Chapter 10

Ultho Basa was going to be our last quarry on this caper if he really was to one who set it up in the beginning. The local cops could pick up the rest of the conspirators, once we had the kingpin. I suspected that he was going to be a tough nut to crack, so we did a little homework on his species.

Basa fit all of the outside characteristics of what humans thought of as a snake. He had a scaly skin which he shed occasionally and no arms or legs. He made up for the latter by having a remarkably strong, mobile, and controllable tongue. His tongue could do any of the things that a common tentacle could do, so he was not hampered in this way.

His one weak point was in his eating habits. He usually ate a very large meal once every 10 days and then was lethargic for two or three days afterwards as it was digested. He got rid of stuff he couldn't use, like hooves and hair, by vomiting it out after digestion was otherwise completed. This raised an interesting question: Basa was reputed to be a vicious murderer, but no bodies were ever found. Was this the reason?

This information prompted us to schedule our attack on the day after his usual meal. Amphy did some research for us and found that he had just eaten his regular meal the day before, so this was the ideal time to attack. We quickly gathered our equipment and had ourselves transported to his home.

We were deposited at a metal gate in a fence which surrounded a grove of very large trees. Basa was said to live in a house constructed in the largest of the trees. As expected, there was a gatekeeper, and he was the same species as Basa. "Go away! The boss doesn't want to be disturbed!"

"Let us in! We have urgent business with Basa and he wouldn't want us to be delayed."

"Yeah? Well, tell me what this business is and I'll decide if it's important enough."

That did it! I was now pissed so I shot the gatekeeper with a 24-hour stun charge. "Julia, please open the gate for us."

When she reached up to set the charge at the gate's lock, she brushed against the metal and was thrown back about 10 feet by a high voltage, very low current, jolt. She announced, "I'm OK, but there's quite an electric charge on that gate. We need to short it out before I touch it again."

Arthur said, "Let me do it." He unrolled a length of wire and wrapped it around a steel pin he was carrying. Summoning all his strength, he jammed the pin into the ground as hard as he could force it. The pin went in for its full length; Arthur then pissed on the pin and the surrounding ground to improve the conductivity. He wrapped a short length of the other end of the wire around a small stone to give it some mass and inertia and tossed it against the gate. There was a small arc and some sparks when the wire hit the gate, but it didn't last. "It should be safe now," he announced as he touched the gate. He was unharmed, so he stepped back to allow Julia plenty of room to work.

She set a small charge which cut the lock loose and it fell to the ground. The gate swung fully open from its own weight and I cautioned everyone to be careful about touching it, since Arthur's wire had been pulled loose when the gate opened.

We formed our fighting column and set off into the forest, for that's what the place looked like. We moved along the trail, carefully watching for booby traps with all of our senses set to their highest range and sensitivity. We found a pit filled with sharpened stakes which we jumped over. We met our first real obstacle once we got past the pit.

Two of the "snakes" were hanging from the trees beside the trail and they tried to attack Jim and Augusta, the first two of our party in line, as soon as we got close enough. We had detected the snakes by their infra-red signature long before we actually came to them, so they were easy to pop with the stun gun set at the 24-hour position. The snakes had not tried to bite, but had dropped down to snare us in their coils. They were constrictors, not biters.

Only a few feet further on, we saw a strange fog-like presence in the air over the path. We could only see this with our radio frequency vision, and it was completely new to us. We talked about it for a little while and decided that it must be some sort of detector beam. Since Basa had to know that we were already on his property, a simple detector did not seem reasonable; we thought it more likely that this was the trigger to a bobby trap.

The fog seemed to be in a conical shape emanating from a point about 10 feet to the right of the path. Not knowing what else to do, I told Cicero to take it out with his grenade launcher. There was the expected small explosion from the grenade destroying whatever was projecting the beam, but we were completely unprepared for the sheet of flame which sprang out from jets buried in the path. Thank God for our enhanced vision! If we hadn't seen the detection beam, Jim, at point, could have been injured by the flame thrower.

We decided to play it safe and wait for the flame throwers to run out of fuel. It just wasn't logical for them to be loaded with a long-term charge. The flames died out in less than three minutes and we were ready to continue our journey toward Basa's house.