out her five fingers. "And they were all of one like as if born in one
birth. They had no hair on their heads, and their bodies were of this
hue--" She plucked at one of the coverings they had heaped around her;
it was a lavender-blue mixture.
Ross sucked in his breath, and Torgul was fast to pounce upon the
understanding he read in the Terran's face.
"Not your kind--but still you know them!"
"I know them," Ross agreed. "They are the enemy!"
The Baldies from the ancient spaceships, that wholly alien race with
whom he had once fought a desperate encounter on the edge of an unnamed
sea in the far past of his own world. The galactic voyagers were
here--and in active, if secret, conflict with the natives!
11
Weapon from the Depths
Jazia told her story with an attention to time and detail which amazed
Ross and won his admiration for her breed. She had witnessed the death
and destruction of all which was her life, and yet she had the wit to
note and record mentally for possible future use all that she had been
able to see of the raiders.
They had come out of the sea at dawn, walking with supreme confidence
and lack of any fear. Axes flung when they did not reply to the
sentries' challenges had never touched them, and a bombardment of
heavier missiles had been turned aside. They proved invulnerable to any
weapon the Rovers had. Men who made suicidal rushes to use sword or
battle ax hand-to-hand had fallen, before they were in striking
distance, under spraying tongues of fire from tubes the aliens carried.
Rovers were not fearful or easily cowed, but in the end they had fled
from the five invaders, gone to ground in their halls, tried to reach
their beached ships, only to die as they ran and hid. The slaughter had
been remorseless and entire, leaving Jazia in the hill shrine as the
only survivor. She had hidden for the rest of the day, seen the killing
of a few fugitives, and that night had stolen to the shore, launched one
of the ship's boats which was in a cove well away from the main harbor
of the fairing, heading out to sea in hope of meeting the homing
cruisers with her warning.
"They stayed there on the island?" Ross asked. That point of her story
puzzled him. If the object of that murderous raid had been only to stir
up trouble among the Hawaikan Rovers, perhaps turning one clan against
the other, as he had deduced when he had listened to Torgul's report of
similar happenings, then the star men should have withdrawn as soon as
their mission was complete, leaving the dead to call for vengeance in
the wrong direction. There would be no reason to court discovery of
their true identity by lingering.
"When the boat was asea there were still lights at the fairing hall, and
they were not our lights, nor did the dead carry them," she said slowly.
"What have those to fear? They can not be killed!"
"If they are still there, that we can put to the test," Torgul replied
grimly, and a murmur from his officers bore out his determination.
"And lose all the rest of you?" Ross retorted coldly. "I have met these
before; they can will a man to obey them. Look you--" He slammed his
left hand flat on the table. The ridges of scar tissue were plain
against his tanned skin. He knew no better way of driving home the
dangers of dealing with the star men than providing this graphic
example. "I held my own hand in fire so that the hurt of it would work
against their pull upon my thoughts, against their willing that I come
and be easy meat for their butchering."
Jazia's fingers flickered out, smoothed across his old scars lightly as
she gazed into his eyes.
"This, too, is true," she said slowly. "For it was also pain of body
which kept me from their last snare. They stood by the hall and I saw
Prahad, Okun, Mosaji, come out to them to be killed as if they were in a
hold net and were drawn. And there was that which called me also so that
I would go to them though I called upon the Power of Phutka to save. And
the answer to that plea came in a strange way, for I fell as I went from
the shrine and cut my arm on the rocks. The pain of that hurt was as a
knife severing the net. Then I crawled for the wood and that calling did
not come again--"
"If you know so much about them, tell us what weapons we may use to pull
them down!" That demand came from Vistur.
Ross shook his head. "I do not know."
"Yet," Jazia mused, "all things which live must also die sooner or
later. And it is in my mind that these have also a fate they dread and
fear. Perhaps we may find and use it."
"They came from the sea--by a ship, then?" Ross asked. She shook her
head.
"No, there was no ship; they came walking through the breaking waves as
if they had followed some road across the sea bottom."
"A sub!"
"What is that?" Torgul demanded.
"A type of ship which goes under the waves, not through them, carrying
air within its hull for the breathing of the crew."
Torgul's eyes narrowed. One of the other captains who had been summoned
from the two companion cruisers gave a snort of disbelief.
