They were still a long way off but coming fast, whistling down the sky.
Price could make out about a dozen bright dots flashing against the
blue. Sawyer said,
"We'd better run for it!"
They fled, along the twisting path through the ruins. All around them,
ahead and behind, other men were running, bolting away like wild
creatures into the shadows of the broken walls.
And this was once their city, Price thought. A place of streets and
homes and schools and churches, a good place, built with long hope and
striving. What right did the Vurna have to break it?
He looked up at the fliers. They were larger now, moving swiftly above
ragged crenellations that showed stark white in the hot summer sun.
He looked down, and there was desolation. He ran in it, leaping and
stumbling over the bones of a city, driven like the rest.
Sawyer swept a lean arm out in a commanding gesture. "Take cover!"
They dodged into the crevices of an unidentifiable mass half grown with
creepers and rank grass. The old bricks tottered and threatened to fall
as they pressed past them. They lay panting and listened to the Vurna
fliers go over.
"They've broken formation," Price said. He had listened to hostile
craft before. "Spread out. They'll sweep back and forth--"
A section of wall collapsed, close by them, with a rumble and a great
puff of white dust. They leaped back, and Sawyer said, "That makes a
beacon for them. Well, come on."
They ran out, crouching low, scurrying along the ravaged streets where
their grandfathers had walked in peace. Price could see the green
woods in the distance, but the air was full of the power-scream of the
searching aerodynes, and he did not think that they would make it. He
was right.
One of the ships shot down to hover three feet off the ground ahead of
them, and another dropped behind. Sawyer turned to the right. A third
ship came down. He turned to the left. A fourth one blocked him. He
stopped where he was, too proud to look farther for escape where he
knew there was none. Burr and Twist stood with him. All three lifted
their rifles and prepared to die.
Price had nothing in his hands. The bright hovering ships mocked him,
their noise deafened him, the wind of their air-blasts tore at him with
vicious force. He hated them. He had never hated anything so much in
his life, not even the enemy he had fought in Korea. He groped among
the rubbish around his feet, half-blinded by dust and a red haze that
was of his own making.
A very loud metallic voice spoke to them from one of the ships. "Put
down your weapons and stand together with your hands high. You will not
be harmed." Sawyer laughed. He hunched the rifle to his shoulder and
fired. The slug went _splat!_ on the skin of the aerodyne, and dropped.
"Put down your weapons and stand together. We will count six. At that
time we will fire. Six. Five. Four."
Sawyer laid his rifle into the dust at his feet and straightened,
folding his arms. Twist and Burr did the same. Tears stood in Burr's
eyes, tears of outraged anger.
And this was their city, Price thought. My city. Ours.
Men began now to jump out of the hovering aerodynes, Vurna with cropped
silvery hair. They wore uniforms of dark green. This was not their
city, it was not their world. Price's fingers closed over the end of an
iron bar in the rubbish.
He sprang forward, holding the iron bar.
* * * * *
A beam of cold light, hardly visible in the sunshine, flashed out from
the nearest ship. Price was running, and then he was not running, he
was face down on the ground with the white dust in his hair. The bar
spun out of his hand and fell with a faint clatter.
The Vurna closed in. They escorted Sawyer and Burr and Twist each
into one of the ships. Two of the green-clad soldiers bent and picked
up Price and carried him to the fourth. They clambered in, and the
aerodynes rose whistling into the air.
Over the place from which the Earthmen had fled, roughly in the center
of the city, several of the ships were gathered. They circled slowly,
but nothing moved in the streets. At length all but one of them rose
up, and that one made brief lightnings flicker from its underbelly.
Down below a volcano erupted, thundered, burned, and died, sinking
into ash and dust. That gathering-place would not be used again, and
any store of arms or powder concealed in it would not be used either.
The ships of the Vurna raced away toward the east. Behind them the
forest was full of men and horses, moving out.
After a while a remote and disoriented consciousness returned to Price.
He opened his eyes and saw a blur of red and silver and flesh tones. A
little later he opened them again, and the blur had become a woman with
silver hair and a uniform of dark crimson.
The woman.
