Lighting a cigarette, the steward turned his attention to the men working with the cutting torches.

  He wondered what was behind the door they were working on and decided it was loot.

  “Nothing could make the boss chomp ollos like that except loot,” the steward thought.

  The hiss of the inner door opening again was so slight that the steward did not notice it. Nor did the officer in charge of the honor guard. Nor did Keglar. Nor did Holm.

  What happened next was so loud that everyone noticed it.

  It was the full-throated, bull-chested, gut-driven roar of fighting men going into battle. It was a torrent of sound. It was a mixture of screams, grunts, and roars. Mixed in it was the scream of a woman turned into a person resembling one of the warrior Amazons of the lost ages of Earth.

  9

  The startled steward turned to look toward the inner door of the lock. It was open again. Pouring through it was a tide of blue men in full war array.

  The steward had never seen a blue man. He had no idea that such monsters existed. However, he had good sense. He ran as fast as his legs could cany him, fleeing through the opening that led into the hangar of the deep space ship.

  Keglar also heard the sound. Like the steward, he turned to look. He had seen blue men before, he knew what they were, but he couldn’t understand how they could possibly have gotten here. His first reaction was simply to doubt his eyes. Was he drunk? He couldn’t remember having had a drink.

  Hearing the roar, Holm turned in his chair. Pushing his bulk to his feet, he began to scream at Keglar.

  “Colonel, you told me this place was secure! Colonel, what’s the meaning of this? Colonel, where did those men come from?”

  These were not questions that Keglar had either the desire or the information to answer. The blue men were charging. Around Holm, the honor guard waited for orders to fire.

  In the van of the blue men, Keglar glimpsed one that was bigger than any of the others. He remembered having seen this huge brute flat on his nose in the Zylon, the place of peace, when the kid with the curls had played tricks on everybody. This was the war chief of the blue men, Korder. Behind Korder, in a space suit with the visor open, he caught a glimpse of a human. The distance was too great for Keglar to be sure of this man’s identity, but Keglar was reasonably certain that this was Hartford. Two others in space suits were also occasionally visible in the charge of the blue men, but the humans were being outdistanced by the blue devils and were being pushed to the rear.

  The volume of sound coming from the blue men was so great that it stunned Keglar momentarily, slowing his reactions. However, sound had not been known to kill anybody. These blue devils might be noisy but they were armed with shields and war clubs. Primitive weapons against the explosive slugs of the honor guard! The blue men wouldn’t last a minute! It would be fun to let them get dose, to let them think they had a chance to win, then to kill half of them with one single volley!

  Then Keglar saw something that really shocked him. In addition to their shields and dubs, the blue men had gas guns!

  Somebody had armed these natives!

  According to the police of Earth, Inc., arming natives was a crime punishable by death. Armed natives would shoot back!

  “Fire!” Holm screamed.

  This was not the proper order to give, if military procedure was to be observed. However, the officer in charge of the honor guard understood Holm’s meaning. He shouted to his men. They lifted their weapons.

  From somewhere in the press of charging blue men a human voice shouted a single word, “Verdu!”

  Hartford had not anticipated that this wild charge would take place. The situation had gotten beyond his control the instant the blue men had seen their enemy.

  The blue men understood the word that Hartford shouted at them. They were not familiar with the strange weapons that this wonderful human had given them from his own ship, which had been hidden near their country. But he had told them a marvelous story of much fighting that needed to be done off yonder in the world of no air. He had told them that the bad men who had killed their peacemaker were there, killing other peacemakers. After he had told them this, he had had no trouble finding his ship. There he had given them guns from his own arsenal and had taught them all that was necessary to know, which was to point these strange war clubs in the general direction of the enemy and pull the trigger.

  They did this.

  The result was a crash of sound, little of it coming from the guns, most of it coming from the explosions taking place in the brilliant uniforms of the honor guard. Holms appeared in the ranks of the men guarding Cyrus Holm.

