The Wealth of Echindul

by Noel M. Loomis

Netse must have been contacted by Relegar and told to keep hands off. That was why Grant had wanted to see Netse first. But he had not dreamed that Netse would refuse him entirely. He had thought it would be merely a matter of the price.

Now what could he do? He didn't dare let the constrictor have more than three day's head-start, for the saurian would finish digesting the fish in about five days. That meant Grant would have to start back to the swamp tomorrow. But Relegar's spies would report every move. The minute he set out, Relegar would be notified. And Relegar would come after him. Grant shuddered. Where his hands touched his face his finger tips were cold.

Relegar would find him. The spider had a locator sense that was infallible. He could set out days later and find Grant unerringly. And how could one fight the Uranian when they met? Relegar's nervous system was so constructed that he was practically impossible to kill. You could boil him or freeze him without injuring him. Uranians had been boiled alive in prussic acid for forty hours without ill effects. You could cut off legs and even sever the head and they would still live. So what could a man do?

There was only one thing Grant knew. That was to go after the stones. They were his and he would never give them up. They might take the stones away from him, but he would never give them up.

So the next morning he overhauled his suit and patched it. He got fresh oxygen and bought a meager supply of food. He had one more good meal and started out south again with the single stone in his watch-pocket.

It took him seven hours to reach the place where he had left the constrictor. It was gone, of course. How far, he could not know. He took the one telepathic stone from his pocket. He found a spot where he could sit in the open, cross-legged, with his eyes fixed on the stone. From the corner of his eye he saw a brown detached eye on a stalk pop up from the surface of the water, but he paid no attention. He concentrated on the stone.

The stone had a fair polish. He looked at its surface and shut out all the normal sounds from his ears. The stone seemed to be in motion on the inside, and presently that motion communicated itself to his mind. He had a picture of a constrictor, lying sleepily in a pool of brown water surrounded by heavy, deep grass that hung over the banks and grew down into the water.

He heard now the distant bellow of a swamp-ox, the buzzing of aquatic bees. Slowly he turned the stone on its edge and revolved it carefully. When the picture was clearest in his mind he picked out an orientation point in the distant mountains. Then, well pleased, he put the stone in his pocket, got into his diving-suit, screwed on the helmet, adjusted the oxygen, and stepped off into the brown water of the swamp.

The bottom here was steep but it was good. It was hard and not more than knee-deep in mud. He traveled carefully, freezing on occasion when huge shadows moved above him. He was in fifty feet of water and he liked that better because it was easier to go unnoticed. He avoided a patch of electric cactus, for the spines would have electrocuted him even through the suit, and he went far around an area of white bull-root, shaped like women's legs, because he knew the bull-root was always infested with swamp-razors that would cut through the seams of his diving-suit.

When he came out of the water he found his orientation point and kept going. He came to a wide stretch of water, and with the wind at his back, made fast time by climbing on an island of floating grass and going straight across. This was important. He needed to find the constrictor by the time Relegar started after him.