Chapter 4: Gold Mine in the Sky

Neal ran! He stretched his tired legs in great leaps that carried him far and fast in the light gravity. He breathed in great sobbing gasps, recurring waves of panic forcing him to ignore the tearing pain in his side. It felt like he'd been running, hardly stopping, for hours as one stampeding herd of animals after another thundered past. The pounding hooves surged toward him in an unstoppable tide. The leaders of this new herd bounded past, a straggle of tiny zebrastriped antelopes with sharply pointed horns. Their shrill cries trumpeted around him as they fled, sharp hooves shredding the yielding turf. As small as they were, one stumble and he would be cut to ribbons, and the billowing dust was making it even harder for him to breathe.

He ran diagonally across the face of the herd, drawing closer to the isolated clump of slender trees that was his goal, but the surging antelope were all around him now. He almost fell as a striped body caromed against him, but once more he was saved by the light gravity. He was in among the trees! From the dubious shelter of a tree trunk, he leaped for a dangling length of vine. It stretched and tore as he swarmed up its twisted length, pulling loose from its tenuous anchorage under his weight. He caught a branch as the vine ripped loose from the top of the tree, but at last he was safe.

Safe? Well, that depended on your definition of the word. Safe for the moment, anyway, perched like some ungainly bird on a swaying limb some twenty feet above the ground. He grinned wryly at the thought as the frantic pounding of his heart slowed, and gradually his agonized gasping for breath eased. His pack with its tiny radio direction finder was long since gone, trampled into the golden turf along with his rifle and binoculars. Not that it would have been any help, since his beacon had surely been pounded flat by a herd of what had looked like shortnecked giraffes. He didn't know how many miles he had come, running for his life under the lavender sky. Avoiding predators. Dodging wave after wave of stampeding animals across a plain that surely resembled the African veldt before the coming of mankind. The bloated orange sun was now high in the sky, and he had arrived at this place just after sunrise.

Arrived! A tame enough word, but it would have to do until he could decide on a better terminology. It was hard to believe that he, Neal Marten, had stumbled onto a bridge across the reaches of interstellar space while puttering in his garage laboratory.

His hobby of studying obscure magnetic effects had gradually given birth to a bizarre contraption of rods and coils, of knobs and switches. Powered by a bank of storage batteries, it had become a window into deep space, a portal that spanned light years as though they didn't exist! Most of the settings on his makeshift control panel had revealed only the vacuum of empty space, but at last he had found the one that brought him here...

Enough of that. The last of the stampeding herd was long since gone, shadowed by its halfglimpsed pursuers, and no more herds seemed to be in his immediate vicinity. He hadn't gotten a good look at whatever had set off this particular stampede, only enough to know that the creatures were huge! He was just as glad that they hadn't come any closer to him, since it meant that they hadn't seen him, either. From the glimpses he'd gotten, he'd preferred to keep it that way.

Right now the golden prairie stretched away emptily in all directions under the orange sunlight, with no trace of the crowding herds that had driven him so far from his arrival point. He could see no signs of danger as he slid awkwardly down from his perch. Starting back the way he had come, he paused as a splotch of crimson caught his eye. A striped antelope lay crumpled against the base of a nearby tree, its neck twisted back under its torn and trampled body.

His empty stomach growled at the thought of fresh meat, helping him to make up his mind in a hurry. There was no way he was going to make it back to his portal before dark, and all of his supplies were still in his lost pack, somewhere back along the trail of trampled turf. His pocket knife was small for the job, but at least it was good and sharp, and it didn't take him long to hack off a meaty hind quarter. He left the hide on to help protect it from the clouds of purple flies that were already buzzing around.

Carrying the haunch of meat in his hand like a club, though it was only a little larger than a goodsized turkey drumstick, he alternately walked and trotted back along the trail of trampled sod. The air was warm and muggy but he pushed on as hard as he could, trotting, walking, trotting, then walking once more, running easily across the trampled grass in the light gravity. He figured that he must weigh less than threequarters of what he would back on Earth. His earlier fatigue was almost forgotten as he took deep breaths of the unpolluted air, and his long strides made it seem almost like he was flying.

