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.