"You have nothing to do with them?"
"We have nothing to do with them."
"Third trick make people angry."
"If there's a third trick, we're no part of it."
The chief nodded solemnly and turned to face the water. Ahead of
the flotilla, a single runabout was quite close to land now. Jane
recognized the corporal who had chased her out on the quay. With him
were two other soldiers.
"Halloa!" the corporal shouted. "Hallo, Miz Crowley. Won't do you no
good to try and hide. We got orders to take you back. Mr. Masters with
you, ma'am. You'll come peacefully?"
"We won't come any way at all," Sid said defiantly. "Not until we're
good and ready."
The chief suddenly strode forward, to the edge of the water and then
ankle deep in the surf. "Wait," he said, lifting both hands solemnly.
"You and these two--you know one another?"
"They're Miz Crowley and Mr. Masters," the corporal shouted back.
"And you know they come here?"
"Heck, yes," said the corporal. "It's why we came. Following them."
"Otherwise you no have come?"
"That's right."
"Then you go," the chief said in a strong, solemn voice. "Tell others.
Go! You come close, we hurt these two people. You try to land, take us
off--we kill them. We stay here. Our right is to stay. Our Lord Sun
no hurt Mandmoorans. Lord Sun for life and growing of crops, not for
death. You go."
"You can't keep them for hostages," the corporal shouted across the
water. "You can't do that."
* * * * *
The chief let his right hand fall. A line of spearmen trotted up behind
him and let fly with a fusillade of long-shafted spears. The spears
fell around the military runabout, but none of them touched it.
"They stay," the chief said, "You take hundred million Mandmoorans off
Mandmoora, we keep two earth people here to see nothing happens to
Lord Sun. Now go!"
"Sid," Jane said. "Sid, did you hear him? They--they're going to keep
us here, and--Sid, is there any chance the sun won't go nova?"
Sid shook his head. His face looked suddenly bleak. "No chance at all,
kid. I guess we should have listened."
"Sid, I'm scared."
There was a roaring sound as the runabout, instead of retreating, came
bucketing toward the beach. "Come on down to the water!" the corporal
bawled at the top of his voice. "We'll get you!"
The Chief raised his hand. Another line of spearmen came trotting
forward. "Go back," Sid shouted. "They'll kill you!"
But the runabout came toward them on the heaving surf. Before the chief
could raise his hand a second time, the corporal stood up in the prow
of the runabout and fired a blaster toward the beach. He had fired it
high and he waited for it to disperse the spearmen. When it did not,
he fired again, lower. The chief lifted his hand and brought it down.
A volley of spears leaped from muscular arms, arching in the sunlight,
dropping toward the runabout....
The corporal fired again and a figure near the chief slumped to the
sand. Then the runabout, riddled by fifty spears at the water-line,
began to sink.
"Take them," the chief said.
A score of Mandmoorans swarmed out through the surf toward the sinking
boat. Jane watched as they surrounded it and brought the three soldiers
back with them quickly. By then the runabout had gone under, but the
flotilla of rescue craft was now only a few hundred yards offshore and
coming fast.
"Five hostages," the chief said. "Tell them go."
Voices shouted back and forth across the water, but Jane saw that the
chief wasn't listening. Instead, he went to the man who had fallen
before the corporal's blaster. He knelt and took the yellow shocked
head on his knee and murmured to it. The young Mandmoora's right arm
had been all but blasted off at the elbow. Blood was gushing and
pumping from severed arteries. The chief raised his head and wailed:
"Grower, healer, Lord Sun! Save the Princeling of your people. Grower,
healer, Lord Sun!" he chanted, repeating it. "Grower...."
"Princeling?" Sid said. "The old boy's son, you think?"
"If they just keep chanting and leave him like that, the poor boy'll
bleed to death. Can't we do something?"
Just then an amplified voice came across the water toward them,
metallic and somehow unreal. "Masters! Miss Crowley. We'll stay here.
We won't budge until--until it's too late. Until we have to leave.
But we can't come after you. The Mandmoorans would fight. There would
be death on both sides and--I'm sorry, Masters, Miss Crowley. We are
positively forbidden to use force of arms here. You understand?"
It was a rhetorical question. It did not matter if they understood or
not. The flotilla would wait--hopelessly. The flotilla would leave when
it had to. And the corporal and his companions, along with Sid Masters
and Jane, would be left with the Sun-trusting Mandmoorans.
