Kirk stood up, yelled, as he fought.
Kirk stood up, yelled, as he fought.
Kirk stood up, yelled, as he fought.
The shag started up again, and two more came with him.
There was something queer about the echoes. They got louder and wilder. Men's voices, shouting. Kirk couldn't look, but he heard the yellow girl cry:
"Piruts!"
He heard them coming closer, bare feet scrambling on rock. The shags came higher. He struck down, left and right. One beast lost hold with one sucker and fell into another, knocking it loose. They fell, clawing each other. The third came on. Kirk hit it. It slid its head aside and caught his wrist.
The pain blinded him. He roared and beat at it, but the grip on his wrist pulled him to his knees and almost over the edge. The brute started back down the boulder, taking Kirk with him.
The yellow girl slid suddenly in under Kirk and reached over and took hold of the shag's snout and peeled it back. The beast snuffled and squealed and chewed on Kirk's arm. The girl twisted harder. Blood began to spill down over the shag's teeth.
It let go. Kirk began to hear slingstones whistle. The shag bellowed and took itself back down the rock, fast. The others were scattering away across the plain, driven by stones from expert slingers. Kirk and the girl crouched quietly, trembling and breathing hard.
Somebody called cheerfully, "You might as well come down now."
Kirk supposed they might as well. He climbed down, streaming blood from his torn wrist, with the girl scrambling beside him. The hackles were raised across her yellow shoulders.
Piruts. Kirk thought about Pa and Russ and Frank being driven up that tongue of naked rock. Their own people had killed them, but the Piruts put them there in the first place. And there was Jakk. Besides....
They were Piruts. That was enough. Kirk felt numb inside. It might have been easier if the shags had got them, after all.
The man who had called them was waiting, lounging back against a rock. He was no taller than Kirk, but he was a lot thicker and his hair was red. The bones of his face were heavy and brutal under his beard. His horny overlids were dropped so that only bright black slits showed of his eyes. He was smiling. It was a lazy, white-toothed, cheerful smile, but Kirk didn't like. It made his belly knot up.
"What," said the Pirut, "the hell are you two kids doing out here?"
"Hunting," said Kirk shortly. There were a lot of Piruts among the tumbled rocks. Four, five hands of them.
The red Pirut had stopped looking at Kirk. He was looking at the Captain's yellow daughter. "Well," he said. "Well, well!" He took himself away from the rock and came toward them. He moved slowly, as though he might be sleepy. Kirk didn't like that, either.
He said, "Let us go. We haven't anything to steal."
The Pirut chuckled. "I'm not so sure about that." He was still looking at the yellow girl. "No," he said. "I'm not sure about that at all."
He raised his hand and called the others in. Kirk knew he couldn't fight; he followed the leader.
It was a lot colder in the Pirut cave than it was back in the huts of the colony. Everybody kept close together for warmth, crowded around the scanty heat-stones. There was a moaning draft from somewhere that kept Kirk's hair stirring, and there were babies crying. Babies that didn't sound any different from the one at home.
Kirk chewed up the last of his handful of pemmican, made of shag meat and sour berries, and was thankful for a full belly. The yellow girl crouched on the cold stone, not saying anything, her arms around her knees. The Pirut women watched her out of hostile eyes.
Samel, the red Pirut who had turned out to be some sort of an Officer, watched her too, but his eyes were not hostile.
"Close-mouthed piece, aren't you?" he said. He threw a scrap of bone at a wiry black girl huddled over the heat, and laughed. "Sada," he yelled, "get her to give you lessons, will you?"
Everybody enjoyed that. Sada called him a name and turned her back. Samel's black eyes came back to the yellow girl.
"You won't tell who you are. That means you're somebody. An Officer's daughter, likely. Maybe even the Captain's."
Some flicker in the girl's eyes must have told him he'd hit home. He jumped up and shouted, "Hey! All of you, look here! We've got somebody—we've got the Captain's daughter!"
