Project U.L.F. (40 page)

Without warning, Gon-Thok stepped forward and swept Par up into his arms as if he were nothing more than a child. The human just managing to snatch up his pack before he was carried away.

*
  
*
  
*
  
*
  
*

Pain shot up Par’s side every time the alien took a step, and he gritted his teeth to stop himself crying out and alarming the creature. Gon-Thok had walked away from the DSM in the opposite direction from which Par and Byron had approached. It was taking him further away from the others, but he did not care. He did not fear this creature, nor was he concerned about where it was taking him. All he knew was that this animal was his best chance of survival and he presumed it was carrying him somewhere out of the rain. The fire in his leg was now a permanent pain. It felt like someone had inserted a red-hot lance under the skin near his ankle and was now pushing it further and further up his side. The combination of pain and cold, of fire and ice, mixed with the exposure and exhaustion was overwhelming. He passed out in the creature’s arms.

When Par came around he was warm again. It was a comforting warmth in which he wanted to stay. Mumbling in his slumber he ran a hand over the surface he was lying on. It was soft and yielding, but at the same time rock-hard beneath him. He bunched some of it up into a fist and immediately recognized the texture. It was sand.

He opened his eyes and rolled over onto his back. The pain from last night, so quickly forgotten, surged through his leg again as if to remind him that he was going nowhere in a hurry. His head fell back to the floor in resignation. For the briefest of moments he wondered whether being rescued, if that’s what it was, had really been a good thing. Why couldn’t he have just been left to die? Even if the others did mount a rescue party or volunteer another couple of people to find the DSM, they would not find him. Not now.

It was then that he saw them. Drawings. They were everywhere. On the ceiling. On the walls. They covered almost every inch of the cave that he was lying in. They were crude and of things that he did not and could never have recognized, but they were drawings all the same, and Par realized that here was more potential for him and the alien to communicate. He gazed at them in wonder, letting his eyes wander over the alien images, as foreign to him as Egyptian hieroglyphs.

He tried to get up but first had to remove what was covering him, which, on closer examination, seemed to be fronds or leaves from a tree or large plant, the fine numerous hairs on their surfaces giving them a soft, velvety texture. He pushed them away and noticed he was stripped to the waist. Looking around he spied the rest of his clothes, his small pack and his gun on the other side of the cave. He hauled himself to his feet, using the craggy wall for handholds and support and then half-limped, half-hopped to the far wall, falling up against it in relief when he reached it. The effort used in just covering that short distance had brought a flush to his cheeks. Picking up his clothes, Par discovered they were dry. He couldn’t believe it. Only last night they had been sodden. He checked the date on his watch to confirm to himself that he had only been here one night. He felt his pants. They were dry, too. Intrigued, Par carefully lowered himself, clinging onto the rocky wall until he could stoop and touch the ground. He hadn’t noticed it before but it was warm. Very warm.

He pulled himself back up to standing and headed for the cave entrance some ten yards away from him. Beyond the shadowed cave floor the fine sand was colored silver-gray where the morning sun could reach it with a warming touch. Beyond that was water.

When Par reached the mouth of the cave he stopped to catch his breath and had it immediately taken away from him again. The lake outside the cave was a spectacular sight. The gray sand that lined the cave floor and formed the beach tinged the lake with its color. The silver water, flat calm, formed a liquid mirror. It was like a lake of mercury and Par looked at it dumbstruck. It was the most beautiful natural phenomenon that he had ever seen. A shroud of mist hung over the water and the slightest of breezes, not even enough to cause a ripple in the silver surface, would send wisps skating away like lost souls in some graceful ice dance.

So stunned was Par by the panorama before him that it took him a while to put two and two together. It was not mist that hovered above the surface but steam. The cool air of the morning had exposed the lake’s secret to him. This place was a hot spring. Somewhere far below him the water table came close to this planet’s still-cooling crust and was heated by it. Here, that same water broke through to the surface to form the lake, but Par suspected that the same water ran just underground for hundreds of meters around here and the heat from that water permeated through the layers of rock above it. That would account for the warm sand in the cave. Sand which hadn’t seen the light of day for years.

As Par stood gazing in awestruck wonder, something broke the surface in front of him. Through the steam it was difficult to make out but he knew it was there; the ripples on the otherwise still water gave it away. Through the white wisps, moving swiftly above the surface, appeared Gon-Thok’s head, a large tail hanging out of its mouth. With a swift toss of its head and a gulp, the tail, and whatever owned it, were gone. Gon-Thok slowed in the water and then stood, its shoulders and upper torso lifting clear out of the water. With slow, laboring steps it waded its way to the beach.

For Par, it was the first time he had seen his savior in daylight. Its pronounced facial features he remembered from the night before, but that was all he had seen except for the hands. Yes, he remembered the webbed hands as well.

Gon-Thok had not seen him yet and he took the opportunity to scrutinize the alien further. The creature’s skin reminded him of wet chamois leather and had the same dark tan coloration that Par associated with it. In most places its skin was taut, like that of a human’s, but on the torso, back and thighs it hung in small folds. The arms and legs looked like they were composed of the same muscle groups as a human
—
biceps, triceps, quadriceps
—
but the actual limbs themselves were adapted for the long periods of time the alien obviously spent in water. Whether it was the muscles or something else Par couldn’t tell, but the arms and legs seemed to bulge at the front and back, giving them a curiously thin appearance from the front and a flatter, broader look when seen in profile. There were no external genitalia, at least not as far as Par could see, but he assumed that Gon-Thok was male. If not, then…then he might have been rescued for completely different reasons, which Par didn’t want to contemplate. He shuddered and put the thought to the back of his mind. Gon-Thok was male, Par decided, if only due to the fact that its voice was at least six octaves deeper than his.

