CHAPTER VII
Price stood stone still, meeting her gaze. But his thoughts were racing like startled deer. How could even the super-scientific Vurna have guessed his incredible origin? It was a freak, a fluke that wouldn't happen once in a million years....
Linna was saying, "Take your plane. Obsolete in model as it was, it would require extensive machine shops to fabricate it. And your clothing. Your shirt is of synthetic fabric, and so is the dye. It was woven on machines. And these are new—not relics preserved for a century."
Price managed to keep his voice level as he said, "So—"
"So," Linna said, "there is somewhere a hidden community big enough to keep the old technologies of your people alive. A community we've known nothing about."
She regarded him in stern triumph, as though she had gained a victory.
Price sat down on the narrow bed. He had an hysterical desire to laugh, but he did not do that. Instead, he turned his head away from Linna as though to hide his dismay, but actually he was trembling with a sudden realization.
She had just given him his chance, if he kept his head and played it right. In her wholly mistaken, if quite natural, deduction of his origin, she had given him a chance for escape.
She misread his silence. "Further lies will not do you any good." Astonishingly, there was pity in her voice. "I see now what you intended. You wished to share your community's knowledge with other tribes, to give them new weapons in their fight against us. And now you hope still to keep your secret, so someone else may succeed where you failed. Believe me, Price, I understand—"
"Do you?" he said savagely.
"Yes," she said, her voice hardening. "And I understand better than you what would have happened to your army if they had attacked, armed with pitiful little planes like yours and only slightly more powerful rifles." She spoke swiftly to the guard outside, and then snapped at Price, "Come, I want to show you something."
She led Price out between the green-clad guards. They went down the echoing corridor of the cell-block, and into a lift that took them swooping up a long way, and then into another corridor and eventually into a medium-sized room circular in shape, completely surrounded by a double row of screens. The lower screens gave a fixed view of the terrain within eyeshot of the Citadel itself. The upper screens reflected a roving, ever-shifting view of the remoter Belt, the woods and prairies, herds of wild cattle grazing, deer bounding with their white flags up, the lonely starships waiting on their isolated fields. Four men in uniforms of dull gold watched the screens and checked a series of clicking recorders. Beneath each screen was a battery of studs.
"You see how much chance you would have of approaching unseen? And do you see what would happen to an army? One man here, touching those firing studs, and the whole Belt would become in seconds like the barren outside the walls. Nothing would be left. Nothing."
In Linna's eyes now there was the same impatient contempt for his stupidity that he had seen there before, when Arrin had talked to Sawyer in the square.
"And this is how you would help them—to their destruction."
If the situation had been what she imagined it to be, that would have been the truth. Price allowed a sullen doubtfulness to show in his face. But he said,
"What about your starships? You wouldn't destroy them."
"They can be flown on auto-pilot at a moment's notice, out of harm's way. Oh, for heaven's sake, Price, can't you see that I'm trying to help you? I don't want your people slaughtered. We, the Vurna, don't want them slaughtered. But if you persist in battering your stubborn heads—"
"All right, all right," he said crossly. "You've got the weight and weapons. Let's get out of here. It makes me sick to think how helpless we are."
They went outside into the corridor again. At its end there was a window, and Price stood by it, looking out. He pretended to be sunk in bitter reflection, but his brain was spinning furiously, trying to see all ways at once. He said,
"If I show you where our hidden colony is, you'll only smash it up. There's a lot there that isn't weapons, things that could help build up a civilization again. Why should I show you?"
"To keep some other idiot from trying to do what you have done. We won't destroy anything that's useful, only control it as to the production of weapons." She sighed, and added, "I hate to put it this way, Price, but if you don't show me willingly it will have to be another way, and I don't want that."
There was a real ring of sincerity in her voice. Price grumbled around a bit, permitting himself to be beaten.
"All right," he said at last. "I guess there's nothing for it. I'll show you."
"Good. I'll arrange for a flier—"
Her voice was drowned out by a sudden hooting of sirens all through the Citadel. For a moment no one moved. Linna's face became drained of all color. The guards stiffened, staring in a kind of wonder. The steel shutter of the window clanged to with a ringing snap, and Price could feel in that vast building a stirring and buzzing as of a menaced hive.
