Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 (3 page)

 
          
"We
still have what counts in war," insisted Spence. "We've been putting
old equipment into shape for years. We have guns and ammunition. We have
chemicals, even some planes."

 
          
"All
of which counted for exactly nothing fifty years ago."

           
That was quite true, but the five chiefs
did not like to be reminded of it. They let their young tormenter know as much
by their five angry scowls.

 
          
"It
just occurs to me that you're doing a lot of talking when you don't even have a
vote in this council," said Spence. "We don't even know what your
name is."

 
          
"My
name's Darragh. Mark Darragh. And I'm not trying to vote; I'm only trying to
remind you of the facts. Wait now—give me just half a minute more, please. All
of you feel safe here in the tropics."

 
          
"We've
been safe here for half a century," said Capato.

           
"Because
"they've forgotten about us.
Suppose you and some others get
together a fighting force and go up north and get licked? You've shown fight;
you've called yourselves to their attention. They'll come down here and wipe
out the last human being alive."

 
          
"That's
nonsense," exploded Capato. "They can't venture into these
temperatures. The jungle hides us, anyway."

 
          
"They
can slide into the stratosphere above here," said Mark Darragh. "It's
cold enough for them up there. And from that point they can put those
destroyer-rays of theirs to the jungles. They could wipe us out, the way we
wipe out pests—by setting the grass afire."

 
          
The
picture of such a fate, briefly and flatly sketched, again
brought throughtful pause
to the five chiefs. Darragh seized the moment
and plunged on.

 
          
"Let
me ask you again, to visualize how things have changed. When the first of them
came to Earth, we were entrenched and powerful and in the majority. Now
they're entrenched. I've been up yonder—up into the
Gulf of Mexico
. I've seen their outpost communities . .
."

 
          
"We
know about that," Spence tried to cut him off. "You reported on your
scouting of their outposts."

 
          
"I've
seen their outpost communities/,' repeated Darragh stubbornly
.
"
Big
forts,
sealed and domed and walled.
Aircraft crawling overhead.
The only sign of human
habitation is ruins. I know what I'm talking about. I doubt if any man has gone
so far in among them for years and years, and come back alive."

 
          
"It
was the foolish adventure of a boy," sneered one of the other chiefs.

 
          
"You're
right, sir—it probably was foolish. I went up there a boy; but I spent two
years on the prowl, and I feel that I came back home a grown man, with helpful
knowledge about the enemy."

 
          
"You're
not much help when you say to forget fighting them," charged Megan,

 
          
"I
didn't say to forget fighting them. I just said, don't fight their way. Don't
fight the way that got us whipped once. Develop another policy and other
weapons."

 
          
"Such
as what policy and what weapons?" prompted Spence.

 
          
Darragh
frowned. For the first time he looked baffled. "I don't know, just
yet," he admitted after a moment.

 
          
There
was harsh laughter all around the fire.

           
"All right, Darragh, you seem
to have come to the end of your little comedy," said Spence. "I'm
presiding over this council, and 111 give you leave to clear out and let us
finish the rest of our business."

 
          
Darragh
got up. "All right, I'll leave," he said. "But let me leave as
your scout, gendemen,"

 
          
"Scout?"
echoed Megan.

           
"Let me go back up there once
more. Let my spy out the land and the Cold People. Let me bring back the secret
that will destroy them."

 
          
"Now,
I'll go to hell if the kid isn't eloquent," chuckled Megan. "He
almost convinces me. He would if he hadn't dropped that about a new policy and
new weapons he doesn't know anything about."

 
          
"I'm
looking for the secret," insisted Darragh.

           
Spence shook his canny head.
"Even if you found it, you'd take too long," he objected. "We're
tired of sneaking and hiding. You told us that the Cold People are getting
mighty thick up there in the land we ought to be living in."

 
          
"That's
right," nodded Capato. "We've got to smack them right now, or
never."

