“My guess,” said Steve, growling, “is that somebody’s trying to talk them into making a rush and they haven’t much stomach for it. We did plenty of damage in those woods!”
“I saw you were safe,” said Frances uneasily. “But I’ve been trying to help the women, and some of the men are wounded. I was so afraid the people you were trying to help would kill you.”
“I was pulling they wouldn’t,” said Steve drily. “And there was a shaving-kit in those suitcases, remember. I was shaved. To our friends that meant I was civilized. The guerillas don’t bother.”
Frances peered out the window toward the leaping flames. At least, she seemed to.
Actually, it was an excuse for being comfortingly close to Steve for a moment.
“Do you think they’ll try to storm the house?”
“Probably,” said Steve reflectively. “It’s a long arrow-shot to the fire. But maybe the crossbow could reach it. Get that chap with the crossbow, Frances. Tell him to come up here. And whoever has the strongest bow.”
“But—Steve! You told Lucky and me that you warned some people once that the guerillas were coming, and they beat off the guerillas, and—bombs fell and wiped them out.”
“Yes,” said Steve curtly. “Guerillas and looters are wiping out the last traces of civilization, and so long as they’re winning, the people with planes and bombs don’t interfere. But if anybody is strong enough to stand off looters, somebody among the looters talks into a pocket radio and a plane takes care of the situation. Economical! How to destroy a civilization: give bandits a free hand and use bombs only where decency is able to defend itself! Go get that cross-bowman and somebody with a strong bow, won’t you?”
She hesitated, and he kissed her, there in the darkness by the open window.
“We’re chaperoned, now,” he said drily. “Go on!”
She went away, feeling her way down the unlighted steps to the great living room with its feeble flickering ruddy light. When she came back, two of the fugitives came with her.
“The guerillas are holding a council of war, down by the fire there,” Steve told them. “They’re working out plans for storming the house. Can you drop an arrow or two or a bolt or two among them?”
“I ain’t a expert,” the bowman said wearily. “I made a bow and arrows because there wasn’t anything else to shoot with.”
“And as for me, I thought this crossbow would be good,” the crossbowman admitted. “And I did get a couple of guerillas. But I’m no sharpshooter.”
“Try it just the same,” Steve urged. “Just let the thing fly high and fall near the fire. I guarantee results.”
Frances caught her breath. He could. An arrow shot into the air, however inexpertly aimed to fall among the men about the campfire, would have one chance in a thousand or two of striking one of the figures. And if one had a crater-stone which controlled chance, that one-in-a-thousand chance was the only one which could happen.
The bowman loosed an arrow, aimed high and pulled all the way back. There was a long, long wait. Then a sudden startled hubbub about the fire.
“It hit,” said Steve. “Now you two, take turns and let off as many as you can as fast as you can. I think you’ll be lucky.”
The crossbowman loosed a bolt. The bowman, another arrow. The crossbowman gain. The archer. Yells and screams and howls of fury came from the fire circle.
There was no suspicion that the missiles came from the house. The fire was too accurate and too deadly. The guerillas thought they were being ambushed from the woods and undergrowth. They dived away from the fire and sought their attackers. They found—sometimes—each other.
* * * *
A half hour later there was a lurid red glow over a hilltop, and Steve raged impotently.
“They’ve fired the generator-shack!” he told Frances bitterly. “And I’d figured we’d start using electricity in a day or two. Maybe they’ll wreck the dam.”
He stood irresolute a moment, and then fury got the best of him.
“I’m going out,” he said savagely. “I’m safe enough; we’ve got a date for five years from now, with Lucky.”
“We’ll—be together in five years,” said Frances shakily, “but we won’t necessarily be alive, Steve! If anything happens to you—”
“Use the crater-stone,” he told her. “I’m going out!”
He went downstairs, still raging. He summoned two of the newcomers and had them stand guard by a repaired, battered door—with no faintest light behind it—while he opened it silently and slipped out into the darkness.
Despite his fury, he was cautious. He lay close behind the wall for a long time. He heard no sounds which were not obviously natural. No one massed for an attack, certainly. After a long time he moved away from the building. He found nothing, save one groaning figure which he avoided.
An hour after his first emergence, he heard a low muttering sound. He trailed it, moving with infinite caution. He knew the ground about the house now, and he was able to progress with Indianlike silence.
He found a man. One man, alone. That one man muttered quietly, and stopped as if listening for a reply, and muttered again. He was not speaking English. Steve could not hear the syllables clearly enough to tell what the language was, but he knew that it was not English.
There was a surge of frenzied hatred which swept over him. Then he lay still. Very still. He waited until the conversation was ended. There was a tiny clicking sound, and then a stirring where the talk had been. A man moved away. One man only.
Steve let him get well on ahead, and then trailed. A mile on, he grew deliberately careless. He limped. He crashed through bushes. He made whimpering noises to himself. He heard the sounds of the other man’s progress stop. He blundered on, moaning a little, and limping more markedly than before.
Then he heard a thrashing. He snarled in a high-pitched, scared tone:
“Who’s that?”
“Me,” said a voice in the darkness, somehow amused. “You hurt?”
