The Defiant Agents

by Norton, Andre

  “What does it do?” asked Buck practically.

  “I’m not sure. But it is important enough to have a special mention on the tape.” Travis passed the weapon along to Buck and worked another loose from its holder.

  “No way of loading I can see,” Buck said, examining the weapon with care and caution.

  “I don’t think it fires a solid projectile,” Travis replied. “We’ll have to test them outside to find out just what we do have.”

  The Apaches took only three of the weapons, closing the box before they left. And as they wriggled back through the crack door, Travis was visited again by that odd flash of compelling, almost possessive power he had experienced when they had lain in ambush for the Red hunting party. He took a step or two forward until he was able to catch the edge of the reading table and steady himself against it.

  “What is the matter?” Both Buck and Jil-Lee were watching him; apparently neither had felt that sensation. Travis did not reply for a second. He was free of it now. But he was sure of its source; it had not been any backlash of the Red caller! It was rooted here—a compulsion triggered to make the original intentions of the outpost obeyed, a last drag from the sleepers. This place had been set up with a single purpose: to protect and preserve the ancient rulers of Topaz. And perhaps the very presence here of the intruding Terrans had released a force, started an unseen installation.

  Now Travis answered simply: “They want out….”

  Jil-Lee glanced back at the slit door, but Buck still watched Travis.

  “They call?” he asked.

  “In a way,” Travis admitted. But the compulsion had already ebbed; he was free. “It is gone now.”

  “This is not a good place,” Buck observed somberly. “We touch that which should not be held by men of our earth.” He held out the weapon.

  “Did not the People take up the rifles of the Pinda-lick-o-yi for their defense when it was necessary?” Jil-Lee demanded. “We do what we must. After seeing that,” his chin indicated the slit and what lay behind it—”do you wish the Reds to forage here?”

  “Still,” Buck’s words came slowly, “this is a choice between two evils, rather than between an evil and a good—”

  “Then let us see how powerful this evil is!” Jil-Lee headed for the corridor leading to the pillar.

  It was late afternoon when they made their way through the swirling mists of the valley under the archway giving on the former site of the outlaw Tatar camp. Travis sighted the long barrel of the weapon at a small bush backed by a boulder, and he pressed the firing button. There was no way of knowing whether the weapon was loaded except to try it.

  The result of his action was quick—quick and terrifying. There was no sound, no sign of any projectile … ray-gas … or whatever might have issued in answer to his finger movement. But the bush—the bush was no more!

  A black smear made a ragged outline of the extinguished branches and leaves on the rock which had stood behind. The earth might still enclose roots under a thin coating of ash, but the bush was gone!

  “The breath of Naye’nezyani—powerful beyond belief!” Buck broke their horrified silence first. “In truth evil is here!”

  Jil-Lee raised his gun—if gun it could be called—aimed at the rock with the bush silhouette plain to see and fired.

  This time they were able to witness disintegration in progress, the crumble of the stone as if its substance was no more than sand lapped by river water. A pile of blackened rubble remained—nothing more.

  “To use this on a living thing?” Buck protested, horror basing the doubt in his voice.

  “We do not use it against living things,” Travis promised, “but against the ship of the Reds—to cut that to pieces. This will open the shell of the turtle and let us at its meat.”

  Jil-Lee nodded. “Those are true words. But now I agree with your fears of this place, Travis. This is a devil thing and must not be allowed to fall into the hands of those who—”

  “Will use it more freely than we plan to?” Buck wanted to know. “We reserve to ourselves that right because we hold our motives higher? To think that way is also a crooked trail. We will use this means because we must, but afterward….”

  Afterward that warehouse must be closed, the tapes giving the entrance clue destroyed. One part of Travis fought that decision, right though he knew it to be. The towers were the menace he had believed. And what was more discouraging than the risk they now ran, was the belief that the treasure was a poison which could not be destroyed but which might spread from Topaz to Terra.

  Suppose the Western Conference had discovered that storehouse and explored its riches, would they have been any less eager to exploit them? As Buck had pointed out, one’s own ideals could well supply reasons for violence. In the past Terra had been racked by wars of religion, one fanatically held opinion opposed to another. There was no righteousness in such struggles, only fatal ends. The Reds had no right to this new knowledge—but neither did they. It must be locked against the meddling of fools and zealots.

  “Taboo—” Buck spoke that word with an emphasis they could appreciate. Knowledge must be set behind the invisible barriers of taboo, and that could work.

  “These three—no more—we found no other weapons!” Jil-Lee added a warning suggestion.

  “No others,” Buck agreed and Travis echoed, adding:

  “We found tombs of the space people, and these were left with them. Because of our great need we borrowed them, but they must be returned to the dead or trouble will follow. And they may only be used against the fortress of the Reds by us, who first found them and have taken unto ourselves the wrath of disturbed spirits.”

  “Well thought! That is an answer to give the People. The towers are the tombs of dead ones. When we return these they shall be taboo. We are agreed?” Buck asked.

  “We are agreed!”

