John Rackham (14 page)

Small things like this added up to a lot in
his mind. Crops every seven or eight weeks, if they were needed. In the
cold-store shed he had seen several canisters and cans of powders which Hork
had told him were weed-killer, growth accelerators, pesticides and additives.
The machete was glass, with a razor edge that had shown no sign of needing to
be honed. Things like this stirred up his problem harder than ever. Ingenuity
and resourcefulness under pressure. But what was the pressure? Ryth's sleek
shoulder brushed against his as she lowered her blade for a moment's breather.

"You do not talk much, Denzil, but you
think a great deal.
I
would like to know what it is you think
about, all the time?"

Before
he could offer some kind of answer the air about his head leaped violently and
a monstrous
kaBAM—BLAM
made him duck and cringe by
reflex. Then, almost as swifdy, he straightened up as he identified the sound
and looked up for the source. Hearing the shrill dopplering wail, he spotted
vapor trails against the blue, and whistled softly to himself.

"Supersonic jets—already? They can
certainly move when they have a mind!" Still staggered by the magnitude of
the technical achievement in such a short time, he looked down to Ryth again.
And she was flat on the ground, curled into
a
fetal panic. For a moment he stood quite
still, not knowing quite what to do. Then he crouched down by her side, touched
her shoulder and shook it gently, feeling the shiver through her satiny skin.

"Scares you a little if you've never
heard one before," he said gently, "but there's nothing to be afraid
of, really. It's just a fast aircraft on the way over. There was a flight of
seven, actually." She stirred, lifted her head and brushed the hair from
her face, stared at him and he saw stark terror in her gray eyes. It was so
unlike her that he could hardly take it in for a while. Then he heard a distant
bellow and stood up to see Hork come galloping up the slope from the house.

Well,
well!
he thought.
So they can be scared. But why
a
supersonic bang? Where did they hear that before?

By
the time Hoik arrived Ryth had regained her feet and the terror was gone from
her eyes, but she was still shaking with aftereffect.

Hoik,
white-faced and out of breath managed to gasp, "There was no alarm! What
was it?"

"Just
a flight of aircraft going over, traveling a little faster than usual."
Bragan stared at him, at both of them. "Super-son ics. Something new to
you?" It obviously was, and he tried to explain as simply as he could why
an aircraft that was flying faster than the noise it was making would deliver
the whole accumulated noise in a packet with two ends. They heard him. They
listened, and he thought they understood, but they made no comment. For the
very first time he had run into a subject they didn't want to talk about, that
was somehow taboo. It was not mentioned again.

The
following day a more conventional aircraft wheeled gently down into the
clearing by the farmhouses to carry Hork away to the city. The leavetaking was
brief and non-demonstrative. B-.agan watched the aircraft lift off again with
mixed feelings. The job was going to be tough now, and he wasn't just thinking
about the manual work. As a strategist he had trained himself to regard any
situation as a game, to remain uninvolved personally, but ever since Ryth had
rescued him from death by starvation he had found it more and more difficult
to be impersonal. Now that he was to be left alone with her it was going to be
impossible.

As the flying thing vanished over the hill he
said, "Two of us, to do one woman's work . . . p"

"Don't
take Hork too seriously," she told him. "He was Leing resentful
simply because all the other men have moved into the city. There will be work
enough for both of us. There is always work on a holding."

They
turned to walk back to the house.
"I
wonder
if you can answer a question for me, Ryth."

"I can try. What
bothers you?"

"People,
again. You and others. You said, long ago, that Scarta is not owned by you,
that you don t think of it that way. Yet you—young men like Hork, that is—are
willing to give up almost anything to fight, which is strange to you, to keep
Scarta from an enemy. It would be simpler to say let the Zorgan come and take
over, as they must, and we will work for them. The difference would be slight,
perhaps a fifth part of all you produce."

"A change in our way
of life."

"It's changing now,
isn't it?"

"Yes,
but it is the way we choose, not the way someone else tells us."

"Even
that's not true. This change comes as a result of the threat of Zorgan, not by
your choice at all."

She
was silent for a while, then, "We work for what we get. What we have
worked for we keep. We owe nothing to anyone or thing—from the sky." It
was the first time she had used such an expression, and he was careful to scout
around it, to save it for later.

"Think
of it from another angle, then. Yield to Zorgan and you change your way of life
somewhat. Stand up and resist—and this fair planet of yours will bear the scars
of the result for all time. Perhaps you don't mind being killed, but think of
all this, as far as you can see, blasted bare of green, transformed into a
smoking hell of radioactive sterility. That could happen with just one
medium-size nuclear bomb. There are other weapons more terrible than you would
believe
I"

"Denzil!"
She halted to face him in the shadow of the building she called home. "It
is difficult for me to feel that you are an enemy. If I could keep that
thought"—her gray eyes fell away from his—"I would try to persuade
you to tell me exactly how a small force would use craft to beat
a
larger one. You have shown something of how
it can be done. A man with your skill and knowledge of Zorgan—" Her voice
faltered. He knew exactly what her trouble was, because he shared it. He
forced his mind away from a purely emotional impulse and made a laugh that
shook a little.