* * * * *
The Mandmooran prince's face was ashen with pain and loss of blood. The
chief cradled his head, and mumbled, and chanted. And the blood pumped
from the severed arteries.
A ring of Mandmooran guards surrounded Jane, Sid Masters and the three
soldiers, but when Jane walked through the ring, quite close to two
of the spearmen, they did not try to stop her. It was because of the
Mandmooran women, she decided: the Mandmooran women were so small and
fragile-looking that their men would never take the guarding of a woman
seriously.
Jane went over to where the chief was kneeling by his stricken son.
"Unless you stop the bleeding," she said quietly, "he's going to die.
Don't you know that?"
"Healer sun stop bleeding. Lord Sun."
Jane shook her head. "The sun is a slow healer. The sun can't perform
medical miracles. I have no argument with your religion, chief--but we
can save your boy's life if you let us."
At first Jane thought she had failed. The Chief continued chanting
over his son, not looking at the Earthgirl. Then, slowly, he looked
up. Not at Jane, not immediately at Jane: he let his gaze come to
rest on the Mandmooran sun, faintly bluish and clearly swollen now,
egg-shaped almost as its internal forces gathered themselves for the
final cataclysmic explosion which, in hours, would all but tear the
star apart. Even a fanatic sun-worshipper would know now that something
was wrong with their deity. On the other hand, a fanatic sun-worshipper
might regard the change, Jane realized, as a manifestation of
displeasure. Hadn't all but an infinitesimal fraction of the
Mandmoorans deserted their god? Wasn't that reason enough for the wrath
of the Lord Sun?
But then the chief looked at Jane. His eyes were sad and old and
suddenly and unexpectedly very wise. He said, "You can help? You can
save his life?"
"You're not trying," Jane said. "I can try."
Carefully the chief stood up, making a mound of sand and letting his
son's head rest there. "Then save him," he said finally. "Save him and
you can return to your people."
A very old Mandmooran, far older than the chief, a skin-puckered,
limping, hunch-backed, rheumy-eyed, gray-skinned Mandmooran, approached
the chief and jabbered excitedly in their own language. The chief
jabbered back at him and the old man raised his voice. The chief
shouted him down. Shrugging but smiling, the old man wandered off to a
hillock of sand, threw his arms up at the Lord Sun, and began a weird,
wailing chant.
"Shaman say," the chief told Jane, "yours is bad medicine."
Jane didn't answer. She went down on one knee near the injured prince.
It almost made her ill to stare at his torn, mangled arm. She was no
nurse. She knew first aid, but that was all. Still, anything was better
than the fatalistic Mandmooran attitude.
"Shaman say," the chief went on, "we offer sacrifice to wrath of Lord
Sun. For long time our people no offer sacrifice in human form. Human
sacrifice now, at moment of trial, work. So say shaman."
Turning, the chief shouted something. Three spearmen stalked within the
circle around the Earthmen and came out with the uniformed figure of
the corporal. The ancient shaman jabbered excitedly, but the chief did
not look happy.
* * * * *
Sid Masters came brawling through the ring of spearmen, fighting clear
with flailing arms and legs. "Wait a minute, chief!" he cried. "Who's
running the show round here, you or that magician?"
The shaman jabbered, but the chief silenced him with a gesture. "I am
chief of the Mandmoora," he said slowly.
"The girl is trying to save your son's life. Is that the thanks we
get--what you're going to do with the corporal?"
The chief was silent for a few moments, meditating. Then: "Let him go.
Until the girl has succeeded--or failed."
The shaman jabbered again. He didn't like it but he returned,
grumbling, to his hillock. Jane was already going to work on the
stricken prince. First she tore a strip from her jumper and used it
to bind the prince's upper arm. The bleeding was first. She had to
stop the bleeding. Twisting a pencil in the knotted tourniquet, she
tightened it until the blood had stopped flowing. She felt anything but
calm. She actually felt queasy. But somehow her fingers worked quickly
and surely and before long a few score of the Mandmoorans came to watch.
"He's lost an awful lot of blood," Jane told Sid Masters. "I've stopped
the bleeding now, but he needs a transfusion if he's going to have a
real chance. And look at the wound, will you? It's dirty. He needs
antibiotics and he needs them fast."
"On the flotilla out there?" Sid asked. "They ought to have
antibiotics."
"Get them then," Jane said, and turned to the chief. "My companion
needs strong medicine from the boats which wait."
