The sun was fairly high now, and Denning’s vision had returned. As his eyes wandered thoughtfully past the golova, into the blue distance over the Gory Razorjenny, they caught high in the sky a glint of sun on metal.
For a moment Denning stood rigid. He had forgotten completely, forgotten that they were coming.
Then he pointed into the sky. “The rockets!” he shouted. “Rakety!”
In an instant every warrior was on his feet. Denning continued to point toward where he had seen the reflected flash; eyes were shaded and strained.
For perhaps half a minute the blue sky still looked empty. Then one man, then another, then all saw the space rockets; tiny dark specks, almost invisibly high, but visibly descending.
The golova stood with his cloak flung back, his lined and bearded face raised to the heavens; his gloved hand rested uselessly on the worn butt of the automatic pistol at his belt.
“They have found us!” he cried in a loud voice to them all. “Yet perhaps they will not see the village. The warriors must flee into the desert and scatter; the women and children shall remain underground, and hope—”
But even as he spoke they could already make out the long fishlike shapes trailing pale flares of atomic hydrogen, racing nearer second by second. As the men started to run en masse for the tarpaulin-covered cars among the boulders, the rockets slowed in their downward plunge and dropped slowly into a flattening trajectory that carried them over the summits of the range only twenty miles distant even as the first motor sputtered into life.
Denning stood still, numbed, staring skyward. The plan had worked beautifully, as the Colonial Staff had planned it. The direction finders in the rocketships must have located his signal within a few miles. Now they could hardly miss the village.
The golova had not followed his men; he was still standing a few feet away, watching the onrush of the aerial armada. In a low voice, half to himself, the Martian repeated an earlier phrase of his own, “When the rockets come, it is not war—Earthman, will you flee with us or wait here for your own people?”
But there was no time even for an answer. For the first rocket was going over, so low that you could see the open gun ports in its glistening belly armor; as it passed overhead the afterdrive was shut off, and the great machine coasted forward on its momentum two thousand feet above the plateau. That was so the vibration of the drive wouldn’t interfere with the gunners up there—but nothing happened. The first ship was merely observing; its drive flared out again, and it climbed away as the rest came in.
Like most other people in that time of the long peace on Earth, Vic Denning had never seen a war rocket in action.
New weapons had come out of Earth’s laboratories in the past hundred years, and had been outlawed by the Council of the Nations for use on Earth itself; there was almost no one outside the Council and a handful of high military officials and technical experts who knew what those weapons could do. So it was a rare, opportunity for a glance at the shape of things to come, which Denning had in the next few minutes; but somehow he didn’t appreciate it.
The five following rockets cut off their drives, coming over in formation perhaps a mile high; and even as they did so, the roaring of the first rolled down upon the village.
They had come in faster than sound travels on Mars, and until now they had seemed to slide through the sky on noiseless wings of flame. But now the shriek of that first ship’s passage smote Denning’s ears, numbing his nerves and brain; the solid plateau seemed to tremble, and the whole air screamed to the flight of that hundred-foot projectile traveling at half a mile a second.
In that same moment, the destruction began.
From the leading ship stabbed a spear of light so blinding that the day was darkened by it; it struck not at the village, but at a group of battle cars that were zigzagging away among the dunes. Where it touched the iron sand flashed into vapor, and bits of white-hot stuff sputtered out of the fiery cloud to fall hundreds of yards away. In the mere second before the rockets passed on and were over the village, the death ray swung a mile across the desert, and behind it a flaming slash burned brighter than the eye could bear.
Denning knew that another look would leave his vision permanently damaged, if it wasn’t already; he spun about and started to run, shielding his face with his arms. Then hell exploded all around him; the atomic blast had flicked down to strike the village.
Light and incandescent vapor erupted far over his head. The blast of air that swept over him made him cry out in seared agony; he flung himself groveling into the sand, covering his head, and heard the high, triumphant screaming of the man-made thunderbolts as they plowed across the desert, destroying everything.
