The Cold Equations Part 31

Rider picked up the coil of rope and started toward the door, Beeling's blaster following him. Primmer spoke in protest: "But General Beeling! As a deserter he should be held for proper punishment, sir-"

Beeling silenced him with a hard look and turned to the communicator. He began his report: "General David A. Beeling, Unit Twenty, Deneb Five. Subjects: Impending attack of native armies, due to erroneous reports and general incompetence of Frontier Corps commander Captain Harold Rider; Report of Captain Rider's rebellion and desertion on eve of attack; Details of dangerous impracticability of Frontier Corps methods and-"

The words faded away, drowned by the wind, as Rider and Loper went down the street.

"He rie," Loper said. "They can't berieve him, can't ever hang you, can they?"

He smiled a little. "No, they won't be able to hang me."

He angled across the street, toward the edge of the dagger-brush thicket, and pa.s.sed not far from one of the guards. It was the red-haired boy, facing the enemy lines with his weapon, a crate hammer, gripped tightly in his hand. Rider saw the code number on the supplies he guarded: XG-B-193.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," he said.

"What are he guarding?" Loper asked.

"Exchange items and good-will gifts that the ERB has designated as suitable for barbaric cultures of this type. He's supposed to fight to the death to protect three thousand pounds of gla.s.s beads, hand mirrors, and bright red toy magnets."

They went into the thicket and the camp was hidden from view. The winding course of an old animal trail led in the desired direction and they followed it until it skirted the base of a small hill. He climbed to the top of it, with Loper at his heels, and looked back at the camp. There was a great deal of activity around the helicopter and he could distinguish Primmer standing to one side and directing the refueling operations.

He looked to the southeast, along his route to the sea, and along the rocky ridge that lay like a barrier between he saw the natives waiting and watching.

"I think," Loper said, "that they not want us to pa.s.s. I think we fight there, Captain." "You'll stay here, on this hill," he said.

"Stay?" Loper jerked up his head in surprise and defiance. "No!"

"That's an order. I want you to watch the camp until after it's all over with tomorrow."

"I not stay safe whire you fight arone!" Loper braced his forepaws wide-apart and stubborn on the ground. "I not do it!"

He sat down on a sun-blackened boulder. "Listen, Loper-listen to the reasons why you have to help me: "The government of Earth is four hundred light-years away and they will have to believe Beeling's story; that the natives are treacherous and hate all humans and that the Frontier Corps goaded them into ma.s.sacring the entire camp. The natives are honest in their fear and distrust of humans-they think they are fighting for their world-and there will be no one after tomorrow to tell them they are wrong.

"Except you and Laughing Girl. They might listen to you Altairians since you know humans well and yet aren't human. You must tell them that Earth never takes a world by force, that even Beeling meant well but did not understand, and that all the things I told them Earth would do for them would have been done. And you must stay here until after tomorrow morning and watch the camp so that when a ship comes from Earth to investigate you can tell the officers exactly what happened here and what caused it to happen. It will be too late to save the Frontier Corps but if they will listen to you it might not be too late for them to see the mistakes that have been made and start over again."

The rigid stubbornness was gone from Loper, understanding and dark misery in its place. "It wrong-everything are happen awr wrong and I never see you again!"

"Yes," he said, "everything is all wrong and shot to h.e.l.l. I'm trying to salvage the remains the best I can and I have to have your help."

"I do everything you say, Captain."

"For some time this will be your world and Laughing Girl's. Maybe for all your lives.

So be friends with the natives and don't blame them for what they did. Remember that."

"Yes, sir. I remember."

He looked at the sunset's violet afterglow and stood up. "I'll have to hurry or I won't get there in time. Good luck, Loper."

"Good-bye, Captain. I-I sorry."

He turned and went down the hill and across the flat beyond. He looked back when he was almost to the ridge and saw Loper still staring forlornly after him.

He reached the foot of the ridge and climbed its steep slope. Three natives were waiting for him on top, their long rifles in their hands and the smiles on their faces. The one in the center was Resso, a sub-chief in Selsin's tribe.

"Where would you go, human?" Resso asked in the native language.

"I would go to the sea," he answered in the same language, and told them why. "I ask permission to pa.s.s," he said.

Resso rubbed the breach of his rifle, his eyes thoughtful and hard. "Between here and the sea are many by-paths. You might lose your way and be troublesome for us to find in the morning."

He took the long knife from his belt, spun it in the air and caught it by the blade. The three rifles centered on him as he did so.

"This is my only weapon," he said to Resso. "I think I can put it in your throat before I can be killed-but I ask you to let me save the Altairian first and match it against your rifles tomorrow."

Resso spit on the ground. "Tomorrow I will make you eat it before I kill you."

Rider felt a great sense of relief-Resso was going to let him pa.s.s . . .