  Then the answering volley came. The blue men discovered that their shields, which would protect them from spears and thrown war clubs, could not save them from human weapons. Some of the slugs exploded on contact with the shields, others exploded in the space between the shield and the body, and still others exploded on impact with the bodies of the blue men.

  As his men began to go down around him, Korder screamed a command. In obedience to it, his men broke up their compact mass and spread like nimble goats to the right and to the left. In this way, they presented individual targets, which were much harder to hit than a mass. As they spread, they continued to charge.

  For the first time in his life, Cyrus Holm smelled the reek that comes from explosive slugs doing their deadly work; for the first time he saw men explode in splashing blood, saw them knocked backwards and down, saw them fall in heaps of shapeless muscle.

  Beyond his honor guard, he saw the blue men spread like a fan and continue to come on at full charge.

  Cyrus Holm fell too, not because he had been hit but because he was so badly scared that his legs would no longer support his gross bulk. Once he was down, he knew it would be wise to stay there. It would even be wiser to dig in. He tried to dig a hole in the tough lava floor of this hidden city. Failing in this, he crawled under the dead bodies of two of his honor ^guard. He lay there whimpering and waiting for the death he was sure was coming.

  Keglar had stronger legs. He used them. Ducking back from the honor guard, he found a room and ducked into it. The room was the one used by Jim Moler to teach mathematics, but Keglar did not know this. Crawling under the desk, he tried to hide. Just as soon as things settled down, he hoped to make his way back to Holm’s landing barge and use it to return to the big ship, which was immune to attack. Then to his horror, he realized that these blue men had come from the lock which contained Holm’s barge. If^the barge was taken, there was no way back to the ship for him. Or for anybody else.

  Among the charging blue men, Hartford caught a glimpse of Holm going down and of Keglar running away. He assumed Holm was dead. If the lion was down, it was still necessary to comer the jackal. He turned aside to follow Keglar. Micki followed him. He had tried to make her stay back in the country of the blue men, with their women. She had acidly told him that she was not a blue woman. Later, when the ship had landed, he had tried to make her remain in it until the fighting was finished. He had had no luck with this idea, either. Wherever he went, she was going too.

  Hartford had also intended to lead the attack of the blue men. He had led them out of the ship and had remained in the lead until they had seen their enemy. After that, he had had to struggle to keep up with them. A red flag had far less effect on a bull than did the sight of the enemy on these warriors from the Great Depression of Pluto. They had been fighters all their lives. War was the one trade they understood. After they saw their enemy, everything was in the hands of God.

  With the battle raging at his right, Hartford went to the left. Glancing toward the battle, he saw that most of the blue men had already thrown away their guns and were moving in with their clubs. At dose quarters, in the hands of the blue men, the clubs were as deadly as guns.

  Hartford stopped in front of the classroom where Keglar had gone into hiding. “Come out of there with your hands upl”

  Keglar replied with an explosive slug. The guns in Hartford’s hands answered. Explosions inside the room became a continuous thud of sound. He saw Keglar come out from under the desk, then saw the slugs hit him. He turned away from the doorway as Micki caught up with him. “Stay away,” he said.

  “Keglar-”

  “Scratch Keglar,” he answered. “He will send no more men on the long drop.”

  She sighed.

  He turned back to the melee in time to see the last of the honor guard go down, except for one who was trying to run. Flight gained him nothing. A thrown dub knocked his legs out from under him. Some of the guard the blue men had simply overrun and had taken alive. Korder was standing like a grim giant in the middle of the melee. He lifted his club in a semi-salute and grinned as Hartford and Micki came up.

  “The fighting here is finished, man from Earth.”

  “Organize squads and search the place for those who may be hiding.”

  “At once.” At Korder’s order, his warriors split themselves into squads which began to range the hidden city.

  The place stank with the reek of explosive fumes and the odor of blood.

