Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Without loss of time, the motors started up again, and the car jerked into forward motion and was quickly pitching at reckless speed over the wind-built dunes.

  Denning had long known the trick of putting physical misery out of his mind; he needed it before that night’s journey was done. In the lurching car the pain of his cramped muscles became well-nigh unbearable, and he had never ridden with an internal-combustion engine before; its fumes and noise became sickening. More than once, a sudden plunge over the wavelike crest of a dune flung him painfully against the other cargo in the compartment.

  It went on for long hours during which he could see nothing but pitch blackness; during the infrequent stops, there were voices and metallic hammerings that could only mean they were visiting the remains of wrecked vehicles in the path of the battle, stripping them of still-useful parts. Once someone apparently wanted to throw some of the salvage in the back of the car where Denning lay; the Earthman heard a few words of explanation in the force of the man who had kicked him, and a hand slapped jocularly on the metal door that kept him prisoner coincided with a deep laugh.

  At last, after a longer period of riding, the car slowed down in the midst of a tumult of shots and of voices raised in shouting. All around was the grinding of many wheels; some time during the night the war party had gathered again for the return dash to their base. For a moment the gunfire made Denning imagine that they had run into hostile raiders; then he realized that the din was of welcome.

  Nevertheless, it was almost a quarter of an hour before the lock clicked and the door was flung wide again, and the voice of his last night’s captor snapped. “Vykhod!”

  It was almost all he could do to straighten his arms and legs and stand up; he remained leaning on the car, facing the two men who’s to oil watching him, and blinking at the pale gray light of dawn.

  He cast a quick glance around; the desert seemed covered with parked cars and with men, women, even children, all busy at once—but he saw no village. The thought came to him that perhaps the Izgnanniki were true nomads, having no permanent abiding-place—though that seemed incredible in view of their mechanized equipment and the evidences of family life. But in that case, his mission was just a laugh, a sour laugh.

  He had to look back at the men facing him. One of them was the tall warrior who had booted him in the ribs; a young but hard-looking face with eyes that seemed habitually narrowed behind his respirator mask; the other man was tall also, and wore a heavy cloak over the baggy-trousered coverall suit that was everybody’s dress on Mars. He had a thick black beard and his face was deeply lined, though he did not look older than forty-five.

  Denning couldn’t read either of those faces. If they had expression, it didn’t follow the same rules that you learned among Earth people for reading thoughts from faces.

  For a short time there was silence as the two Izgnanniki looked the Earthman over; Denning was glad to have a little time for the circulation to seep back into his arms and legs, and for him to take a better look at the scene around.

  I le saw now that a frenzied activity of concealment was going on; short bursts of motor noise rose among the irregular crags and boulders that here covered the desert, as men drove the cars into the sheltering shadows and covered them with heavy tarpaulins coated like them with the red iron oxide. And he saw what the women were doing; wearing broad shoes that left little track, and armed with big brooms, they were methodically sweeping over every wheel mark in the vicinity of the encampment. In an hour or less the wind and the dust would rise to wipe out every trace; but in the meantime, the Izgnanniki were taking no chances.

  Denning guessed that some of those precautions were new, since the Earthmen had come with their rocketships. Until then there had been no danger from the air on Mars—it was funny; when the first crude gasoline-driven rockets had struggled across space, five hundred years ago, airplanes and radio had already been in use on Earth, but both inventions had died out here. That was simple: Neither of them worked on Mars, with the merest excuse for an atmosphere and no Heaviside layer—or more properly, with a Heaviside layer right down to the ground, so that you couldn’t send radio bouncing over the Martian surface except maybe a little way at night.

  In the distance he could see a jagged range of mountains that, from what knowledge he had of this part of the planet, he guessed to be the Gory Razor jenny; and nearer, not more than a couple of miles away, a glint of water caught the light of the rising sun. There, lying below the rocky plateau where the encampment was, was one of those mysterious ozheri, one of the surface lakes which still exist on Mars. Most of the irrigation system of the ancient civilization was underground; and the flow from the melting polar caps still breaks through to the surface here and there, from the uncharted channels which remain after a hundred million years. There was the water supply, here were the Izgnanniki, but where—

  Then, ridiculously enough, he saw the village.