"There are no such ships--" he began, to be silenced by a gesture from
Torgul.
"We know of no such ships," the other corrected. "But then we know of no
such devices as Jazia saw in operation either. How does one war upon
these under-the-seas ships, Ross?"
The Terran hesitated. To describe to men who knew nothing of explosives
the classic way of dealing with a sub via depth charges was close to
impossible. But he did his best.
"Among my people one imprisons in a container a great power. Then the
container is dropped near the sub and--"
"And how," broke in the skeptical captain, "do you know where such a
ship lies? Can you see it through the water?"
"In a way--not see, but hear. There is a machine which makes for the
captain of the above-seas ship a picture of where the sub lies or moves
so that he may follow its course. Then when he is near enough he drops
the container and the power breaks free--to also break apart the sub."
"Yet the making of such containers and the imprisoning of the power
within them," Torgul said, "this is the result of a knowledge which is
greater than any save the Foanna may possess. You do not have it?" His
conclusion was half statement, half question.
"No. It took many years and the combined knowledge of many men among my
people to make such containers, such a listening device. I do not have
it."
"Why then think of what we do not have?" Torgul's return was decisive.
"What _do_ we have?"
Ross's head came up. He was listening, not to anything in that cabin,
but to a sound which had come through the port just behind his head.
There--it had come again! He was on his feet.
"What--?" Vistur's hand hovered over the ax at his belt. Ross saw their
gaze centered on him.
"We may have reinforcements now!" The Terran was already on his way to
the deck.
He hurried to the rail and whistled, the thin, shrill summons he had
practiced for weeks before he had ever begun this fantastic adventure.
A sleek dark body broke water and the dolphin grin was exposed as
Tino-rau answered his call. Though Ross's communication powers with the
two finned scouts was very far from Karara's, he caught the message in
part and swung around to face the Rovers who had crowded after him.
"We have a way now of learning more about your enemies."
"A boat--it comes without sail or oars!" One of the crew pointed.
Ross waved vigorously, but no hand replied from the skiff. Though it
came steadily onward, the three cruisers its apparent goal.
"Karara!" Ross called.
Then side by side with Tino-rau were two wet heads, two masked faces
showing as the swimmers trod water--Karara and Loketh.
"Drop ropes!" Ross gave that order as if he rather than Torgul
commanded. And the Captain himself was one of those who moved to obey.
Loketh came out of the sea first and as he scrambled over the rail he
had his sword ready, looking from Ross to Torgul. The Terran held up
empty hands and smiled.
"No trouble now."
Loketh snapped up his mask. "So the Sea Maid said the finned ones
reported. Yet before, these thirsted for your blood on their blades.
What magic have you worked?"
"None. Just the truth has been discovered." Ross reached for Karara's
hand as she came nimbly up the rope, swung her across the rail to the
deck where she stood unmasked, brushing back her hair and looking around
with a lively curiosity.
"Karara, this is Captain Torgul," Ross introduced the Rover commander
who was staring round-eyed at the girl. "Karara is she who swims with
the finned ones, and they obey her." Ross gestured to Tino-rau. "It is
Taua who brings the skiff?" he asked the Polynesian.
She nodded. "We followed from the gate. Then Loketh came and said that
... that...." She paused and then added, "But you do not seem to be in
danger. What has happened?"
"Much. Listen--this is important. There is trouble at an island ahead.
The Baldies were there; they murdered the kin of these men. The odds are
they reached there by some form of sub. Send one of the dolphins to see
what is happening and if they are still there...."
Karara asked no more questions, but whistled to the dolphin. With a flip
of tail Tino-rau took off.
Since they could make no concrete plan of action, the cruiser captains
agreed to wait for Tino-rau's report and to cruise well out of sight of
the fairing harbor until it came.
"This belief in magic," Ross remarked to Karara, "has one advantage. The
natives seem able to take in their stride the fact the dolphins will
scout for us."
"They have lived their lives on the sea; for it they must have a vast
respect. Perhaps they know, as did my people, that the ocean has many
secrets, some of which are never revealed except to the forms of life
which claim their homes there. But, even if you discover this Baldy sub,
what will the Rovers be able to do about it?"
