Those were the conquerors, and not one of them but had known defeat once and again, and not one of them but had risen to victory. Just now, all mankind was down; but not out, by no means out. Resting, rather, on one knee, shaking the groggy head clear, flexing the muscles, growing strong by the respite, getting ready to resume the struggle. The plight of the human race was desperate, but not too desperate.
Then Darragh saw in his mind those villages and little towns in the South American jungle where his people lived— houses of hewn timber and adobe-like stucco and tight-thatched roofs, with their governments and market places, with their fields here and there for the growing of crops and the grazing of herds. He saw the civilization mankind had rebuilt; the forge, where the blacksmith had found his frade one of dignity and prestige as in brave old days; the looms and the potteries; the village schools, such as the one in which his father had taught from old books that told the story of humanity's greatness and wisdom and courage; even the simple printing presses that produced new books and newspapers, the factories where simple machine tools were achieved, the laboratories where doctors and other scientists wrought.
As a matter of fact, conquered mankind had come back a long way from what the Cold People must have thought was complete destruction. The Cold People had better look out.
One late afternoon, midway of his third week of sailing, Darragh steered his canoe to the southeastern point of the island of Haiti. He needed water and food; he took in sail and let his boat drift close inshore, under some drooping palms. Even as he dropped his anchor stone overboard, he saw through the frondy foliage half a dozen aircraft of the Cold People, dancing like midges among high, streaky clouds overhead.
Had they seen him? Would they investigate? He stood up in the boat, one hand on a palm trunk. He watched while one of the ships dropped down like a pouncing hawk, and another and another. One by one they dipped beyond the belt of tall shaggy-leafed trees inland from his anchorage.
They were landing there, not far away. Maybe they had not sighted him, after all. He, Darragh, was there to scout and spy, and he did not hesitate long. Hurriedly he belted on his saber. That well-sharpened blade had been a legacy from his grandfather, who had inherited it from an ancestor once with a Kentucky cavalry regiment in the Civil War. Kneeling, Darragh tightened the straps of his sandals, said a quick prayer for luck, and stepped out of the canoe to the sandy beach. Stealthily he moved in the direction of those descending ships.
He made careful progress, from the first few palms at the water's edge to the shelter of a bush, beyond to another bush. Then he was among trees and comfortably dense undergrowth, the best of cover. The leaves overhead would screen him effectively from a possible flying observer, and, from long hunting habit, he crouched low among the trunks and bushes, advancing without any rustle of the stems around him.
Up ahead, gray light shone through the green of the jungle. That meant there was open country just beyond. Darragh moved more cautiously still, until he came to the edge of a clearing. Squatting low, he cautiously pulled aside two great femy fronds of leaves, and looked out.
Here in the midst of the jungle of Haiti was a spacious bald circle of earth—as large, perhaps, as an old flying field— and in its center stood a big artificial dome of a patchworky gray substance. Upon the top of this structure was just then descending the last of the ships. As Darragh watched, the ship vanished, as though through a trapdoor or valve. He was looking, as on several occasions of his earlier expedition, at an outpost shelter of the Cold People.
He wished with all his heart for one of the precious cameras his people had been able to make; but such things were jealously kept as scientific instruments, and not even Darragh's audacity had been sufficient to allow him to ask for one. Spence and the other chiefs would have refused, anyway.
The next best thing would be a drawing, and Darragh rather fancied his skill as a draughtsman. From his belt pouch he fished a folded wad of the coarse, tan-tinted paper manufactured by an enterprising fellow in a village that neighbored Darragh's. Another dig in the pouch, and he produced a pencil, hammered out of a strip of lead. He put a sheet of the paper on his bare brown knee, squinted at the scene, and began carefully to draw.
The dome, as Darragh judged, was a good two hundred yards in diameter, and fairly half as high. He had better jot down those estimated figures, and did so. Its curved surface might be of several materials, for the shades of gray were various. Dull, darkish metal in one place, or so it seemed; circles and quadrilaterals of glasslike semi-transparency; irregularly shaped blotches that might be fine-grained stone or possibly, some kind of mortar or cement. Here and there showed ports through which the outer world could be observed. Rectangular panels at regular intervals were furnished with what looked like hinges, so that they might open for doorways.
Darragh wished for something else, one of the few pairs of field glasses that had also made the retreat from the destruction of America. With glasses, he felt, he could be surer about those entry panels—could be sure, too, of the condition of the ground around the dome shelter. He strained his unaided eyes, and guessed that the structure was fairly new, and that the baldness of the clearing was new, too—he could make out no sprouts of young vegetation in the fat dark earth.
Undoubtedly this open space in the jungle had been made by the use of those mysterious rays, snuffing and scalding away the trees and bushes and ferns into clouds of vapor. There were no felled trunks, no chopped-away decaying leaves. Once the clearing was there, the dome had been erected. While he drew, Darragh summed up his findings in his mind.
This might well be one of a group or system of new posts in the tropical southern regions, disturbingly close to where men had been living in comparative safety. The Cold People might have become more numerous, perhaps by emigrations and increased births of new individuals on the planet they had so ruthlessly appropriated. Now, they seemed to be closing in on the tropics. The denuding of the island of Dominica might mean that another outpost would be built there. And more encroachments would come, perhaps into the home jungles of mankind.