The rockets passed, but they would swing and come back. They would lace the plateau with flame until nothing living remained.
Or perhaps—He had heard of atomic bombs. A few of those, and even the plateau would no longer exist.
The sky was filled with thunder and weird winnings of air torn by the hurtling ships and their guns. The whole sky was a reverberating bowl where lightning leaped and crackled, aimed and vindictive, lashing down again.
He tried to burrow into the sand; red-hot particles showered down on his bare skin, and he could feel the glare going through him, not through his eyes but through his body. That was a light of atomic combustion, a light that ate your bones away. He realized now, finally, that those who had sent him here had never expected him to live through the attack. His was a suicide mission.
Only when the rockets had passed once more did he dare to raise his eyes and see.
The atomic blasts had ripped the underground village to pieces. That Denning lived was a miracle : the very rocks that had shielded him were split and blackened. Nothing human could be seen in the smoking rubble, not even the wreckage of a machine—only molten metal reached fiery fingers snaking from the glowing scars where the blast had struck.
His skin was agonizingly blistered by the radiation and by the scorching gusts of wind that still whipped across the desert. Far away, almost out of sight over the mountains, the rockets were circling back again, still in unbroken formation, confident, superbly invulnerable; at their height and speed no weapon that Martians had could touch them.
All at once Denning hated them. Up there within those hurtling projectiles of death were Earthmen, men who did not fight but pressed buttons instead. They were pressing buttons now, methodically wiping out a threat to the triumphant march of their safe, soft civilization.
“When the rockets come, it is not war—”
He knew now what vision had shadowed the eyes of the Martian chief, saying that.
The rockets were coming hack again, and this time they would finish it.
But a few miles away, the formation veered aside; with smooth co-ordination, as if stunt flying for an open-mouthed audience, they wheeled into a tight turn and began to circle over the desert. The roar of their driving tubes came down to batter the plateau with sound; then from their belly ports the atomic blast flamed down again.
But this time, where it struck, great clouds of steam leaped far into the air, steam and other than steam, for where the blast struck directly, the water of the ozliero on which its power was being loosed was smashed to hydrogen and oxygen, or to stripped atoms and fragments of atoms. Fire rose with the steam, and an ear-splitting hissing came across the distance to Denning.
He was not long realizing what this new action meant. The lake boiled only for minutes, and afterward flaming clouds of evaporated rock and metal rolled up from where it had been, turning to black smoke that climbed higher and higher almost to the heights where the rockets flew, a mighty pillar of darkness that overshadowed the desolated plateau.
It was all over for the Izgnanniki. The rockets were finishing the job, wiping out of the water supply to make the place forever uninhabitable for men not equipped with the facilities of Earthly engineering. By now, where the oshero had been, was only a great pool of hardening sla
g where water could never rise again.
Only a handful of warriors had escaped, and those would probably be hunted down and exterminated by the vindictive hate of the neighboring tribes.
Denning covered his burning eyes and looked no more toward the pillar of smoke. He felt sicker, more used-up than he had after the fight with Pravdivy; his head throbbed with pain, perhaps his brain had been injured by the radiations, he was battered and bruised where he had fallen among the rocks, his whole skin burned as if he had passed through flame. But over and beyond the physical pain, he felt with a helpless misery that he had seen the end of something for which he had been born out of place and out of time.
He was sitting, up, his back against a glassily fused splinter of rock, when the rocket landed on the desert and a dozen crewmen armed with automatics and flame rifles pushed cautiously into the still-smoldering heaps where the village of the Izgnanniki had been.
Denning was conscious, and when he saw them coming he moved jerkily to pick up something that lay beside him on the ground. They saw that it was an automatic rifle; fumblingly, he raised the weapon to his shoulder, the muzzle pointing waveringly toward the search party, and seemed to be trying unsuccessfully to fire it.