"I want to ask a favor of you," he said to Resso. "That the Altairians not be harmed."

Surprise showed on Resso's face. "Why should we harm the furry ones? They are only your slaves and not responsible for what humans do."

"Then you promise?"

Resso took a step forward, glowering in quick anger. "Do you have the insolence to question what I say? Be on your way-run, human, and find your hiding place!"

He went, walking past them with the glum thought: This makes Ignominious Exit Number Two. I hope my last one, tomorrow, will have at least a little dignity to it . . .

The desert was miles of red iron sand, across which rocky ridges lay like a hundred randomly flung barriers. Some of the ridges were of limestone, honey-combed with natural caves. These he would have to avoid at all costs since they were the lairs of the ten-foot sand hounds.

He was no more than well started when dark came. He had no light and without a blaster he would not dare to use one if he had it. It would attract the attention of sand hounds for miles around.

For the greater part, his way was along relatively clear stretches of the wind-packed sand and his progress was fairly fast. At intervals, however, he came to dense and wide- spreading thickets of the poison-thorned desert vegetation and these he had to bypa.s.s with time consuming detours.

Once he almost walked upon a band of wild dragon-beasts, grazing silently in the starlight. Only the good fortune of the wind being in his favor prevented them from detecting him and charging. He had to backtrack and then climb a long ridge to get around them. It cost him an hour of time.

The last of the clouds disappeared from the eastern sky as the storm went its way across the Southern Gulf. He was grateful that it had not swerved inland and turned the dim starlight into total darkness. His time margin would be small, at best.

Shortly before midnight he stopped on a sand dune, to rest for the first time. It was there that he saw a tiny, distant red spark; a signal fire on the hill north of camp. It blinked for several minutes in a code he did not understand, then went out.

When it did not reappear at the end of two more minutes he got up and resumed his journey to the sea.

Not long afterward the sky to the east turned pale; a whiteness that grew swiftly brighter and obscured the eastern stars. It was the dawn of the three moons; the moons that brought the Big Tide with them. They lifted above the horizon in a flying wedge formation, flooding the desert with cold, white light. He could see well, then, and he hurried faster down the long slopes that led to the sea.

The bright moonlight greatly increased the danger of being seen by a sand hound and he had not gone far when one screamed from somewhere behind him. He stopped, and looked back.

He could not see it but he saw something else when he looked to the rocky ridge west of him; flitting shadow-shapes that seemed to be dragon-beasts were keeping pace with him. He wondered if it would be Resso and the others, making certain he would not be hard to find when morning came. They were gone from view before he could be sure he had not imagined seeing them.

He hurried on again. The character of the desert had changed as the elevation decreased and a dry, wiry gra.s.s was replacing most of the vegetation. He changed his course slightly so that he could walk down the center of a shallow valley where it grew the thickest, listening for the sand hound to scream again.

It did so, much closer than before. Two more answered it from farther back, then a third. Which made four of them racing toward him, each of them like a reptilian ten-foot greyhound with the claws of a tiger and the teeth and jaws of a young tyrannosaurus.

He lighted the gra.s.s at his feet, then started two more fires on each side of the first one. Within that short time the tinder-dry gra.s.s was burning in a solid wall of flame, pushed down the valley by the wind at increasing speed and spreading wider as it went.

He had to run to get in front of it and then run still faster to keep ahead of it. Through the choking smoke he could see nothing except the red blaze of fire behind him but he heard the sand hounds screeching in frustration beyond it. The sound of their fury faded as he ran on, and then was gone.

A mile farther on he angled to the left, to the rim of the valley where the gra.s.s was too thin to burn, and there he rested until his hard panting had subsided. Then he walked on again; to hurry faster and faster as the three moons neared the zenith. Shortly after they had pa.s.sed the zenith it would be sunrise and the Big Tide would reach the Sea Cliffs.

He saw no more of the phantom dragon-beasts, but the smoke from the valley he had fired lay like a pall across the desert and visibility was limited.

The eastern sky was lightening with the first glow of dawn when he saw the distant gleam of moonlight on the ocean. The delays during the night had been greater than he had thought-there would be no time margin, at all.

He went the rest of the way in a fast trot, the rope ready in his hand.

The sea to the east was flat and calm when he reached the ragged top of the Sea Cliffs but the pale violet of dawn had turned into a vivid blue-white. Sunrise and the Big Tide were at hand.

He looked down over the edge of the cliffs, down the sheer face of them where the crevice reached up for two hundred feet before it dwindled into nothing, and saw the red- sh.e.l.led horrors grouped in a thick ma.s.s at the bottom. Laughing Girl was above them, wedged tightly in the crevice as far up it as she had been able to climb. It had not been far; the groping claws of the topmost Elephant Crabs were cracking together only inches below her.

