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reputation as wild game hunter. For circuses, for museums and zoos, he had tracked and trapped
thousands of rare life-forms on hundreds of worlds.
They had finally contacted him on Bouyella and offered him the ship, the charter, and exactly as much
money as he needed to complete the job back on Earth.
Arrangements had been quickly made, half the pay had been deposited to Claybourne s accounts (and
immediately withdrawn for delivery to certain men back home), and he had gone out on the jump to
Selangg.
This was the last jump, the last indignity he would have to suffer. After Selangg back to Earth. Back
to Garden.
He wasn t certain he had actually seen it! The movement had been rapid, and only in the corner of his
eye.
Claybourne leaped up, throwing off the safeties on the molasses-gun. He yanked off the inflation patch
with stiff fingers, and the foam-rest collapsed back to flatness in his pack.
He took a tentative step, stopped. Had he actually seen something? Had it been hallucination or a trick of
the weak air blanket of Selangg? Was the hunt getting to him at last? He paused, wet his lips, took
another step.
His scarred, blocky face drew tight. The sharp gray eyes narrowed. Nothing moved but the faint rustling
of the blue saw-grass. The world of Selangg was dead and quiet.
He slumped against the rock wall, his nerves leaping.
He wondered how wise it had been to come on this jump. Then the picture of Garden s fat, florid face
slid before his eyes, and he knew he had had to come. This was the ending. As he tracked thefetl , so he
tracked Garden.
He quickly reviewed what he knew of thefetl s appearance, matching it with the flash of movement he
had seen:
A big, bloody animal a devilish-looking thing, all teeth and legs. Striped like a Sumatran tiger,
six-legged, twelve-inch sabered teeth, a ring of eyes across a massive low brow, giving it nearly one
hundred and eighty degrees of unimpaired straight-line eyesight.
Impressive, and mysterious. They knew nothing more about the beast. Except the reason for this hunt; it
was telekinetic, could move objects by mind-power alone.
A stupid animal a beast of the fields yet it possibly held the key to all future research into the mind
of man.
But the mysteries surrounding thefetl were not to concern Claybourne. His job was merely to capture it
and put it in the custody of the Institute for study.
However . . .
It was getting to be a slightly more troublesome hunt now. Three weeks was a week longer than he had
thought the tracking would take. He had covered most of the mere five hundred miles of Selangg s
surface. Had it not been for the lessened gravity and the monstrous desert grasslands, he would still be
searching. Thefetl had fled before him.
He would have given up had he not found prints occasionally.
It had been all that had kept him going. That, and the other half of his pay, deliverable upon receipt of the
fetl at the Institute. It seemed almost uncanny. At almost the very instant he would consider giving up and
turning back to the ship, a print would appear in the circle of lamplight, and he would continue. It had
happened a dozen times.
Now here he was, at the final step of the trek. At the foot of a gigantic mountain chain, thrusting up into
the dead night of Selangg. He stopped, the circle of light sliding like cool mercury up the face of the
stone.
He might have been worried, were it not for the molasses-gun. He cradled the weapon closer to his
protective suit.
* * *
The grapple shot hooked itself well into the jumbled rock pieces piled above the smooth mountain base.
Claybourne tested it and began climbing, bracing his feet against the wall, hanging outward and walking
the smooth surface.
Finally, he reached the area where volcanic action had ruptured the stone fantastically. It was a dull, gray
rock, vesiculated like scoria, and tumbled and tumbled and tumbled. He unfastened the grapple, returned
it to its nest in his pack, and tensing his muscles, began threading up through the rock formations.
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