Star Hunter Read Online Free Page B

his heart pounding as if he had been racing to outdistance the
rising wind now pushing against his half-naked body.
    What was he doing here? Where
was
here?
    Panic, carried through from that awakening, dried his mouth, roughened
his skin, made wet the palms of the hands he dug into the sand on
either side of him. Vaguely, a picture projected into his mind—he had
sat in a room, and watched a man come to him with a cup. Before that,
he had been in a place of garish light and evil smells.
    But he was Rynch Brodie, he had come here on an L-B when he was a boy,
he had buried the ship's officer under a pile of rocks, managed to
survive by himself because he had applied the aids in the boat to
learn how. This morning he had been hunting a strong-jaw, tempting it
out of its hiding by a hook and line and a bait of fresh killed
skipper.
    Rynch's hands went to his face, he crouched forward on his knees. That
all was true, he could prove it—he would prove it! There was the
strong-jaw's den back there, somewhere on the rise where he had left
the snapped haft of the spear he had broken in his fall. If he could
find the den, then he would be sure of the reality of everything else.
    He had only had a very real dream—that was it! Only, why did he
continue to dream of that room, that man, and the cup? Of the place of
lights and smells, which he hated so much that the hate was a sour
taste in his fright-dried mouth? None of it had ever been a part of
Rynch Brodie's world.
    Through the dusk he started back up the stream bed, towards the narrow
little valley where he had wakened after that fall. Finally, finding
shelter within the heart of a bush, he crouched low, listening to the
noises of another world which awoke at night to take over the stage
from the day dwellers.
    As he plodded back, he fought off panic, realizing that some of those
noises he could identify with confidence, while others remained
mysteries. He bit down hard on the knuckles of his clenched fist,
attempting to bend that discovery into evidence. Why did he know at
once that that thin, eerie wailing was the flock call of a
leather-winged, feathered tree dweller, and that a coughing grunt from
downstream was just a noise?
    "Rynch Brodie—Largo Drift—Tait." He tasted the blood his teeth drew
from his own skin as he recited that formula. Then he scrambled up.
His feet tangled in the net, and he went down again, his head cracking
on a protruding root.
    Nothing tangible reached him in that brush shelter. What did venture
out of hiding to investigate was a substance none of his species could
have named. It was neither body, nor mind—perhaps it was closest to
alien emotion.
    Making contact stealthily, but with confidence, it explored after its
own fashion. Then, puzzled, it withdrew to report. And since that to
which it reported was governed by a set pattern which had not been
altered for eons, its only answer was a basic command reaffirmed.
Again it made contact, strove to carry out that order fruitlessly.
Where it should have found easy passage, a clear channel to carry
influence to the sleeper's brain, it found a jumble of impressions,
interwoven until they made a protective barrier.
    The invader strove to find some pattern, or meaning—withdrew baffled.
But its invasion, as ghostly as that had been, loosened a knot here,
cleared a passage there.
    Rynch awoke at dawn, slowly, dazedly, sorting out sounds, smells,
thoughts. There was a room, a man, trouble and fear, then there was
he, Rynch Brodie, who had lived in this wilderness on an unmapped
frontier world for the passage of many seasons. That world was about
him now, he could feel its winds, hear its sounds, taste, smell. It
was not a dream—the other was the dream. It had to be!
    Prove it. Find the L-B, retrace the trail of yesterday past the point
of the fall which had started all this. Right there was the slope down
which he must have tumbled. Above, he would find the den he had been
exploring when the accident