Star Hunter | Page 9

aloof watching in
amazement.
He was Rynch Brodie, and he had been traveling on the Largo Drift with his mother.
Memory presented him automatically with a picture of a thin woman with a narrow,
rather unhappy face, a twist of elaborately dressed hair in which jeweled lights sparkled.
There had been something bad--memory was no longer exact but chaotic. And his head
ached as he tried to recall that time with greater clarity. Afterwards the L-B and a man
with him in it--
"Simmons Tait!"
An officer, badly hurt. He had died when the L-B landed here. Rynch had a clear memory
of himself piling rocks over Tait's twisted body. He had been alone then with only the
survival manual and some of the L-B supplies. The important thing was that he must
never forget he was Rynch Brodie.
He licked grease from his fingers. The ache in his head made him drowsy. He curled up
on a patch of sun-warmed sand and slept.
Or did he? His eyes were open again. Now the sky above him was no longer a bowl of
light, but rather a muted halo of evening. Rynch sat up, his heart pounding as if he had
been racing to outdistance the rising wind now pushing against his half-naked body.
What was he doing here? Where was here?
Panic, carried through from that awakening, dried his mouth, roughened his skin, made
wet the palms of the hands he dug into the sand on either side of him. Vaguely, a picture
projected into his mind--he had sat in a room, and watched a man come to him with a cup.
Before that, he had been in a place of garish light and evil smells.
But he was Rynch Brodie, he had come here on an L-B when he was a boy, he had buried
the ship's officer under a pile of rocks, managed to survive by himself because he had
applied the aids in the boat to learn how. This morning he had been hunting a strong-jaw,
tempting it out of its hiding by a hook and line and a bait of fresh killed skipper.

Rynch's hands went to his face, he crouched forward on his knees. That all was true, he
could prove it--he would prove it! There was the strong-jaw's den back there, somewhere
on the rise where he had left the snapped haft of the spear he had broken in his fall. If he
could find the den, then he would be sure of the reality of everything else.
He had only had a very real dream--that was it! Only, why did he continue to dream of
that room, that man, and the cup? Of the place of lights and smells, which he hated so
much that the hate was a sour taste in his fright-dried mouth? None of it had ever been a
part of Rynch Brodie's world.
Through the dusk he started back up the stream bed, towards the narrow little valley
where he had wakened after that fall. Finally, finding shelter within the heart of a bush,
he crouched low, listening to the noises of another world which awoke at night to take
over the stage from the day dwellers.
As he plodded back, he fought off panic, realizing that some of those noises he could
identify with confidence, while others remained mysteries. He bit down hard on the
knuckles of his clenched fist, attempting to bend that discovery into evidence. Why did
he know at once that that thin, eerie wailing was the flock call of a leather-winged,
feathered tree dweller, and that a coughing grunt from downstream was just a noise?
"Rynch Brodie--Largo Drift--Tait." He tasted the blood his teeth drew from his own skin
as he recited that formula. Then he scrambled up. His feet tangled in the net, and he went
down again, his head cracking on a protruding root.
Nothing tangible reached him in that brush shelter. What did venture out of hiding to
investigate was a substance none of his species could have named. It was neither body,
nor mind--perhaps it was closest to alien emotion.
Making contact stealthily, but with confidence, it explored after its own fashion. Then,
puzzled, it withdrew to report. And since that to which it reported was governed by a set
pattern which had not been altered for eons, its only answer was a basic command
reaffirmed. Again it made contact, strove to carry out that order fruitlessly. Where it
should have found easy passage, a clear channel to carry influence to the sleeper's brain,
it found a jumble of impressions, interwoven until they made a protective barrier.
The invader strove to find some pattern, or meaning--withdrew baffled. But its invasion,
as ghostly as that had been, loosened a knot here,