The mob stirred and moved in. People began to shout, to curse and make animal noises of sheer hate. For a minute Kirk thought he and the girl were going to be torn apart. He shivered violently, and the hate was so strong in the air he could smell it.
Samel pulled out his sling lazily and loaded it. The sweep of his arm stopped part of the crowd, and the rest quieted down enough to hear him say:
"Hold it! Sit down, you fools! The girl's gold. We can buy things with her."
Kirk didn't get that word 'gold', but he understood the rest of it. It was what he had told her, himself.
He wished the babies would stop crying. It was hard to hate these people so much when you knew they had kids just like the one at home, wailing in the cold.
The mob relaxed sullenly. The Captain's daughter spoke suddenly, very clear across the muttering quiet of the crowd.
"You can't buy your way into the colony with me. They'll kill me, like they did the three Hans, only this time they won't wait as long."
She was telling the truth. Samel didn't like it, and Kirk liked it even less, but she was. The muscle twitched under Kirk's eye. It was a hell of a world. You couldn't keep straight in it at all.
"All right," said Samel. "But we can buy heat with you. And maybe before we do we can get some things out of you,free." He moved in close to her, staring down with sultry eyes. He said huskily, "And don't think we can't, baby. And don't think we wouldn't enjoy it!"
She shivered, but her eyes didn't flinch. She told him steadily, "If it's about the Ship, you can do what you want and go to hell with it."
"I watched you up there on that rock," said Samel slowly. "Both of you. You have guts, all right. But I wonder...." He let his gaze slide down over her long, arrogant body. "It would be a pity to spoil that."
The girl Sada pushed her way out from the crowd.
"You big red son of a she-shag! Look at us! Look at this lousy cave, and those boxes of heat-stones that wouldn't keep a rat-pup warm, and then think of these swine sitting up there on their plateau, fat and happy, toasting their feet!Theydrove us out here to starve and freeze.They'rerobbing the gullies of heat-stones. Listen to those kids crying! They haven't been warm since they were born, and whose fault is it? And you worry about spoiling that yellow vixen!"
Samel said pleasantly, "Shut up that screeching." He shoved the girl aside hard enough to sit her down on the stones and then knelt beside the Captain's daughter. He pulled her head back by the yellow hair and looked down into her eyes and said:
"But she's right. Pretty soon there aren't going to be any more heat-stones at all. Pretty soon we're all going to die of the cold. But you won't, you up there on the plateau. You can watch us freeze on the rocks and feel pretty smart about it. And you'll have the Ship."
He drew his breath in, sharp, as though something hurt him. His horny lids dropped and his lips twisted like a child about to cry with pain. His hand tightened suddenly in the girl's hair, jerking her head back hard on the taut curve of her neck. He slapped her twice across the face and let her go and stood up, backing off and trembling.
"You'll have the Ship," he whispered, "for always."
Kirk got up. He felt sick, and there were red clouds across his eyes. The Captain's yellow daughter. He'd cuffed her himself. Why did this happen to him when somebody else did it? It was a hell of a world and he was lost in it. All he knew was that he wanted to hit Samel hard enough to kill him.
Instead somebody hit Kirk from behind with a sap, not very hard. He fell on his face. From a great distance he heard the girl Sada screaming:
"You and your silly Ship! What does the Ship matter when we're all going to die?"
"It matters." Samel's voice was husky and queer. "It's the beginning and the end. What it has in it belongs to us. It would make us fat and warm and strong, so that we could rule the whole world. My father died trying to reach it, and his father before him, andhisfather before that. The Ship matters. It's everything."
It was still in the cave. It was as though his voice had wiped it clean of sound. Kirk shivered. And in the silence the babies cried, a thin wailing lamentation to the cold.
Kirk got up on his knees. "Wait a minute," he said thickly. "Wait, you're going at this wrong. We all are. Wait, and listen to me."
