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her just twice, in the flesh. It's novelty. I'm attracted by her exotic
strangeness. When I get out of here, in five years or so, maybe, I'll meet a
girl from Peoria and marry her." The very term marriage made him realize the
fantasy of the situation. He grinned inwardly.
"Biologically I rather imagine it's impossible. Besides, such things don't
happen. I certainly wouldn't want my wife going out at night to sit on the
back fence and howl."
Nevertheless the thought did not entirely leave him. The union of two races,
two species, rather, had never occurred in the history of biology. He broke
the problem down into basic equations of genes and chromosomes, and that
passed time, but finally made him feel foolish. Eventually he was glad to
raise his head warily above water and prepare to emerge.
A long time had passed, and the alarm must long since have died down. No one
was visible on any of the castle's many balconies, nor could the courtyard be
seen from here. But if Raft attempted to cross that open plain, he would
inevitably be spotted.
He could keep to the river though its slow, powerful current was a danger. So
he set off upstream, hugging as closely to the bank as he could, crawling
mostly, swimming at times, and keeping the reed always ready. Once, at a
suspicious flash of movement, he lay hidden, but he was overly cautious then.
By the time he reached the forest, he was freezing cold and bleeding from
scraped elbows and wrists.
He hoped the cat people did not trail by scent. It was unlikely. They were a
civilized race, and the dulling of certain senses is the price evolution
exacts. The lower species, depending on scent and sound, have those faculties
highly developed. On the other hand, man's vision is far more powerful and
more easily adjustable than the vision of most beasts.
Darum would not know his destination. The closer he got to Kharn, the safer he
would be from pursuit.
A cyclopean tree shut out the turrets of the castle. Raft went on cautiously
for perhaps half a mile. Then he opened the sealed pocket, made sure his
revolver was dry, and put the dagger into his belt. The amulet he took out for
a closer inspection.
It told him nothing. A spark of fire glittered in the depths of a cloudy
crystal chip that was in turn set in a thick metallic lozenge, square with
rounded corners. The flat gem could, he found on experiment, be revolved like
the dial of a safe. He turned it cautiously.
There was no change, except, perhaps, for a freshening of the breeze. How
could he test the device?
His watch, of course.
Luckily the watch was waterproof. He stared at the dial, noticing that the
second hand was moving very slowly. He turned the crystal on the amulet again
and the pointer moved faster. Another turn, and it raced.
Which meant that his metabolism was correspondingly slower.
Would the amulet also increase the rate of life? If so, that would solve many
problems. He could get to Kharn, perhaps, even before Parror arrived there.
But he was doomed to disappointment on that score. The amulet could retard
metabolism, but it could not increase it beyond the rate prevalent in Paititi.
That meant the spark, undoubtedly, was attuned to the Flame itself, radiating
at the same energy-
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e%20-%20uc.txt rate and moving in the same cycle. Well, Raft didn't want to be
handicapped by moving more slowly than the rest of his temporary world, and he
adjusted the device till it was as he had found it.
He now put it in the pocket that held the revolver, and went on. He was
estimating, as well as he could remember, the velocity of a bullet, and
wondering if, under the current conditions, any target he fired at might be
able to dodge lead.
He must remember to use the gun at close range, the closer the better!
The use of artillery would be handicapped in Paititi. If a bomb were dropped
on Doirada Castle, the cat people would almost have time to dismantle the
structure and move it elsewhere before the egg landed. No wonder the species
fought with steel, instead of propellents. Only an energy-ray could be truly
efficient here.
Which explained, Raft decided, why mental powers were so highly
developed Janissa's mirror, Yrann's hypnotic sphere. Timelag would be
minimized with such devices.
The whole inanimate part of the valley was indeed under a spell, such a one as
had protected the
Norse god Baldur. There could be few fatalities through accident. Not when
stones floated, rivers ran like treacle, and a man fell as slowly as Alice
descending the rabbit-hole!
As he went on, he paid more attention to the life around him, the curious
creatures that used the gigantic trees as hiding places. In the cool, clear
light he could make out new details.
The flower-bright vines, with their dangerous tentacles, slithered swiftly
across the bark. There were many of the three-foot alligators, lurking hi the
pools they themselves seemed to have constructed on the trunks, shells that
resembled the cups rubber-workers fasten to the hevea bark as they drain their
milky latex.
The 'gators had surprisingly flexible claws. Raft noticed a couple of them
constructing their pools, scraping resinous wood from the tree and making it
into a kind of cement with a fluid they secreted from salivary glands.
Only the sloths were truly familiar, and they were all the stranger because of
the rapidity with which they moved. The true sloth hangs motionless by its
claws, as its tongue flashes out to reap a nutritious harvest of insects. Its
metabolism is abnormally slow.
But it was not slow here.
As for the inch-long parasites that crept through the sloths' hair, Raft found
those creatures too unpleasantly familiar to be truly interesting. Only their
ape-like tails kept them from resembling too closely the species that was not
dominant in Paititi, though it might be elsewhere.
Most intriguing were the brown furry mammals in the apart-
ment-house nests. They had sucking-disks on their paws, which were none too
efficient, but their elongated snouts ended in tabs of flesh like the
extremity of an elephant's trunk, a finger and thumb, which they used as man
might use his hands. Its prehensile delicacy was amazing.
Raft wondered what the interior of the nests was like. He felt that what lay
inside might be surprising.
Underfoot was only the moss. There was no underbrush. Those incredible trees
seemed to have sucked all the nutriment out of the ground, leaving so little
that only moss could flourish. That gave a logical explanation for the
tree-parasites.
Where else could they live, except in a closely integrated society, where
hunger made an automatic check-and-balance? Even the trees were part of that
inexorable system, for they had drained the earth of life. And in return, they
were hosts to other species.
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Species had reached dead end in this land. They would never evolve to
dominance, as the cat people had evolved, Raft surmised. They had found their
balance.
And, meanwhile, he had to find Craddock.
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