Chapter 20

Kirk found a small stand of what looked like blue bamboo. The shafts were long and straight and tapered toward the tip. He put his back against a tree and worried at one of the shafts until he was able to snap it at a joint across a rock. He hefted it experimentally. The ten-foot length would make a serviceable spear.

He would have preferred a cannon. There was nothing here which he wanted to touch with a ten-foot spear. And most of the local fauna looked capable of using it for a toothpick.

He picked out a short length which might be stabbed like a knife and tucked it into the robe belt. The stuff was too rigid to make a good bow, he decided, and he doubted he would have the leisure. He heard the coughing of the cat behind him still.

And this time he looked up again at the low branches where they had first found Sola. All right. She knew this territory. He doubted that the trees would help him against the cat, but they might keep down the werewolves and a few other things. He found a couple of low branches and swung up into them. Many were wide enough to stand on easily and from most he could reach some other interlocking branch before it narrowed to become a tightrope.

He brightened a little. Things were looking up. What worried him was that Sola and Spock would be frantically combing the planet for him. Or perhaps the Totality would have given her some place to start, and she, or they, would be down here, beating the bushes for him. Matehunt? Would she come for him if that were the only way she could come? There was, he realized, another danger. Perhaps the Totality did not merely wish to have her hunt him, but wanted to reduce him to some state where Totality would seem like a refuge. In which case the Totality was probably hunting him, too….

He turned to look at his back-trail and found a saber-toothed black cat-bear, for want of a better description, looking at him from a branch twenty feet away. The cat-bear was about a dozen feet long….

Spock moved through the upper terrace with a Vulcan concentration which excluded all else save the vine or balance-branch which he needed for the next forward progress. It was not unlike a balance skill taught to Vulcan children in infant school. The children were not, however, required to practice it some 20.3 meters above the jungle floor.

But there were no obstructions here. He had attempted the lower terrace of wide interlocking branches. It was safer, but the need to detour around various interlocked areas did not suit his need for haste. The ground, of course, was quite impossible. Therefore, he reached back into ancient skills once learned as play and adapted them to an alien environment. At this height he could often vault on a tall, thin sapling for ten or twenty meters. Speed was of the essence.

He was not certain what guide he was following. It was some directional sense which could span distance, but he was not certain whether it led to Sola, or whether it was the still more primitive sense which had once or twice led him to Kirk.

In either case he was certain that it would ultimately lead him to both of them. Sola would, of course, in all logic, go after Kirk-or she would have to answer to Spock. She would know that.

But huntress that she was, she could not be expected to cope with the trap which Spock expected the Totality to lay for them.

Wherefore the Vulcan hurled himself through the trees like a projectile, and there was little in him of Vulcan’s thousand years of peace or of the disciplined Starfleet officer. This was jungle and desert, a million years old, and Spock of Vulcan and all his savage ancestors were at home here.

If he did not reach Sola and Kirk in time, this was where he would die….