Samel looked at him as though he'd forgotten Kirk existed. Somebody said, "Shall I fix him, Boss?" Samel started to nod, and then something in Kirk's face changed his mind.
"He put up a good fight out there. Let him talk."
Kirk got his feet under him. His head throbbed, and falling on his bandaged wrist hadn't done it any good, but at least he could see, and talk. He was scared, because what he was going to say was against everything he'd been taught since he was born, but he had to say it. There might be a lot of things wrong with it, but basically it was right, and he knew it. He knew Jakk Randl would have said it, too.
He did not look at the Captain's yellow daughter.
"Listen," he said, loud enough so that everyone could hear him. "You're wrong about one thing. We don't have heat-stones up there on the plateau. Not the people like me, the little guys, the Hans. We starve and freeze just like you do, and our babies cry just as loud. And we sit, like you do, looking at the Ship and wondering."
He took a deep breath. They were watching him, not believing nor disbelieving. Just listening, feeling him, waiting for something he said to hit them so they'd know whether he was lying or not.
"Some of us have wondered a lot lately, about that Ship. The Officers don't let us near it. They never have, no nearer than you out here in the gullies. But somebodydidget close to it, one man who believed in what he was doing, and he saw...."
He told them what Jakk had seen, thinking about Jakk's blood running red through his fingers and the fire dying in his eyes.
"I'm a Ship's man. I've been taught to hate and fear you. You killed my friend. But the Officers killed my father, without even trying to save him. And I think we're fools, we Hans and you Piruts. We're all just people, with empty stomachs and cold backs and kids that never get warm. Why should we kill each other at those walls?"
He had them. He could hear the mob suck its breath in like one man. Samel's eyes were hot enough to burn. Kirk cried out:
"It's the Officers we ought to hate! It's the Officers who hold the Ship, and hide the heat-stones in it! It's the Officers we ought to fight, not each other!"
The mob screamed out of a single throat. Out of the tail of his eye Kirk saw the yellow girl spring up. Her hands were clenched and her face was a mask of horror, of hatred and a strange pleading. She was saying something, but the mob yell drowned her words, and when it died down somebody had the girl, holding her arms and her mouth.
"All right," said Samel hoarsely, and licked his lips. "All right. What are you going to do about it? What's your scheme?"
"I'm going to take you there, the secret way. I'm going to take you to the Ship, so that we can break the Officers and live, together."
He did not look at the Captain's yellow daughter.
The northern escarpment of the plateau fell sheer into a deep gorge. Kirk led them into it, Samel and six hands of Pirut men and the yellow girl with a strip of hide to gag her mouth. The darkness had come down, so thick and black that pupils at their widest spread could hardly make anything from the starshine. They went slowly, but almost without sound.
Kirk watched the dead Ship, thrusting high above them against the cold stars. Presently he stopped and whispered, "Here, I think."
They stopped. Kirk went alone to the cliff wall and felt along it. His hands slipped behind a curtain of moss, into a crack barely big enough for a man's shoulder. There seemed to be a blank wall beyond, but he felt sideways, and found that Jakk had been right. There was a way.
He went back to Samel. "It's there. Come on."
"No!" Samel caught his arm. He was looking up, at the broken Ship on the cliff-top, and he was trembling. "Wait," he whispered. "I want to know this, to keep it."
Kirk followed his rapt stare. The Ship, brooding over the plain, dominant even in death. The Ship that had brought them, Officers and Hans, in some strange forgotten way from some forgotten place, and died in the bringing. The Ship, Untouchable....
Kirk shivered, violently. His heartbeats choked him. And then Samel was speaking, no louder than a whisper, to the night and the Ship.
"We came from the sky, following, hunting. It had power and gold in its belly, and they kept us from it. They kept us Outside, away from the Ship, and we starved and froze and waited. And now we're going in." He caught his breath between his teeth and shuddered. "And now we're going in!"
