Title: Thralls of the Endless Night
Author: Brackett, Leigh
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Thralls of the Endless Night" ***


                     THRALLS of the ENDLESS NIGHT

                           By LEIGH BRACKETT

              The Ship held an ancient secret that meant
               life to the dying east-aways of the void.
               Then Wes Kirk revealed the secret to his
             people's enemies--and found that his betrayal
                 meant the death of the girl he loved.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                       Planet Stories Fall 1943.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk
and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and
went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him.

He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his
thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold
wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.

The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,

"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second
Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their
families."

His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,

"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to
freeze?" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking
child. She added sharply, "Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's
talk, and only gets the sucking-plant."

"Who's to hear it?" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils
widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking
the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of
blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.

The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by
himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running
right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and
edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms,
guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust
that burst when touched.

Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk
into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as
there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were
empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.

Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called
Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.

Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were
the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps
where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have
meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But
there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and
a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be
laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.

And beyond the Engineers--the Officers.

The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger
ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the
dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them
and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.

The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.
The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but
there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.
Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place
highest of all.

Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged
against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.

The Ship.

Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. "I would like to kill them,"
he said. "I would like to kill them all."

"Yah!" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. "All but the Captain's
yellow daughter!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of
reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.

"Yah!" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. "I've seen you
looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to
her eyes. You wouldn't kill _her_, I bet!"

"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!"

Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind
his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two
jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.

She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had
happened, "Ma says will you please not let so much heat out."

Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil
yelled, "Ma!"

The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching
with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing
stage.

Ma Kirk said, "Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size."

Kirk stopped. "Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!"
He leaned forward to glare at Lil. "And I would so kill the Captain's
daughter!"

The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close
to the heat and said wearily:

"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble
without that?"

Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.

"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us."

Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes
glowed in the feeble light.

She said, "You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to
stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields."

The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung
tight, quivering to move. "Besides," she demanded, "what have the
Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to
kill them--all but the Captain's yellow daughter?"

Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. "Ma," he said, "you make that brat shut
up or I'll whale her, anyhow."

Ma Kirk looked at him. "Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young
man! Now you stop it, both of you."

"All right," said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands
over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have
his belly warm, even if it was empty. "Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry.
Hope they killed meat."

Ma Kirk sighed. "Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the
heat-stones."

"Maybe," said Kirk heavily, "it all goes to the same place."

Lil snorted. "And where's that, Smarty?"

His anger forced out the forbidden words.

"Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship."

There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word "Ship" hung
there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over
the door and back to her son.

"Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know."

"It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way
they do? We can't even get near the outside of it."

Lil tossed her head. "Well neither do they."

"Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they
haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the
plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about."

He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands.

"There must be something in the Ship that they don't want us to have.
Something valuable, something they want to keep for themselves. What
else could it be but heat-stones and maybe dried meat?"

"We don't know, Wes! The Ship is--well, we shouldn't talk about it.
And the Officers wouldn't do that. If they wanted us killed off they'd
let the Piruts in on us, or the shags, and let 'em finish us quick.
Freezing and starving would take too long. There'd be too many of us if
we found out, or got mad."

Kirk snorted. "You women know so much. If they let the shags or the
Piruts in on us, how could they stop 'em before they killed everybody,
including the Officers? As for slow death--well, they think we're dumb.
They've kept us away from the Ship ever since the _Crash_, and nobody
knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They
think we'd never suspect."

"Yah!" said Lil sharply. "You just like to talk. Why should the
Officers want us killed off anyhow?"

Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.

"There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they
let their young ones cry with the cold?"

       *       *       *       *       *

There was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky.
His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never
talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set
him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a
mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....

"Listen!" said Ma Kirk.

Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need
to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by
the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into
a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was
no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its
source.

The great alarm gong by the Captain's hut.

Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong
stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting
aside the door curtain.

Ma Kirk said stiffly, "Which way are they coming?"

Kirk's ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and
found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain.

Kirk pointed. "From the west. Piruts, I think."

Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. "Your Pa
went hunting that way."

"Yeah," said Kirk. "I'll watch out for him."

He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of
the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,
where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred
shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The
baby began to whimper again.

Kirk shivered in the cold wind. "Lil," he said. "I would, too, kill the
Captain's yellow daughter."

"Yah," said Lil. "Go chase the beetles away."