Had Spence and the others been right after all? Had their instinct been good, even while he had derided it, that now or never was the time to fight? If man waited to make war, it might well be that war would come and seek him out in his tropical refuge.
Darragh completed his drawing, and attempted a sketch, from memory, of that last ship seen comparatively close at hand. Then he began a careful circuit of the clearing, within the shelter of the trees. At point after point he studied the dome; it presented no arrestingly new features from any observation. A full hour went by as Darragh moved in his circle, and almost as he reached his starting point he saw a sudden shimmer of motion at the dome's summit. A torpedo shape of a flying craft came into view and roared slowly upward. Another made its appearance and fose in its turn. More came. Darragh counted five in all. They drifted off to seaward above the trees, as though on some sort of patrol mission.
The sun was sinking low. Darragh's previous expedition had convinced him that the Cold People were not particularly active in the dark, and he would feel safe in departing from Haiti. He slipped away from the clearing, and headed back toward the place where his dugout waited under those seaside palms.
Moving silently, as before, he was aware of some noisier thing, in the direction of the water's edge.
At once he dropped flat among the low-growing bushes, and lay there for long moments. A slender, bright-blotched snake wriggled by within inches of his face, and his flesh crawled at the sight of its flat head, heavily jowled with poison sacs, but he dared not move to strike or retreat. The snake departed, but the noise continued. Finally Darragh crept forward on hands and knees. It sounded as though some clumsy body, large as a hippopotamus, wallowed at the beach.
He came to where he could peer through some lemon-scented leaves into the open.
There were the palms, there was his boat, and there, close to it, moved something
of a fish-bright gleaming hue, vaguely pyramidal.
One of the Cold People hunched along the water's edge, between him and his boat.
Darragh remained motionless and stared. There was little more than that for him to do. He had never seen one of the Cold People so close at hand before, and he studied the form of the uncouth monster. It seemed swaddled and blurred by a strange sheathlike cloak it wore, apparently some land of insulating armor against the tropical heat. The fabric was as transparent as isinglass and quite supple, as he could see, but it seemed to be of considerable thickness. Each of the tentaclelike organs that served as arms had a close sleevelike covering of it.
The creature's attention was plainly directed to seaward, and Darragh made bold to creep to a new observation point between two trees.
He could see the edge of the sea by the palms, and his boat riding there at its tether. Floating easily above, just clear of the palm fronds, hovered an air vehicle of silvery metal like a twenty-foot cigar. On top of this apparatus perched another Cold Creatine, also draped in transparent armor, and the one on the beach was joined by a third, shuffling into Darragh's view from behind the clump of palms. The two on the ground stood still, examining his boat.
After a moment or so, they turned their armored comb-tops toward each other. Their tentacles vibrated rhythmically, as though they communicated in some weird sign language. Then the one on the top of the aircraft dropped out of sight as though through a trap into the interior, and quickly clambered back with a tangle of lean, dark cordage. This it dropped down to its companions.
The two of them busied themselves here and there beside the boat. They twined and interlaced the cords, very deftly as it seemed to the helplessly-watching Darragh. Then the craft dropped down to the sand, and with awkward but powerful motions the two on shore scrambled upon it. They and the third climbed down inside. A breath's space later, the ship rose gendy.
Half a dozen lines drew taut from ship to water. Then Darragh's boat, with all his possessions, came up from where it lay, in a net of the dark lines. Despairingly Darragh watched, while the craft with its dangling burden floated inland above him, toward the domed shelter.
Darragh forgot caution. He rose and fairly raced back in the same direction. He gained the edge of the clearing in time to see the Cold People's littie ship, still carrying his boat slung beneath it, descend to the top of its home structure and dip out of sight.
CHAPTER III
Wretchedly, softly Darragh voiced a long and black curse. His dugout, with its sail and rudder, and its load of food and equipment, was primitive and sketchy in a high degree; Darragh had known that from the first. But it was all he had had in the way of transportation, provision and base of operations.
He had raced back through the trees without taking any thought whatever. Now, standing still and miserable under the trees, he did some quick and serious thinking.
Those Cold Creatures undoubtedly had noticed his boat by mere chance; but their discovery and seizure of it-leaving him thus stranded and foodless in a strange, wild place far from home—meant that they must divine his presence in the neighborhood. Very soon, therefore, they would come out again to hunt for him and kill him out of hand, as they had once killed almost a full generation of his fellow men.
Then he must flee. With good luck, he might escape far into Haiti's howling inner jungles. But if he did . . . what then? He would be alone, for he knew the Cold People well enough to understand that they would have built their dome fortress on Haiti only after satisfying themselves that no human colony had survived on the island or on any near shore. Even alive, he would be cut off from home, cut off by a vast blue ocean that at that moment seemed as impossible to cross as starry space. With only his sword and knife, could he fell the proper sort of tree, shape and fire-hollow it, equip with rudder and outriggers, weave himself a sail, gather provisions, find his way back to the mouth of the Orinoco without chart or compass?
