Sandcats of Rhyl by Robert E. Vardeman Read Free Book Online

entering the column or get blown apart once inside.”
    “Blown apart?” Heuser said, his eyes never leaving the hauntingly beautiful and immensely deadly landscape.
    “Vacuum inside. A hard vacuum. Why do you think all that dust gets sucked straight up into the sky?” Richards was silent for a moment, then continued, “Looks dead out there, doesn’t it?”
    Nightwind knew this was some sort of test Richards was putting them through. A proper answer would clinch his support in their odd search for a treasure of unknown value or composition in a place where it could be buried under thousands of kilos of dust by now.
    The gaunt man said slowly, “Not too dead, not unless those scrubby bushes are dead.” He had sighted a plant less than ten centimeters in diameter. It was a silvery ball on a landscape which should have overpowered it.
    “That’s a chameleon bush. Silver during the day to reflect as much of the sunlight as it can, then turns black at night to absorb whatever heat is left.”
    “Mind if I go look at it?” asked Nightwind.
    “Nope. You’re the ones paying me a fortune each day we’re out. Plant’s not dangerous or anything like that.”
    Nightwind quickly pulled up the hood of his desert suit and flattened the breathing mask across his nose and mouth. He settled the polarizing goggles across his eyes and nodded. As the tiny portal through the glasteel dome opened, he piled out. The quick snapping noise told him Richards wasn’t taking any chances of stray sand working into the cabin of the aircar.
    The man tramped through the sand to the chameleon plant. He saw it was globular — the perfect shape for maximum volume with a minimum of surface area. The “leaves” were circular and overlapping like fish scales. By pinching one of them back, he was able to discover the plant’s secret. The inside of the leaf was black. At sunset, the plant simply reversed all its leaves, the silvered side turning inward as the black came out. Inside the mass of leaves was a slightly damp core. The plant managed to tenaciously guard the precious water stolen from a chary planet. Satisfied with the cursory examination, Nightwind started back in the direction of the hovering aircar.
    He stopped for a moment. The aircar poised less than ten centimeters over the surface, held aloft by magnetic repulsion. The trim vehicle was streamlined wherever possible with the bubble containing the men and controls in the front, a cargo compartment immediately aft and the powerful atomic engine and magnetic generators in the stern. More than half of the nine-meter-long craft was engine. The outer surface was pitted from innumerable sandstorms of herculean intensity. Nightwind couldn’t help musing at the relative calmness of the wind after seeing the damage already wrought to the gleaming exterior of the aircar. The gale force wind had died down to a mere forty kilometers an hour, and the dust was settling back to the dunes. For Rhyl, it was a dead calm.
    The relative clarity made the aircar in the distance stand out like a firefly dropped on brown velvet. Nightwind adjusted his polarizing goggles, wincing at the sting of sand cutting into his skin. A few particles had worked between his goggles and forehead. He quickly twisted the lenses up to five-power magnification. The following aircar snapped into a shimmery focus.
    The heat haze over the distance between them prevented Nightwind from clearly seeing the other aircar. But there was no doubt in his mind who the occupants safely hidden behind the force screen were. If he hadn’t bothered to take a look at the local flora, the chances were excellent he wouldn’t have detected his pursuers.
    He readjusted his goggles and signaled Richards to let him back into the aircar. The door irised open, and he scrambled in bringing a cloud of sand with him.
    Heuser coughed and said, “Damnit, Rod, did you really want half this crummy desert for a souvenir?” The pile of sand around