There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's
bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.

Men and youths like himself, old enough to fight, were spilling out of
low doorways and forming companies on the flat ground. Kirk spotted
Jakk Randl and fell in beside him. They stood with their backs to the
wind, stamping and shivering, their head-hair and scant fur clouts
blown straight out.

Randl nudged Kirk's elbow. "Look at 'em," he said, and coughed. He was
always coughing, jerking his thin sharp face back and forth. Kirk could
have broken his brittle light-furred body in two. All Randl's strength
was in his eyes. The pupils were always spread, always hot with some
bitter force, always probing. He wasn't much older than Kirk.

Kirk looked up the hill. Officers were running from the huts below the
gaunt, dead Ship. They didn't look so different from the Hans, only
they were built a little taller and lighter, less bowed and bunchy in
the shoulders, quicker on their feet.

Kirk stepped behind Randl to shield him from the wind. His voice was
only a whisper, but it had a hard edge. The baby's thin, terrible wail
was still in his ears.

"Is it true, Jakk? Do you know? Because if they are...."

Randl laughed and shuddered with a secret, ugly triumph. "I crawled up
on the peak during the last darkness. The guards were cold and the wind
made them blind and deaf. I lay in the rocks and watched. And I saw...."

He coughed. The Officers' voices rang sharp through the wind. Compact
groups of men began to run, off toward the west. The whisper of sound
had grown louder in Kirk's ears. He could hear men yelling and the
ringing of metal on stone.

He started to run, holding Randl's elbow. Grey dust blew under their
feet. The drifts of crystal stones sent their sound shivering back at
them in splinters. Kirk said fiercely:

"What did you see?"

They were passing under the hill now. Randl jerked his head. "Up there,
Wes."

Kirk looked up. Someone was standing at the doorway of the Captain's
hut. Someone tall and slender and the color of the Sunstar from head to
foot.

"I saw her," said Randl hoarsely. "She was carrying heat-stones into
the Ship."

Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his
knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.

The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last
gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the
tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox
head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying,
piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.

They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into
the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low
behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took
courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who
drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was
too bad for the man who climbed on them.

It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone.

He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts.
Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there
on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had
to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You
had to keep them from getting onto the plain.

He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work
any time, but when the Piruts were raiding....

No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer,
was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching
furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order.

Pa hadn't been alone, of course. Frank and Russ went with him. The
three of them would have sense enough to keep safe. Maybe they were in
the pillbox.

A big raid. More Piruts than he'd ever seen before. He wondered why.
He wondered how so many of them had been able to get so close to the
pillbox all at once, walking two or three abreast on the narrow tongue
of rock under the spears and slingstones.

They poured in through the gates of the stone-walled building,
scattering up onto the parapet. There were slits in the rooms below and
rusty metal things crouching behind them, but they weren't any good for
fighting. A man needed shoulder room for spear and sling.

It was pretty hot up there. The wall of bodies had built up so high,
mostly with shags, that the Piruts were coming right over the wall.
Kirk's nose wrinkled at the smell of blood. He avoided the biggest
puddles and found a place to stand between the dead.

Randl went down on his knees. He was coughing horribly, but his hot
black eyes saw everything. He tried three times to lift his sling and
gave it up.

"I'll cover you," said Kirk. He began taking crystal pebbles out of a
big pile that was kept there and hurling them at the Piruts. They made
a singing noise in the air, and they didn't stop going when they hit.
They were heavy for their size, very heavy, with sharp edges.

Randl said, "Something funny, Wes. Too many Piruts. They couldn't risk
'em on an ordinary raid."

Kirk grunted. A Pirut with red hair standing straight in the wind came
over the wall. Kirk speared him left-handed in the belly, dodged the
downstroke of his loaded sap, and kicked the body out of the way.

He said, "Wonder how they got so close, so fast?"

"Some trick." Randl laughed suddenly. "Funny their wanting the Ship as
much as you and I do."

"Think they could know what's in it?"

Randl's narrow shoulders twitched. "Near as we know, their legend is
the same as ours. Something holy in the Ship, sacred and tabu. Only
difference is they want to get it for themselves, and we want to keep
it." He coughed and spat in sudden angry disgust. "And we've swallowed
that stuff. We've let the Officers hoard heat and food so they can live
no matter what happens to us. We're fools, Wes! A lot of bloody fools!"