"What is it?" he asked, his feeling of triumph beginning to slip away almost before he had had time to enjoy it.
Linna's voice was quite steady when she answered. "Possibly nothing. You must return to your cell now. We'll discuss the trip later."
The sirens stopped.
The guards hustled Price along urgently now, as though they had more important things to attend to. The Vurna were shifting rapidly from places to other places, but all in good order. Only their faces were tense and they did not talk except to pass an order or ask for one. It was obvious that there was an alarm, that the Citadel was taking up battle stations, and that everyone was, if not afraid, at least severely uneasy. Price began to be uneasy too. Nevertheless, he noted the symbol that identified the floor, and studied the life-controls as he was dropped down to the prison level again.
In perfect silence they stepped from the lift and started down the corridor toward Price's cell. Then the sirens screeched again, but on a different note. Linna gave a little sigh. Without thinking about it he put his arm around her.
"All clear?"
"Yes. What a relief. I'm technically a soldier, but I'm afraid a technicality is all it is. I—shh! Listen."
A clear metallic voice had begun to speak over some communicator system that apparently reached every corner of the Citadel. Linna drew away from him without seeming to notice his familiarity, listening intently. The guards listened too, and so did three or four other Vurna visible in the corridor. Price could understand nothing, except that the word "Ei" occurred several times. The Vurna's favorite bogeyman. He wondered if the Vurna powers-that-were used it to hoodwink their own people, too. It would explain Linna's sincerity, Arrin's honest annoyance, if they themselves believed in a menace called the Ei.
The window at the end of the corridor had reappeared as the safety shutter slid back. Through it, tantalizingly small and far away, Price watched the landing of a starship, and it was disappointingly remote and unreal as a scene done with models for an old film.
Until he felt the mighty fabric of the Citadel, man-made mountain of steel and iron, quiver underneath him with the shock-wave of that landing. Then he knew.
The voice stopped speaking. There was a moment of dead quiet, as though what the voice had said was more momentous than the alarm. Linna's face was pale again, and the guards looked both excited and apprehensive. One of them spoke to Linna, and she shook her head, apparently giving him a reassuring answer.
Price said irritably, "Can you tell me what's going on?"
"There was a skirmish," she said, "out there. That's what the alarm was, to tell us there was fighting going on, but of course it was already over. There was only one Ei ship, a scout."
"Oh," said Price, and almost smiled. Scramble them once in a while, keep them on their toes. Remind them of the menace. It was a simple technique. Earthmen had evolved it quite early.
People were talking now. He could hear their voices echoing down the metal halls, excited, fearful. Several went to the window to crane their necks at the distant starship. And then the metallic voice began to speak again, very crisp and clipped.
"Maximum security," Linna said. "All corridors cleared, all doors and safety bulkheads locked. All off-duty personnel in quarters. Go in, Price." She pointed to his cell door. "I have to hurry."
The corridor was clearing like magic. Price hung obstinately in the doorway. "What now?"
"They captured the scout. They're bringing in two of the Ei—alive."
One of the guards shoved him in, and the door slammed shut on its magnetic lock.
Price lay down on the bunk. So they had captured a scout, and they were bringing in two Ei, alive. And everybody in the Citadel was ordered behind locked doors. Handy. Very. He was beginning to feel less hostility toward at least some of the Vurna. They were not so hard-headed and skeptical as the Earthmen. They believed, and the belief was keeping them here to man an outpost fort when they would doubtless much rather return home.
He found himself unaccountably pleased that he had an excuse to stop hating Linna.
He thought about the plan he had in mind until he went to sleep.
It was difficult, in that windowless and practically sound-proof place, to judge the passage of time. To Price it seemed like centuries. He slept, and woke, and ate, and paced around, and fretted between hope and a despairing certainty that Linna had forgotten all about him. He slept again, and was awakened from that sleep by the deep shuddering of the Citadel as a starship either landed or took off. He lay drowsily wondering what it was like to fly one of those mighty craft, traitorously wishing he was a Vurna so he might have a chance to find out, and dreaming of space and stars and foreign worlds.