  It was not so strange that his first blinking glance had missed it, though it began only a hundred yards away. The place was camouflaged almost out of existence. The huts looked like the rocks; there were windows, but those that faced the sunrise had already been closed with tight-fitting, solid plugs surfaced like the rest of the dwelling with the red sand of the desert itself. Those remaining in shadow would not break the light-and-shadow picture as seen from the air; they hardly looked adequate for ventilation, but nevertheless most of the place must be underground—there had to be storehouses, tunnels, repair shops for work on the vehicles which could not be done in the open.

  The Izgnanniki had had over forty years, since their first contact with Earthmen, to perfect their concealment. They had done pretty good, said Denning to himself admiringly.

  Then the black-bearded Martian spoke, in a deep voice that had the timbre of authority.

  “Ponimash gdye nakhodishsha, shemniko? Jestesh vrekami Isgnannikikh.”

  With something of an effort, Denning straightened up and stood without leaning on the battle car, facing the motionless cloaked figure and staring straight into the masked and bearded face.

  “Yes,” he answered steadily, in the Marsski language. “I know that I am in the hands of the Driven Out. What of it?”

  The sky overhead was growing lighter. It was already about a minute since Denning’s tongue had covertly pressed the trip on his mouth radio in a certain manner, and the signal had been hurled out at the speed of light, to be picked up by the tremendously sensitive receptors on the waiting patrol rockets somewhere up there. They would not delay.

  “I am the golova,” said the man with the black beard solemnly. “It is my duty, under the law of war of the Izgnanniki, to give you the choice of the prisoner. Under the law, it is the right of the captive to choose one of two things: Either to serve all his life as a slave among our people, or to fight the death battle with one of our warriors, man to man, and if he conquers, to be accepted in the place of him whom he has slain as a warrior of the Izgnanniki, swearing obedience to the law of war upon the honor of a fighting man.”

  Denning took a moment to digest that formal speech. It was a crazy thing, but it appealed to something in his mind—some corresponding reservoir of quixotry in himself. And he could see how it must have worked in the past centuries to bring new blood into the isolated tribe of the Driven Out—always fighting blood. That was what the system was meant to do, and it was a scheme worthy of a society of warriors.

  “Choose, Earthman,” said the chief of the Izgnanniki. “Either this morning you become a lifelong slave, a branded coward—or you fight for your life against one of us, fight as the law prescribes, naked and without weapons, the draka besvosd ushnaya.”

  The battle without air. That was good for another bit of thinking. Denning realized that all he had to do was wait a few minutes and the rockets would be here; the part of wisdom was to play out his last night’s pose of fear and choose slavery. But something deep in his make-up rebelled against that, something kept need
ling his adrenal glands and awaking his hunger for the thrill that comes of confronting death. Otherwise, his mission was going to be accomplished practically without danger; it was pitiful.

  It was then that the tall hard-faced man who had kicked Denning the night before broke in. “My chief,” he said with a faintly-mantled arrogance, “I have never heard that the law of war is for the Earthmen. The Earthmen themselves obey no law.”

  The golova bowed his head slightly, a frown deepening the furrows in his forehead. “There is truth in what you say, Pravdivy,” he admitted. “The Earthmen do not fight wars like men; instead they wait and work to invent machines that will kill other men like vermin, so that they, cowards, will not have to fight. When the flame-driven rockets first came from Earth, the days of open warfare on Mars were numbered. Yet the law is the law, and the Izgnanniki will obey it as long as there are still Izgnanniki.”

  “He will make the coward’s choice,” said Pravdivy with a faint shrug, a jeer in his voice. “He is a coward; as such he received the kicks which I gave him when we found him.”

  Denning had been staring at the warrior, his hands slowly clenching at his sides; now on his lips was a twisted version of his boyish grin. The former mayor of Belem, back on Earth, might have been able to interpret that twist—if the mayor had not been electrocuted by a flame gun in Denning’s hands mere seconds after he first saw it.

