Lin Carter - Down to a Sunless Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

trap the unwary, who tread upon the thin surface of its hiding place, break through, and provide the predator with fresh meat. But something in the behavior of the loper made him think it had detected some other form of life than a sandcat.
    He wondered what it might be. Then he unlimbered his pair of binoculars from the saddlebags and began to search the dreary flatness of the dustland.
    The powerful lenses had been adapted to the dimmer daylight of the Red Planet, and could be adjusted to various degrees of distance. By their aid he soon ascertained the cause of the loper's fretfulness.
    "What have you seen, O Brant?" demanded Zuarra breathlessly.
    "Strangers," he said briefly. "Two of them, at least. In trouble of some sort."
    "Let us go on," suggested nervous little Suoli in a timid voice, "and leave them to their problem, which is not ours."
    Brant grunted, saying nothing, but Zuarra shot her "sister" a scathing glance of pure contempt. Survival is a deadly struggle in the great dustlands of Mars, and even clan-war and blood-feud are ignored when strangers meet.
    "Wait here," he said tersely, mounting the loper and turning its head out into the desert.
    "We will go with you," said Zuarra, "to share together what may chance to befall." Behind her words was the obvious fact that, without Brant and the loper, they would have no chance to live very long in this desolate and hostile region.
    "Suit yourself," Brant said flatly. "But keep up!"
    They made slow progress in the thick, soft sands, which sucked at their feet like quicksand and impeded every stride. However, Zuarra made no complaint and little Suoli dared not even whimper.
    The loper, with its flat, splay-footed stride, moved more quickly and easily atop the superfine sands than did the two women; however, an extended journey across the dustland would soon exhaust it, as well.
    Brant was not overly familiar with these Argyre dustlands, cxcept that he was aware that they were vast in expanse and were cleft in twain by a very deep but very narrow canyon called the Erebus—one of those lesions in the rocky crust made eons ago when the planet dried and cracked and shrunk with the loss of its ancient oceans.
    He hoped they would not have to travel as far as the canyon to reach the imperiled strangers, but doubted they could be that far off. Had they been, he did not think it possible for the loper to have scented them in the distance.
    Fortunately, the newcomers were on this side of the Erebus, and not as far off as he had feared. Only a few minutes of hard riding brought Brant a closer view of them.
    There were two men and two riding-beasts, and one of the lopers was clearly dead, the victim of a sandcat's attack, from the clawed and torn condition of its carcass. Indeed, a moment later, Brant was able to observe the corpse of the predator, slain probably by the laser rifle the younger of the two strangers was holding. The sandcat was bigger than a Bengal tiger, and curiously catlike in appearance, for all that it was reptilian.
    The two men he observed narrowly as he rode up to where they stood. One was a native, lean and wolfish, holding a bright new laser rifle at high port, not exactly pointing the weapon at the mounted man, but having it ready for action at need. He had hard, cold eyes and a cruel, thin-lipped mouth, and Brant noticed that his garment bore no clan markings, which suggested that he was aoudh- —an outlaw, exiled from his nation.
    The other man, rather surprisingly, was an Earthsider, older than Brant by a couple of decades, probably, wearing a fresh nioflex suit but without a respirator, which meant his body chemistry and lungs had been surgically modified to endure Martian conditions. Brant himself had undergone these modifications years before, and knew that few colonists save for the Colonial Administration police can afford to have their bodies adjusted to life in the open on the desert world.
    However, the older man did not look like a cop to