Short Fiction Poul Anderson (reading a book .TXT) 📖

of a sword. If Volakech or a descendant of his took the warlike race out among the stars, with a high level of industry to back a scheme of conquest⁠—

But it didn’t matter. All the universe didn’t matter. There was only Ellen, and his own dead kin, and himself.

A man’s heart can only hold so much.

Janazik stood quietly back, watching his friend’s restless prowling. He had seen that pacing before, and he knew that some scheme would come out of it, crazy and reckless and desperate, with his own cool unhuman intelligence to temper it and make it workable. He and Anse made a good team. They made the best damned fighting team Khazak had ever seen.

Presently the human lifted his head. There was silence in the hiding place, thick and taut, so that they could hear their own breathing and the steady drum of rain on the trapdoor.

“I have an idea,” said Anse.

III

The long night wore on. Janazik had sent most of his Khazaki out to alert the other loyalists in their hiding places, but only they had a chance of slipping unobserved past the enemy patrols. Humans, obviously alien, slow-footed and clumsy beside the flitting shadows of Khazak, would never get far. They had to wait.

Anse was glad of the opportunity for conference with Janazik, planning the assault on the citadel. Neither of them was very familiar with the layout, but Alonzo, as an engineer on the rocket building project, and old Chiang had been there often enough to know it intimately.

It was impossible that a few hundred warriors armed with the primitive weapons of Khazak could take the stronghold. Its walls were manned by more fighters than that, and there were the terrible Earth-type guns as well. Alonzo had a blaster with a couple of charges, but otherwise there was nothing modern in the loyalist force.

But still that futile assault was necessary⁠—

“It’s taking a desperate chance,” said Dougald Joan. She was young yet, hardly out of girlhood, but her voice had an indomitable ring. The true warriors among the five Earthling families were all Dougald thought Janazik. “Suppose Ellen doesn’t come out of hiding? Suppose she’s dead or⁠—or captured already, in spite of what we think.”

“We’ll just have to try and destroy the rocket then,” said Alonzo. “Certainly we can’t let Volakech get to the Star Ship.” He sighed, heavily. “And the labor of another generation will be gone.”

“It wouldn’t take us long to build another boat,” said his wife. “We know how, now, and we have the industry to do it.”

“There are only a few who really know how to handle and build the Terrestrial machines, and most of them are in the enemy’s hands,” reminded old Chiang. “I’m sure I couldn’t tell you much about atomic engines, even though I was on the Star Ship herself once. If those few are killed, we may never be able to duplicate our efforts. What Terrestrials survive will sink back into barbarism, become simply another part of Khazaki culture.”

“I don’t know⁠—” said Nora.

“I know, because I’ve seen it happen,” insisted Chiang. “In the fifty years since we were marooned here, two generations have been born on Khazak. They’ve grown up among Khazaki, played with native children, worked and fought with Khazaki natives, adopted the dress and speech and whole outlook of Krakenau. Only a few in this third generation have consciously tried to remain⁠—Terrestrial. I must admit that Masefield Carson is one such. Ellen is another. But few others.”

“Would you have us wall ourselves out from the world?” asked Anse with a bridling anger.

“No. I don’t see how the situation could be helped. We are a minority in an alien culture with which we’ve had to cooperate. It’s only natural that we’d be more assimilated than assimilating. Even at that, we’ve wrought immense changes.”

Janazik nodded. The stranded Terrestrials had found themselves in an early Iron Age civilization of city-states, among a race naturally violent and predatory. For their own survival, they had had to league forces with the state in which they found themselves⁠—Krakenau, as it happened. Before they could build the industry they needed, they had to have some security⁠—which meant that they must teach the Krakenaui military principles and means of making new weapons which would make them superior to their neighbors. After that⁠—well, it took an immense technology to build even a small spaceship. The superalloys which could stand the combustion of rocket fuel required unheard-of elements such as manganese and chromium, which required means of mining and refining them, which required a considerable chemical plant, which required⁠—How far down do you have to start? And there were a hundred or a thousand other requirements of equal importance and difficulty.

Besides, the Terrestrials had had to learn much from scratch themselves. None of them had ever built a rocketship, had ever seen one in action even. It was centuries obsolete in Galactic civilization. But gravity drives were out of the question. So⁠—they’d had to design the ship from the ground up. Which meant years of painstaking research⁠ ⁠… and only a few interested humans and Khazaki to do it. The rest were too busy with their own affairs in the brawling barbaric culture.

Ten years ago, the first spaceboat had blasted off toward the Star Ship⁠—and exploded in mid-acceleration. More designing, more testing, more slow building⁠—and now the second one lay ready. Perhaps it could reach the Star Ship.

The Star Ship⁠—faster than light, weightless when it chose to be for all its enormous mass, armed with atomic guns that could blast a city to superheated vapor. Whoever controlled that ship could get to Galactic stars in a matter of weeks. Or could rule all Khazaki if he chose.

No wonder Carson and Volakech had struck now, before the rocket boat was launched. When they had the ship⁠—

But only Ellen knew the figures of its orbit and the complicated calculations by which the boat would plot a course to get there. A bold warrior might make