"Stay. All stay."
"Then your son dies."
The chief looked at her. He was very quiet. The shaman wailed louder
now. "Go," said the chief, and Sid Masters went splashing out into the
water.
Five minutes later, swimming hard, he returned to the beach. He
produced a water-proof packet of antibiotic powders and Jane opened
it and let the powders sift down on the prince's wound. "Listen,"
Sid whispered. "We're in trouble, all right. They can't be sure when
the sun is going to nova, you see? They figure it ought to be about
seventeen hours, but nobody's going to make book with his life. They're
giving us fifteen minutes. Then they're pulling out. They're sorry,
but they're pulling out. You can't blame them, Jane, especially since
interstellar law won't permit them the use of force."
"But you came back, Sid," Jane said.
"We're trying to help the boy. Besides, I couldn't leave you holding
the bag like this--alone with those soldiers and three thousand
fanatic Mandmoorans."
Jane smiled at him. There was nothing else she could offer him
now. Their deaths seemed almost a certainty. They would be--had to
be--deserted. They would be left to the Mandmoora--and the novaing sun.
"Is the boy going to live?" Sid asked.
"For a while. I've done all that first aid can do. The bleeding's
stopped. The antibiotics will take care of any possibility of
infection. But he's lost blood. If he doesn't get a transfusion soon,
I'm afraid he won't pull through."
"Then tell the chief."
Jane nodded, and found the chief near the shaman's hillock, gazing on
his medicine man with a troubled expression as if he couldn't decide
between the old way and the new. "Your boy," Jane said.
"The boy lives?"
"For now he lives. He needs the kind of medical care I can't give him.
The kind of care he can get aboard the exodus ships. Let him go, chief.
Let us take him back. We can save his life."
* * * * *
The shaman leaped from the hillock and--for all his bag-of-bones
appearance--alighted athletically beside them. "I heard!" he cackled,
showing a toothless black hole of a mouth. "I heard! A trick to leave
our island. A trick to leave our planet! A trick...."
"Just the boy then," Jane said. "If you want him to live. But you'll
never know about it. Because if you stay here you'll all be killed."
"You see, a trick!" protested the shaman.
The chief shook his head slowly. "Life blood flow from boy. Boy would
have died. She save boy. If she wish, let the boy go with them."
"But they stay here!" the shaman shrieked. "They must stay. Sacrifice
all to Lord Sun, Lord Sun shrink again. Otherwise--" He showed the
palms of his hands in a hopeless gesture.
"Bring small boat," the chief said, making up his mind. "The girl goes,
with princeling, to her people."
But Jane shook her head. "Not alone, I don't. I go with this man here
and with the three soldiers, or I don't go at all. And neither does
your son. We can save his life, chief--but we don't intend to if you--"
"Tricks! Deceit!" screamed the shaman, jumping up and down. "Kill them!
Kill them all!"
An uncertain line of spearmen appeared, but the chief lifted his hand
and they remained perfectly still as if with the small motion of his
arm he had somehow frozen them in their tracks. The spearmen seemed
content: they had come forward at the shaman's summons without great
resolution.
All at once the shaman leaped at Jane. He came so suddenly that she
had time only for a quick look. Still, she had not missed the gleam
of something in his hand and she threw herself sideways as the hand
came down. She heard the chief shout, heard Sid Masters' startled oath
as she fell to the sand with the old medicine man. Something burned
against her shoulder and she knew it was his knife, knew it had pierced
her flesh there. She felt a wave of giddiness, but after that the pain
wasn't so bad. She could see Sid lifting the shaman bodily and flinging
him away across the sand like an empty sack, could see Sid's face,
grave with concern, swim close to her through the suddenly shimmering
range of vision before her eyes.
"Bleeding pretty bad," Sid said. "Ought to be able to control it with
the pressure point in your neck. Hurt much?"
Jane shook her head.
"Here goes then."
"Wait." Jane pushed his hand away. She could feel the warm wetness of
her blood streaming down across her breast from the shoulder wound. She
turned to the chief:
"I stopped your son's bleeding," she said calmly. "I saved his life.
Stop my bleeding, chief. Save my life in return."
The chief looked at her without answering. Then he looked at the
shaman, who had climbed to hands and knees but made no move to get up.
"Don't do it!" Sid pleaded. "He can't save you and you know it. You'll
bleed to death."