Kirk whispered, "What are 'power' and 'gold'?"
"I don't know. Something in the legend. Something men live for, and die for. We'll know soon."
"We'll know soon. Samel, remember the bargain. No killing or plundering among the Hans."
Samel smiled, but the muscles ran hard along his jaw.
"If you're telling the truth, there won't be any reason for it. We'll let the Officers decide whethertheydie or not." Samel started forward. "The Ship," he said softly, and laughed. "The Ship!"
They went toward the cleft in the rock. Somebody said, "Hey, it's warm in this gorge!" Kirk realized then that he wasn't cold, and wondered why. Then he smiled bitterly. Sure. The Officers had found a vein of heat-stones, probably just under the soil where they were standing. The gorge had never been a source of the stones, the crystal rocks that looked just like the ones scattered all over except that they had a tiny light in them and burned you when you picked them up. But the Officers must be getting them from here and taking them up to the Ship, to hoard.
Most of his superstitious chill went away when he thought about that.
Inside the cleft was a shaft leading up, tool-shaped here and there, with rusty metal bars set in the rock. Kirk led the way. There was no sound made loud enough to be heard over the wind that blew across the plateau. Kirk and Samel came up out of the shaft and took the two guards from behind easily enough, and went on to the Ship.
Just for a moment, looking down across the plain, thinking about Ma Kirk and Lil and the little ones, Kirk was scared. He'd let the Piruts in. If Samel didn't keep his word, if anything....
But nothing would go wrong. There was no reason for it to. He was telling the truth, and once the Ship was broken into there was no quarrel between the Piruts and the Hans. They were allies against the Officers.
He remembered what he'd said to Lil, about the Captain's yellow daughter.
Samel left a guard behind and went into the Ship.
Darkness and cold and the smell of a place that hasn't been used or lived in for a long, long time, and the grit of rusty metal under bare feet. They went very slowly, and the yellow girl whimpered in her gag.
They couldn't really be silent, slipping and blundering in blackness too thick even for their eyes, over buckled deck plates and around broken walls. Somebody heard them and called out, and the yellow girl struggled like a speared shag.
Kirk shivered and the palms of his hands were wet. He could feel the Ship like a living presence in the dark.
The somebody called again, with fear in his voice. They stumbled down a long, tilted passageway and came into a little room with a great gash in it looking out over the gorge. There was a barred door in one wall, and a man sitting in front of it over a tiny box of heat-stones.
The Captain.
He got up, a lean grey man moving with dignity. He didn't drop his spear, but he didn't try to use it, either. He didn't say anything. His eyes took them in, in the dull glow of the heat-stones—Kirk and Samel and the Piruts, and then the yellow girl, gagged and held by the arms. His eyes blazed, then. Kirk's heart jolted. It was just the way Pa might have looked at Lil.
He said roughly, thinking of Pa, "Don't try anything, and you won't get hurt. I've made a pact with the Piruts. There's to be no more fighting and we take the Ship together, share and share alike. The Officers can obey, or take what's coming to them. Where are the heat-stones?"
The Captain stared at him. His face had no expression. He said, "Let my daughter go."
Samel started forward. The Captain raised his spear. "Let my daughter go!" The Piruts raised their weapons. Samel looked around the room, at the single door behind them, and grinned.
"Sure," he said. "Why not? Let her go."
They let her go. She tore off the gag and ran to her father and stood by him, glaring at the Piruts with hot black eyes. Neither one said anything.
"All right," said Samel lazily. "Now where are the stones?"
"There." The Captain pointed at the tiny box at his feet. "Those are all the heat-stones there are in the Ship."
Kirk cried, "That's a lie!"
The Captain looked at him. "Tell your friends to go and search."
"What about that door behind you?"
"There are no stones in there."
Kirk laughed. The laugh was not pleasant. He was thinking of the cold huts of the Hans and the thin babies that cried, and Jakk Randl dying on the pillbox wall, telling him what he'd seen.
