CHAPTER III
The brown-haired man withdrew the knife with a nice dexterity, its tip reddened for perhaps a quarter of an inch. Price looked at it and at him in dumb horror. The six wolfish faces collected in a close circle above him and peered down, smiling.
"It's the same color, Burr. Who'd have thought it?"
"Just blood. Hah! And I always thought they'd bleed hard and shiny, like quicksilver."
"Stick him again, Burr."
"I wish we had time," said Burr, and licked his lips with a red tongue. "But they know where we are." He sighed and raised the knife again. "We got to get out of here. Fast."
Price found his voice. "For God's sake," he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing? I ask you for help, and you—" He struggled furiously against the ropes. "You haven't any right to kill me. I haven't done you any harm."
"Star-spawn," said Burr softly, using that word for the second time. He prodded Price above the belt with the knife-point. "If I had time I'd do this slowly, very slowly. Be glad we don't have time."
"But why?" Price shouted. "What for?" He glared up at the circle of hairy faces. "I only got here today. I couldn't have done anything to you. I came from—"
From yesterday? A hundred years ago? Through time? Tell them, and ask them to believe it. Maybe they will. I don't.
"—from the West," he said. "From Nevada. I haven't anything to do with stars."
Burr laughed. He raised the knife. But another man, with a shrewd dark eye and gray hairs in his beard, caught his wrist.
"Wait a minute. Look at his hair. It's as dark as mine."
"Dyed," said Burr. "Look at his clothes. Look at the flier he came in, at his weapons. Look where he is—in the Forbidden Belt. If he isn't from the Citadel—don't be a foolish man, Twist. Let go."
"Why would he dye his hair to look like a human and then come to us in a flier? Is that reasonable? Now hold on, Burr. You hear me? There's a way to tell."
Burr grumbled, but he relaxed, and Twist let him go. He caught Price by the collar and dragged him into the glade by the butchered cow, where the sunlight fell in strong shafts. Then he rolled Price's head back and forth, studying it with intense interest. The others looked over his shoulder.
"His eyes are dark too," said Twist. "You can't dye eyeballs. And look here. See that, Burr? Feel it. He's got the sproutings of a beard. Now we all know the Starlords don't grow hair on their lovely faces."
"Hey," said the others. "That's right. Twist is right."
"Of course he's right," said Price. "I'm human." He knew that much. The rest of the talk was a mystery, but that didn't matter. Not right now. "I come from the West. I'm a friend."
Burr looked sullen. "Humans don't fly. Only Starlords do that."
"Maybe he's a collaborator?" said a yellow-haired boy, all bright and eager, and Burr smiled again.
"Maybe. Anyway, he's none of us. Stand by, Twist."
But Twist did not stand by. He faced the others in fatherly anger at their stupidity.
"You're almighty anxious for a killing Burr. Now what's the Chief going to say when we come back and tell him that a human man came in an airplane, and asked us for help, and we stuck him like a pig and left the plane for the Star Lords?"
For some reason the word "plane" sobered them down and made them thoughtful. Twist pressed his advantage.
"You've all seen the old pictures. You know this flier isn't from the Citadel. It ain't the same shape and it don't make the same noise. It's a plane. Maybe the last one on Earth, and this man knows how to fly it. And you want to cut his throat?"
There was a short silence, during which Price thought he could hear the drops of sweat trickling down his forehead. Then Burr said, without rancor,
"I guess you're right. We'd better take him to the Chief."
"All right," said Twist. He crouched down and began unwrapping the bolo ropes. Price said, "Thanks." It seemed a very small word, and inadequate. Twist grunted.
"If you prove out to be a collaborator," he said, "you'll wish I'd let you die an easy death."
"I'm not," said Price. His brain had been working with abnormal speed. "This is an—an old plane. The papers are still in it. It's been kept hidden, except—" He groped desperately for explanations. "It's a tradition in my family to fly. We're taught, father to son."
That was true enough. Price's father had taken to the air in World War I, and for years afterward had run a flying service. The rest of it he had to play by ear, and God help him if he guessed wrong.
Twist helped him to his feet. "Now," he said to the others, "I want to know what about that plane."
"Get it under cover," Burr said. "Hide it."
