H.M. Hoover - Lost Star Read Online Free PDF

waving, and the three surrounded her. A cool, soft anemone hand reached out and touched her arm. She flinched away, startled, and then felt ashamed of her rudeness. They all regarded her now, then slowly backed away. Somehow she got the feeling she had just become a great disappointment, as if they had expected more from her.
    The three looked at one another, then turned away and started off down the path, walking slowly. They did not look back. After hesitating a moment to argue with her common sense, she followed.
    5
    The lumpies led her to the far side of the hill, down through a thicket, and beside an oblong meadow bare of trees. They seemed in no hurry, almost aimless.
    Orange berries grew at the meadow's edge. They stopped to pick and eat them. Their fingers were very deft. When they moved on, it was to wander downhill into a heavily wooded area.
    Vines flourished over a low cliff. The three left the path and approached the cliff, pushed aside some vines, and disappeared behind them. Lian stopped and waited, watching to see where they would re-emerge. But they did not, and when some minutes passed, she decided they had grown tired of being followed and had given her the slip. And very neatly, too.
    She imagined this trio of chubby gray creatures tiptoeing away into the woods and smiled at the image. She walked up the slope to investigate, but slowly, just in case they were hiding back there, watching her. She did not want to irritate or startle them. Even gentle animals bit when provoked.
    "Hello?" she called and patted the vines.
    There was no response. Birds sang among the trees.
    She pulled some vines aside and saw a cavelike hollow space behind them. The lumpies were not there. She slipped inside and let the vines fall shut. Gravel scrunched beneath her boots. It was a pleasant hiding place. The sunlit leaves made an opaque wall of jade that shadowed green on green. The cliff narrowed down to nothing to her right. She turned left and followed the tunnellike curve of the outcropping. Around the second bend she saw an opening in the cliff wall and stopped still.
    It was a doorway, perfectly round and machine tooled, as if designed for a huge vault. A few yards away, almost buried in soil and leaves, lay the massive door that had once fit that frame. Lian stood there, taking in the meaning of it all, then reached over and knocked on the cliff wall. It rang not as stone but as a foamed metal, part of the ruin. Lumpies went through that doorway; she could see their finger marks all over it.
    Her first impulse was to run back to the dig and tell Dr. Farr. But tell him what—"I found an open door"? That sounded rather silly even to consider. Besides, they probably knew about it. He said they had sonar-tested and measured the whole site. Probably it was only a wall remaining from a ruin and not exciting at all. Still, there were no human tracks. She went up to have a look, thinking, That's how the lumpies gave me the slip.
    The door led into a ruin, but not the ruin she expected. It opened on a wide, dim corridor that stretched away into darkness. Its floor was covered with mud and leaves. Lumpie tracks were everywhere, and the vaulted walls were hand-marked as high as they could reach. One glance and Lian knew she had made an important find.
    "I wonder where it goes," she whispered to herself. "To the center of the eye?" It would be interesting to learn what was under that green hill, learn it by herself without having to explain about the singing to people who might not believe her.
    The lumpies must have come in here; it couldn't be too dangerous or they wouldn't go in and out. And it must be here that they had learned to sing. She checked to see that nothing lurked on either side of the doorway and then entered. It was very still inside. There was a cellar smell of dampness and age.
    "Hello?" she called. There was no echo. These walls were as sound-absorptive as the corridors of a star-ship. "Lumpies? Are you in