"I don't know--yet." Ross could not tell why he clung to the idea that
they could do anything to strike back at the superior alien force. He
only knew that he was not yet willing to relinquish the thought that in
some way they could.
"And Ashe?"
Yes, Ashe....
"I don't know." It hurt Ross to admit that.
"Back there, what really happened at the gate?" he asked Karara. "All at
once the dolphins seemed to go crazy."
"I think for a moment or two they did. You felt nothing?"
"No."
"It was like a fire slashing through the head. Some protective device of
the Foanna, I think."
A mental defense to which he was not sensitive. Which meant that he
might be able to breach that gate if none of the others could. But he
had to be there first. Suppose, just suppose Torgul could be persuaded
that this attack on the gutted Kyn Add was useless. Would the Rover
commander take them back to the Foanna keep? Or with the dolphins and
the skiff could Ross himself return to make the try?
That he could make it on his own, Ross doubted. Excitement and will
power had buoyed him up throughout the past Hawaikan day and night. Now
fatigue closed in, past his conditioning and the built-in stimulant of
the Terran rations, to enclose him in a groggy haze. He had been warned
against this reaction, but that was just another item he had pushed out
of his conscious mind. The last thing he remembered now was seeing
Karara move through a fuzzy cloud.
Voices argued somewhere beyond, the force of that argument carried more
by tone than any words Ross could understand. He was pulled sluggishly
out of a slumber too deep for any dream to trouble, and lifted heavy
eyelids to see Karara once again. There was a prick in his arm--or was
that part of the unreality about him?
"--four--five--six--" she was counting, and Ross found himself joining
in:
"--seven--eight--nine--ten!"
On reaching "ten" he was fully awake and knew that she had applied the
emergency procedure they had been drilled in using, giving him a pep
shot. When Ross sat up on the narrow bunk there was a light in the cabin
and no sign of day outside the porthole. Torgul, Vistur, the two other
cruiser captains, all there ... and Jazia.
Ross swung his feet to the deck. A pep-shot headache was already
beginning, but would wear off soon. There was, however, a concentration
of tension in the cabin, and something must have driven Karara to use
the drug.
"What is it?"
Karara fitted the medical kit into the compact carrying case.
"Tino-rau has returned. There _is_ a sub in the bay. It emits energy
waves on a shoreward beam."
"Then they are still there." Ross accepted the dolphin's report without
question. Neither of the scouts would make a mistake in those matters.
Energy waves beamed shoreward--power for some type of unit the Baldies
were using? Suppose the Rovers could find a way of cutting off the
power.
"The Sea Maid has told us that this ship sits on the bottom of the
harbor. If we could board it--" began Torgul.
"Yes!" Vistur brought his fist down against the end of the bunk on which
the Terran still sat, jarring the dull, drug-borne pain in Ross's head.
"Take it--then turn it against its crew!"
There was an eagerness in all Rover faces. For that was a game the
Hawaikan seafarers understood: Take an enemy ship and turn its armament
against its companions in a fleet. But that plan would not work out.
Ross had a healthy respect for the technical knowledge of the galactic
invaders. Of course he, Karara, even Loketh might be able to reach the
sub. Whether they could then board her was an entirely different matter.
Now the Polynesian girl shook her head. "The broadcast there--Tino-rau
rates it as lethal. There are dead fish floating in the bay. He had
warning at the reef entrance. Without a shield, there will be no way of
getting in."
"Might as well wish for a depth bomb," Ross began and then stopped.
"You have thought of something?"
"A shield--" Ross repeated her words. It was so wild this thought of
his, and one which might have no chance of working. He knew almost
nothing about the resources of the invaders. Could that broadcast which
protected the sub and perhaps activated the weapons of the invaders
ashore be destroyed? A wall of fish--sea life herded in there as a
shield ... wild, yes, even so wild it might work. Ross outlined the
idea, speaking more to Karara than to the Rovers.
"I do not know," she said doubtfully. "That would need many fish, too
many to herd and drive----"
"Not fish," Torgul cut in, "salkars!"
"Salkars?"
"You have seen the bow carving on this ship. That is a salkar. Such are
larger than a hundred fish! Salkars driven in ... they might even wreck
this undersea ship with their weight and anger."