He got up and began jabbing with his spear at heads that poked up over
the wall.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Piruts began to slack off. Stones still whistled past Kirk's
head--a couple of them had grazed him by now--and spears showered down,
but they weren't climbing the walls any more.

Randl grounded his spear, gasping. "That's that. Pretty soon they'll
break, and then we can start thinking about...."

He stopped. Kirk put a stone accurately through the back of a Pirut's
head and said grimly:

"Yeah. About what _we're_ going to do."

Randl didn't answer. He sat down suddenly, doubled over. Kirk grinned.
"Take it easy," he said softly. "I'll cover you."

Randl whispered, "Wes. Wes!" He held up one thin hand. Kirk let his own
drop, looking at it. There was blood on it, running clear to the elbow.

He went down beside Randl, putting his arms around him, trying to see.
Randl shook him off.

"Don't move me, you fool! Just listen." His voice was harsh and rapid.
He was holding both hands over the left side of his neck, where it
joined the shoulder. Kirk could see the bright blood beating up through
his fingers.

He said, "Jakk, I'll get the sawbones...."

Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young
beard hardly full on its sharp jaw.

"Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good--and why would
I want to go on living anyway?"

He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness
or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two
huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's
fingers.

"It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the
Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You
carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise."

Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's
eyes.

"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and
listen...."

Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice
stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.
Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had
made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.

Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.

Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, "Hey,
kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you." He stopped, and then said
more gently, "Oh. Jakk got it, did he?"

Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. "Yeah."

"Kind of a pal of yours, wasn't he?"

"He wasn't very strong. He needed someone to cover him."

"Too bad." The man shook his head, and then shrugged. "Maybe it's
better, at that. He was headed for trouble, that one. Kinda leading you
that way, too, I heard. Always talking."

He looked at Kirk's face and shut up suddenly. He turned away and
grunted over his shoulders, "The O.D.'s looking for you."

Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall.
There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and
down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down
below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies
for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning
cannibal.

That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get
into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook
some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and
said:

"I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?"

"Yes." The O.D. was also the Third Officer. Taller than Kirk, thinner,
with the hair going grey on his body and exhausted eyes sunk deep under
his horny overlids. He said quietly:

"I'm sorry to have to tell you this...."

Kirk knew. The knowledge leaped through him. It was strange, to feel a
spear-stab where there was no spear.

He said, "Pa."

The Officer nodded. He seemed very tired, and he didn't look at Kirk.
He hadn't, after the first glance.

"Your father, and his two friends."

Kirk shivered. The horny lids dropped over his eyes. "I wish I'd
known," he whispered. "I'd have killed more of them."

The Officer put his hands flat on the top of the wall and looked at
them as if they were strange things and no part of him.

"Kirk," he said, "this is going to be hard to explain. I've never done
anything as hard. The Piruts didn't kill them. They were responsible,
but they didn't actually kill them."

Wes raised his head slowly. "I don't understand."

"We saw them coming up the tongue of rock. The Piruts were behind them,
but not far. Not far enough. One of the three, it wasn't your father,
called to us to put the ladder down. We waited...."

A muscle began to twitch under Kirk's eye. That, too, was something
that had never happened before, like the stab of pain with no spear
behind it. He licked his lips and repeated hoarsely:

"I don't understand."

The Officer tightened suddenly and made one hand into a fist and beat
it slowly on the wall, up and down.

"I didn't want to give the order. God knows I didn't want to! But there
was nothing else to do."

A man came up over the top of the ladder. He was carrying a body over
his shoulder, and breathing hard.

"Here's Kirk," he said. "Where'll I put him?"

There was a clear space off to the right. Kirk pointed to it. "Over
there, Charley. I'll help."

It was hard to move. He'd never been tired like this before. He'd never
been afraid like this, either. He didn't know what he was afraid of.
Something in the Officer's voice.

He helped to lay his father down. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled
them, fighting on the pillbox walls. But never one he'd known so long,
one he'd eaten and slept and wrestled with. The thick arm that hauled
him out of bed this morning, the big hands that warmed the baby against
the barrel chest. You saw it lying lax and cold, but you didn't believe
it.

You saw it. You saw the spear shaft sticking out clean from the
heart....

You saw it....

"That's one of our spears!" He screamed it, like a woman. "One of our
own--from the front!"