"You lie. You bring the stones up out of the gorge and hide them here. Jakk Randl saw your daughter doing it."
"There was only a tiny pipe of stones in the gorge. This is almost the last of them. We used them rather than take from the community supply."
Samel smiled his lazy smile and started toward the barred door. His eyes had a queer wild shine to them. The Captain cried out:
"Wait! Wait, and let me speak!"
Samel looked at the door and his breath made a little sob in his throat. "All right," he said hoarsely. "I can wait."
He wasn't thinking about the heat-stones so much then. He was thinking of the words of the legend, power and gold.
The Captain said quietly, "You can kill me, and go on. But I ask you not to. I ask you to believe me. There are no heat-stones in that room. The bar hasn't been lifted since the Crash. I ask you not to violate a sacred trust."
Kirk scowled and looked at the bar. It didn't look as though it had been lifted since the Crash. He began to be uneasy.
Samel spoke silkily. "Sacred trust, eh? Something that belongs to us, the Piruts. Something we've waited for, longer than anyone knows."
The Captain nodded. He seemed very tired. "I should have remembered that. The Legend grows a little hazy.... You Piruts caused the Crash. You followed our Ship and attacked it, and in the battle your own ship was destroyed. You made land somehow in little ships carried inside the big one. After we crashed you tried again to take what is in the Ship, and we drove you out into the gullies and kept you there."
"Ever since," answered Samel huskily. "Starving and freezing."
"We've starved and frozen, too, all of us—Officers and Hans alike. But we had a sacred trust in this Ship. We've guarded it. I think at first the Officers of that day thought that someone would come from—from wherever the Ship came from, and take them back. No one ever did. And in the struggle to live, everything has been lost. The only thing left is the knowledge that we Officers had a duty, a trust, and we've guarded this door night and day since the Crash."
"What's behind it?" asked Samel. "What's behind it?"
"Even that is lost."
Samel laughed and started forward. He caught the Captain's half-raised spear in his hands and broke it and pushed him away with the yellow girl. He took hold of the bar and lifted. Kirk and the packed mass of Piruts swayed forward like one man.
It fought him. He heaved on the bar, and sweat ran dark on his red body-hair and the veins stood like ropes on his forehead, but the rust held. Samel struggled, crying like a child.
Kirk thought: "He told the truth, the Captain did. No heat-stones, and I've let the Piruts in." He began to shiver. He started to shout—
The bar screamed like a man in torment and swung back in Samel's hands, and the door was open.
The pale glow of the heat-stones filtered through the opening. Kirk saw a box with black marks on it—DANGER. ATOBLAST HIGH EXPLOSIVE—and above that a much smaller box made of metal, on a shelf. The black marks on the first box didn't mean anything to anybody. The father of the Captain's great-grandfather had remembered that there was such a thing as reading.
Samel reached out and took the smaller box, which was at eye level, and locked with a heavy lock, and sealed. He put it down and took the Captain's broken spear and tore the lock away.
The Captain and his yellow daughter stood like dead things, watching. Kirk's heart was pounding in his throat. The secret of the Ship, the sacred thing, the gold and power that had caused the Crash—
Samel's big red hand pulled out a flat bundle of metal sheets, marked with marks like the first box.
Treaty of Alliance between the Sovereign Earth and the Union of Jovian Moons, providing for Earthly colonization and development of the said Moons, and mutual aid against Aggressor Worlds.
A single sheet fell out of the bundle. "...have taken the precaution of sending the treaty secretly in a ship of colonists, in care of the captain who knows nothing of its nature. It has been rumored that our mutual enemy, the Martio-Venusian Alliance, may try to intercept it, possibly with the aid of hired pirates. This would, as you know, mean war. It is my prayer that the treaty will safely...."