She said, "You will be normal again in an hour or so. The shock-ray
does no permanent damage."
He looked at her, not caring very much about how he would feel an hour
from now. He felt pleasantly languid, forgetful of his cares. Her eyes
were a curious color, not like Earth eyes at all. They were like little
bits of sky and moonglow and the far-off fires of stars, cool and
strange and lovely. He said,
"They're not cruel, after all."
"What are you talking about?"
"Your eyes. They're beautiful. Like you."
A faint flush touched her cheeks. But she only said, "How are you
called?"
He told her, and she wrote it down. He saw now that she held a kind of
clipboard on her knee. Just beyond her was a cabin window. Streamers
of torn cloud whirled by it so fast that he was startled. Then other
things began to impinge on his senses, air-scream, a smooth rush of
speed. He sat up.
The man beside the pilot turned abruptly, his hand reaching for a
weapon at his belt. The woman spoke to him in her own tongue, and then
said to Price,
"We do not wish to stun you again. You will not make it necessary."
"No," said Price. He leaned forward, staring in fascination at the
controls of the aerodyne, watching the pilot's movements.
"You are interested? As a pilot?"
"Yes." The controls seemed surprisingly simple. These controlled the
force of the air-flow, those the angle of the blast--"It's so much more
maneuverable than a jet, and so much more powerful than any 'copter.
I--"
He shut his mouth, abruptly conscious that he had made a bad slip.
But the woman did not seem to have noticed it. He asked her hastily,
changing the subject, "What's your name?"
"Linna," she said. "Of Vrain Four. That's the planet of a star you
never heard of, in the Hercules Cluster. I have some other identifying
words, a patronym much like yours and a set of code-numbers such as
have been used on this world also."
"You seem to know a lot about us, for a girl from--uh--Vrain Four."
"That's my business. I'm a specialist in Earth cultures. Section 7-Y,
Social Technics. Where is your home?"
She was friendly, almost too much so. Price was wary now, his mind
shaking off the lethargy of the shock.
"Nevada."
She wrote on the clipboard, some kind of shorthand. "I have not been
that far west. What is Nevada like?"
* * * * *
He told her, leaving out any mention of cities. The aerodyne raced
forward, and he watched the controls avidly. So simple. So beautifully,
functionally simple. His fingers twitched with eagerness.
"You have flown a great deal?"
"My father taught me." Careful, Price thought. These people are
probably no brighter or shrewder than my own, but they're better able
to investigate and check on things. "Tell me, what's it like on Vrain
Four?"
"We eat and sleep, make love and die," she said, "very much like you.
The sky is very beautiful at night. The stars are close and burning,
not cold and far-away like yours." She paused.
"Where did your father learn to fly?"
"From his father. It's a family tradition."
"And the plane had belonged to your family since the Ei destroyed the
atomic cultures of your Earth-year 1979?"
"Since the _Vurna_ destroyed it--yes."
She did not argue the point. "How old was the plane then?"
Sneaky little question, quietly asked. What was she driving at? Price
began to feel that he was in a trap, but he could not quite see the
shape of it. Then, before he was forced into an answer that might very
well be the wrong one, he saw something that gave him the perfect
excuse to ignore it.
The thing he saw was a starship.
He had never seen a starship before in his life, but he knew this could
not be anything else. He judged that they must be back across the river
now and well within the Forbidden Belt. The ship stood like a tower of
white metal, enormous, slim, delicate, a thing of slumbering power that
caught the throat with awe and wonder. There were no trees anywhere
near it, and the earth underneath was fused and hardened to a substance
more durable than iron or concrete.
Linna said, "That is one reason we do not want men in the Belt. There
is danger of being caught in a take-off or a landing."
The aerodyne flashed past, and Price looked back as long as he could
at the dwindling shape, splendid but curiously lonely in the middle of
nowhere.
"I would have thought you'd have a port, close in. By the Citadel, I
mean."
Linna shook her head. "Dispersal is much safer. That is why the Belt is
so wide. We have a number of ships."
The man beside the pilot spoke, and Linna touched Price's shoulder,
pointing ahead. "In a minute you will see the Citadel."