"I let them get as close as I dared," said the Officer tonelessly. "I
tried to find a way. But there wasn't any way but the ladder, and that
was what the Piruts wanted. That's why they made them come."

Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. "You killed them. You killed my
father."

"Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire
too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to
understand! I had to do it."

Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men
moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet.

"Please try to understand," whispered the Officer. "I had to do it."

The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all
went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off.
Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close
enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing
under the wall, looking up, and no way through.

Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a
spear through the heart.

After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a voice, a long way off. It said, "God, he's strong!" Over
and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and
he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.

It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer
had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.
The Officer was gone.

Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.
Somebody whistled.

"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him."

The Officer's voice said dully, "No discipline. Better take him home."

Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, "You better
discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill
you."

"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand."

"I'll understand, all right." Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper
that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. "I'll understand about
Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow
daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.
I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!"

The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. "Boy! Do you know what you're
saying?"

"You bet I know!"

"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!"

"Worse for us, or for you?" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in
the wind. "Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up
there in the Ship they won't let us touch?"

There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of
luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in
close to Kirk.

"Shut up," he said urgently. "Don't make me punish you, not now. You're
talking rot, but it's dangerous."

Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if
he'd wanted to.

"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me
while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones
into...."

The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged
down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him
that he didn't want to show.

He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, "Discipline, for
not longer than it takes to clear the rock below."

Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.
One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.

"Rock's pretty near clean," he said, "but even so...." He shook himself
like a dog. "That Jakk Randl, he was always talking."

One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, "Yeah. And
maybe he knew what he was talking about!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The little stone room was cold and quiet. It was dark, too, but the
sucking-plant carried its own light. Kirk lay on his back watching
the cool green fire pulse on his chest and belly. It looked cool, but
underneath the sprawling tentacles of it he was burning with the pain
of little needles that bit and sucked.

He was spreadeagled with leather thongs. He made no sound. The sweat
ran into his eyes and the blood went out of his body into the hungry
plant, drop by drop.

Somebody came in, somebody too quick and light to be a fighting man.
Kirk let his pupils spread. First a slim tall shape moving, a kilt of
little skins swirling beneath the shimmering sinthi-mesh overall suit.
Small sharp breasts and a heavy mane of hair caught back.

Then color. Yellow. Yellow like the Sunstar, from head to foot. Kirk's
jaw shut and knotted.

The sucking-plant was ripped away very deftly by its upper fronds and
thrown into a corner. Kirk went rigid, but he didn't make a sound. The
yellow girl took a knife from her belt sheath and slashed him free with
four quick strokes.

Kirk didn't move.

"Well," she said. "Aren't you going to get up?"

He could see her eyes, great black shining things. "What did you come
here for?"

"They told me about you. I said I thought it was criminal to discipline
you when you didn't know what you were doing. So I came down to see
what I could do about it."

She always came with the other women after a raid, to help the wounded.
Kirk looked at her stonily.

"You must have just missed my speech."

"They told me about it. Whatever made you say things like that?"

"Aren't they true?"

"No!"

Kirk laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. "You could have saved
yourself the trouble. This isn't going to make me believe you."

The girl tossed her thick hair back impatiently. "You're acting like
a child." She was no older than Kirk. "We're all terribly sorry about
your father," she went on gravely, "but that doesn't give you the
right...."

"I have the right to tell the truth."

"But you're not telling the truth!" She was down on her knees now,
beside him. "I don't know what this Jakk Randl saw, or whether he saw
anything, but...."

Kirk said slowly, "Jakk's dead. He was my friend, and he didn't lie."

"Perhaps not. But he was mistaken."

"He saw you, taking heat-stones into the Ship."

"But only a very few! We're not hoarding them. We wouldn't!"

"Then what do you use them for?"

"I can't tell you that. And it doesn't matter anyway."

Kirk laughed again. He got up, stiffly because of the raw places
drawing across the front of him. His hair was gone in a sprawling
pattern, eaten off by digestive acids. He said:

"You'll have to do better than that."

She was angry, now, and perhaps a little scared. He enjoyed making her
angry and scared. He enjoyed the thick hot feeling of power it gave him.

She asked, "Then you won't believe, and you won't stop talking?"

"I made a promise to go on talking. And I believe in what I'm doing."