The rocketmen scattered, closed in, and disarmed him without difficulty, the gun slipping from fingers that went suddenly limp. The rifle was useless anyway, its breech mechanism smashed by some flying fragment. He must have picked it up when he dragged himself through the wreckage to where they found him.
As two crewmen lifted Denning to lay his burned and bruised body on a stretcher, he struck at them feebly, crying, “Ya voin Izgnannikikh! Ya Izgnannik!”
On the return march, when the rescued Earthman’s delirium had lapsed into near-unconsciousness, one of the men asked of the lieutenant who walked at the head of the party:
“Sir, did you hear what this guy was saying when we picked him up?”
The officer shook his head, looking toward the great torpedo shape of the rocket lying on the sand a couple of hundred yards in front of them. “I never learned Marsski. What did he say?”
“I don’t know what it meant, sir,” said the crewman a little hesitantly. “He must have been through plenty back there. But what he said, literally, was, “I am a warrior of the Izgnanniki! I am an Izgnannik!—that is, an Outcast.”
THE END.
1947
FAILURE ON TITAN
Terror flared across the Saturnian moons. One of the Woollies, that perfect slave-race, had killed a man! But to Big Bill, shambling away from his bloody, suddenly silent master, the ancient pattern of obedience was unchanged.
BIG BILL LUMBERED swiftly forward across the frozen ground, and behind him came the rest of the work gang—a score of bent and mighty-manlike shapes, draped like Big Bill from head to foot in long white hair.
They moved in a straggling group, but the rhythmic side sway of the great bodies was more uniform than the tread of marching men. Their red eyes peered ahead through the noonday twilight toward the landing strip two hundred yards away, slashed clean and straight across the ragged low-gravity terrain.
There were human figures—three of them—moving along the edge of the strip that was nearer to the cluster of lighted Company buildings. At the distance they all looked alike, big-headed and thick-waisted in their vacuum suits, but even so, Big Bill identified them with ease. Behind those dull red eyes were perceptions wholly alien to Man’s, senses to which the distinctive personalities of the men were things as obvious as are apples or oranges to eyes and fingers.
Brilliant lights flashed on all along the landing strip. Thin nictitating membranes descended over the eyes of the approaching Woollies, and the gang came to a simultaneous halt. They sank slowly to their haunches on the iron-hard, fire-cold surface, and in the act became less like fur-clad men and more like crouching, hairy beasts.
Big Bill hunkered unmoving in his place, but his peculiar senses were probing with an unusual curiosity at the familiar minds of the three men. The one who had just risen from bending over the switchbox that controlled the lights was named Paige, and, when Big Bill’s mind touched his, the Woolly felt an odd apathy behind which something tense and secret smoldered like a fire banked under ashes. And the fire was hate.
The second, who stood stiffly near Paige, was called Doc. In his brain too burned hate, a dense and palpable thing to Big Bill, mixed with a fear which turned the hatred inward on the mind that had given it birth.
The third man was Paul Gedner.
He stood a little apart from the others, gazing into the starry sky from which the rocket would come. For the watching Woollies his tall figure was clothed in a tangible aura of power, commanding all their inborn, robot-like obedience. He towered like a sublime and terrible god between the narrow horizons of Phoebe, over the desolate landscape of weird lights and shadows cast by Saturn and the distant Sun. And in his thoughts the Woollies glimpsed dimly something beyond their understanding—a Plan, worthy of godhead in its cosmic vastness, leading toward some unguessable triumph—and it was that Plan which the other men hated and feared.
There was still a fourth human on Phoebe. But that man’s mind had gone where not even a Woolly’s perceptions could follow it.
Abruptly Gedner gestured, and though the furry watchers could not hear what he said into his helmet radio, they turned as one to stare eastward.
