II

The trail snaked along precipices and wound past narrow, hidden

valleys. At the foot of a cliff lay the shell of a space-cruiser which

had been telescoped from its original six-hundred feet to a bare

two-hundred, though much of the nose had melted from the impact against

the rocks. Gnarled oaks and junipers reached up from a riven seam of

the shell. The metal had not rusted. It was merely tarnished to a slate

gray. It was a mine of such metal as could have furnished all manner of

implements for the Terrestrians--but they did not know how to exploit

it.

Finally, Verrill was looking down into narrow, upland meadows where

sheep grazed. There were barley patches. His eyes felt as though they

were full of sand. The snow-white glare from cliffs, and the dust which

rose in yellow puffs at every step, made the way a torment for one

accustomed to the paradisiacal clime of the Venusian Domes.

Each day's march brought the donkey-caravan within sight of alternate

trails, guarded by mud-brick towers, where armed men were stationed

to watch the moves of hostile neighbors. The return, even without

pursuit, would be dangerous.

At last they came to Ardelan's mud-walled houses, huddled on a rocky

shelf which overhung a fertile valley. The settlement was surrounded

by a wall of earth and stone, and had escaped contamination because no

one would have bombed a 12,000 foot range of limestone peaks except by

mistake.

When the trading convoy filed into the tangle of flat-roofed houses

which surrounded a hard-packed central square, women, children, and

dogs came out, each in full voice. The procession kept straight on

toward the entrance of a two-storeyed building. Half the ground-level

was a stable; the rest, a courtyard where Ardelan and a handful of

armed companions lolled under an awning of black goat-hair.

Terrestrian faces were no novelty to Verrill; but this time, being

a stranger among them--instead of merely a spectator seeing a

handful of them, half defiant and half uneasy in the strangeness

of a trading-post--he saw what he had never before noticed. They

tended toward height and ranginess, prominence of nose, angularity

of face; yet behind this likeness was a shadow-pattern of racial

differentiation. There were differences of flavor, rather than of

outright form. The flare of a nostril, the shape of an eye, the

fullness or thinness of lip--a thick necked one, here and there,

suggested that, generations back, there had been among his ancestors a

blocky Mongol from Central Asia.

The guards, instead of presenting Verrill, explained him as though he

had been some trade article. Ardelan, listening, studied his visitor

with entire impersonality, as he might have scrutinized a basket of

fresh ripe apricots to see how they had endured being hauled so far.

"What's in the bag?" he demanded, abruptly.

"Medicine. I am a doctor."

"What for? People die anyway."

"A doctor," Verrill explained, concealing his dismay, "is not to keep

people from dying. He is to make it more agreeable for them until they

finally have to die."

Ardelan addressed his henchmen. The answers summed up to this: that if

nothing much ailed a man, he'd get well by himself, and if something

really incapacitated him, it would of course be something so serious

that he could not last long at the best.

Ardelan digested this wisdom, then asked, "Verrill, can you make knives

like these you gave that man?"

"I am a doctor, not a blacksmith."

"Can you make guns or cartridges?"

"No."

"Can you fight?"

Verrill glanced uneasily about, as though Ardelan might be on the point

of selecting an opponent to test the stranger's claims. And, having

read Verrill's face, Ardelan snorted, and not waiting for a reply,

demanded, "Then what are you good for?"

"To treat the sick," Verrill repeated, with growing sense of futility.

"To bind wounds. To set broken bones."

"Look at us. We've done very well."

"I can do better."

"Can't work, can't fight! Good for nothing but doctoring. Bad as a

priest! Lock him up; I want to think this over."

The guard hustled Verrill and his medical case into an empty granary.

They slammed the door and rolled a boulder against it. It made no

difference whether or not he could shove the door open; there was

nowhere to go if he did get out. He could not find his way back to the

trading-post except over the way which his escort had brought him: a

guarded way.

* * * * *

In the half-gloom, Verrill noted that the wall had been cracked by

earthquakes. These cracks gave him hand and toe holds, to climb up

until he could catch the rough-hewn timber which supported the roof

of brush and clay. Lying on the crown of the wall, he could look out

through rifts in the roof.

Herdsmen were driving their flocks in from distant slopes. Others drove

donkeys laden with brush. Verrill was appalled by the ever present

evidence that Terrestrian life was a matter of digging, scratching,

and enduring the elements. The stark emptiness of the sky worried him;

he was accustomed to the perpetual twilight and impenetrable clouds of

Venus.

Well away from the settlement, and outside the wall, was a small,

squatty cube with a small tower at each corner. The structure was

backed up against an overhanging cliff, and was unapproachable except

from the walled town. The precipitous ending of the shelf guarded the

whitewashed cube more surely than if it had been within the town wall.

The open doorway was so large in proportion to the structure itself

that surmise made Verrill's pulse hammer. That must be the shrine where

the Fire of Skanderbek was kept.

Toward dusk, drums rumbled and trumpets of ram's horns bawled hoarsely.

Men carrying tightly bound bundles of brush marched in procession

toward the whitewashed cube, and chanted as they went. When they came

to the place, they filed in, each coming out with his faggots ablaze.

They returned to their houses. Before long, Verrill's captors brought

him a bowl of mutton stew, and leathery cakes of bread. "They couldn't

have cooked this stuff so soon," he reasoned. "It must have been

cooking all the while, on fires already lighted. That procession was

fire worship."

He sat there a long time after he had licked the gravy from his

fingers. A shocking business: meat so plentiful that it was fed to a

prisoner, and yet the barbarians knew nothing at all about cookery.