 
          
"Right
now?" repeated Darragh. "How soon is right now? Let's see, this is
early September. You aren't figuring on a winter campaign, are you?"

 
          
"No,
we aren't," said Spence. "Well gather and arm our men, then organize
and drill this fall and winter. We'll move north with the hot weather. Take the
Cold People at the worst time of the year for them."

 
          
"That
means six months from now," summed up Darragh for him. "Then let me
have six months for my expedition."

 
          
Smiling
crookedly, Spence shrugged in contemptuous concession. "All right,"
he said. "Get back in six months and tell us the whole tale. You'll find
us ready for our campaign."

 
          
"That's
a deal," said Darragh. He looked down toward where Megan sat. "When I
get back, maybe you'll want to take up that little quarrel you tried to force
on me."

 
          
Megan
laughed and shook his head, without malice. "Look, sonny, I'll make a deal
with you. I'll take back that thing I said. You're no coward or you wouldn't be
heading into Cold People country. No hard feelings."

 
          
"Fair
enough," said Darragh.

           
"We've made fun of you,
youngster," put in Capato, "and, one way or the other, you've
deserved it with your butting in. But you've got nerve, and I wish you luck.
Get back here safe in six months."

 
          
"Amen
to that," said another. "You're a long, tall young man. We'll want
you and lots like you in the army."

 
          
"And
if I bring back the secret of the Cold People's weakness?" persisted
Darragh.

 
          
"Oh,
that?" said Spence, almost indulgently. "Bring it back, and we'll
see."

 
          
"I'll
bring it back," promised Darragh, "and I most certainly hope you'll
see."

 
          
Within
forty-eight hours, Mark Darragh
was drifting down the
Orinoco
in a canoe, his goal the
Caribbean Sea
and the strongholds of the Cold People
along its northern shore and beyond.

 
          
Chief
Megan had been right in withdrawing that accusation of cowardice, but Chief
Capato had been wrong in chuckling at Darragh for a fool. Darragh's equipment
for the voyage had been assembled with both courage and wisdom.

 
          
His
thirty-foot dugout of red gum had been a legacy from his father—a good hunter
and a part-time teacher in the shabby village school. The wood of that dugout
had a tough hardness that was almost metallic, and had been worked and shaped
with skill and artistry. Darragh's father had chosen the log with experienced
sense, had hollowed it by fire to a two inch shell, had scraped the inside
smooth and clean and polished the outside to a silky sheen the color of stale
cherry juice. At the widest, the dugout measured three feet; it was perhaps
twenty-four feet long. Its pointed bow and stern were decked in against waves;
it was furnished with outriggers to starboard and port, and there was a
paddlelike rudder that swung on an upright pin of wrought iron. A single mast
was stepped a littie forward of center, slooped-rigged with main sail and jib
of closely-woven palm fiber. As loaded by Darragh, the craft rode a good
eighteen inches out of the water.

 
          
Stowed
under the after deck Darragh carried his provisions —flat cakes of cassava,
with meal to bake more; some big yams; breadfruit; the dried and smoked meat of
pig, armadillo and goat; a fiber bag of guavas, pomegranates and avocados; a
small bunch of bananas; and a string of twenty green drinking coconuts. He
brought water in an array of big gourd bottles, and trusted to rainstorms to
provide more. His cooking apparatus was simple but efficient—a rectangle of
slate clamped in the bottom of the boat, with a basket of charcoal for fuel and
a spit and a saucepan for utensils.

 
          
Darragh
was no experienced navigator; he had taught himself what he could of
navigation theory, from grubby old books that had come down from
North America
in that long-ago retreat. He had a compass,
a quadrant and a tattered set of United States Navy charts of the
Caribbean Sea
, perhaps three-quarters of a century old.
His arms were an ancient but well-whetted cavalry saber; a good sheath knife
of home-forged, home-tempered steel; and—since all firearms had long ago been
confiscated by the chiefs who planned that uprising against the Cold People—a
bow and a quiver full of arrows.