  Buck tried his weapon on a sapling, saw it vanish into nothingness. None of the Apaches wanted to carry the strange guns against their bodies; the power made them objects of fear, rather than arms to delight a warrior. And when they returned to their temporary camp, they laid all three on a blanket and covered them up. But they could not cover up the memories of what had happened to bush, rock, and tree.

  “If such are their small weapons,” Buck observed that evening, “then what kind of things did they have to balance our heavy armament? Perhaps they were able to burn up worlds!”

  “That may be what happened elsewhere,” Travis replied. “We do not know what put an end to their empire. The capital-planet we found on the first voyage had not been destroyed, but it had been evacuated in haste. One building had not even been stripped of its furnishings.” He remembered the battle he had fought there, he and Ross Murdock and the winged native, standing up to an attack of the ape-things while the winged warrior had used his physical advantage to fly above and bomb the enemies with boxes snatched from the piles….

  “And here they went to sleep in order to wait out some danger—time or disaster—they did not believe would be permanent,” Buck mused.

  Travis thought he would flee from the eyes of the sleepers throughout his dreams that night, but on the contrary he slept heavily, finding it hard to rouse when Jil-Lee awakened him for his watch. But he was alert when he saw a four-footed shape flit out of the shadows, drink water from the stream, and shake itself vigorously in a spray of drops.

  “Naginlta!” he greeted the coyote. Trouble? He could have shouted that question, but he put a tight rein on his impatience and strove to communicate in the only method possible.

  No, what the coyote had come to report was not trouble but the fact that the one he had been set to guard was headed back into the mountains, though others came with her—four others. Nalik’ideyu still watched their camp. Her mate had come for further orders.

  Travis squatted before the animal, cupped
the coyote’s jowls between his palms. Naginlta suffered his touch with only a small whine of uneasiness. With all his power of mental suggestion, Travis strove to reach the keen brain he knew was served by the yellow eyes looking into his.

  The others with Kaydessa were to be led on, taken to the ship. But Kaydessa must not suffer harm. When they reached a spot near-by—Travis thought of a certain rock beyond the pass—then one of the coyotes was to go ahead to the ship. Let the Apaches there know….

  Manulito and Eskelta should also be warned by the sentry along the peaks, but additional alerting would not go amiss. Those four with Kaydessa—they must reach the trap!

  “What was that?” Buck rolled out of his blanket.

  “Naginlta—” The coyote sped back into the dark again. “The Reds have taken the bait, a party of at least four with Kaydessa are moving into the foothills, heading south.”

  But the enemy party was not the only one on the move. In the light of day a sentry’s mirror from a point in the peaks sent another warning down to their camp.

  Out in their mountain meadows the Tatar outlaws were on horseback, moving toward the entrance of the tower valley. Buck knelt by the blanket covering the alien weapons.

  “Now what?”

  “We’ll have to stop them,” Travis replied, but he had no idea of just how they would halt those determined Mongol horsemen.

  17

  There were ten of them riding on small, wiry steppe ponies—men and women both, and well armed. Travis recalled it was the custom of the Horde that the women fought as warriors when necessary. Menlik—there was no mistaking the flapping robe of their leader. And they were singing! The rider behind the shaman thumped with violent energy a drum fastened beside his saddle horn, its heavy boom, boom the same call the Apache had heard before. The Mongols were working themselves into the mood for some desperate effort, Travis deduced. And if they were too deeply under the Red spell, there would be no arguing with them. He could wait no longer.

  The Apache swung down from a ledge near the valley gate, moved into the open and stood waiting, the alien weapon resting across his forearm. If necessary, he intended to give a demonstration with it for an object lesson.

  “Dar-u-gar!” The war cry which had once awakened fear across a quarter of Terra. Thin here, and from only a few throats, but just as menacing.

  Two of the horsemen aimed lances, preparing to ride him down. Travis sighted a tree midway between them and pressed the firing button. This time there was a flash, a flicker of light, to mark the disappearance of a living thing.

  One of the lancers’ ponies reared, squealed in fear. The other kept on his course.

  “Menlik!” Travis shouted. “Hold up your man! I do not want to kill!”

  The shaman called out, but the lancer was already level with the vanished tree, his head half turned on his shoulders to witness the blackened earth where it had stood. Then he dropped his lance, sawed on the reins. A rifle bullet might not have halted his charge, unless it killed or wounded, but what he had just seen was a thing beyond his understanding.

  The tribesmen sat their horses, facing Travis, watching him with the feral eyes of the wolves they claimed as forefathers, wolves that possessed the cunning of the wild, cunning enough not to rush breakneck into unknown danger.

  Travis walked forward. “Menlik, I would talk—”

  There was an outburst from the horsemen, protests from Hulagur and one or two of the others. But the shaman urged his mount into a walking pace toward the Apache until they stood only a few feet from each other—the warrior of the steppes and the Horde facing the warrior of the desert and the People.

  “You have taken a woman from our yurts,” Menlik said, but his eyes were more on the alien gun than on the man who held it. “Brave are you to come again into our land. He who sets foot in the stirrup must mount into the saddle; he who draws blade free of the scabbard must be prepared to use it.”