“Yeah!” snarled Steve.
He seemed to stumble and pitch headlong. The other man came to him as he rolled and grumbled. Steve got his legs under him. He was crouched when the other figure loomed over him. He rose, and the little foil struck aside a branch and slid into flesh with the curious sliding resistance Steve had learned to know.
Three minutes later he had found a small instrument which could be concealed under a man’s armpit. He reflected with some grimness that the discovery justified his unwarned attack, which would have been assassination under other circumstances. But atomic war allowed of no ethics at all.
This man had been with the guerilla band. He’d lingered after his fellows fled. They thought they were attacked by deadly figures from the wood. They could not imagine, of course, that arrows and crossbow bolts could be shot with such absolute accuracy from the house The chances against every missile finding its target would have been too great to believe in, and they knew of no solution to the paradox of the indeterminate. So the guerillas had fled into the darkness, seeing enemies behind every tree-trunk, and frequently finding them.
Only this man had remained until all was quiet, and then he’d fired the dynamo-shed as a minor blow, and later still he’d used this pocket microwave transmitter. He was a spy for the people with planes and bombs, guiding guerillas to loot and burn and kill, so that any trace of human life above the savage stage would be eradicated.
The burning question was, would he have reported a defense by people civilized enough to need bombing, or on a strictly barbaric level? Would he have reported the attackers from the dark as another band of guerillas who would undoubtedly carry out the mission the defeated looters had in mind?
* * * *
Back at the house, Steve consulted with Frances. He showed her the little transmitter and no less than two automatic pistols and a precious store of cartridges he’d found on the spy’s body.
“They were routed with arrows,” he told her, frowni
ng. “They also thought they were finding enemies all over the woods, though they were actually fighting each other. The logical thing for him to report would be that his gang ran into another, which chased his gang off to do the murdering and raping his mob planned, themselves. But I think we’d better move away eight or ten miles for a week or so, just in case this house is bombed.”
Frances shook her head.
“We can’t do it, Steve. One of the babies is sick. Desperately sick. And two of the men couldn’t walk ten miles. All of them are completely worn out. They just can’t go any farther! They’ve been fighting a rear-guard action for four days already. They’re exhausted. So—I used my crater-stone. I pulled for it that the baby’d get well and be playing in the sun in front of the house day after tomorrow. And the crater-stone warmed.”
Steve considered.
“Then it will happen. Crazy, isn’t it? If the baby can play in front of the house day after tomorrow, there can’t be a bombing. Evidently it’s on the dice that we can escape for awhile, and the possibilities which would prevent it are blocked off now. But I wish you wouldn’t use those things, Frances! They must be radioactive when they warm up. So I’ve got to figure out a way to do what they do, without them.”
“I wish you could, Steve. If I could understand, it wouldn’t seem so much like magic.”
He ran his hand through his hair, in exasperation.
“But it’s not magic. It’s physics! It’s no more magic than radar. If you’d read all the way through my copy-books you’d understand it perfectly. It’s simply forced resonance. We picture something in our minds and the crater-stone amplifies it, and the happening we imagine—if it exists in a possible future—gets charged up with that extra energy, and the equilibrium of things in general can only be restored by that thing happening. That’s all. It’s perfectly simple.”
He looked longingly at the tiny microwave set.
“I’d like to look this thing over, but I need good light and it’s hours until dawn. Go get some sleep.”
Himself, he went out again and to the still-glowing embers of the generator-house by the dam. The dynamo was ruined. The reek of scorched insulation mingled with the stinging smell of smouldering wood. Steve was too disheartened to try to quench the embers with water from the pond.
“We’re savages,” he told himself savagely. “We fight with bows and arrows. We’ve no lamps—not even candles—and our only light is an open fire. Those crater-stones are simply freaks. Maybe Frances and I can keep going with them, but we can’t build up a civilization with a few hunks of accidental mineral. Now we’ve a pack of refugees on our hands and we can’t feed them, and the electricity I figured I could tinker with has gone to the devil!”
He heard his own voice, complaining and querulous. He stopped.
“Maybe I’d better go out and cut my throat,” he said wryly. “I’ll cart some fish back to the house and poke into that radio set as soon as it’s light.”
He did. There was no point in trying to capture individual fish. He hauled the whole trap out of the water and slung it over his shoulder. One of the younger fugitives had been sent scouting. He helped Steve bear the load. Steve had noticed the boy—a gangling youngster of sixteen or thereabouts.
“Bob,” said Steve. “Do you know anything about electricity?”
“I had a television set,” the boy told him awkwardly. “I put it together myself, and it worked.”
“M-mmm,” Steve began. “There’s a generator up by the dam at the end of the pond. It did make electricity to light and heat the house. Those fellows last night burned down its shed. It looks like it’s ruined, but maybe some of the inner layers of wire can be salvaged and we can rewind it by hand. Want to take a look at it?”
“Yes, sir!” The boy’s face lighted up.
“Go to it, then,” said Steve.