Gon-Thok stopped dead in its tracks. He looked into the creature’s eyes to find them looking straight back at him. It had seen him and it clearly had not expected him to be up and about. Par didn’t know what to do or say. For a minute they looked at each other like a couple of strangers who had just woken up to find they had shared the same bed. Both deeply suspicious of the other, but both curious as to what the other would say, or do, or simply how they would be. Both absolutely desperate to find out what the hell was going on.

“Par,” Par mumbled nervously, patting his chest again. Then he pointed to the alien, “Gon-Thok.” The creature made a quick head motion which Par didn’t really like the look of. He turned his back on it to show he meant it no harm and hobbled back into the cave. He heard the alien coming up fast behind him and stopped. Regardless of whether this thing had saved his life or not, he was still none the wiser as to its intentions for him. Better to be careful. He turned back to it to find it only a couple of feet away from him. Its proximity startled him.

“The, er, the drawings,” he stammered. They’re very good.” The alien cocked its head to look at the wall Par had indicated. “Drawings,” Par said again, holding an imaginary pen and sketching in the air. At this Gon-Thok began to make a series of deep, guttural croaks. Par had no idea what the alien was doing or saying, but the noises sounded excited. He smiled to himself. They were getting along famously already.

Tired, Par lowered himself slowly to the ground, falling the last few inches and landing heavily on his rump. The pain in his leg made him wince.

“There are others,” Par said. He needed to communicate with this thing and at the same time hoped that it might comprehend the idea of reinforcements, just in case its plans for him were not that savory. The fact that those reinforcements would not come anywhere near this place was privy only to him. “I must get back to them.”

Gon-Thok turned its attention to Par’s face, looking curiously at the human’s mouth as if seeing it for the first time. It was clear it did not understand a thing that he was saying. Par sighed in frustration. He would never make it back if they carried on like this. It could take days, even weeks, to make himself understood, by which time the others would be long gone or dead. He needed to represent what he meant graphically and he looked around the cave for whatever the alien had used to etch the images onto the surrounding walls. There was nothing. As he sat there, frustrated at his inability to make himself understood, he realized that his finger could be his paintbrush and his canvas was right beneath his feet.

Par cleared an area of the sand with his hand. He drew a stick man with his finger. “Bar,” he said pointing at it. Next to it he drew another.

Gon-Thok, who had until now been watching intently with its huge eyes, leaned across and dragged a claw through the second figure, bisecting it. “Nie-dum,” it said. Par looked at the alien, trying hard to figure out what it understood. Did it know about Byron? Is that why it had crossed out the second figure? Maybe, but he needed to communicate that there were more of his kind. He drew the second man again. Gon-Thok crossed it out again. “Nie-dum,” it insisted, its voice firmer. “Ban-chi mog-wump ki-too-allaa.”

“Ban-chi,” Par repeated quietly in wonder. It sounded remarkably similar to
banshee.
Gon-Thok, hearing him, mimed what it meant. It spread its arms wide like wings. “Ban-chi,” it repeated.

“Banshee,” Par said, excited that they had added a new word to their shared repertoire. “Yes, yes! The bird. I understand!” He returned his attention to the drawings in the sand, re-drawing the second figure. Gon-Thok crossed it out once more. “Nie-dum,” it said again.

“No!” Par moaned.

“Ro!” Gon-Thok croaked, raising its arms to the position it associated with the word.

“Yes, no!” Par said, raising his hands too to show that Gon-Thok had understood correctly. It would help if the alien continued to associate gestures with certain words. “No,” Par groaned, slapping his hand into his forehead. Yes, no. What was he talking about? What a fine teacher he was turning out to be. There had to be a way around this problem. He pointed to the crossed-out figure. “This is Byron, yes?”

“Nie-dum,” Gon-Thok croaked again.

“Exactly. That’s what I thought.”

He left the image representing Byron and drew four more stick men in the sand, one slightly shorter than the others to represent Kate. “There are others,” Par explained slowly. “Oth-ers.” He pointed to the four new figures in the sand. Nothing. Not even the faintest glimmer of comprehension. What did he have to do? He pointed to each of the figures in turn. “Bar, Bar, Bar,” he said slowly and then when he reached the smaller one, “Er…….Kate.” Still no response. One last thing might do it.

He sketched the tree in the sand and drew a crude square in the branches to represent the shuttle. “Ship,” he said, pointing to it. Slowly, Gon-Thok rubbed the square from the picture with its webbed hand and drew an even cruder representation next to the four stick men. Par watched, stunned, unsure what was really going on.

“Mi-greb,” it said, pointing to its version of the ship, and then it pointed to the other figures. “Chee-men-wi.”

“Mi-greb. Chee-men-wi.” Par whispered the words softly, repeating them out loud so he might better commit them to memory. He looked at the picture again. Gon-Thok had put the shuttle on the ground next to the stick men. “You…you…you know this?’ he stammered. “You’ve seen this?” he asked of it, pointing to the drawing, then at the creature’s eyes, and back to the drawing. “Have you seen this?” he demanded, his slightly raised voice carrying a lilt of excitement.

He made as if to grab the alien and shake the answer out of it. Then, realizing that there was nothing for him to grab, he clenched his hands into fists of frustration. “I must go to them,” he said. He put two fingers over the depiction of himself and walked them over to the others. “Bar. Chee-men-wi,” he added in his broken alien dialect, and somehow he knew that it understood him.