The Defiant Agents | Page 6

for some tribes, father of all evil for others. In the wealth of tales the coyote,
above all other animals, held pride of place.
Driven by the press of civilization into the badlands and deserts, fought with poison, gun,

and trap, the coyote had survived, adapting to new ways with all his legendary cunning.
Those who had reviled him as vermin had unwillingly added to the folklore which
surrounded him, telling their own tales of robbed traps, skillful escapes. He continued to
be a trickster, laughing on moonlit nights from the tops of ridges at those who would hunt
him down.
Then, in the early twenty-first century, when myths were scoffed at, the stories of the
coyote's slyness began once more on a fantastic scale. And finally scientists were
sufficiently intrigued to seek out this creature that seemed to display in truth all the
abilities credited to his immortal namesake by pre-Columbian tribes.
What they discovered was indeed shattering to certain closed minds. For the coyote had
not only adapted to the country of the white sands; he had evolved into something which
could not be dismissed as an animal, clever and cunning, but limited to beast range. Six
cubs had been brought back on the first expedition, coyote in body, their developing
minds different. The descendants of those cubs were now in the ship's cages, their
mutated senses alert, ready for the slightest chance of escape. Sent to Topaz as eyes and
ears for less keenly endowed humans, they were not completely under the domination of
man. The range of their mental powers was still uncomprehended by those who had bred,
trained, and worked with them from the days their eyes had opened and they had taken
their first wobbly steps away from their dams.
The male growled again, his lips wrinkling back in a snarl as the emanations of fear from
the men he could not see reached panic peak. He still crouched, belly flat, on the
protecting pads of his cage; but he strove now to wriggle closer to the door, just as his
mate made the same effort.
Between the animals and those in the control cabin lay the others--forty of them. Their
bodies were cushioned and protected with every ingenious device known to those who
had placed them there so many weeks earlier. Their minds were free of the ship, roving
into places where men had not trod before, a territory potentially more dangerous than
any solid earth could ever be.
Operation Retrograde had returned men bodily into the past, sending agents to hunt
mammoths, follow the roads of the Bronze Age traders, ride with Attila and Genghis
Khan, pull bows among the archers of ancient Egypt. But Redax returned men in mind to
the paths of their ancestors, or this was the theory. And those who slept here and now in
their narrow boxes, lay under its influence. The men who had arbitrarily set them on this
course could only assume they were actually reliving the lives of Apache nomads in the
wide southwestern wastes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Above, the pilot's hand pushed out again, fighting the pressure to reach one particular
button. That, too, had been a last-minute addition, an experiment which had only received
partial testing. To use it was the final move he could make, although he was already half
convinced of its uselessness.
With no faith and only a wan hope, he depressed that round of metal flush with the board.

What followed no one ever lived to explain.
At the planetside installation that tracked the missiles, a screen flared brightly enough to
blind momentarily the man on watch, and the warden-globe was shaken off course. When
it jiggled back into line it was no longer the efficient eye-in-the-sky it had been, though
its tenders were not to realize that for an important minute or two.
While the ship, now out of control, sped in dizzy whirls toward Topaz, engines fought
blindly to stabilize, to re-establish their functions. Some succeeded, some wobbled in and
out of the danger zone, two failed. And in the control cabin three dead men spun
imprisoned in their seats.
Dr. James Ruthven, blood bubbling from his lips with every shallow breath he could
draw, fought the stealthy tide of blackness which crept up his brain, his stubborn will
holding to rags of consciousness, refusing to acknowledge the pain of his fatally injured
body.
The orbiting ship spun on an erratic path. Slowly its mechanisms were correcting, relays
clicking, striving to bring it to a landing under auto-pilot. All the ingenuity built into its
computer was now centered in landing the globe.
It was not a good landing. The sphere touched a mountain side, scraped down rocks,
shearing away a portion of its