* * * *
When he reached the house, dawnlight was beginning, to the east. He turned over the fish to a competent-looking young farmer, on sentry duty near the house. And Frances had not gone to sleep. She was watching for him. She slipped her hand into his.
“You seemed so uneasy, Steve, when you went out. Do you feel better now?”
“Outside of various problems,” he said drily, “such as how to find food for all these people, and how to make a ruined generator generate electricity, and how—without information or equipment—to make something that will do what the crater-stones do so we can understand ’em and make the most of them, and how to keep guerillas away without being suspected of holding on to the decencies of life.”
He almost ran out of breath.
“In short, outside of feeling that there’s not much use in trying, I’m all right.”
She bent close and whispered in his ear.
“Thanks,” he said moodily. “The feeling is mutual. But I insist that until I’m something more than a witch doctor doing mumbo-jumbo with magic stones, until I’m a civilized man again—Oh, blast it!” Then he said abruptly, “The light’s good enough. I’m going to look at that pocket radio.”
She ran indoors and brought it to him. He regarded it sourly.
“Only a spy should ever see this. So just possibly, in case a spy was killed by accident, they might have tricked it up. I’ll be a little bit cagey.”
He moved a hundred feet away. He worked busily, while she watched him. Presently there was a sharp popping sound and she gasped. But he waved his hand reassuringly. After a few moments be came back.
“Thorough, systematic people, our friends with planes and bombs! If you open this thing the obvious way, it explodes. I cut it open from the back, so it didn’t. That popping you heard was the detonator-cap, after I’d taken out the explosive.”
He spread out the opened small contrivance. There were tiny, almost microscopic radio-tubes. There were infinitesimal conductors and inductances. A minute battery. And there were two dials beside the midget microphone and miniature speaker.
He regarded it for a long time.
“Nice,” he said at last, ironically. “Wonderfully nice. It’s a microwave set. If a plane’s high enough in the stratosphere, this can contact it even several hundred miles away. They beam the microwaves by using the foil speaker-cone as a reflector. Look! This dial is set to a fixed frequency. It points to the source of a signal of that frequency only. The odds are that it’s to enable spies to get into touch with each other on the ground and cooperate in their deviltry. Pretty, eh?
“This dial points toward any other electrical disturbance. If we had that dynamo running, any spy could get a line on it. Or any internal-combustion engine could be spotted or anything at all that made a spark now and then. A good way to locate any small oasis of civilization, eh?
“If we had electric lights or current or even used a flashlight, sooner or later some spy would be led to us with absolute certainty, either to bring guerillas to wipe us out, or to arrange for bombs.”
He stopped and laughed without mirth:
“You see how that changes the picture, don’t you? If we use electricity in any form we’ll be spotted. If we’re spotted we’ll be destroyed. If we defend ourselves against looters, we’ll be bombed. If we don’t, we’ll be killed.
“If we hang on without trying to keep anything of civilization, we’ll forget it all. If we even try to be decent, we’ll be bunted down by all the scum of the earth, aided by every technical device that ingenuity can contrive! Isn’t it a picture, now? What price crater-stones against that set-up, Frances? Want to go out with me now and let’s cut our throats?”
CHAPTER X
Stalemated
In all there had been twenty-two men originally, and eighteen women, and almost as many children ranging from babies in arms to Bob, the television enthusiast who had helped Steve carry the fish. The day before there had been fifteen men left. Today there were eleven. And of the eighteen women only twelve remained.
In their hearts burned hatred so terrible that it was a corrosive hur
t. The hatred was for guerillas, of course, but also it was directed against those unknown, unseen, unidentifiable people who had aeroplanes and atomic bombs.
The refugees knew that there was a link between the guerillas and the bombs. Wherever honest folk fought to hold to everything that separated men from animals, looters turned up to destroy them. If the looters failed, bombs came screaming down from seemingly empty sky.
Perhaps not all the guerillas knew of the link. Perhaps only chosen, talented leaders had this cooperation. There was no need to encourage most looters. There are always some people who seize upon any catastrophe to behave as beasts, and in the atomic war it was an advantage to be a beast. Honest men tended to group together for mutual aid and protection.
But under the conditions of atomic war, such assemblages only made more vulnerable targets for bombs, or objectives for guerilla raids. And surely there was detailed information given somehow to make murder and rapine the easier. Leaders had sprung up with intuitive knowledge of spots where food and victims for amusing brutality could be found. Steve now had evidence that their intuition came in small instruments, in microwave communication sets.
The people now tacitly accepting his leadership had come to the same conclusion without his definite evidence. They had been a group of farmers and their families, closely knit by blood-ties, who had not followed the common urge of normal folk.
They had been fiercely independent and their small holdings were remote from the rich lands the looters preyed on at first. They were watchful. They were prudent. They closed ranks when the world collapsed about them, and tried to go on sturdily as before. Their houses were close together, but did not form a village. For a long time they escaped notice. But they used ploughs, and ploughed land shows up clearly in air-photographs.
A single ragged wanderer appeared, begging food. They gave it to him, and now bitterly regretted that they did not kill him with torture, instead. Because he went away, vowing gratitude, and two weeks later looters converged upon their community from three directions.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 39