"If
I was a friend, Ityth, I couldn't do better than I have done, to tell you to
give up the hopeless task. But as an enemy—all right, I'll do whatever you ask.
Let's pretend I'm in charge of Scarta, and we are hell-bent on beating Zorgan.
You'll have to tell me about the planet and its resources, and I'll tell you
best how to employ them."

"Truly?"

"Truly. It's futile, but if that's what
you want, all rightl" VIII

A
nt) so the days
and weeks slid by and fell into a pattern.
Hard but healthy and satisfying work during all the hours of daylight and long
and detailed arguments and discussions in the evening under the ribbon of light
in the starlit sky. She did her part well, listening critically and often
making him explain a second and third time just why it would be wrong to do
this and right to do something else. First and basic, he told her, was to
preserve the air of innocence the planet had worn in the first place, to make
it a trap. Then to concentrate on ways of knocking out those ships they could
safely hope to hit. He explained the system that provided unlimited power for
the men in the field, unlimited power for the ships as they came down, from the
sun itself, and the npture of those shielding screens that had held off the
valiant bombardment.

Night
after night he rolled into his narrow cot bone-weary, knowing that everything
he said was being carefully relayed to other ears. And it was what he wanted,
but he was not happy about the means. He was living a lie, and so was Ryth; a
thin and delicate bubble of pretense shimmered between them and was in
evergrowing danger of being broken. Because you cannot work and eat and share
healthy exhaustion and satisfaction with someone else, day after day, without
coming to be very close to that other person; and there was a quality of
spontaneous affection about Ryth that made it ever more difficult for him to
remain impersonal.

He
began to dream about her. There were times when he found himself about to reach
out and touch, to take her hand, or pat a sleek suntanned shoulder. Every once
in a while she would get out a special flask of stuff and wash her hair in it,
and then sit brushing it dry on the grass by him while she went on with her never-ending
questions. Those times were a particular torment, and yet a delight to him.

But
they went on being Zorgan and Scartanni on the brittle surface, and all around
them Scarta was exploding into action. Bragan saw very little of it, but he
knew it by what Ryth told him, and more from what she didn't mean to tell him,
but conveyed by the way she kept harking back to ideas and adding questions
that could come only from those who were trying them and running into snags.
There were things he saw with his own eyes, too. More of the supersonic
aircraft flew over, and this time Ryth was not scared at all. The little
ball-wheeled truck that came in from Tarat once every other week to collect
their spare produce, turned up one time as a sizzling ground-effect floater
that was bigger, faster and in all ways more efficient than the truck had been.
The slim eighteen-year-old redhead who drove it was fiercely proud of its speed
and its total indifference to deficiencies in the road surface.

But
she brought a message, too. Ryth relayed it after she had gone.

"We must grow more, Denzil. So many men
in the cities, all working at other things and all needing to be fed."

"Wartime
economy," he nodded. "I'm surprised it's taken so long to hit us.
This always happens. War is a wasteful business."

"You didn't think so
when you first came here."

"Oh
yes, I did," he corrected. "But I was in it then. There was nothing I
could do to alter that. I knew that precious material, resources, and skill and
brains, were being wasted. Lives too. But in my job I had to disregard that. I
had to see the big picture. Now I'm close to it—never mind, you say we must
expand. How? You're the boss; what can we do?"

She pointed to the hillside
opposite the mereen paddock and said, "We will clear those trees. That
will give us more ground."

"We
will clear them. That would
take a squad of men
a
week!"

"Not the way we do it.
Tomorrow I will show you."

It
turned out to be simple but strenuous, a matter of gas-cylinders and a
power-cell, a long heavy cable and a cutter that was no more than a fine wire
loop fitting into a handle, which grew white-hot when he touched the switch. As
soon as he had climbed, and topped, and stripped the branches from one tree and
begun on the next, she took another cutter to burn through the bole and send it
crashing down. By the end of the day they were both sooty, sweaty, impregnated
with the tang of scorched green-wood, and weary. But the trees were down, and
lie had a question.

"What now? Do we cut 'em up, leave 'em,
haul 'em away, or what?"

"A
drag will come, tomorrow, to carry the trunks away for timber. I have a
chemical that will rot the stumps into compost, and the day after, we will
plant. Now, tell me again about this what you call camouflage—"

The drag came, and with it two husky men
known to Ryth by sight and name. They drove a thing with a huge motor that
whined powerfully and that drew after it an array of paired wheels. Bragan
eyed them from afar but went on with his own job, which, for that morning, was
stripping down a pump that had choked itself on weeds. He managed to get it
clear and turning over in time for the midday meal-break, just as Ryth came to
check.

"That is good," she approved.
"Yarrow and Belven asked for a spray to quench the few embers still
glowing in the logs, but I think they really want it to get cool. I can let
them have it now."

Bragan followed her around the buildings to the
green patch that was the farmyard, to see the logs all mounted in piles of
eight or ten in a long chain of wheeled mounts. Ryth had guessed shrewdly. One
man, Yarrow, was in fact spraying the smoking logs, but taking care to get
himself wet, and to direct a squirt or two over his companion.

All
in good fun,
Bragan
thought and had to grin in sympathy. But Yarrow saw the grin differently. All
at once he