CHAPTER IV
Trapped in a strange dream, Price looked down from the forested ridge into a shallow green valley. Burr pointed and said,
"There it is. The Capitol of the Missouris."
He said it with pride. He and Twist had talked of this place, in the two days since they had hidden the plane and headed north. And they had talked of it proudly. Their home, the city of their people, the focus of a shadowy government that ruled the forest-lands which once had been two great states.
Price looked at it, and he felt pity. Pity, and a wrenching regret for what the world had once been, and what it had become during the lost years.
In the valley, straddling a clear little river, lay a half-dozen streets of wooden houses and workshops and smithies. The buildings were neat enough, of massive squared timbers. But the streets were unpaved and dusty, and their only traffic was loaded wagons from the surrounding tilled lands, and pack-horse trains from the forest trails, and men, women, children in drab leather and wool. A faint sound of creaking axles drifted up through the drowsy afternoon air.
"The Capitol of the Missouris," Price thought. "And oh God, why did it have to happen to our world?"
He had listened, on the way here, to everything Burr and Twist said. Bit by bit, the jigsaw fragments of information had fallen into place, and a few casual questions had completed the apocalyptic picture.
It had happened long ago in the lost years, the years that Price had been hurled through. As near as he could make out the date had been 1979, sixty years ago.
That had been the year of doom. That had been the year when they had first come from outer space.
The Star Lords. The Vurna, as they called themselves. The accursed star-spawn, as men called them. Their tremendous cruisers had come out of the blue, had poised above the Earth, and then had struck.
Every city, every big town, every atomic power-plant, every arsenal, every important bridge, viaduct, dam and factory. In one week of holocaust, they had been smashed by the remorseless cruisers that went round and round the planet. Millions died, that week. And the Star Lords' cruisers went away.
Quickly, they had returned. This time, not to destroy but to seize. What had been the fat, smiling lands of Illinois and Indiana, they had made their domain. In it, they built their Citadel.
The Citadel was a fortress, a city, above all, a base. The Star Lords contemptuously refrained from attacking the dazed Earth peoples who had been thrown back to near-primitive conditions. To the lords of the Citadel, Earth was only the site of an important base. Or so they said.
Was it any wonder, Price thought, that these men of the Missouris would kill anyone, anything, from the Citadel? Just hearing of it all had kindled his own rage. These men's fathers had lived it, and they were still living it.
He looked down at the wooden town, as he and Burr and Twist went down a trail, and he thought,
"Careful, though! They still think I may be from the Citadel—Watch every word!"
Two hours later, Price sat in a wooden-walled room in the biggest of the houses, facing the Chief of the Missouris.
His name was Sawyer, and he was old. But he looked formidable as an old panther in his buckskins. His leathery face held deep pride, intelligence, and a brutal ruthlessness. Behind him stood the Chiefs of the Indianas and of the Illinois, those scattered peoples on whose lands the Citadel now stood.
Sawyer listened without a word to Price's story, and all the time Price told it he thought how thin and far-fetched it sounded. But, looking at these faces, he knew he could never convince them of the truth.
"Two days ago," said Sawyer finally, "the Vurna were here. They were almighty hot and bothered. They were looking for a plane. I never saw a plane in my life, and I said so."
He paused, his swarthy, wrinkled face brooding, and no one, least of all Price, dared speak.
He went on. "Since then, the sky's been lousy with their flying-eyes, hunting and hunting. You must have seen them."
Burr took that as an opening. "We did. We kept ducking them, all the way."
Sawyer looked out the doorway at the dusty, sunlit street and then back again to Price and he said with sudden blazing fierceness,
"You tell me you heard of us Missouris way out in your mountains, that you wanted to bring your plane to us—why?"
Price floundered. "Why, I wanted to help you—"
"To help us do what?" A garnet light was in the old man's eyes now. "What did you hear we were doing that you wanted to help on?"
Price sensed from the other's fierceness that he was in imminent danger, that something he had said had deepened suspicion.
