Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 (4 page)

 
          
In
his fancy he saw ranks of warriors that seemed to pass his mind's eye in
review, ranging one behind the other as they came out of the dead centuries.
There were the battered but triumphant Marines of Midway and Okinawa, the
scarred infantry that had swept like a tidal wave up the beaches of Normandy;
the victors of Cantigny and the Argonne, in weathered khaki; Lee's gray
Virginians, Grant's stubborn men in blue; the Light Brigade that did not pause
to reason why at Balaklava; Cortez and his rusty-armored handful that gulped
down the Aztec Empire; the Crusaders, led by Richard and Saint Louis, the
Saracen chivalry of Salah-ad-Din; Caesar's Tenth Legion; Assyrian phalanxes,
bearded and scale-armored. And, behind these, barely visible in prehistoric
antiquity, the hairy men of the Flint People, Darragh's first human ancestors
who in
Europe
had met the Neanderthal race, another
monster people who had to be taught who was ruler of Earth.

 
          
Those
were the conquerors, and not one of them but had known defeat once and again,
and not one of them but had risen to victory. Just now, all mankind was down;
but not out, by no means out.
Resting, rather, on one knee,
shaking the groggy head clear, flexing the muscles, growing strong by the
respite, getting ready to resume the struggle.
The plight of the human
race was desperate, but not too desperate.

 
          
Then
Darragh saw in his mind those villages and little towns in the South American
jungle where his people lived— houses of hewn timber and adobe-like stucco and
tight-thatched roofs, with their governments and market places, with their
fields here and there for the growing of crops and the grazing of herds. He saw
the civilization mankind had rebuilt; the forge, where the blacksmith had found
his frade one of dignity and prestige as in brave old days; the looms and the
potteries; the village schools, such as the one in which his father had taught
from old books that told the story of humanity's greatness and wisdom and
courage; even the simple printing presses that produced new books and
newspapers, the factories where simple machine tools were achieved, the
laboratories where doctors and other scientists wrought.

 
          
As
a matter of fact, conquered mankind had come back a long way from what the Cold
People must have thought was complete destruction. The Cold People had better
look out.

 
          
One
late afternoon, midway of his third week of sailing, Darragh steered his canoe
to the southeastern point of the
island
of
Haiti
. He needed water and food; he took in sail
and let his boat drift close inshore, under some drooping palms. Even as he
dropped his anchor stone overboard, he saw through the frondy foliage half a
dozen aircraft of the Cold People, dancing like midges among high, streaky
clouds overhead.

 
          
Had
they seen him? Would they investigate? He stood up in the boat, one hand on a
palm trunk. He watched while one of the ships dropped down like a pouncing
hawk, and another and another. One by one they dipped beyond the belt of tall
shaggy-leafed trees inland from his anchorage.

 
          
They
were landing there, not far away. Maybe they had not sighted him, after all.
He, Darragh, was there to scout and spy, and he did not hesitate long.
Hurriedly he belted on his saber. That well-sharpened blade had been a legacy
from his grandfather, who had inherited it from an ancestor once with a
Kentucky
cavalry regiment in the Civil War.
Kneeling, Darragh tightened the straps of his sandals, said a quick prayer for
luck, and stepped out of the canoe to the sandy beach. Stealthily he moved in
the direction of those descending ships.

 
          
He
made careful progress, from the first few palms at the water's edge to the
shelter of a bush, beyond to another bush. Then he was among trees and
comfortably dense undergrowth, the best of cover. The leaves overhead would
screen him effectively from a possible flying observer, and, from long hunting
habit, he crouched low among the trunks and bushes, advancing without any rustle
of the stems around him.

 
          
Up
ahead, gray light shone through the green of the jungle. That meant there was
open country just beyond. Darragh moved more cautiously still, until he came to
the edge of a clearing. Squatting low, he cautiously pulled aside two great
femy fronds of leaves, and looked out.

 
          
Here
in the midst of the jungle of Haiti was a spacious bald circle of earth—as
large, perhaps, as an old flying field— and in its center stood a big
artificial dome of a patchworky gray substance. Upon the top of this structure
was just then descending the last of the ships. As Darragh watched, the ship
vanished, as though through a trapdoor or valve. He was looking, as on several
occasions of his earlier expedition, at an outpost shelter of the Cold People.

 
          
He
wished with all his heart for one of the precious cameras his people had been
able to make; but such things were jealously kept as scientific instruments,
and not even Darragh's audacity had been sufficient to allow him to ask for
one. Spence and the other chiefs would have refused, anyway.

 
          
The
next best thing would be a drawing, and Darragh rather fancied his skill as a
draughtsman. From his belt pouch he fished a folded wad of the coarse,
tan-tinted paper manufactured by an enterprising fellow in a village that
neighbored Darragh's. Another dig in the pouch, and he produced a pencil,
hammered out of a strip of lead. He put a sheet of the paper on his bare brown
knee, squinted at the scene, and began carefully to draw.