 
          
Since
Darragh was to spy upon the Cold People, he had prepared and packed warm
clothing. It lay there under the foredeck, a combination garment that would
cover body, limbs and head—also two heavy gauntlets, and a pair of high moccasins
that could lace up snugly. The lack of furry pelts in the tropics had baffled
him at first, but he had made shift with two thicknesses of deer leather tanned
to the utmost softness. Between these layers he had sandwiched a third layer
of cotton lint, and had quilted the whole together with strong tuft stitches.
There was a pair of immemorial glass goggles set in a half-mask of old leather,
which he had oiled carefully to make it soft again, and a scarf knitted of
heavy cotton yarn to protect his face. Completing the cargo was a handful of
personal odds and ends—several hand-whittled pipes; a bag of tobacco; his
father's well-ground straight razor; a bamboo tube of hand-rolled quinine
pills; and a copy of
"Robinson Crusoe".

 
          
At
first Darragh had nothing to do except steer his dugout as the strong-flowing
current of the
Orinoco
carried him down and down and to the open
sea. There he ran up his sails to take advantage of a fair breeze from
southward.

 
          
Running
well before that breeze on a bright, hot afternoon, Darragh sailed to starboard
of
Trinidad
and at sundown dropped his stone anchor
close in to a swampy shore. He slept some hours, breakfasted before dawn on
cassava bread and dried meat, then set sail again. The sun came up to show him
the
Island
of
Tobago
on his right.

 
          
An
effort to sail straight past and away from
Tobago
was unsuccessful; a strong current beat him
back, and it occurred to him that the same current was mentioned in his
Robinson
Crusoe
book. He tacked to go around the other way, and was successful.
Pleasant days and nights followed. He slept little, with sails furled and
rudder lashed, but the little he slept was enough for a healthy young body. He
felt that his makeshift navigation was to be congratulated when he made a
landfall at the old
port
of
St. George's
on
Grenada
for fresh water and exploration, on his
seventh day out from the mouth of the
Orinoco
.

 
          
He
found that the one-time capital of the island colony was in prone ruins and
overgrown with jungle; plainly, it had received the attention of the invaders
long ago. Trying to trace the old streets, Darragh saw that even the concrete
curbs had gone to powder. He wondered, as so often in the past, at the
riddlesome force of the explosive ray mechanism that had spelled disaster for
his race.

 
          
Guns
would be nothing against it, and Spence and those other chiefs of the alliance
were unable to think or imagine beyond guns. Darragh found a clear spring and
refilled his array of gourds with sweet water. He picked some custard apples to
take back to the boat, and pushed off to sea again, thinking soberly and
somewhat gloomily.

 
          
But,
out on the blue water with his palm-woven sails bellying to the breeze, he
plucked up spirits. He had seen nothing of the Cold People so far. Plainly they
ignored the latitudes in which he sailed. His previous scouting adventure had
taken him to westward along the coast of
South America
, far up the isthmus. In three years he had
seen only a few domelike shelters of the enemy, and those in the Mexican
highlands. This time, he told himself, he would reach the
Gulf
Coast
of the old
United States
, perhaps reach the
Mississippi River
and voyage upward and learn the
actualities of the Cold People.

 
          
It
was his business to remain cautious and clear-eyed, and wide awake at all
times. Yes, and it was his business to be— vicious.

 
          
For
had not weak adversaries triumphed over strong ones in the earlier days of
Earth's history? It was a matter of spirit, if you came down to first
principles. Spence and

 
          
Megan
and Capato and the others were almost sensible about the right attitude.
Darragh wished he'd thought of that when he spoke to their council; that he'd
pointed out the direction for them to continue thinking, the refusal to accept
defeat.

