,” Joel said. “What do you say, Corp? Which way do we go? I think there may be Knackers swarming over this area before long.”

  Cleery stared at him. “Karsh, I’m no brain. I’m a supply corporal, and a damn good one, but I don’t give orders and I don’t figure out answers to tough questions. Gumble used to tell me if I had a brain I’d lose it down a mouse hole. So I’ll make a deal with you.

  “You do the thinking. I’ll back you up in anything you decide to do, and if we get back to the Drop I’ll take the blame for anything that goes wrong. How’s that?”