He had already tied a series of knots in the end of the rope so she could grip it firmly between her teeth. He dropped the knotted end over the cliff and gave the rope a flip to guide it toward the crevice.

He glanced again to the east, at the calm, flat sea, and in that instant its horizon abruptly swelled and lifted up and became a mountain rushing toward him.

The Elephant Crabs were spilling apart, scrambling to positions of safety where they could anchor themselves against the rough rock surface and be protected by the thick armor of their sh.e.l.ls. Laughing Girl was suddenly alone in her refuge, a small black huddle that watched the coming of the Big Tide in frozen helplessness.

The rope was snaking down the crevice as fast as he could play out the coils. He whistled at her as the rope neared her. She jerked up her head, almost falling in her surprise, and greeted him in her native language; a word that was like the joyous yelp of a pup. Then the end of the rope reached her and she seized it between her teeth.

He hauled up on the rope, bringing it back hand over hand, while Laughing Girl clawed at the rock to help all she could. She disappeared from his sight where the cliff became vertical and the thin, hard rope was almost impossible to grip tightly as her full weight went upon it.

The tide raced inward as he struggled with the rope; the forefront of an oceanic plateau. Between it and the cliffs the beach and sea below lay like a valley, then a narrow basin, then suddenly a vanishing canyon- * * *

Laughing Girl's head popped into view and she came pawing and scrambling over the edge of the cliff. She dropped the rope and leaped toward him in ecstatic welcome.

"You come for me! You-"

The tide struck the cliffs with a thunderous roar, making the earth shake. He seized Laughing Girl by the scruff of the neck and dropped flat to the ground, where he could lock his free arm around a projection of rock. A solid ma.s.s of water was flung high into the air by the impact, to descend upon them with a smashing force that knocked the breath from his lungs and bruised his face against the rocks. He held grimly to the rock and Laughing Girl as the ma.s.s of water poured back over the cliff, ripping and tearing at him as it tried to take them with it.

They staggered erect as it drained away and ran. A second ma.s.s of skyward-flung water came too late to do more than drench them. They stopped a little farther on, along the top of a low ridge.

Behind them the sea growled and rumbled as it surged against the cliffs. Laughing Girl looked back, trembling a little.

"I thought you had forgot me, Boss. I was scared, and I wait and wait . . ."

"Everything is all right, now," he said. "You won't ever have to go under the Sea Cliffs again."

He was tired, weak with near-exhaustion. He wiped the salty water from his face and saw, as something that was no longer of importance, that the sun was up. His job was done, his last duty carried out, and the thing that would happen next was something inevitable and beyond his control. He saw that his knife was gone, washed into the sea- but that no longer mattered, either.

"You will go home now," he said to Laughing Girl. "Don't wait for me. Loper will probably be starting on his way to meet you in a few minutes. He'll tell you about the things that have happened in the past two days. From now on the two of you will do whatever he thinks is best for you."

Her eyes were wide in alarm before he had finished, anxious and questioning.

"What are wrong, Boss? What are going to happen to you-prease, what are wrong?"

A slow, m.u.f.fled thudding came from the east and he looked into the bright blaze of the sun to see the dragon-beasts trotting down the ridge toward him. There were six of them and even against the sun he could see the gleam of battle helmets and the long rifles across the saddles.

"Go home!" he ordered. "Right now!"

She looked from the approaching war party back to him and flung up her head in defiance as Loper had done.

"No! You know they come to kirr you-I can terr. I stay!"

"There are things you don't yet understand, Girl," he said. "For my sake, go now.

Run."

"I-" She hesitated, her sense of duty and sense of loyalty conflicting. The loyalty won. "No! I not go!"

He could not permit her to stay. When the natives shot him down she would attack them with a fury that only her own death could stop.

He stepped forward and hit her; a hard, open-handed blow alongside the jaw that sent her rolling. She got to her feet with amazement and hurt in her eyes and he made his tone harsh and ugly: "I'll not order you but this one more time-go home!"

She obeyed, her tail drooping as she started across the swale. She stopped once, to look back at him, and he motioned her on with a curt gesture.

She was gone from sight when the natives reached him. Resso was not with them-it was Selsin who rode in the lead.

They stopped before him in a semi-circle and regarded him silently, the mocking smiles on their faces.

"It is sunrise," Selsin said.

"It is," he agreed.

"We followed you last night. I wanted to know if you told the truth about going to save the furry one."

"And now," he said, "I want to know if Resso told the truth when he said she and her mate would not be harmed."

"He did." There was nothing more to say, then. He waited, wondering if they were deliberately delaying his execution in the hope of seeing him weaken under the tension.

Selsin spoke again: "Your superior and his aide escaped in the flier shortly after you left. The fire signal at midnight said they had landed on one of the Northern Islands and were firing steadily at a school of bladder fish. They seemed to think the fish were an attacking party."