HIGH up in the dusky sky a white star was moving. In seconds it grew through magnitudes; it became a fiery, onrushing comet, then a polished, hurtling cylinder of steel lit up by the glare that went on before it. Swiftly the rocket descended; its underdrive flared briefly out, flattening its trajectory, and it came in over the jagged horizon on a long slant toward the landing strip.
The flame of the drive perished, and an instant later the face of the little moon vibrated to the shriek of steel runners on fire-glazed rock. The ship sledded forward in a shower of red sparks for five hundred yards before friction slowed it to a stop.
The men were running toward the ship even as it was still sliding, their little topheavy figures increasingly dwarfed by the great gleaming hull, though they were coming nearer to the slope on which the Woollies squatted.
Big Bill watched intently as a forward port swung slowly open in the smooth side of the rocket. His mind was still attuned to that of the tall Gedner, and beneath his flat skull stirred an excitement, utterly strange to the Woolly, yet in some way pleasant. The feeling was not Big Bill’s, yet for the moment it was as much a part of him as it was of the man whose thoughts imprinted themselves upon his. Big Bill was a complete extrovert; his mind, like those of all his race, was a sensitive instrument attuned to the mental atmosphere around him, and almost incapable of independent ideation. By that token the Woollies were willing slaves of the introverted, insensitive Earthmen.
The metal gangway had descended to grate against the rocky ground. Two vacuum-suited silhouettes appeared in the lighted airlock and began to clamber down, the first with a self-possessed, leisurely poise, the other showing signs of a jerky impatience. Behind them came another, grotesquely burdened with a weight of luggage which would have given trouble to half a dozen men under Earth gravity.
But Big Bill’s mounting interest was focused on the first of the new arrivals. He sensed clearly that this was the visitor expected, with various and puzzling reactions, by the three waiting men, and also that the coming of this strange, great rocket, long before the scheduled arrival of the little freighter which stopped at long intervals to load the Phoebean jade, had something to do with the fourth man—the one who now lay out on the frigid rock outside the dwelling of the humans, without a vacuum suit, a tarpaulin pulled up over what had been his face.
All these things, Big Bill knew, had one meaning: the fruition of the great Plan was close at hand.
Abruptly the Woolly rose from his squatting position, disregarding the others who remained motionless, and rolled silently forward on his great splayed feet to within a sho
rt distance of the knot of humans. His telepathic sense groped curiously at the mind of the visitor, but told him little, since he was unaccustomed to the interpretation of its vibrations; but his vision served him better. The figure turned to give some order to the porter, who was still on the gangway, and the combined light of Saturn and the Sun fell on the face behind the transparent mask, a feeble illumination that was yet enough for the great red eyes of Big Bill.
He saw that the face was subtly different from any he had known before—more rounded, with less prominent feature, smaller bones better sheathed in flesh, and, more spectacularly and superficially, it was framed in long soft hair which gleamed with almost metallic brightness at the edges of the faceplate.
It was Big Bill’s first glimpse of an Earthly woman, and the sight of this alien being set up a queer unease in his little, heteroplasmic brain.
LEILA FREY gazed round her, at the ill-lit Phoebean landscape, with a look of no great rapture. She said flatly, “I think, if I were in charge of Saturn Colonial, I’d give this rock back to the Indians.”
The tallest of the Company men said, shrugging, “That’s probably what they’ll do before another year is out. It won’t be that long before the market for genuine Phoebean jade has worked down a couple more income levels, to the point where it can’t compete with the just-as-genuine synthetic product.”
“That’s a pre-eminently dirty trick,” said Leila Frey with sudden heat. “Some of my friends bought your jade when you were holding production down and the price was just about out of reach. Now you start flooding the market with the stuff, and—” She had turned to look directly at the tall Earthman, and the Saturn-light was on his face. Her lips parted in surprise and for a moment she was quite dumb; then she essayed a laugh of pleased surprise, which rang hollow inside her air helmet. “Why, Paul! Fancy meeting you here!”
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 15