Darragh very much doubted that he could. The Cold People would be after him. They would quickly discover if he was working at a boat. Then they would close in to finish him. Even if he hid himself, surely they would not scruple to blast away the jungle that he used for shelter. And his effort to gather information to give his fellows, back there at their fumbling war-plans in the South American jungles, would have gone for nothing.
"I've got to get that damned boat back again," he whispered fiercely to himself;
Then night fell, with the abruptness it affects in the tropics.
Darragh lingered at the edge of the Cold People's clearing. A large and hungry mosquito sang near and prodded Dar-ragh's cheek with its bill. He slapped at it—too late. It buzzed away, then returned to pink him again. Brushing at the pest with his hands, he leaned close to a tree and studied the great domed shelter of his enemies.
As the gloom deepened, lights were flaring up inside that dome, behind the patchwork of glass panes. The Cold People needed light in the darkness, Darragh knew. Whatever their sensory system, they could not be properly and efficiendy aware of objects save with light. Darragh, outside in the dark, probably would be hard to observe. He would steal into the open, steal close to the dome.
Thus he reasoned, but it took pluck as well as reason to force himself out into the open. He waited for a full minute, screwing up new determination. Then, crouching double, he stole forward across the bare, black earth.
Overhead shone the host of stars, but no moon; Darragh was thankful for that. At last, after what seemed breathless hours, he came close to the dome. He shifted his direction to avoid a direct approach to any of the lower tier of windowlike spaces. At last he came up against a comfortably opaque curve of rough stony foundation, pressed closed against it, and sidled along until he could peer past the edge of a transparent panel.
He looked into a small square compartment with walls of speckless white, in which half a dozen of the Cold People were ranged at a bench of dull metal, picking daintily with their tentacles at a keyboardlike array of levers and buttons. Some sort of intricate machinery, he righdy judged, that begat power—perhaps an item of the complex refrigeration system that the shelter must demand in order that the Cold People survive. As Darragh looked, a mosquito—might it have been the same that had annoyed him at the edge of the clearing?—buzzed in and assailed the tip of his big straight nose.
Again he struck at his tormentor, and again it nimbly dodged away. Damn all mosquitoes, thought Darragh, as he stooped low and slipped past beneath the groundward edge of the transparent pane to reach another stretch of massive stone wall beyond.
Here, his hands groped along a considerable and apparently deliberate roughness. The surface was incised with lines, one above the other, into which he could slide his fingers. As high as Darragh could reach, those lines were scored into the swell of the rocky wall, like rungs of a ladder.
Ladder, he said to himself. That was what these lines were meant to be. The Cold People could mount upward over such a deeply-cut design, with the creeping vacuum-suction powers of their bases so like the locomotive organs of snails. This, then, would lead to the top. He determined to climb.
He slipped off his sandals and thrust them into his belt. He paused and listened. Then he mounted the curve of the dome, fingers and toes probing for the heavily notched lines. It was not too difficult a feat for an active climber who wanted badly to reach the top, and at that moment Darragh wanted nothing else in the world so badly. His boat had gone inside the dome, up there at the top. If he failed to find that boat of his again, to drag it out somehow and away and at last to the shore of the sea, the Cold People were fairly certain to get him anyway. He might as well be hanged—or rayed—for a sheep as for a lamb.
He wriggled sidewise around two more glasslike panels in the surface of the dome, also around several nozzlelike projections that might have been ray-throwing devices. He wanted to look down into these latter but withstood the temptation. There was the mosquito again, relishfully prodding him in th
e middle of his bare back.
With a furious shudder, Darragh fairly bucked the little insect away. "Get out of here!" he whispered in the night. "Go bite a Cold Creature if you're hungry!"
Then he clung trembling to the notched lines, for his saber-sheath had scraped loudly on the stone. He felt that all the Cold People in the universe must have heard it, that a whole throng of them would burst from inside to surround him. But could they hear? Were they sensitive in any way to sound waves? He had seen them gesturing to each other. Perhaps he still was lucky. He unfastened the saber from his belt and slung it behind his shoulder lest it betray him.
He had mounted a considerable distance by now, and the curve of the dome was not so steep as it had been at first. He made faster progress, and was glad that the mosquito was not plaguing him any more. For a moment he wished he could be a mosquito, unnoticeably small, able to dart here and there and spy out the enemy's secrets. Up he scrambled toward the top of the dome. Ahead of him he saw darkness, more black than the night. It was some sort of an opening. He crept cautiously to the edge of it.
Here a great slice of the dome was slid away into some sort of recess, leaving a gap like that made by the cutting away of a plug in the rind of a plump melon. Darragh moved forward, and found himself crouching at the brink of a sizable quadrangular pit, a good forty feet long by half as wide. At the bottom was a bare glimmer of pale light, oozing up through a floor that appeared to be made of a substance like heavily clouded glass. Upon this floor rested a small aircraft of the Cold People. Darragh leaned farther into the pit to peer. Yes, and his boat rested there beside the flying ship, still wound in the lashings of cord.
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 Page 3