The town swarmed with flies. Vultures perched on the walls and

watch-towers, waiting to clean up the garbage and offal flung from the

houses. The community well had a nasty taint from surface drainage from

the stables. Verrill, after a bad night's sleep, spent the morning

deciding that when pestilence did break out, he would need his medical

supplies for himself.

The women, shapely and graceful, gathered about the well to fill the

earthenware jugs they carried balanced on their heads. They chattered

mainly about the outsider, giving most emphasis to his looks, though

devoting certain speculation to his possible usefulness, and probable

destination.

"Kwangtan," they all agreed, "wants him killed or sent away."

From what he could piece together from the various relays of women

he overheard, Verrill concluded that Kwangtan was the keeper of the

shrine; and that medical practice was the monopoly of old women, who

cooked up herbs. These potions, plus Kwangtan's incantations, kept the

community in health.

The drowsy silence of midafternoon was broken by an hysterical

screeching and screaming. Before Verrill could arouse himself from the

stupor of half suffocation, the door was jerked open and several men

pounced for him.

"You, with the medicine! Work for you. Bring the black box!"

* * * * *

They hustled him to a house where several old women were shaking and

back-slapping a boy of three or four. The kid's mother, one of the

few redheads in the colony, was wailing at a pitch that made Verrill

shiver. A beetle-browed young man with a wiry beard squatted on the

floor, looking helpless. All he did was repeat, "Get Kwangtan!" And no

one paid him any heed at all.

At the sight of Verrill, one of the old women laid the child on a

sheepskin spread on the floor. The child's face was gray. His lips were

bluish. His eyes bugged out. He wheezed agonizingly. It made Verrill's

skin twitch, just to see the little fellow's losing battle for breath.

He was slowly choking. With all voices suddenly stilled at Verrill's

approach, the sound became all the more ominous.

In his utter perplexity and dismay, Verrill hoped that what he heard

was the death-rattle which would relieve him of the task about to be

forced upon him. The absence of Kwangtan, the holy man, told him the

story: that wise fellow was not going to lose any prestige by tackling

something he could not handle.

"What's wrong?" Verrill asked, with a show of assurance.

"You're a doctor," the kid's father snarled. "Do something."

"He swallowed an apricot seed," the child's redhaired mother said.

"It's stuck, we can't shake it out, he's choking. Get it out, you

blinking fool!"

The kid's father drew and cocked his pistol. The dry click chilled

Verrill to the heart. He remembered an old story of an emergency

operation at a trading-post. The yarn had given the Venusians quite a

thrill.

Ardelan stalked in. He nodded his approval of the man who had a pistol

trained on the doctor. "Stranger, do not make any mistakes. Kwangtan

has warned us."

Verrill had a raft of Venusian specifics for just about every known

ailment; he had counted, however, on nothing of the sort which now

confronted him--had looked forward simply to giving the savages pills,

and swabbing them with antiseptics. As he knelt, he fumbled helplessly

with the instruments in the case.

"Do this right," Ardelan said. "Or he shoots."

Verrill loaded a hypo with a local anaesthetic. The glint of metal,

and the sudden end of the child's gagging as the injection stilled his

struggles, nearly cost Verrill his life. Ardelan's big hand knocked the

pistol out of line as it blazed, and the slug scorched Verrill's cheek

and pounded a chunk out of the wall.

"He's not dead," the chief said, "Not yet."

A splash of antiseptic.

Then, nerving himself, Verrill made a slit in the throat. There was not

much blood. He got the apricot seed free. With haggling jabs, he took a

couple of stitches. He taped and bandaged.

Then, shoulders sagging, he settled back, trying to keep from toppling

to the floor. The kid's lips were no longer bluish. He was breathing

freely. At last he blinked, cried out, and reached for his throat.

"He's brought him back to life!" the redhead cried, and snatched up the

boy.

* * * * *

Verrill crumpled. He toppled, and sprawled. He was, however, conscious,

and when he heard what the mountaineers were saying he realized that

had he done it intentionally, he could not have done better than

collapse.

One said, "He's left his body for awhile to fight off the devils, so

they won't come back to hurt the kid."

Verrill muttered and mumbled until, satisfied that his act had been up

to their expectation, he sat up. Again, he faced a pistol, but this

time it was presented butt foremost.

"Take it, doctor. It's yours," the kid's father said.

And now Kwangtan, the fire priest, joined the group.

His deep-set eyes blazed fiercely. His face was sunken. His hands

were like parchment drawn over bones. He wore white pants and a white

shirt. His beard and his shoulder-length hair were white. For a moment,

Verrill thought that the old fellow was a veteran of The War. His age

made him fantastic in a colony where men over forty were scarce, and

those over fifty, rarities; though old women were more than plentiful.

Verrill declined the gift of the pistol. "Give it to the holy man," he

said. "I did not come here for pay."

Then he went with Ardelan to sit under the black awning where the chief

settled disputes, and planned raids on neighboring tribes.

"Excellency," Verrill pointed out, "holding a pistol at a doctor's head

is no way of making sure he'll help the patient."

"You are a stranger. You might have killed him with a curse."

"He was already nearly dead."

"But he was still alive, and you might have finished him."

"He must have known I'd do my best."

"Still, if the boy had died, that clan would have lost a fighting man,

so your clan had to lose. That is our law."

"Is that why Kwangtan wouldn't help?"

"Not at all. He's not a stranger. And if the women who were working on

the boy had kept at it until he choked to death, no one would have hurt

them. They're not strangers."

"The quicker I get out of here, the better!"

Ardelan permitted himself to smile. "Once you are no longer a stranger,

doctoring will not be so dangerous."