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"These watchers you don't know them?" "No. Nor do I like what you've seen of them, Brodie. So I'm willing to call a truce. The Guild believed Jumala an open planet, our records accredited it so. If that is not true we may be in for bad trouble. As an Out-Hunter I am responsible for the safety of three civs back there in the safari camp." Hume made sense, much as Rynch disliked admitting it.
"A billion credits," he repeated softly. Rynch laughed. "You'll have to think of a better one than that, fly-boy." "The stakes would have to be high, wouldn't they, for us to go to all this staging? You've been conditioned, Brodie, illegally brain-channeled!" To Rynch the words meant nothing.
That expression brought another momentary flash of hazy memory a smoky, crowded room where men slid counters back and forth across tables not one of Brodie's edited recalls, but his own. Rynch stood up, started for the rise of the slope, but before he topped that he glanced back. The damaged com box still smoked where its wearer had flung it.
He was Rynch Brodie, and he had been traveling on the Largo Drift with his mother. Memory presented him automatically with a picture of a thin woman with a narrow, rather unhappy face, a twist of elaborately dressed hair in which jeweled lights sparkled. There had been something bad memory was no longer exact but chaotic. And his head ached as he tried to recall that time with greater clarity.
He tried, as he strode along, to piece together more of his memories and the scanty information he had had from the Nahuatl man. So he had been "brain-channeled," given a set of false memories to fit a Rynch Brodie whose presence on this world meant a billion credits for someone. He could not believe that this was the spaceman's game alone, for hadn't he spoken of "we"? A billion credits!
That man would come, Rynch was sure of that, but he was too spent to struggle on. No, the answer to every part of the puzzle lay with that man. To go back to the ship clearing was to risk capture but he had to know. Rynch looked with more attention at his present surroundings. Deep mold under the trees here would hold tracks. There might just be another way to move.
"Nothing." Hume lowered the lenses, held them before his broad chest as he still watched the peaks. "What did you expect?" Rynch snapped. He was hungry, but not hungry enough to abandon the islet. Hume laughed shortly. "I don't know. Only I'm sure they are heading us in that direction." "Look here," Rynch rounded on him. "You know this planet, you've been here before."
Rynch Brodie sat up, flexed his bare thin arms, and moved his long legs experimentally. No broken bones, anyway. But still he frowned. Odd that dream which jarred with the here and now. Crawling to the side of the creek, he dipped head and shoulders into the water, letting the chill of the stream flush away some of his waking bewilderment.
The mist had thickened, but there were more of those ominous lights at water level, spreading down both sides of the point, forming a wall. Dark forms moved out of the water ahead of them, flopping on the rocks, pressing higher, towards the ledge where the men stood. "Those globes I think they're moving in the river now." Rynch found another stone, took careful aim, and smashed a second one.
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