[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February
1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Illustration: The chance of mass slaughter was their eternal
nightmare.]
[Sidenote: _How black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous
traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?
That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero._]
Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when
he reached the village.
He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,
parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's
unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred
miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'
second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like
a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.
He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on
his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the
single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick
house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof
now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed
in a _Kumaji_ raid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest
time as a boy.
He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked
as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and
brought the ladle to his lips.
He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.
Poisoned.
He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost
gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen
and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with
the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's
house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the
saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table
was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last
night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.
The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of
the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth--too
late for anything.
He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring
at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard
scurried away.
"Earthman!" a quavering voice called.
Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,
a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and
sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,
which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.
Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost
spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the
canteen and said:
"What happened here?"
"They're gone. All gone."
"Yes, but what happened?"
"The Kumaji--"
"You're Kumaji."
"This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now
they're gone."
"But you stayed here--"
"To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too
old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water."
* * * * *
Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened."
Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century
Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were
sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The
Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life
on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one
oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,
Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about
the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,
so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had
suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since
a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,
almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.
"When did it happen?" Steve demanded.
"Last night." It was now midafternoon. "Three folks died," the Kumaji
said in his almost perfect English, "from the poisoning of the well. The
well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,
and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses."
"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?" Oasis City,
built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the
surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,
was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of
trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....
"They have to," the old man said. "And they have to hurry. Men, women
and children. The Kumaji are after them."
* * * * *
Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could
find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way
he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,
trekking across a parched wilderness--to the safety of Oasis City--or
death.
"Come on," Steve said, making up his mind. "The unicopter can hold two
in a pinch."
"You're going after them?"
"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long."
"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember."
"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell."
"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow."
"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without--"
"I'm staying," the old man said, still without self-pity, just
matter-of-factly. "The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame
'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,
long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll
need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?"
"No," Steve said.
"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck."
"But you can't--"
"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home
I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow."
Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small
metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It
could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.
* * * * *
Steve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back
to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be
refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself
airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.
The old man's voice called after him: "Tell the people ... hurry ...
Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their
trail ... but hurry...."
The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.
Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on
hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.
Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and
wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and
a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the
slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle
East--and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here
on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of
burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked
beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with
the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands
with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve
could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to
ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five
hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....
"Hullo!" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding
clumsily through the sand toward him. "Cantwell's the name," Steve said.
"I'm one of you."
Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. "Cantwell. Yeah, I
remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,
no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing
here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?"
The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias
Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a
boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in
his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in
his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was
well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a
big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had
hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve
Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the
Kumajis, and had grown rich--by colony standards--at his business. Now,
Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the
others--either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a
new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.
Perhaps that explained his bitterness.
"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell."
The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.
They hardly seemed to be moving at all. "Is my aunt all right?" Steve
said. She was the only family he remembered.
Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. "I hate to be the one to tell you
this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died
from the poisoned water last night."
For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was
pity--pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.
Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.
* * * * *
The caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.
She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face--it would be a
pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized--was etched with
lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. "Who is he, Dad?" the
girl said.
"Young Cantwell. Remember?"
So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten
years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.
She was a woman now....
"Steve Cantwell?" Mary said. "Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I--I'm
sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your
aunt. If there's anything I can do...."
Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a
slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time
like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was
completely genuine.
He appreciated it.
Tobias Whiting said: "Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get
along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know
that." He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. "But I
never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be
poor again. We could have been rich."