 
          
The
dome, as Darragh judged, was a good two hundred yards in diameter, and fairly half
as high. He had better jot down those estimated figures, and did so. Its curved
surface might be of several materials, for the shades of gray were various.
Dull, darkish metal in one place, or so it seemed; circles and quadrilaterals
of glasslike semi-transparency; irregularly shaped blotches that might be
fine-grained stone or possibly, some kind of mortar or cement. Here and there
showed ports through which the outer world could be observed. Rectangular
panels at regular intervals were furnished with what looked like hinges, so that
they might open for doorways.

 
          
Darragh
wished for something else, one of the few pairs of field glasses that had also
made the retreat from the destruction of
America
. With glasses, he felt, he could be surer
about those entry panels—could be sure, too, of the condition of the ground
around the dome shelter. He strained his unaided eyes, and guessed that the
structure was fairly new, and that the baldness of the clearing was new, too—he
could make out no sprouts of young vegetation in the fat dark earth.

 
          
Undoubtedly
this open space in the jungle had been made by the use of those mysterious
rays, snuffing and scalding away the trees and bushes and ferns into clouds of
vapor. There were no felled trunks, no chopped-away decaying leaves. Once the
clearing was there, the dome had been erected. While he drew, Darragh summed up
his findings in his mind.

 
          
This
might well be one of a group or system of new posts in the tropical southern
regions, disturbingly close to where men had been living in comparative safety.
The Cold People might have become more numerous, perhaps by emigrations and
increased births of new individuals on the planet they had so ruthlessly
appropriated. Now, they seemed to be closing in on the tropics. The denuding of
the
island
of
Dominica
might mean that another outpost would be
built there. And more encroachments would come, perhaps into the home jungles
of mankind.

           
Had Spence and the others been right
after all? Had their instinct been good, even while he had derided
it, that
now or never was the time to fight? If man waited
to make war, it might well be that war would come and seek him out in his
tropical refuge.

 
          
Darragh
completed his drawing, and attempted a sketch, from memory, of that last ship
seen comparatively close at hand. Then he began a careful circuit of the
clearing, within the shelter of the trees. At point after point he studied the
dome; it presented no arrestingly new features from any observation. A full
hour went by as Darragh moved in his circle, and almost as he reached his
starting point he saw a sudden shimmer of motion at the dome's summit. A
torpedo shape of a flying craft came into view and roared slowly upward.
Another made its appearance and fose in its turn. More came. Darragh counted
five in all. They drifted off to seaward above the trees, as though on some
sort of patrol mission.

 
          
The
sun was sinking low. Darragh's previous expedition had convinced him that the
Cold People were not particularly active in the dark, and he would feel safe
in departing from
Haiti
. He slipped away from the clearing, and headed back toward the place
where his dugout waited under those seaside palms.

 
          
Moving
silently, as before, he was aware of some noisier thing, in the direction of
the water's edge.

 
          
At
once he dropped flat among the low-growing bushes, and lay there for long
moments. A slender, bright-blotched snake wriggled by within inches of his
face, and his flesh crawled at the sight of its flat head, heavily jowled with
poison sacs, but he dared not move to strike or retreat. The snake departed,
but the noise continued. Finally Darragh crept forward on hands and knees. It
sounded as though some clumsy body, large as a hippopotamus, wallowed at the
beach.

 
          
He
came to where he could peer through some lemon-scented leaves into the open.

 
          
There
were the palms, there was his boat, and there, close to it, moved something of
a fish-bright gleaming hue, vaguely pyramidal.

 
          
One
of the Cold People hunched along the water's edge, between him and his boat.

 
          
Darragh
remained motionless and stared. There was little more than that for him to do.
He had never seen one of the Cold People so close at hand before, and he
studied the form of the uncouth monster. It seemed swaddled and blurred by a
strange sheathlike cloak it wore, apparently some land of insulating armor
against the tropical heat. The fabric was as transparent as isinglass and quite
supple, as he could see, but it seemed to be of considerable thickness. Each of
the tentaclelike organs that served as arms had a close sleevelike covering of
it.

 
          
The
creature's attention was plainly directed to seaward, and Darragh made bold to
creep to a new observation point between two trees.

 
          
He
could see the edge of the sea by the palms, and his boat riding there at its
tether. Floating easily above, just clear of the palm fronds, hovered an air
vehicle of silvery metal like a twenty-foot cigar. On top of this apparatus
perched another Cold Creatine, also draped in transparent armor, and the one on
the beach was joined by a third, shuffling into Darragh's view from behind the
clump of palms. The two on the ground stood still, examining his boat.

 
          
After
a moment or so, they turned their armored comb-tops toward each other. Their
tentacles vibrated rhythmically, as though they communicated in some weird sign
language. Then the one on the top of the aircraft dropped out of sight as
though through a trap into the interior, and quickly clambered back with a
tangle of lean, dark cordage. This it dropped down to its companions.

 
          
The
two of them busied themselves here and there beside the boat. They twined and
interlaced the cords, very deftly as it seemed to the helplessly-watching
Darragh. Then the craft dropped down to the sand, and with awkward but powerful
motions the two on shore scrambled upon it. They and the third climbed down
inside. A breath's space later, the ship
rose
gendy.

 
          
Half
a dozen lines drew taut from ship to water. Then Darragh's boat, with all his
possessions, came up from where it lay, in a net of the dark lines.
Despairingly Darragh watched, while the craft with its dangling burden floated
inland above him, toward the domed shelter.