"And you can find these salkars near-by?" Ross began to take fire. That
dragon which had hunted him--the bulk of the thing was well above any
other sea life he had seen here. And to its ferocity he could give
testimony.
"At the spawning reefs. We do not hunt at this season which is the time
of the taking of mates. Now, too, they are easily angered so they will
even attack a cruiser. To slay them at present is a loss, for their
skins are not good. But they would be ripe for battle were they to be
disturbed."
"And how would you get them from the spawning reefs to Kyn Add?"
"That is not too difficult; the reef lies here." Torgul drew lines with
the point of his sword on the table top. "And here is Kyn Add. Salkars
have a great hunger at this time. Show them bait and they will follow;
especially will they follow swimming bait."
There were a great many holes in the plan which had only a halfway
chance of working. But the Rovers seized upon it with enthusiasm, and so
it was set up.
Perhaps some two hours later Ross swam toward the land mass of Kyn Add.
Gleams of light pricked on the shore well to his left. Those must mark
the Rover settlement. And again the Terran wondered why the invaders had
remained there. Unless they knew that there had been three cruisers out
on a raid and for some reason they were determined to make a complete
mop-up.
Karara moved a little to his right, Taua between them, the dolphin's
super senses their guide and warning. The swiftest of the cruisers had
departed, Loketh on board to communicate with Tino-rau in the water.
Since the male dolphin was the best equipped to provide a fox for salkar
hounds, he was the bait for this weird fishing expedition.
"No farther!" Ross's sonic pricked a warning against his body. Through
that he took a jolt which sent him back, away from the bay entrance.
"On the reef." Karara's tapped code drew him on a new course. Moments
later they were both out of the water, though the wash of waves over
their flippered feet was constant. The rocks among which they crouched
were a rough harborage from which they could see the shore as a dark
blot. But they were well away from the break in the reef through which,
if their outlandish plan succeeded, the salkars would come.
"A one-in-a-million chance!" Ross commented as he put up his mask.
"Was not the whole Time Agent project founded on just such chances?"
Karara asked the right question. This was Ross's kind of venture. Yes,
one-in-a-million chances had been pulled off by the Time Agents. Why, it
had been close to those odds against their ever finding what they had
first sought along the back trails of time--the wrecked spaceships.
Just suppose this could be a rehearsal for another attack? If the
salkars could be made to crack the guard of the Baldies, could they also
be used against the Foanna gate? Maybe.... But take one fight at a time.
"They come!" Karara's fingers gripped Ross's shoulder. Her hand was
hard, bar rigid. He could see nothing, hear nothing. That warning must
have come from the dolphins. But so far their plan was working; the
monsters of the Hawaikan sea were on their way.
12
Baldies
"Ohhhh!" Karara clutched at Ross, her breath coming in little gasps,
giving vent to her fear and horror. They had not known what might come
from this plan; certainly neither had foreseen the present chaos in the
lagoon.
Perhaps the broadcast energy of the enemy whipped the already
vicious-tempered salkars into this insane fury. But now the moonlit
water was beaten into foam as the creatures fought there, attacking each
other with a ferocity neither Terran had witnessed before.
Lights gleamed along the shore where the alien invaders must have been
drawn by the clamor of the fighting marine reptiles. Somewhere in the
heights above the beach of the lagoon a picked band of Rovers should now
be making their way from the opposite side of Kyn Add under strict
orders not to go into attack unless signaled. Whether the independent
sea warriors would hold to that command was a question which had worried
Ross from the first.
Tino-rau and Taua in the waters to the seaward of the reef, the two
Terrans on that barrier itself, and between them and the shore the wild
melee of maddened salkars. Ross started. The sonic warning which had
been pulsing steadily against his skin cut off sharply. The broadcast in
the bay had been silenced! This was the time to move, but no swimmer
could last in the lagoon itself.
"Along the reef," Karara said.
That would be the long way round, Ross knew, but the only one possible.
He studied the cluster of lights ashore. Two or three figures moved
there. Seemingly the attention of the aliens was well centered upon the
battle still in progress in the lagoon.
"Stay here!" he ordered the girl. Adjusting his mask, Ross dropped into
the water, cutting away from the reef and then turning to swim parallel
with it. Tino-rau matched him as he went, guiding Ross to a second break
in the reef, toward the shore some distance from where the conflict of
the salkars still made a hideous din in the night.
