John Rackham (11 page)

"I can't stop you from
talking."

She pinked a little at his rudeness, but rode
on past it. "Do you know anything at all about the land? How to plant end
grow and gather food?"

"Some.
Not much. Enough to be able to live off the country if I have to. That's part
of my military training. Why?"

"I
will tell you. Hallex Mordin, my father, is a city man, a landholder of Stopa.
This is his life. It is not mine. I have a small holding, a farm some distance
from here. About forty miles. Near a small village called Tarat. It is small. I
work it with my brother Hork. The work is hard, but satisfying, to me at least.
But Hork is impatient to get away and work in the city like his father. And I
could not work my holding alone. I would welcome a helper. Will you
accept?"

"Accept what? The offer to become a
farmhand, under you?"

"Under
at first, yes, until you leam. But then, with knowledge, it would be equality,
a full sharing."

Bragan pushed his distresses into the
background and took a minute to look at her proposition. "It's a
trick," he growled. "Why should you go out of your way to do
this?"

"On
Scarta we do not like waste. We say, life is too precious to be wasted. You are
able, intelligent, healthy. Will you support yourself if you have the chance?
It is no more than that."

"What do you get out
of it?"

"A
helper. When Hork goes I shall need more hands. There are trees and bushes to
be cleared from one plot I can use. There is a stream to be diverted. Many
things. There is always work, on a holding."

"Would I still be a
prisoner?"

"Only of your needs. To eat and sleep
you must work. There will be no bonds on you. If you choose to run off into the
wilds—" She let the sentence hang, expressively; then, "What say
you?"

He gave it another minute then shrugged, then
wished he hadn't. "You have yourself a helper. Is there any more to
it?"

"Very
little, except that I must get you out of here, get you some food and clothing.
And a bath."

An
hour later, any shreds of dignity Bragan might have fancied he had left had
been totally destroyed. He had been hoisted out of his prison by two husky men
with a rope. He had been half-led, half-carried to the nearest building that
could offer hot water and cleaning oil. He had chewed ravenously on plain bread
and a handful of things like carrots, and Ryth had got for him a coarse gray
wool tunic and sandals. Although shaking and aching, thoroughly humiliated and
kitten-weak from hunger, Bragan used his eyes, and his wits. The people who
encountered him wore grins, but nothing savage. The water was hot. The
depilatory paste was efficient. The bread was good, full-flavored. Texture was
the word he settled on. These people had a rich texture to their lives, as if
they lived every minute fully.

When
he was ready to move, and Ryth led him to the little airfield, there was more
to note and wonder at. To his way of thinking a little airfield meant little
and clumsy aircraft, and the impressive thundering waves of bombers the other
night needed some explaining. Now he could see their flying machines close up,
and gape.

One
was taking off as they walked out into the open. It was stumpy of body and
wing, no bigger than would seat six at the most, and with two engines turning
airscrews. But even as the screws began to spin gently the whole of the
body-top lifted, stood clear on a thick spindle and began to rotate, and he saw
that it was a cunningly flattened oval tube with air-slots. And hardly had the
tube-wing begun to windmill at speed than the machine was rising, straight up
and away.
Vertical
takeoff,
he
thought, watching it climb and then swoop away at speed.

Ryth
nudged him toward another similar craft and he clambered aboard, noting the
stark simplicity of the interior. He began to add and subtract, and make
patterns, because that was how his mind was trained to work and he needed the
answers. He got some. These people, the Scartnnni, were highly advanced in
potential. No matter how contradictory it might seem, the fact that they
demonstrated few luxuries, that they lived on an agrarian level, did not mean
they were primitive. It merely meant that they had deliberately so chosen. He
recalled his own words to Swann on that same conclusion.

They had highly efficient radio technology,
with a standby telephone substitute. They had some kind of computer technology,
according to what Mordin had said. They had aircraft, good ones. They had
advanced chemical knowledge —he knew from the history he had read just how difficult
it was to produce a satisfactory depilatory—and they had fantastic inventive
and technological capacity. Yet they chose, deliberately, to remain simple.

Some of it, he reasoned, came from their
philosophy of life, to judge by the samples he had had from Ryth, and her
father. But that moved the whole key question just one stage back. Where did
that philosophy come from? He cleared away a few odds and ends from his mind,
tried to ignore the remaining aches, and his still-clamant hunger, and realized
that this was the one thing he had to know. This was the touchstone that would
crack the enigma. Then he slid a careful glance aside at Ryth, as the aircraft
shuddered and took off, and knew what he had to do. Strategy. Gain her
confidence. Find out just what it was that made the Scartanni tick. And he
knew, even as he planned his future course, that he was moving into the most
dangerous phase of the game so far.