  “Have you seen a huge fat man—Ah! There he is. Dead.” He glanced at Holm’s bulk hidden under the bodies of his honor guard. “Well, that at least saves us the trouble of hanging him.”

  Korder stirred Holm with his war club. “But he is not dead, man from Earth. However, that is easily remedied.” He lifted the war club.

  “No,” Hartford shouted.

  Korder held the blow. His brow wrinkled as he tried to comprehend the reasoning of this man from the planet far away. “Is he not the leader of the men who killed our peacemaker?”

  “Yes. But humans do not kill that way.”

  “Humans killed Einer,” Korder answered.

  “Yes, I know. But—”

  “To keep an enemy alive is not the mark of great wisdom, but you are our friend and you have brought us here and if you wish it—” He saw that Hartford was not looking at him and he turned to see what had attracted the attention of the man from Earth.

  Korder’s scarred face took on a look of puzzled surprise. And more than this—of happiness.

  Elfro was coming toward them. Behind him were the teachers and the students as well as many of the balls of floating light. In his hand, Elfro held Einer’s staff. As if recharged with life, it glittered with swirling colors.

  “From the dead, Einer has come back to us,” Korder said. His voice had great happiness in it, and no surprise at all. Living in a world of primitive wonder, it did not seem strange to this blue man that his peacemaker should return to him.

  ‘ Moving away from Holm, he knelt before Elfro. “Tell me, Great One, did I do wrong in breaking your peace by fighting here?”

  “You did right. Sometimes war is the only way to peace. In this case, you must be terrible in war.” The stripling’s voice was very gentle. “But I am Elfro, Einer’s twin brother.”

  “Elfro? This word has a strange taste in my mouth,” Korder answered. “I like the sound of Einer better.”

  “I demand to be taken to my ship!” Holm’s voice rose in a shriek. Holm had managed to get to his feet. Korder, rising, lifted his war club. Holm shrank away from the giant blue man. It was Elfro who restrained Korder.

  “Who is this monster? Make him stay away from me!” Holm instantly selected Elfro as the important person present. It was obvious that he was repelled by Elfro’s youth, but in spite of the stripling’s teen-age appearance, Holm sensed that power lay in the youth’s hands. He also saw that Elfro held the staff.

  Sweating at every pore, with the broken bodies of his honor guard around him, in abject terror, the fat man first demanded that he be taken back to his ship. When this failed, he tried to buy his way back. Slowly he realized there was something in the Solar System even his enormous wealth could not buy.

  “I’ll give you a billion credits if you will take me back to my ship,” he promised.

  “Take him in charge,” Elfro said to Korder.

  The blue chieftan nodded happily. “And if he tries to escape, Great One?”

  Tap him gently on the head with your club,” Elfro instructed.

  “Burke!” Hartford was finally aware that Micki was pulling at his arm. The visor of her helmet was open, revealing eyes filled with tears. “Come here, Burke.”

  She led him to a spacesuit clad body that lay sprawling on the floor. A feeling of sad sickness rose up in Burke Hartford as he realized that the body lying on the floor with half its chest missing was all that was left of Ed Teller.

  “He searched half the Solar System to find this place—” Hartford felt a lump rise in his throat. “His search ended this way.”

  The lump in his throat turned to bitterness. Ed Teller had been a decent human being. All that had ever been wrong with him had been his fixed idea that something of importance could be found on Pluto, if only somebody would go there and really look. As things had turned out, this fixed idea had been right. As the bitterness deepened, Hartford started to tum. Micki caught his arm and wanted to know what he was going to do.

  Tm going to shoot Cyrus Holm myself!” he answered.

  “No,” Micki said.

  Elfro was standing in his way. The stripling’s gaze went down to the floor. An inscrutable expression came into his eyes. He lifted the glowing staff in a gesture of salute. “Farewell, my friend from Earth.”

  Hartford felt the impulse to destroy Holm subside. “Is everything all right here?” he asked.