The Terran waded in the shallows, stripping off his flippers and
snapping them to his belt, letting his mask swing free on his chest. He
angled toward the beach where the aliens had been. At least he was
better armed for this than he had been when he had fronted the Rovers
with only a diver's knife. From the Time Agent supplies he had taken the
single hand weapon he had long ago found in the armory of the derelict
spaceship. This could only be used sparingly, since they did not know
how it could be recharged, and the secret of its beam still remained
secret as far as Terran technicians were concerned.
Ross worked his way to a curtain of underbrush from which he had a free
view of the beach and the aliens. Three of them he counted, and they
were Baldies, all right--taller and thinner than his own species, their
bald heads gray-white, the upper dome of their skulls overshadowing the
features on their pointed chinned faces. They all wore the skintight
blue-purple-green suits of the space voyagers--suits which Ross knew of
old were insulated and protective for their wearers, as well as a medium
for keeping in touch with one another. Just as he, wearing one, had once
been trailed over miles of wilderness.
To him, all three of the invaders looked enough alike to have been
stamped out from one pattern. And their movements suggested that they
worked or went into action with drilled precision. They all faced
seaward, holding tubes aimed at the salkar-infested lagoon. There was no
sound of any explosion, but green spears of light struck at the scaled
bodies plunging in the water. And where those beams struck, flesh
seared. Methodically the trio raked the basin. But, Ross noted, those
beams which had been steady at his first sighting, were now interrupted
by flickers. One of the Baldies upended his tube, rapped its butt
against a rock as if trying to correct a jamming. When the alien went
into action once again his weapon flashed and failed. Within a matter of
moments the other two were also finished. The lighted rods pushed into
the sand, giving a glow to the scene, darkened as a fire might sink to
embers. Power fading?
An ungainly shape floundered out of the churned water, lumbered over the
shale of the beach, its supple neck outstretched, its horned nose down
for a gore-threatening charge. Ross had not realized that the salkars
could operate out of what he thought was their natural element, but this
wild-eyed dragon was plainly bent on reaching its tormentors.
For a moment or two the Baldies continued to front the creature, almost,
Ross thought, as if they could not believe that their weapons had failed
them. Then they broke and ran back to the fairing which they had taken
with such contemptuous ease. The salkar plowed along in their wake, but
its movements grew more labored the farther it advanced, until at last
it lay with only its head upraised, darting it back and forth, its
fanged jaws well agape, voicing a coughing howl.
Its plaint was answered from the water as a second of its kind wallowed
ashore. A terrible wound had torn skin and flesh just behind its neck;
yet still it came on, hissing and bubbling a battle challenge. It did
not attack its fellow; instead it dragged its bulk past the first comer,
on its way after the Baldies.
The salkars continued to come ashore, two more, a third, a fourth,
mangled and torn--pulling themselves as far as they could up the beach.
To lie, facing inland, their necks weaving, their horned heads bobbing,
their cries a frightful din. What had drawn them out of their
preoccupation of battle among themselves into this attempt to reach the
aliens, Ross could not determine. Unless the intelligence of the beasts
was such that they had been able to connect the searing beams which the
Baldies had turned on them so tellingly with the men on the beach, and
had responded by striving to reach a common enemy.
But no desire could give them the necessary energy to pull far ashore.
Almost helplessly beached, they continued to dig into the yielding sand
with their flippers in a vain effort to pursue the aliens.
Ross skirted the clamoring barrier of salkars and headed for the
fairing. A neck snapped about; a head was lowered in his direction. He
smelled the rank stench of reptile combined with burned flesh. The
nearest of the brutes must have scented the Terran in turn, as it was
now trying vainly to edge around to cut across Ross's path. But it was
completely outclassed on land, and the man dodged it easily.
Three Baldies had fled this way. Yet Jazia had reported five had come
out of the sea to take Kyn Add. Two were missing. Where? Had they
remained in the fairing? Were they now in the sub? And that sub--what
had happened to it? The broadcast had been cut off; he had seen the
failure of the weapons and the shore lights. Might the sub have suffered
from salkar attack? Though Ross could hardly believe that the beasts
could wreck it.