The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (52 page)

In the looted pantry, too, there had been some rotted vegetables. Tomato-seeds were salvageable from a dried-up mess on the floor. With electric power for warmth, and a snug house, Steve planned to move some plants indoors and have food during the cold weather by hot-house cultivation.

He fumbled in the fish-trap and hauled out a good-sized trout by the gills. He reached in again, trying to corner another of the wildly darting, imprisoned creatures.

“I’m a half-wit!” he repeated bitterly. “Of course I can duplicate what the crater-stones do. I can practically make them tell me how. I can work out a line of research and see if the answer’s there by pulling for it to turn up. If it can, the crater-stone will warm up and make it sure I’ll find it. Oh, I’m an imbecile!”

He straightened up, and Frances raised one hand. She had turned her head and was listening with a desperate concentration. She was a little bit pale.

Steve froze. He listened, too. Then he quietly put down the still-flapping fish and drew his revolver. Both of them, then, waited very tensely.

Two hundred yards away, a head appeared. There was a blood-stained bandage about it. It was unshaven and haggard. A second head. A third. They stared at the house. They conferred. Three men broke cover and ran stealthily toward it, but dragging their feet as if at the last gasp of exhaustion.

One of the men carried a shotgun. Another carried a six-foot bow. The third had an unwieldy contrivance which, at a guess, was a cross-bow made with automobile-spring leaves to hurl its bolt. All three men were ragged. Each had been wounded and bandaged and wounded again. They ran heavily toward the house, dodging exhaustedly behind trees to cover their advance.

“Hello, there!” Steve called sharply.

Frances started a little and unconsciously moved closer to him. The three stopped as if shot. They wheeled. Then they came toward Steve. The man with the shotgun held it ominously ready. The man with the bow had an arrow to the string. The cross-bowman had the wire cord of his contrivance drawn back, and doubtless a bolt ready in the groove. But as they came closer to Steve, they bunched as for mutual support. They moved with the air not so much of menace as of desperation.

“The devil!” said Steve, looking from one to another of them. “You’re honest men. Wonders will never cease.”

“Sure we’re honest men,” one of the three said in a choked voice. “How many cutthroats have you got hidden, you that stand there and laugh at us!”

“No cutthroats,” said Steve. His eyes narrowed suddenly. “You’re scouts, eh? Going on ahead to try to find—”

Very, very, thin and far away, a high-pitched yell came through the bright morning sunshine. After it came the muted, distant sound of a shot. The three men turned their heads from Steve to that sound. One of them sobbed.

“Blast ’em! Oh, blast ’em! Come on, let’s get killed!”

He whirled.

“What’s that?” Steve snapped. “Your rear-guard? How many of you?”

“Fifteen men and the women and kids,” the bearded man with the shotgun said heavily. “There’s a gang of guerillas been chasin’ us four days. They got near half of us. Now they’ll get the rest.”

He turned drearily to go where a thin, shrill, triumphant howling rose. There were two more shots. The bearded man’s face worked.

“Get the women in the house,” said Steve fiercely. “It’s stone. They can’t burn you out. We’ll hold ’em off there.”

“What with?” panted the crossbowman, despairingly. “Might as well get killed right off.”

“Come along, Frances!” said Steve angrily. “We’ll find the women, whoever they are. You lead ’em to the house and barricade the doors and windows. I’ll take the men and we’ll see what the crater-stones can do.”

He was already running with her, hand in hand, in the wake of the three weirdly assorted individuals who now toiled exhaustedly toward a confused and intermittent sound of battle.

Where they ran all was quietude and peace—a bright summer sun drenched trees and grass and weeds with shimmering golden light. The small valley below the house, and the forests which covered the hillsides, were empty of any sign of life save the green things themselves. Insects sounded everywhere in the bland and warmth-intoxicated shrilling of midsummer. Somewhere a bob-white quail called tranquilly.

But a man’s death-shriek came faintly from far away. There was another shot in the distance. Steve and Frances dived into the trees after the drearily running trio they had intercepted.

“What can you do with the crater-stones?” asked Frances, between panting breaths.

“I don’t know,” grunted Steve, pounding on. “But they’re honest folk, those three. They bunched when they came close to us instead of spreading out. If they’ve got women with them, they’re what the guerillas are after. The worst of it is, there’ll be somebody with a pocket radio among the guerillas, most likely. There was in the gang I met, once upon a time.”

Yells—far ahead, but nearer than they had been. They saw a scared, flurried movement in the underbrush. Women.

“You mean—if we help beat off—the guerillas,” panted Frances, “the—people with planes and bombs will—bomb us?”

“That’s the idea,” Steve growled. “Take the women to the house and barricade it! I’ll be back.”

“Be careful!” she called desperately after him. “Please be careful!”

But he was gone, diving through brushwood, jumping fallen tree-trunks, running through thick woods toward an inchoate, spasmodic tumult in which men fought like beasts and some died quite otherwise. There were two sides in that battle. Steve was known to neither. Each was likely to think he belonged to the other side.

CHAPTER IX

Besieged

Nightfall descended and the battered, oak-beamed living room of the house was very dark. Children slept in the abandon of absolute exhaustion close by it. There were other figures lying on the floor. Women tended some of those figures. There were three women with babies, which they held tightly in their arms. Some men squatted against the wall, crude weapons at hand, drooping in utter weariness.

Frances found Steve peering from an upper window. There was a great fire burning a hundred and fifty yards down hill. There were figures about it. There was yapping talk coming from the fireside.

“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.