It was a Gypsy world, built of space flotsam,
peopled with the few free races of the Solar
System. Roy Campbell, outcast prey of the
Coalition, entered its depths to seek haven
for the Kraylens of Venus--only to find that it
had become a slave trap from which there was no escape.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Roy Campbell woke painfully. His body made a blind, instinctive lunge
for the control panel, and it was only when his hands struck the
smooth, hard mud of the wall that he realized he wasn't in his ship
any longer, and that the Spaceguard wasn't chasing him, their guns
hammering death.
He leaned against the wall, the perspiration thick on his heavy
chest, his eyes wide and remembering. He could feel again, as though
the running fight were still happening, the bucking of his sleek
Fitz-Sothern beneath the calm control of his hands. He could remember
the pencil rays lashing through the night, searching for him, seeking
his life. He could recall the tiny prayer that lingered in his memory,
as he fought so skillfully, so dangerously, to evade the relentless
pursuer.
Then there was a hazy period, when a blasting cannon had twisted his
ship like a wind-tossed leaf, and his head had smashed cruelly against
the control panel. And then the slinking minutes when he had raced for
safety--and then the sodden hours when sleep was the only thing in the
Universe that he craved.
He sank back on the hide-frame cot with something between a laugh
and a curse. He was sweating, and his wiry body twitched. He found a
cigarette, lit it on the second try and sat still, listening to his
heartbeats slow down.
He began to wonder, then, what had wakened him.
It was night, the deep indigo night of Venus. Beyond the open hut door,
Campbell could see the _liha_-trees swaying a little in the hot, slow
breeze. It seemed as though the whole night swayed, like a dark blue
veil.
For a long time he didn't hear anything but the far-off screaming of
some swamp-beast on the kill. Then, sharp and cruel against the blue
silence, a drum began to beat.
It made Campbell's heart jerk. The sound wasn't loud, but it had a
tight, hard quality of savagery, something as primal as the swamp and
as alien, no matter how long a man lived with it.
The drumming stopped. The second, perhaps the third, ritual prelude.
The first must have wakened him. Campbell stared with narrow dark eyes
at the doorway.
He'd been with the Kraylens only two days this time, and he'd slept
most of that. Now he realized, that in spite of his exhaustion, he had
sensed something wrong in the village.
Something was wrong, very wrong, when the drum beat that way in the
sticky night.
He pulled on his short, black spaceman's boots and went out of the hut.
No one moved in the village. Thatch rustled softly in the slow wind,
and that was the only sign of life.
Campbell turned into a path under the whispering _liha_-trees. He
wore nothing but the tight black pants of his space garb, and the hot
wind lay on his skin like soft hands. He filled his lungs with it. It
smelled of warm still water and green, growing things, and....
Freedom. Above all, _freedom_. This was one place where a man could
still stand on his legs and feel human.
The drumming started again, like a man's angry heart beating out of the
indigo night. This time it didn't stop. Campbell shivered. The trees
parted presently, showing a round dark hummock.
It was lit by the hot flare of burning _liha_ pods. Sweet oily smoke
curled up into the branches. There was a sullen glint of water through
the trees, but there were closer glints, brighter, fiercer, more deadly.
The glinting eyes of men, silent men, standing in a circle around the
hummock.
There was a little man crouched on the mound in the center. His skin
had the blue-whiteness of skim milk. He wore a kilt of iridescent
scales. His face was subtly reptilian, broad across the cheek-bones and
pointed below.
A crest of brilliant feathers--they weren't really feathers, but that
was as close as Campbell could get--started just above his brow ridges
and ran clean down his spine to the waist. They were standing erect
now, glowing in the firelight.
He nursed a drum between his knees. It stopped being just a drum when
he touched it. It was his own heart, singing and throbbing with the
hate in it.
Campbell stopped short of the circle. His nerves, still tight from his
near-fatal brush with the Spaceguard, stung with little flaring pains.
He'd never seen anything like this before.
The little man rocked slightly, looking up into the smoke. His eyes
were half closed. The drum was part of him and part of the indigo
night. It was part of Campbell, beating in his blood.
It was the heart of the swamp, sobbing with hate and a towering anger
that was as naked and simple as Adam on the morning of Creation.
* * * * *
Campbell must have made some involuntary motion, because a man standing
at the edge of the hummock turned his head and saw him. He was tall and
slender, and his crest was pure white, a sign of age.
He turned and came to Campbell, looking at him with opalescent eyes.
The firelight laid the Earthman's dark face in sharp relief, the lean
hard angles, the high-bridged nose that had been broken and not set
straight, the bitter mouth.