Among the Scented Ones

Besan Wur shouted, terror-stricken, as an avalanche of huge green-crested saurians surged toward them through the disintegrating sides of the tubeway. He tasted the salt of bitten lips.

The giant double tires smoked as Nard Rost, the gray-haired Garro at the controls, spun the wheel tightly about and sent it hurtling back along the way they had come.

"That was--close!" Besan's voice was shrill. His fingers were biting into the back of his seat as he peered backward at the hissing horde of denars.

"Ras Thib--Walof Jemar--all the others!"

Nard Rost nodded grave assent. At least twelve of the wheels had been swallowed up by that churning death from the open plains.

"There isn't any chance they could have survived," Besan said numbly. "The wheels are flattened and broken already."

Besan gasped and his hand went to his throat. For by now the acrid musty scent of the older Garro pervaded the narrow drum of a cabin. That scent was the natural protection of the men of Saaar; only a mindless stampeding herd of denars, or other men, would brave contact with his kind.

Besan Wur's eyes leaked moisture. He nudged the valve that released the countering fumes of the tank under his left armpit. Unlike the older man he was not immune to the product of Garro scent glands.

He was an Earthman, one of a hundred-odd Terrans living secretly among the Garros on forbidden Saaar. His dark hair was artfully dyed blonde along the central stripe, and his oversize ears and the flaring tip of his nose were the result of surgery in his youth. Even his red blood was rendered purple by regular injections of an innocuous fluid.

"I know, Besan Wur," said the older man quietly. "All dead. All our friends and fellow students." He paused. "And soon, perhaps, we shall join them."

His hand indicated the slight bulge of the hill beside which the vehicular tube ran. It was a low hill, less than a hundred feet long and half as wide, covered with the coarse grass of the plains of Saaar. Only a thin belt of trees touching the further extremity of its crest offered any protection.

"Perhaps the trees will shelter us," he said. "If not...."

Behind them the sea of hissing thundering life chewed nearer and nearer. In a matter of seconds it would engulf the hill and sweep beyond it, isolating them among the trees.... If they reached them.

"See there, Nard Rost!" cried the Earthman. "Two of the wheels behind us--broke through the mesh--headed for the trees!"

Nard swung into the gap in the wall; the wheel tilted and rocked, the inner drum's gyros groaning in protest, and then they were racing after the other vehicles.

"_Denar!_" shouted Besan Wur, even as an elephantine hammer seemed to crash against the thin metal skin of the cabin.

The great wheel toppled, righted itself, and toppled again as the weight of another denar's vast bulk bludgeoned it. The ragged outer fringe of the great herd had reached them even as they came into the shadow of the trees!

With a crash the thirty-foot wheel and its inner cabin went over. The two occupants were unhurt save for a few bruises, and they wasted no time in racing to the shattered port between the two huge tires. Nard Rost led the way, a knobby metal wrench in his fist to clear away the broken shards yet remaining in the frame.

Five feet away the thick bole of a forest giant lifted. They had come that close to its shelter. Without a moment's hesitation the two men raced up the knotty protuberances of the trunk to the lower branches. There, twenty feet above the ground, they paused momentarily.

Well that they had quitted the wheel when they did. The solid secondary flood of the denar tide swept over the vehicle, churned, eddied, and pounded onward again unchecked over the flattened scraps of metal and resilient durnb.

And now the other wheels suffered a like fate. They too pulped and disappeared. Besan Wur's square face brightened. He shouted something against the all-pervading din of the stampeding lizard horde.

"Relsa Dav!" he shouted into Nard Rost's elongated ear cup.

He had glimpsed the trembling slim form of the girl clinging to a massive horizontal branch a scant three feet above the tossing green crests of the lizards. Now he hurried along a higher branch interlacing with those of the other three where the girl had found refuge.

A moment later he had pulled her to the safety of a higher limb and the girl was sobbing against his tunic's soft brown cloth, her arms about his neck.

He caught a suggestion of moisture in the violet eyes of the older man as he joined them. Nard Rost's mate, Ilva, had perished up ahead there. And with her had died the twenty-four other students and their three instructors bound for a four month's course of practical study in the tin and copper mines of the Durlu Hills.

Only they three had escaped because of the temporary check of the hill and now the sheltering trees. How long the battered lower boles, massive though they were, would remain upright, was doubtful. And the unending flow of squealing whistling denars might continue unchecked for more than two or three days!