  “The Horde is not here—I see only a handful of people,” Travis replied. “Does Menlik propose to go up against the Apaches so? Yet there are those who are his greater enemies.”

  “A stealer of women is not such a one as needs a regiment under a general to face him.”

  Suddenly Travis was impatient of the ceremonious talking; there was so little time.

  “Listen, and listen well, Shaman!” He spoke curtly now. “I have not your woman. She is already crossing the mountains southward,” he pointed with his chin—“leading the Reds into a trap.”

  Would Menlik believe him? There was no need, Travis decided, to tell him now that Kaydessa’s part in this affair was involuntary.

  “And you?” The shaman asked the question the Apache had hoped to hear.

  “We,” Travis emphasized that, “march now against those hiding behind in their ship out there.” He indicated the northern plains.

  Menlik raised his head, surveying the land about them with disbelieving, contemptuous appraisal.

  “You are chief then of an army, an army equipped with magic to overcome machines?”

  “One needs no army when he carries this.” For the second time Travis displayed the power of the weapon he carried, this time cutting into shifting rubble an outcrop of cliff wall. Menlik’s expression did not change, though his eyes narrowed.

  The shaman signaled his small company, and they dismounted. Travis was heartened by this sign that Menlik was willing to talk. The Apache made a similar gesture, and Jil-Lee and Buck, their own weapons well in sight, came out to back him. Travis knew that the Tatar had no way of knowing that the three were alone; he well might have believed an unseen troop of Apaches were near-by and so armed.

  “You would talk—then talk!” Menlik ordered.

  This time Travis outlined events with an absence of word embroidery. “Kaydessa leads the Reds into a trap we have set beyond the peaks—four of them ride with her. How many now remain in the ship near the settlement?”

  “There are at least two in the flyer, perhaps eight more in the ship. But there is no getting at them in there.”

  “No?” Travis laughed softly, shifted the weapon on his arm. “Do you not think that this will crack the shell of that nut so that we can get at the meat?”

  Menlik’s eyes flickered to the left, to the tree which was no longer a tree but a thin deposit of ash on seared ground.

  “They can control us with the caller as they did before. If we go up against them, then we are once more gathered into their net—before we reach their ship.”

  “That is true for you of the Horde; it does not affect the People,” Travis returned. “And suppose we burn out their machines? Then will you not be free?”

  “To burn up a tree? Lightning from the skies can do that.”

  “Can lightning,” Buck asked softly, “also make rock as sand of the river?”

  Menlik’s eyes turned to the second example of the alien weapon’s power.

  “Give us proof that this will act against their machines!”

  “What proof, Shaman?” asked Jil-Lee. “Shall we burn down a mountain that you may believe? This is now a matter of time.”

  Travis had a sudden inspiration. “You say that the ‘copter is out. Suppose we use that as a target?”

  “That—that can sweep the flyer from the sky?” Menlik’s disbelief was open.

  Travis wondered if he had gone too far. But they needed to rid themselves of that spying flyer before they dared to move out into the plain. And to use the destruction of the helicopter as an example, would be the best proof he could give of the invincibility of the new Apache arms.

  “Under the right conditions,” he replied stoutly, “yes.”

  “And those conditions?” Menlik demanded.

  “That it must be brought within range. Say, below the level of a neighboring peak where a man may lie in wait to fire.”

 
Silent Apaches faced silent Mongols, and Travis had a chance to taste what might be defeat. But the helicopter must be taken before they advanced toward the ship and the settlement.

  “And, maker of traps, how do you intend to bait this one?” Menlik’s question was an open challenge.

  “You know these Reds better than we,” Travis counterattacked. “How would you bait it, Son of the Blue Wolf?”

  “You say Kaydessa is leading the Reds south; we have but your word for that,” Menlik replied. “Though how it would profit you to lie on such a matter—” He shrugged. “If you do speak the truth, then the ‘copter will circle about the foothills where they entered.”

  “And what would bring the pilot nosing farther in?” the Apache asked.

  Menlik shrugged again. “Any manner of things. The Reds have never ventured too far south; they are suspicious of the heights—with good cause.” His fingers, near the hilt of his tulwar, twitched. “Anything which might suggest that their party is in difficulty would bring them in for a closer look—”

  “Say a fire, with much smoke?” Jil-Lee suggested.

  Menlik spoke over his shoulder to his own party. There was a babble of answer, two or three of the men raising their voices above those of their companions.

  “If set in the right direction, yes,” the shaman conceded. “When do you plan to move, Apaches?”

  “At once!”

  But they did not have wings, and the cross-country march they had to make was a rough journey on foot. Travis’ “at once” stretched into night hours filled with scrambling over rocks, and an early morning of preparations, with always the threat that the helicopter might not return to fly its circling mission over the scene of operations. All they had was Menlik’s assurance that while any party of the Red overlords was away from their well-defended base, the flyer did just that.

  “Might be relaying messages on from a walkie-talkie or something like that,” Buck commented.