"We might do that," Twist said. "And the first flying-eye that happened along would find it. They do more than see, you know. They smell, too. They smell metal, if it's much bigger than a knife." He held out the stone-weighted ropes and shook them. "That's why we use these when we hunt in the Belt. Remember?"
"Now, there's no call to be jeering, Twist," said Burr. "If you got a better idea, we'll listen to it."
"Fly it out," said Twist sharply. "How else are we going to get it to the Chief? On our backs? Cut up and packed on the horses? No." He turned to the man who had taken Price's pistol. "Give me that, Larkin. And you, Harper, hand that rifle to Burr. Larkin, you're in charge of the party. Get the beef back to the camp, and as soon as you've smoked it load up and head home. Keep an eye out for trouble—this is liable to poke up the Citadel like you'd poke a beehive."
Larkin, a short powerful man with a curly poll like a certain type of bull Price had once seen, asked in a mild high voice, "Where are you and Burr going?"
Twist pointed a thumb sky-ward. "Up there," he said, and his eyes shone with excitement. He looked at Burr and grinned.
Burr was scared. It showed in his eyes, in the way his mouth tightened. But he wouldn't say so. Instead he reached out and grabbed Price by the shirt and shook him fiercely.
"There'll be a gun at your head every minute, and don't you forget. You do anything wrong, and you're dead."
Price forebore to explain what would happen to Burr and Twist if they shot him in mid-air. He only nodded and said,
"Don't worry. I'm as anxious to get to your Chief as you are." He took a deep breath and plunged. "That's what I came for."
Burr said, "You're a long way out of your way."
"This is new country to me. I got lost."
You don't know how lost. You don't know how alone.
"Come on," said Twist. "There's been too much yattering already."
He led the way back to the edge of the trees. Price and Burr followed him. The others were already working on the carcass. Presently they were hidden from sight. At the verge of the prairies the three men stopped and examined the visible world before they left cover. Price looked around and did not see anything and was ready to go on. Burr and Twist not only looked at earth and sky, they sniffed the wind and seemed to feel the quality of the air, like animals.
Twist gave a kind of shrug and said, "Well, we're in it now, whole hog." He began to run through the long grass toward the plane. Burr went fleetly after him. Price, oppressed with many things of which physical exhaustion was the least, ran heavily behind them.
When they were within perhaps fifteen feet of the plane a glittering thing came over the tops of the trees and hesitated, making a couple of short spirals in the air. Then it centered over the plane and hung there, high above. It was a disc-shaped object maybe three feet across, with a big lens on its underside.
Twist and Burr had stopped. Price came panting up to them. They were looking up at the disc, and Price saw in their faces a wild mingling of rage and hate and the despairing fear of men faced with an enemy that no amount of bravery or physical strength can prevail against.
"What is it?" he asked, and Twist said hoarsely,
"You must be from a long way west if you've never seen a flying-eye." His hands dropped to his sides. "Well. That's finished."
Burr began to curse at the thing. He looked as if he wanted to cry.
"What will it do?" asked Price.
"It'll hang there, right where it is, to guide the fliers from the Citadel. They can see us here where we stand, right now, in the Citadel." Burr's face was getting whiter by the second, like a man who has been stung by some venomous thing and realizes that in this present moment, between strides as it were, he must die. "They'll be starting. It's forbidden to come into the Belt. They'd kill us for that alone. But with the plane—God knows what they'll do."
"We can try and dodge them in the woods," said Twist, without hope. "Come on."
He started away, but Price said, "Can't we outfly it?"
"The flying-eye? It'll follow us like a hungry hound."
Some kind of television-scanner, Price thought, with a metal-detection unit and a signal relay to alert the main control in the Citadel. And what was the Citadel, and who or what within it was now watching him as he stood, and preparing for his death?
He said, catching the sudden terror from the others, "Shoot it down."
"Shoot it?"
"Smash the lens. Then it can't see us. Here, give me the rifle."
Burr said, "You crazy? No gun will carry that far."
"What kind of guns have you got?" said Price. "Damn it, give me the rifle."
Twist said, "Let him have it."
Price was a good shot. Not brilliant, just good. But today he was phenomenal. He blasted the lens and whatever insides there were behind it as fast as he could pump the cartridges into the chamber and fire them. He didn't miss once. And the disc flopped and slipped and crashed down sideways in the woods.