  “You arrived just in time. They would soon have had a ‘ hole in the door. They were going to use gas.”

  “Our arrival here was very timely,” Hartford said slowly. “Also we were very lucky to get in.”

  Elfro’s eyes became more inscrutable. “I don’t understand you.”

  “Then I will explain. I expected to have to land my ship outside. Since we were the only ones who had space suits, Ed, Micki, and I would have had to leave the ship and force entry of the outer lock. This would have been a difficult and hazardous operation, but it would have had to be done-before we could get Korder and his warriors inside where they could breathe. However, as we approached, the outer door swung open. It came as no surprise to me to discover Holm’s barge in the lock. I had known intuitively it would be there. Because the air had gone with the opening of the outer door, Holm’s men left with the barge were either dead or dying by the time I set my ship down beside his barge. They were already incapable of resistance, hence could not delay us there. Just as I set my ship down, the inner lock began to open. All I had to do was open the door of my ship and Korder and his warriors were able to go out into air.”

  Hartford paused. Elfro, his eyes growing even more inscrutable, looked away.

  “I could regard any one of those events as a coincidence,” Hartford continued. “But to regard all of them as being just plain luck, is to stretch the meaning of that word much too far.”

  “Perhaps—” Elfro said.

  “You know the answer.” Hartford gestured up toward the ball of light which still floated above him.

  “Oh, yes!” The expression on Elfro s face said that now he understood exactly what the big man had in mind. “I told you they could communicate with each other at great distances. The ones here unquestionably communicated that Holm was inside.”

  “I suppose they also opened the outer and inner doors?”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it in the least,” Elfro said. His face was very youthful now. He looked a litde like a small boy who is fully expecting to be caught in some misdeed. “They are really quite accomplished, you know.”

  “They are also Race X,” Hartford said.

  Elfro looked like a small boy who has been caught. “You are very perceptive, my friend. That is correct. These balls of floating light are really Race X.”

  Pride came into his voice, a touch of it, but there was humility too. It was as if this stripling had touched the fringe of greatness in being near Race X. There was pride because of that. But there was also humility, as if greatness was a word as big as the universe.

  Beside him, Hartford heard Micki gasp in surprise. At his midriff, he felt a surge of emotion. If only Ed Teller could have lived long enough to have known that he had already met Race X!

  “I suspected something like this when I saw that the deep space ship could not be operated by a creature with hands.” Amazement was growing in Burke Hartford. There was food for wonder here, wonder as deep as the sky. “How can a ball of floating light be intelligent?”

  “The Great Life Force takes many forms.” Elfro’s voice had humility in it too. “In all of these forms intelligence is present, to some degree. You must not make the mistake of assuming that the human brain is the only carrier of intelligence, or even the best one. However, we can save this discussion for later. The immediate problem is what to do with Holm.”

  Again the bitterness came up in Hartford. “The long drop!”

  Elfro’s face became thoughtful. “Yes, that is a solution. But is it the only one?”

  “This is one way humans dispose of their wolves. It is guaranteed to work. He deserves death a thousand times.”

  “What about human courts?”

  “How could we bring him to trial, how could we prove his crimes? If we found witnesses, many of them would mysteriously disappear. If he could not buy them off, he could have them killed. This man has real power.”

  Elfro’s eyes looked far away. Hartford realized there was in this stripling the impulse to save even Cyrus Holm, if he could, in a depth of compassion that Burke Hartford did not pretend to understand. “What if we kept him here, as a prisoner?”

  Hartford thought about this. There was compassion in him too, a depth of it that he had not suspected until this moment. “I have no stomach for killing a man who cannot fight back,” he said slowly. “If you can guarantee to keep him a prisoner, I will go along with you. But I warn you; holding Holm may not be easy. His ship is still above us. Eventually his men will come looking for us. If he gets into communication with them, they will be on us like wolves.” The old uneasiness was rising again in Hartford, directed now toward the fate of Cyrus Holm.

 

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