An angry barking and a rush of wings sent him sprawling as he ducked and swerved away from a new peril. Something brown and bulky hurtled past his head, and he almost panicked again. He caught a glimpse of gleaming yellow fangs and leathery wings as it banked around in a sharp turn. On its next pass, he was ready for it. Swinging his antelope haunch from a solid batting stance, Neal met the creature headon. There was a crunch and it spun awkwardly to the ground, its angry yapping silenced.

"Let's see what we've got here," he told himself when he'd stopped shaking. He prodded at it with his booted toe, but it was stone dead, not even twitching. Looking like a huge bat with an elongated wolflike head, it had a muzzle full of yellowed fangs. Long claws curved from its wing joints and hind feet. On Earth it would have been too heavy to get off the ground even with its hollow bones, he thought, but here it was a fiendishly efficient flying engine of destruction.

Keeping a wary eye on the sky, Neal jogged on. The sun was dipping lower, and he automatically glanced at his watch. A second glance confirmed the first, and he grinned ruefully, remembering...

"Old Man Carter's got it in for you," Arnie Rodgers at the next desk had warned him, only the week before. "He's never forgiven you for showing up for work half soused that time, even if it was over a year ago. Sure as you're born he'll give you the sack, the first time he gets even half a chance."

"Thanks, I'll watch it," had been his answer, but he'd probably blown it for sure this time. Not that it would matter one way or the other much longer. Unless he could find his way back before the bank of truck batteries that powered his portal gave out, he'd be as good as dead, stranded here.

There'd been a time, and not too long ago at that, when he wouldn't have cared. The freeway smash that had robbed him of Betty and the kids had made everything seem pointless. A desperate attempt at alcoholic oblivion hadn't helped, either. It had only drained his small savings account, damaged his health, and nearly cost him his job. At last, intrigued by an article he'd come across in an old science fiction magazine, he'd chanced onto a study of obscure magnetic effects and gradually become absorbed in its ramifications.

The bloated orange sun was almost down. Neal kept an eye out for a place to hole up until morning. He didn't like the looks of the banked clouds that were building up behind him, either.

"It can't be too much farther to my portal," he kept telling himself, but there was no sign of it in the fading light. He was plodding along tiredly past an outcropping of boulders, his feet almost too heavy to lift, when he finally called it quits. Taking a careful bearing on the setting sun, he turned aside, finding that the boulders marked the end of a low ridge. He made sure that the shallow cave between the bases of two large rocks was unoccupied, then crawled inside, blocking the opening as best he could with a wall of smaller rocks.

He awoke to the sound of drums in the darkness, momentarily disoriented. Trucks rumbling by on the freeway? No, just the roar of pounding rain, he realized, and he relaxed when the flare of a match showed him nothing but bare rock walls. Luckily, the overhanging rock slabs were keeping off most of the rain. He checked that the entrance to his retreat was still blocked and that nothing had crept in past them to share his refuge, and quickly settled back down to sleep.

The next time he roused, the rain had stopped and the purplishgray light of dawn was seeping in through his barricade. He pushed the flimsy wall of rocks aside, emerging into a world of steamy warmth under a sky that was rapidly clearing. Puddles and rivulets were everywhere, and a goodsized stream had widened and deepened the gully just outside his refuge. He idly picked up a few brightly colored agates that had washed down from higher ground.

"Hey, what's this?" Among the gravel left behind by the freshet, he found several goodsized nuggets of coppery metal. Brightgleaming with a reddish luster where he scratched at them with the point of his knife, they gave promise of crude knives and spear heads if he did end up stranded here.

Some dead branches promised something even better, a hot breakfast. He soon had hackedoff chunks of meat sizzling on sticks over a smoky fire, and when he set out again it was with a pleasantly full stomach. The meat had a slightly gamy flavor, just enough to offset the lack of salt. He'd wondered whether he might react badly to the alien proteins of this world, but had finally shrugged his shoulders as he smelled the tempting aroma of roasting meat.

"The test animals didn't have any trouble with the food here," he'd thought to himself. "Why should I? Now, which way was I headed?"

With a sinking feeling in his stomach that had little or nothing to do with food or the lack of it, he realized that the tracks of the stampeding herd had been wiped out completely by the downpour. His only chance was to keep on going, as nearly in the right direction as he could guess from where the sun was rising, and keep on hoping.