What he saw first was that iron blinking in the low air that he had
seen from the plane. It grew with fantastic speed, taking shape,
acquiring height and substance. Price had been prepared for something
tremendous. In spite of that, he was wide-eyed and astonished as any
tribesman.
The Citadel rose from a level barren, swept clear of every living
thing. It was round, a vast flat-topped tower stunning in its stark
hugeness. It did not fit on Earth at all. This monstrous, man-made
metal mountain belonged to another world.
Around it as far as he could see were launching-pads for a species
of missile that looked more deadly than any of the ICBM'S they had
been dreaming up in his own day. Atop the Citadel, on the vast plain
of metal that was its roof, there were installations that looked
like radar, and others he could only guess at--something in the
radio-telescope line, perhaps, with elaborate grids. Set around the
perimeter of the roof, and looking ominously out across the Belt,
were hooded emplacements that made Price think of Arrin's warning: We
will make of the Belt a blasted barren, where not even a beetle can
survive....
"You see how helpless," Linna said, quietly echoing his own thoughts.
"Men with knives and little guns--they would be throwing their lives
away."
* * * * *
The old anger came back to Price, and he said sullenly, "The Siegfried
Line was supposed to be impregnable, too."
But he knew she was right, and he looked down with a sinking heart as
the aerodyne swept in for a landing on the roof. How could Earthmen
ever hope to throw this mighty power from their backs?
He stepped down to the iron deck, still a little slow and shaky when he
moved. Other aerodynes were dropping down one by one. He looked around
for Sawyer and Burr and Twist, but he did not see them. Vurna guards
fell in on either side and Linna said,
"I think your friends have already landed, and are with Arrin below.
Come on."
The invitation was pure rhetoric. He had no choice. The guard took him
toward a circle painted bright red for the guidance of pilots, and
about eight feet across. He asked, "Is Arrin the big boss?"
"The Supreme Commander of this base. You see how important you are to
us--you and your plane?"
They stood on the red circle, and it dropped with them smoothly down
a gleaming metal shaft. It did not drop too far. They stepped from it
into a corridor, brightly lighted by tubes sunk into the low ceiling.
There were many doors on either side, and Vurna in uniforms of various
colors passed back and forth.
The office of the Supreme Commander was as austere and functional as
everything else Price had seen. Narrow windows with flush shutters
of steel looked out across the sunlit Belt. One wall was a maze of
screens and dials, communicator devices, and another had rows of
tube-mouths with vari-colored tabs. Arrin stood facing Sawyer, with
Burr and Twist behind their chief. There were several guards. As Price
came in with Linna, Sawyer was saying,
"I told you I wouldn't give the man up, nor the plane. As for the
meeting, your paid traitor can tell you all about it. And now you can
go ahead and kill me."
Arrin said impatiently, "It isn't your life I want from you, but only a
little cooperation." He looked up at Price, his eyes narrowing. "This
is the man?"
Linna spoke to him in the Vurna tongue. A look of surprise showed for
an instant on Arrin's face. He questioned Linna. Sawyer, meantime, said
to Price,
"We thought they'd killed you."
Price shook his head. He was worried about what Linna was saying to the
Commander. Once more he had the feeling of a trap he could not see.
Arrin nodded curtly, and gave some order to Price's guards. Linna said
in English, "You are to come with me."
Price said, "I'd rather stay with my friends."
"Perhaps later."
There was no use arguing. Price went where he was told. On another and
much lower level, which might have been underground for all he knew, he
was ushered into a small, neat, impersonal cubicle with no window and
with a lock on the outside of the door. Obviously, a cell.
Linna said, "I would like your shirt, please."
He stared at her. "What?"
"Give me your shirt."
Again there was no use arguing with her. He took it off and handed it
to her.
"Food and drink will be provided," she said. "You will be quite
comfortable."
She went away, with the guards. Securely locked in the cubicle, Price
sat and brooded. Food and water came, packaged, through a slot device
in the wall. He ate and drank, and brooded again.
Finally, Linna came back. She handed him his shirt and watched him
soberly while he put it on. And then she dropped her bomb.
"You have been lying to me," she said quietly. "I know _now_ where you
came from."