"The hell I will!" cried Trevor furiously. He backed away, just a
little, getting set.
The young man came on, and his face was dark and dangerous.
"Saul, wait!" cried Jen.
Saul didn't wait. He kept right on coming. Trevor let him get close
before he swung, and he put every ounce of his strength behind the blow.
The smashing fist took Saul squarely in the belly and sent him
backward, doubled up. Trevor stood with hunched shoulders, breathing
hard, watching the others with feral eyes.
"What are you?" he snarled. "A bunch of thieves? All right, come on! I
got that stone the hard way and I'm going to keep it!"
Big words. A big anger. And a big fear behind them. The men were around
him in a ring now. There was no chance of breaking away. Even if he did
he was so winded they could pull him down in minutes. The stone weighed
heavy in his pocket, heavy as half a lifetime of sweat and hunger and
hard work, on the rockpiles of Mercury.
Saul straightened up. His face was still gray, but he bent again and
picked up a sharp-pointed implement of rock that he had dropped. Then
he moved forward. And the others closed in, at the same time, quite
silently.
There was a bitter taste in Trevor's mouth as he waited for them. To
get his hands on a sun-stone at last, and then to lose it and probably
his life too, to this crowd of savages! It was more than anybody ought
to be asked to bear.
"Saul, wait!" cried Jen again, pushing in front of him. "He saved my
life! You can't just...."
"He's a Korin. A spy."
"He can't be! There's no stone in his forehead. Not even a scar."
Saul's voice was flat and relentless. "He took a sun-stone. Only a
Korin would touch one of the cursed things."
"But he says he's from outside the valley! From Earth, Saul. From
_Earth_! Things would be different there."
Jen's insistence on that point had at least halted the men temporarily.
And Trevor, looking at Saul's face, had suddenly begun to understand
something.
"You think the sun-stones are evil," he said.
Saul gave him a sombre glance. "They are. And the one you have is going
to be destroyed. Now."
Trevor swallowed the bitter anguish that choked him, and did some fast
thinking. If the sun-stones had a superstitious significance in this
benighted pocket of Mercury--and he could imagine why they might, with
those damned unnatural hawks flying around with the equally unnatural
Korins--that put a different light on their attitude.
He knew just by looking at their faces that it was "give them the
sun-stone or die." Dying at the hands of a bunch of wild fanatics
didn't make sense. Better let them have the stone and gamble on getting
it back again later. Or on getting another one. They seemed plentiful
enough in the valley!
Sure, let's be sensible about it. Let's hand over a lifetime of hoping
to a savage with horny palms, and not worry about it. Let's.... Oh,
hell.
"Here," he said. "All right. Take it."
It hurt. It hurt like giving up his own heart.
Saul took it without thanks. He turned and laid it on a flat surface
of rock, and began to pound the glinting crystal with the heavy stone
he had meant to use on Trevor's head. There was a look on his lined,
young, craggy face as though he was killing a living thing--a thing
that he feared and hated.
Trevor shivered. He knew that sun-stones were impervious to anything
but atomic bombardment. But it made him a little sick, none the less,
to see that priceless object being battered by a crude stone club.
"It won't break," he said. "You might as well stop."
* * * * *
Saul flung down his weapon so close to Trevor's bare feet that he
leaped back. Then he picked up the sun-stone and hurled it as far as he
could across the ravine. Trevor heard it clicking faintly as it fell,
in among the rocks and rubble at the foot of the opposite cliff. He
strained to mark the spot.
"You idiot!" he said to Saul. "You've thrown away a fortune. The
fortune I've spent my life trying to find. What's the matter with you?
Don't you have any idea at all what those things are worth?"
Saul ignored him, speaking bleakly to the others. "No man with a
sun-stone is to be trusted. I say kill him."