He almost welcomed the interruption that saved him from answering now, though it was a sound that raised the short hairs on his neck.
The sound of shrieking power across the sky, the sound of the sky-hunters from the Citadel....
"That's the damned star-spawn coming down here again!" said one of the men behind Sawyer.
The old man got to his feet with amazing alacrity. He rapped an order to Twist and Burr, pointing to Price.
"Take him upstairs. If he makes a peep, cut his throat—but do it quiet."
Little more than a minute later, Price was in a hot, dusty little room. It had gun-slots in its heavy wooden shutters, and they let level bars of golden light into the room.
He heard the whine of the flier, coming down fast. He went to the gun-slot.
"No," said Burr.
Price turned and looked at him. He kept his voice low. "The hell with you," he said. "You can stand behind me with your knife. I'm not going to yell. But I'm going to see."
He heard Burr and Twist come up close behind him, as he peered out the wide slot.
Out in the green square, a white craft marked with a curious insigne was making a vertical landing. He thought it was a type of aerodyne. He had never seen one in flight, back in that strangely far-off and quickly-fading time from which he had come, but he had seen sketches and a working model. This seemed to be a refinement of the same principle, faster than a jet and maneuverable as a toy balloon. His hands itched to fly it.
He saw the insigne on its side—a golden sunburst with what looked like a many-colored, many-faceted globe at its heart. He did not know what it signified but he knew what it was. The mark of the Star Lords, of the Vurna. And even as he looked, four of them came out of the craft.
They came along the street to where Sawyer and the other Chiefs and a little crowd of leather-clad men silently waited. No one had a gun, no one made a motion. Yet that dusty street was electric with a hatred so deep and strong and quivering that it made Price shiver.
Yet the four Vurna came straight on. The Star Lords, they from unguessable spaces who had smashed Earth like a child's toy, to make it their footstool. Price pressed closer to the gun-slot. He wanted to see them very clearly indeed.
Especially one of them.
The star lords were tall and well-formed, and they looked much like Earthmen except that they wore tight-fitting garments of various colors, but all cut to the same pattern. Price guessed that they were uniforms, with the colors indicating rank or branch. The other chief difference was the coloring of the Star Lords themselves. They were bronzed as though by radiations fiercer than any known on Earth, and their hair was silver. Not white, and not pallid, but a rich silver. The men—three of the four were men—wore their hair short.
The woman wore hers long, rippling onto her shoulders. It caught the sunset light and gleamed like hot metal. Her uniform was a deep crimson, duskier than flame, molding her long thighs and her high, just-full-enough breasts.
Sawyer was speaking to them now, his voice rolling out harshly in the silence. "If you're still hunting for that plane, my answer's the same. I've never seen one."
One of the Vurna men, who seemed to have the authority, stepped a pace in front of the other two men and the woman.
The woman had raised her head and was looking restlessly at the blank or shuttered windows of the timber houses. Price felt uneasily that she knew he was there and was looking at him through the gun-slot. But that, of course, was ridiculous.
"Sawyer, listen to me," said the man of the Vurna. He spoke clear but stilted English, with strong tones of some alien tongue in its unaccustomed rhythms. He wore a black uniform with a small gold sunburst at the collar. It was impossible to guess his age. And while he kept his voice quiet and his manner calm, there was anger in him.
There was anger in Price too, a deep rage growing in him as he looked at the men and the woman who stood here like conquerors on the planet they had ruined, indifferent to the hatred they faced.
"Here is no time and no place for stubborn obstructions," the Vurna man was saying. "Things move quickly now. We have an enemy before us so vast and powerful that we dare not have one also at our backs, no matter how weak. I ask you to believe that, Sawyer. I ask you to understand that if we Vurna fall, you perish—" he made a sudden chopping gesture of the hand "—utterly."
"I ask you," said Sawyer, "to look at my white hairs, and not insult them by talking to me like I was a child." His voice was strong, and anything but servile. "You can forget that old tale of the 'enemy'. I laughed at it when I was in my cradle. There's been only one enemy seen on this Earth, and that was you."