Price leaped for the plane. "Come on," he said.
The others were staring at him, with their jaws hanging open. "Did you see that? Did you see that gun?"
"Come on," Price yelled, "or I'm going without you!"
They tumbled in. Price started the motor, gunned it savagely, and took off as though the devil was on his tail. One of the men, he didn't know which, yelled out in sheer fright, once. Then they were clear of the tree-tops and climbing fast.
Price looked over his shoulder, and once again he thought he saw that dark metallic gleaming in the northeast.
"Which way?"
"Back across the river. And then," said Twist slowly, "I don't know. They've seen the plane. They'll come looking for it, and the first place they'll look is the Capitol, and after that the villages. They'll find it if it's anywhere near, and you can figure what they'll do to the people. They let us have our guns and our hunting knives, so we can kill game and even each other if we feel like it, but artillery, no. Explosives, no. And planes, no, no, no. Especially not planes. I don't suppose there's been one in the air for almost a century."
Twist shivered, his eyes shining, his hands gripping the seat.
"I'm glad I got to do this before I die. It's—" He fumbled for a word and gave up. "I can't say. But it makes you think what we were once, what we could have been today if it hadn't been for them." And he jerked his head back to indicate the direction of the Citadel. "The star-spawn. The damned Star Lords."
Burr looked out the cabin window. "It's an awful long way down." Then he asked Price, "Why'd you say you came to find the Chief?"
A suspicious man, Price thought, and so is Twist. Careful, careful. But how can you be careful when you don't know what's going on in the world, and you don't dare ask?
Price said, "I came to give him the plane. I'm the last of my family. I wanted to join up with somebody, and—there aren't many in the desert." This, he thought, was a safe assumption. "Life's too hard. I wanted to come where there are trees and water."
It was a good story. He didn't know whether they believed it.
The Beechcraft left a fleeting shadow on the river and passed on. Twist peered anxiously into the sky behind.
"Can you go any faster?"
"I'm wide open now."
"Not fast enough. They come like lightning. Whoom!" Jets, thought Price, and began to look for a hole in the forest. Twist said, "And if they don't find us the first time, they'll send the flying-eyes."
"And they can smell metal," Price said. "So we've got to find a place away from any town and not only out of sight from above but also screened from a magnetic detector. Say in a cave, under a rock ledge, or close to some heavy concentration of metal they're already used to. Can you think of any place?"
There was a total silence, and he realized that they were looking at him with cold and bitter eyes.
"How do you know so much?" asked Burr.
"Isn't it obvious?" said Price impatiently.
"Not to us. What's all this about magnetic detectors and screens—and where did you learn it if you're not working for the Citadel?"
Twist laid the muzzle of the revolver casually against his neck.
"I wouldn't shoot me now," said Price, and explained why, very quickly. "Besides, that's a hell of a way to act. Just because I happen to know a little elementary science—how else do you suppose the flying-eyes find metal? By some supernatural method?"
"Hm," said Twist, and withdrew the revolver. "Maybe he's right, Burr. After all, we're hunters. We never studied much into those things." Burr grunted derisively, but he sat still, apparently convinced that there was nothing to be done about Price now. Twist thought hard for a minute. Then he said, "I know a place. There's a kind of a secret cave there, and room enough for you to land, I guess, figuring by what you took before."
He squinted out the window, confused by the differentness of how things looked from above. But finally he picked out a direction and told Price, "There."
After some low-level circling and searching Price found the place, a fairly flat stretch of bottomland in a little valley, beside an overhanging wall of granite. Twist's estimate of the room was hardly generous, but he made it, and taxied over bumpy sod as close as he could to the cave-mouth Twist pointed out. Then he sent the others to clear away some rocks and dangling creepers, and with a final heave and roar he managed to lurch into the cave itself. He cut the motor. He had about four hours' flying time left in the tanks.
He got out of the Beechcraft and dragged stones under the wheels to chock it. Then he helped Burr and Twist rearrange the hanging vines over the entrance.
A high shrill screaming in the sky gave them less than ten seconds' warning. They ducked back under the overhanging ledge and peered motionless from under it. And Price saw close above him, skimming the rolling land like an eager hawk, an ovoid craft that was not like any jet he had ever seen, wingless, leaving no trail, but tearing with a mighty shriek of power through the sky.