 
          
After
all, defeat was like a lot of other proffered things. It must be accepted.
Otherwise it was—well, refused. A memory came of one of his father's old books.
It had told the story of another open boat, in these very seas, not far away
from where he, Darragh, now sailed; the story of the old man who fished, who
fought what seemed the cosmic spite of fate and of nature itself, who would
have been called a failure. The moral of the tale, as Darragh had decided, was
that you had not been conquered until you yourself fell flat on your face to
kiss the foot that kicked you.

 
          
Now,
he was the young man and the sea, utterly determined to survive and to
succeed, and to decline to recognize that prodding offer of the baleful gift of
defeat.

 
          
He
remembered something else he had read once, a stanza of Kipling. All alone with
the sea and the hot sky and the taut sails, the sand the words to a tune of his
own making:

 
          
"Mistletoe killing an oak-Rats gnawing
cables in two-Moths making holes in a cloak—
How
they
must love what they do! Yes—and we Little Folk, too,
We
are as busy as they, Working our works out of view. Watch, and you'll see it
some
dayr

 
          
That
passage, as Darragh remembered, referred to the crushed Picts in old
Britain
, plotting the downfall of mighty
Rome
. He wished he could think of the rest of
Kipling's powerfully spiteful verses. Since he could not, he sang the single
stanza over again, exultantly.

 
          
Somewhere
in there, he felt mystically sure, was the lesson for him and his own kind—the
way to fight and defeat the

 
          
Cold
People,
the way he knew existed but could not tell the
council. He'd puzzle out the lesson. It was a simple matter of concentrated
rational thinking; when he had it, he'd apply it. Back in the home jungle,
perhaps he would find and learn the rest of that Pict Song Kipling had written,
would sing it and teach it to others as a chant of battle. There was one final
line that did come back to him:

 
          
. . . And then we shall dance on your
graves!

           
With fierce relish Darragh said
those words over. They were a good
omen .
..

 
          
Near
Martinique
, on a gently rolling stretch of sea full of
black prowling sharks, he looked up and was aware of a faraway flying vehicle
of the Cold People.

 
          
At
once he struck his sails and sat silent in the dugout. The ship, a silvery
torpedo shape with no wings or propellers or jet streams, grew larger as it
descended out of the stratosphere. Over him it skimmed and circled, as though
to examine the face of the deep. Sharks came to nudge his craft at either
side.

 
          
Thank you, brother sharks,
said Darragh
in his heart as he sat motionless as a stone image,
thank you for flocking around. Thank you for being big and long and
shaped like my boat.

 
          
For the sharks helped him fool that observer craft up there.
He would seem like one of the great school of sharks. At last the silvery
torpedo hoisted its nose and dived upward and away out of sight somewhere.
Darragh hoisted his sails and headed north again.

 
          
To
supplement his dwindling food supply, he trailed a line overside with a hook
that carried a bait of pork rind. Not a day passed that he did not catch
several good fish. Splitting them, he grilled them over a handful of glowing
charcoal fragments on his slate hearth, and on another bit of slate baked
flapjacks of cassava meal and water.

 
          
Sliding
past
Dominica
, he observed that
Roseau
, too, had been utterly obliterated by the
enemy, nor had the jungle returned; apparently the entire island had been so
thoroughly blasted that all life had been swept away and nothing left but the
great bald mountain in the center. If no seeds had been blown or washed up
there, to grow
a
new mat of
vegetation, perhaps the explosive ray had been at work here recently. Why? Did
the Cold People conduct target practice? If so, did they prepare for another
clash with humanity? And, once more, what was that ray weapon of theirs? It
must be hot beyond imagination to do such scathe, even to concrete buildings
and pavements. But how did the Cold People, so gingerly in even mild warmth,
endure the management of
a
hot
weapon?

           
He could not answer those questions,
but he did not put them out of his mind. The mystery added to the menace;
however, Darragh decided that he did not feel too timid about it. After all—and
he grinned rather tigerishly to himself as he developed the thesis he had
begun—man had ruled too long on Earth to learn defeat in mere half century of
time.