The Citadel shook again, and yet again, and Price came wide awake. He counted twenty-one, and there was no way of knowing how many landings or take-offs had occurred before he woke, or too far out in the Belt to be noticed here.
Certainly some large movement was underway. He took to pacing again, in a sweat of worry over what this meant, not to the Vurna, but to him.
After what seemed an eternity the door opened and Linna stood there, looking pale and grave. There were no guards with her. She was alone.
"The flier is waiting, Price," she said. "Let's go."
He joined her. And now he saw that the aspect of the corridor had changed. A sliding bulkhead had closed off part of it behind a wall of iron.
"What's that for?" he asked.
"Our—prisoners," said Linna, as though the word stuck to her tongue. "Come on."
She seemed in a great hurry to get away from that bulkhead. Price said, "What's the matter, aren't they human, or something?"
She gave him a look. "You still think it's all a great joke."
"I didn't say that."
"You mean it, though. You still believe the Ei are something we made up to shift the blame from ourselves. Probably you believe we are staging this whole matter to impress you and your chief, so that you will go back and assure your tribesmen it is all true."
This was so uncomfortably close to what Price was thinking that he said involuntarily, "You're entirely too smart for such a pretty girl."
"Sometimes I think," she said between her teeth, "that there is no hope for you people, no hope at all."
Price nodded toward the bulkhead. "The solution is simple enough, isn't it? Let me see them. Then I'll have to believe you."
"Simple enough," said Linna, echoing his words. "Do you think you could stand against them? We have fought them for generations, we have knowledge and experience, and even for us, with all our safe-guards, it is difficult. Only a few, like Arrin, would attempt it, and I saw him this morning. He looks like a ghost."
"And that's why you've never let any Earthmen see an Ei—because they're too dangerous."
"No. It's more simple than that. We have had none to show. These are the first Ei we have captured for a century, at least in this sector of the galaxy. I have never seen one, either. And I don't want to."
She strode off, away from the iron wall across the corridor. Price shrugged and followed her.
"Where are my friends?"
"They're here," she said, indicating the row of doors they were passing. "Quite safe—or as safe as any of us. They'll remain here until—" She hesitated, and Price realized for the first time that she was deeply, genuinely afraid. "Until we see what happens," she finished.
"After that, what?"
"If they're still alive, and we're still alive, and there's still a world, they'll go free, and perhaps they'll be wiser men than they are now."
She would not say any more.
The lift swept them up to the roof. It was late afternoon, intensely hot, with storm-clouds banking in the west. The roof area seemed almost deserted, and only one flier was visible. Linna motioned him into it and climbed in herself. She spoke to the pilot, and he took off immediately. There was no co-pilot. Only Price, and Linna, and one man. Price felt a secret surge of assurance, of power, like when you're riding a streak of luck and the dice can't fall any way but right. He sat quietly, looking out the cabin port.
He saw almost at once that the starships were gone. The whole Vurna fleet must have taken off, shaking the Citadel with their leaving. Probably most of the men had gone with it. The deserted appearance of the Citadel, the lack of guards, the lack of a co-pilot, all pointed to a skeleton force. If we're still alive, and there's still a world, Linna had said. Battle, somewhere out in the far reaches of space? Perhaps. Or maneuvers, or a show of force connected with some galactic game he would probably never know about. It was not really important. What was important was the fact that for the present the defenses of the Citadel were weaker, much weaker.
He sat looking out the port and covertly watching the pilot's hands on the controls. Linna had some kind of a side-arm strapped around her slender waist. Probably a shocker. The pilot had one, too. He considered the problem, and the woods and prairies rolled back underneath.
Linna spoke suddenly, out of a long and somber silence.
"This mission is more important than ever now, Price, or I wouldn't have been allowed to divert even one man from our defences. I beg you, for the sake of your own people, to play fair with me. If there's either help or hindrance in our rear, we must know it. The Ei—"
Now said something in Price's mind. He did not stop to question it. When you're riding a hot streak, let it ride. Never stop to question.
He rose and hit Linna on the point of her pretty chin.