"You know what that will mean." He could hear the quiver and the
breathing of her. "People may be hurt, your own people. We don't want
trouble. We can't afford trouble, with the Piruts getting stronger.
It'll mean you'll be punished, maybe even--killed."

That gave him a cold twinge for a moment. Then he thought of Jakk and
shrugged.

"It doesn't matter," he said, and started out.

The Third Officer came in. There were five men with him, and one of
them was the Captain, wearing the gun of authority.

The Captain said, "I'm sorry, Kirk. I heard a lot of what you said; too
much to dare turn you loose just now. Perhaps in solitary we can talk
sense into you."

Kirk stood quite still, not moving anything but his eyes. The four Hans
were big and they had knives. Kirk shrugged and fell in with them. The
girl walked ahead, between the Captain and the Third.

Nobody said anything. They went together up the stone steps.

       *       *       *       *       *

They had taken the wounded off the wall, out of the wind. The rock
below was clean of bodies, and the last of the men were coming back up
the ladder.

Kirk felt queer. He wasn't like himself at all. It was as though he had
fragments of ice inside his head, all jumbled. Then suddenly they fell
into place, clear and frozen and unalterable, without any help from him
at all.

He moved, very fast. Faster than ever before in his life, caught the
Captain's gun.

His two hands thrust out, one against the Captain, the other against
the Third, and sent them staggering. He charged through between them,
gathering the yellow girl in to his chest firing as he went. The
antique gun went dead on the third shot, and he threw it away.

A knife slashed across his shoulders, but it was short. Men began
to yell. He knocked one away from the ladder head and pushed the
struggling girl over and let her drop, so that she had to catch the
rungs. He whirled, swinging, and sent two men sprawling back into the
ones behind. Then he leaped over, dropping down the side of the ladder
hand over hand.

He passed the girl, climbed onto the ladder behind her so that no one
could sling stones at him, and began pulling her down by the foot. She
tried kicking, but it was a long drop to the rock, and after she'd
slipped a couple of times she stopped that and went on down.

Men were howling at him from above. They started to climb onto the
ladder. Kirk yelled at them, threatening to throw the girl off. They
stopped. Presently Kirk felt the cold rock underfoot.

The minute he was off the ladder a man climbed over the wall and
started down. Kirk yelled at him to go back, then got hold of the
bottom of the ladder and pushed out. The yellow girl got out her knife
again and slashed at him. She hadn't opened her mouth once.

Kirk dropped. The knife bit his shoulder, not very deep. He
straightened up suddenly, swinging his open palm. It caught the girl
over the ear. She fell backward away from him, rolling over on the
rock. The knife flew out of her hand. Kirk heard it skitter along and
then vanish over the gully edge.

He pushed hard on the ladder. It gave, and the man at the top began
scrambling up again, fast. He only just made it, dangling half of him
in the air, when the ladder fell. The light aluminum struts it was made
of sent clashing echoes flying in the wind.

It was the only ladder they had. They'd have to bring one from one
of the other pillboxes before they could climb down and get it. Kirk
looked up at the men lining the wall, yelling, waving things.

Just about here Pa must have stood, looking up.

He turned and hauled the dazed girl to her feet and started off down
the tongue of rock. He didn't hurry. There was no need to hurry. The
young strength of the girl was pressed against him, thigh and hip and
chest. It burned, in some queer way.

He watched the yellow hairs rub and tangle with his golden ones. The
muscle started twitching under his eye again.

He had to cuff her twice more to keep her quiet, before they were
safely off the naked rock. He got her down the length of two gullies,
well out of sight of the pillbox. She was still a little groggy, and
very busy keeping her footing in the pebble drifts. They started down a
third cut that angled off. Then, quite suddenly, she fell.

Kirk stopped. He put out a hand to help her up, and then took it back
again. He looked at his feet and surlily, "Get up."

"I can't. Where are you going?"

"I don't know. Just somewhere to think, and plan. I've got to figure
this out."

She thought about that. He could see her wide golden shoulders tremble.
He wanted to touch them. After a while she said:

"Why did you take me? Why won't you let me go?"

"They'd have killed me on the rock if I hadn't had you. And when I go
back...."

She brought her head up. "You're going _back_?"

He laughed at her. "Did you think you could get rid of me that easy? I
told you I'd made a promise. I'm going to keep it, and you're going to
help me. I can buy a lot with you."