He
looked away, out of the window and down over Stopa as it shrank into a
gathering of dolls' houses arranged along the twisting river. Having made up
his mind he was able to slip out of that preoccupation and relax. And pay
attention to the scene as it unrolled beneath him. He felt a pang, an inner
twinge that would have astonished those who knew him well. Because he could
appreciate this beautiful country. Rolling parkland for the most part, with
here and there
a
stretch of untouched wilderness, trees
clinging to upstanding peaks, ravines full of green and dark shadows, wild
life, the real original life—and he contrasted it with the overdeveloped,
overlived and gutted surface of his own home world. Miles upon square miles of
concrete and glass jungle; miles upon ribbon-miles of houses, houses and more
houses. And roadways, railways, factories and developments. De-pressingly
dulling duplication. He began to feel that he was the fool in seeking to find
why the Scartanni had chosen this instead of that. By comparison, this was
paradise unspoiled.

Then
through his sentiment struck the chill reminder of fact. This green and
pleasant land ranged against the juggernaut might of Zorganl There—his eye
caught on a string of little circular lakes like bomb craters—they looked
beautiful now. But imagine the whole of this countryside pocked and cratered
like that! Gashed and ripped and reduced to smoking radioactive ruin. That's
what Zorgan would do at the first hint of resistance. He imagined the little
jewel-drop lakes, not as placid pools of water but as beds of simmering fire
and smoking debris. The shock and roar of earth-shaking explosions—and started
as Ryth nudged him out of his reverie.

"We
are here," she said briskly, and he snorted and straightened, to see that
they had settled down on a green patch close to a clutch of low brown
buildings. He clamped his teeth on a groan as he made to move his limbs, and almost
fell from the hatch of the aircraft onto the ground below. Ryth took
a
firm hold of his arm. "You need a good meal," she decided.
"Come along!"

As
the aircraft whoop-whooped away, she led him across a grassy patch, over a
narrow stone bridge and up to the largest building. Bragan could hardly get
along, and was glad to sag into a chair by a rough table while she vanished
into a further room and began clattering pots and pans. He didn't let the
weakness at his knees distract his attention or his eyes. There were points to
note, here. That bridge out there. The gutter. This stone floor. That added up
to another underground system. In the name of sanity, why? And the building
itself had its peculiarities too.

He twisted around, seeing as much as he
could. This wasn't the friable stone-block .stuff of Stopa. This was a stuff
more like paper, a composition stuff with a glaze to it, but without much body.
He could see one wall give and spring back to the push of the breeze outside.
Frowning, he worked it out. Girders at the comers, solidly bedded in the stone
floor. The walls hung on those. The windows were not glass at all but something
flexible, a plastic. There were no doors between rooms. The outside door had no
lock. A picture grew in his mind and he examined it carefully while Ryth made
busy sounds just like any housewife.

What do you do,
he wondered,
frith an answer that doesn't make sense?
This house, the cellar complex, the type of
building—the whole of Stopa—it all made sense only if you postulated a
population that went in constant fear of and readiness for—aerial bombardment!
Bomb-shelters!

"Here you are." She planked a bowl
down on the table before him. "You can start with that. There will be something
else in a—why do you look at me that way?"

"Because I have just discovered
something very strange about you."

"About me?" She stepped back and looked disconcerted.

"Not you personally. About Scarta."
He scowled down at the bowl of soup, spooned some of it, tasted and swallowed
appreciatively. "I need to think about it." He took another spoonful
and then glanced around at the sound of a heavy footfall. Ryth's brother Hoik
filled the doorway for a moment then came on in, to stand and look down at
Bragan curiously.

"A Zorgan?" he demanded curiously.
"I had expected he would be up to here perhaps!" and he elevated a
muscular arm to aim at a point about a foot higher than his own six foot three.
Bragan studied the youth. Hork was no more than twenty by the look of him, but
he was all muscle and plenty of it. There was more than a hint of his father's
cragginess about his sunburned face and in the way he stood, with just white
wool about his lean hips and a gray cloak over one arm. "Good soup, Zorgan?"

"It's very good," Bragan admitted.
"But a bowl twice as big would be no better, only more of the same,"
and Hork grinned hugely.