The crowd muttered, Yes.
"Your starships," Sawyer said, "smashed our cities and broke our nation and our world down to where it is. My own father saw it happen. One day a free world, the next—nothing. So fast there was hardly even a blow struck back. You did it."
The crowd muttered louder. Price felt Burr and Twist move beside him, breathing in the dark. Breathing hate.
"Don't come to me, an old man," Sawyer said, "and ask me to believe foolishness. As for the plane you say you saw, I tell you again I haven't got it. And if I did have I wouldn't give it up to you, nor the man either. And you know it, Arrin."
The woman spoke briefly in her own language to Arrin, her tone and gesture seeming to say that they were wasting their time. Her voice was low and clear, as beautiful as the rest of her, but there was an impatient contempt in it that made Price bristle. The same thing was in her eyes when she looked at the old Chief of the Missouris.
Arrin shook his head. "Sawyer, I tell you once more, as you have been told for two generations, it was not the Vurna who destroyed your world, but the Ei. And I tell you that the Ei may even attack the Citadel, and that the fate of Earth would be decided in that battle, just as much as ours."
His voice rose suddenly in very human anger. "There is a war, you stubborn old man! A war vast—huge—" His arm swung in a wide circle that seemed to include the whole sunset sky. "Beyond your comprehension. Earth is nothing in it. A forward base, an observation post, that is all. But if we lose it, the Ei will sweep this part of the galaxy and you will regret it more than we. We can withdraw. You cannot. You think you are cruelly treated now. You will weep to have us back!"
Sawyer remained unbending and unimpressed. Arrin sighed. His voice was quiet when he spoke again, but it had a ring of iron in it.
"I feel pity for your barbarism, until I remember that it continues because of your own proud stupidity. If ever you people of Earth had been willing to work with us—but let it be. And now I warn you, Sawyer."
He seemed to grow tall, grim, alien, the spokesman of inhuman forces. Price felt the skin grow cold along his back, and his belly knotted tight with the pricking of fear.
Arrin said, "If you are planning an attack upon the Citadel, forget it. We will slaughter you without mercy—not because we wish to, but because we must—"
Price caught the sharp intake of breath from the men beside him, and suddenly he understood many things he had not understood before.
Arrin was still speaking. "I will give you three days in which to deliver to me the plane and the man who flew it. If this is not done, we will be forced to use harsher measures. You understand?"
Sawyer said, in a tone as cold as Arrin's, "Is that all?"
"One more thing. Keep your hunters out of the Belt. It is a military zone, not a game preserve. Any more incursions will be regarded as a possible invasion—"
Again Twist made a sharp, harsh sound in the darkness.
"—and we will make of it a blasted barren where not even a mouse or a beetle can survive. Consider that, Sawyer."
Arrin turned and walked away, the two men and the woman falling in behind him. Price watched the dark-crimson figure with the bright hair until he could see it no longer, and it dawned on him, as though the two things had a connection, that he was alive and living in this crazy world of Sawyers and Citadels and invaders from the stars, that these were his realities now and he had better wake up and grapple with them, or he would die—and the death would be for real, and not any portion of a dream.
The aerodyne took off with a scream and a whistle. The crowd in the square began to break up. Sawyer turned and came into the house, the chiefs and the sub-chiefs following him.
Burr opened the shutters, and a welcome breath of air came into the stifling room, with a last gleam of dying sunlight. Price looked at his companions. They were watching him, their eyes sharp and hostile.
"So that's why you were so frantic for the plane," he said. "You're planning an attack."
Burr said fiercely, "You should've let me kill him when I wanted to, Twist. And we should've left the plane where it was. Then they wouldn't have got suspicious."
"Maybe so," said Twist, and nodded. "Maybe so. On the other hand, if he is telling the truth, it might make all the difference."
There was a clattering on the loft stair, a man running up the steps. He came in and nodded to Burr and Twist.
"Sawyer says, bring the prisoner down—and hurry!"