Her pupils were little hot pinpoints. "I see. You don't care how many
people you hurt, do you, as long as you can be a big man and keep your
promise."

He said roughly, "Get up."

"All right." She nodded, casually. "I'll get up."

She did. She got up fast, like a rocksnake uncoiling, and she had a
big stone in her right hand. She let it go, straight for his head.

Kirk jerked himself aside, but he was too late. The rock grazed him
above the ear. He staggered, trying to see through a curtain of hot and
flashing lights.

His earcups, working instinctively by themselves, brought him the sound
of naked feet scrambling away over the pebble drifts.

Feet. And then something else....

Kirk yelled. He tried to shake the lights away, and yelled again.

"Stop! Look out--_shags!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

He heard her stop. He began to be able to see again. She was poised
halfway up the head wall of the cut, her ears twitching. For a long
time they stood that way, not moving, listening to the wind and the
rolling pebbles and the soft padding feet of things that were hungry
and hunting them.

She began to move, almost without sound, back to him. Her lips formed
the word "Two," and her yellow head jerked back the way she had been
going. Kirk nodded. He pointed off to the left and held up three
fingers. Then he turned and started down the gully. The girl stayed
close beside him. She was breathing rapidly and her pupils swelled and
shrank. They showed no fear.

Looking at them, Kirk thought of Lil. Lil was right. She did have pink
lids to her eyes, and they were beautiful.

The shags followed them, two behind, three beside them beyond a thin
wall of rock.

Kirk had never been in the outer gullies before. He was too young. But
he'd heard Pa and the older men talk about them from the time he was
old enough to crouch beside the heat-stones and listen.

Out here there were shags and scavenger rats and once in a while a
rocksnake. Men of the settlement never hunted beyond the fringe. Beyond
that was forbidden ground and Piruts. Nobody knew just where the Pirut
colony was any more. Nobody wanted to know.

Kirk's ears were stretched, sifting the tiny shattered echoes. His
spread pupils sucked in every bit of the dim grey light. His body hair
was erect so that even his skin acted as a sensory organ, feeling the
bodies of the shags behind them.

They were getting close.

The gully ended. Beyond it was a little space of tumbled rock with
other gullies opening into it, and then a cliff built of great tilted
slabs of grey stone.

Kirk pointed to the cliff and started to run, with the yellow girl
beside him. Wind slashed sharp and thin across them. The echoes
whispered like many tongues and Kirk fought them and heard the two
shags come onto the plain behind them, running.

The other three came out of the parallel cut. They came fast, and
because of the curve of the plain they were a little ahead of the two
humans.

The girl said between her teeth, "We can't make it."

She was right. Kirk picked out the biggest boulder he could see and
dashed for it. The leading shag was breathing on the girl's heels as he
hauled her up after him.

They were safe for a while, but it didn't do them any good. In this
world even shags would wait forever at the prospect of a square meal.
Presently they'd start climbing and when they did it was all over. Kirk
didn't even have a weapon with which to fight.

He looked down at them. Five squat thick shapes with six legs; four
powerful legs with claws and two slender ones held in against the
chest, armed with sucker discs for climbing. Five pairs of black eyes
watching, hungry and infinitely patient. Five tucked bellies burning
under pale, shaggy hair.

He was looking at death. A strange cold terror took him. He turned his
head toward the yellow girl and saw the same thing in her eyes. They
looked at each other, not moving nor breathing, thinking that they were
young and going to die.

He shivered. The girl's yellow body burned in the grey light. He moved.
He didn't know why, only that he had to. He took her in his arms and
found her lips and kissed them, roughly, with an urgent, painful
hunger. She fought him a little and then lay still against him.

One of the shags started to climb. Kirk saw it across the girl's
shoulder. He let her go and walked to the boulder's edge and waited
until the shaggy head was level with his feet. Then he crouched and
struck, in a way he had never struck before. Blood spurted across his
fist. The shag roared and fell backward clumsily, shaking its head.
Kirk stood up and sucked in his belly and yelled. He felt savage now,
but not afraid. The echoes howled eerily.

[Illustration: _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! _They_ drove us out here to starve and
freeze. _They're_ robbing 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, and _his_ father 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 somebody _did_ get 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 whether _they_ die 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 of _his_ great-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?"





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Thralls of the Endless Night" ***

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