Samel stared at the bundle. He shook it, his face looking dazed, like a man just hit in the stomach. Then he threw it down and shook the box. It was empty. In a black fury he turned on the larger box and ripped the cover back, and there was nothing under it but thick transparent bottles with heavy caps, holding a tiny bit of matter in oily liquid.
There was silence in the room, thick with the breathing of stunned and angry men.
"Power," said Samel. "Power, and gold! Nothing! Nothing to make even a spear-head!"
He picked up the empty box and the bundle and hurled them out through the riven wall into the gorge. Then he caught up the larger box and threw it after.
Kirk had time to see tears running out of Samel's eyes. After that there was an agony of light and sound and motion, and then nothing.
The first thing he knew about was heat. More heat than he'd ever felt in his life, pouring over him. He opened his eyes.
Men were piled against the walls, beginning to struggle back to life. The Ship had changed position. Samel was crouched with his arms around his knees, motionless, staring at nothing. The yellow girl was helping her father out of a mound of Piruts. And it was hot.
There was light beating in through the broken wall. Kirk crawled over and peered out, his pupils contracted to little points.
The bottom of the gorge was split open, and it was burning. The father of the Captain's great-grandfather had remembered vaguely something about radioactivity and crystalline rocks that harnessed it and made heat. The father ofhisgreat-grandfather had had great hopes for the unique form of radiation and what it could be made to do. But all his time was taken hunting meat and heat-stones, and growing moss.
The heavy heart of the little world was burning up through the crack, and for the first time, Kirk was really warm.
Kirk put his hand on Samel's shoulder. "You got heat," he said. "That's better than power and gold, whatever they are."
Samel shivered and closed his eyes. His hands went with blind speed to Kirk's throat and closed, hard. His mouth was twisted, like a child crying with pain.
Kirk clawed at his thumbs. "Don't be a fool!" he croaked. "There's heat now. Heat for everybody. The kids won't cry any more. Samel, bring your people in out of the gullies!"
"Heat," repeated Samel. "Yeah." He took his hands away slowly. "There's that, isn't there? Heat."
The Captain echoed, "Heat." He went to the broken wall and blinked at the light. "The heat-stones were almost gone. I thought we were going to die. And now...." He shook his shoulders, like a man freed of a burden. "Now there's no more need to guard the Ship. Perhaps that's what we've been guarding it for, to save us in time of need."
Kirk said humbly, "I'm sorry."
"You were honest. You believed you were right. But taking my daughter...."
"I deserve the sucking-plant."
"What's done is done, and it's turned out right."
People were clamoring outside the Ship. Kirk was sweating. He tasted it, and laughed, pulling in his belly and spreading his chest.
"Heat," he said. "And no more fighting with the Piruts. Maybe there's some way we can roof the gorge and bring the heat up into the fields so the moss will grow better. And there's a lot of this world out beyond the gullies. We've never been able to explore it because of the Piruts. Samel, do you know what lies beyond you?"
Samel shook his head. "We had to eat and hunt for heat-stones, too."
"A whole world," said Kirk, "just waiting for us. Maybe we'll find other gorges like this one. Maybe places with better soil. The kids can grow up warm and fat, and have kids of their own...."
He turned around and looked at the Captain's yellow daughter.
He said, "Do you still hate me?"
Her yellow shoulders twitched. She turned her back on him, and she was so beautiful he hurt with it. He went up behind her.
"I said I was sorry."
She didn't answer. A close-mouthed piece.
"I lied."
Her head jerked a little and her earcups moved.
"I'm not sorry I took you with me. I'm not sorry I kissed you on the rock. Are you sorry you saved my life?"
She tossed her head. "I didn't."
"You did so. You twisted that shag's nose half off. Why?"
She turned around, hot-eyed, and slapped him. He laughed. He took her in his arms and waited till she quit clawing and struggling. Then he kissed her. Presently she kissed him back.
"You don't talk much," he said. "But who wants talk?"