  Abruptly Denning said, “I choose the battle.”

  The golova’s eyes returned to him with a jerk. His lined face was unreadable, but after a moment’s silence, he said: “That is a good thing for you, Earthman, that you took the man’s choice instead of the coward’s. You will probably die anyway, but if you had chosen slavery, you would have died slowly and with a great deal of pain. The Izgnanniki make no slaves.”

  “Oh?” said Denning to himself. “Catch question, huh?” He felt an inward quiver; he didn’t mind grazing death rather closely, but he liked to see it go by. He made another of a long lifetime series of vows to keep on following his instinct instead of his reason.

  The golova said, “It is now your right to challenge any warrior of the tribe, save the chief, to the death battle. Choose once more, Earthman.”

  That was no question. Denning jerked an insulting thumb at Pravdivy, who stiffened, then slowly relaxed, looking at the Earthman with burning eyes.

  “Pravdivy is my only acquaintance here,” said Denning, biting off his words, “and I dislike him for his excessive generosity—with his feet.”

  “It is good,” said the chief formally. “A warrior, being challenged, may not refuse on pain of being stripped of his weapons and sent to live with the old men.” He eyed Pravdivy.

  “I accept the battle,” said the warrior without apparent emotion. But, as the golova turned away to call others who had finished the task of camouflaging the cars, he added in a confiding undertone. “But I shall not kill you, Earthman. I shall merely gouge out your eyes and break your bones, and leave you to die for lack of air. I have done all those things to men before.”

  “Then,” said Denning, flexing his arms to restore circulation in his sore muscles, “it’s time somebody else took over.”

  He always felt like wisecracking just before things broke; never so much as at times like now, when the dice were loaded both ways. The rockets were coming, but in minutes he would be pitted in the deadliest sort of duel against a powerful and hardened warrior The draka besvozdushnaya—airless fight, and he knew that the Martians had long been accustomed to a pressure four or five pounds lower than Earthmen were used to breathing. Even they couldn’t live in the uncompressed Martian atmosphere, but those four or five pounds could make a lot of difference.

  And Denning felt the sharp, clean thrill of imminent battle, something that in his life was without equal—a thrill such as no beauty, no achievement, no possession had ever been able to give him. He sometimes thought it was only at such moments, when death was near, that he really lived.

  There was a sort of arena, raggedly walled by rocks, floored with rusty sand; and there the warriors gathered round in the light of the rising sun, and there two men went swiftly to work to strip each of the combatants.

  Denning glanced at the impassive faces of the perhaps two hundred men who formed the circle, and wondered how many of them had in the past participated in such a fight. They watched in silence; there was no pity and no partiality in the looks they bestowed on the two in the arena. Whoever won was the better man; only the event could show. That, thought Denning with a flash of understanding, was the way it should be. These were men of the fighting breed; Mars had made them so, the hard life that left no room for any other.

  The sun was already well over the horizon, but the air that smote Denning’s bare skin was like ice. Its chill made him realize more sharply just how stiff and weary he was in bone and muscle after his cramped night, how heavily the cards were stacked against him. But that didn’t matter. Already one of his “seconds” was loosening his respirator helmet.

  He took the last of a series of deep oxygen-storing breaths, and held it; in a pressure of three pounds to the square inch, that took a strong effort. The cold air misted his vision for a moment; he blinked his eyes rapidly, and saw Pravdivy, stripped to the skin like himself, advancing slowly toward him across the twenty feet or so of red sand.

  He had time to admire the Martian’s massive shoulders and muscle-ridged torso; they stood for an instant facing each other, three or four feet apart, moving nothing but their eyes as each searched the other for a weak point. For a moment Denning remembered that somewhere overhead the great space rockets were descending, armed with technical weapons of destruction that his knowledge could only guess at. Then Pravdivy closed to grapple, and the Earthman too forgot everything save the instincts of the fighting animal.

  But Pravdivy came in with hands clutching to grapple; and Denning remembered that he had fists.

  Even as the Martian closed on him, Denning’s right lashed out, driving straight to his enemy’s midriff. He had meant to follow that with a left to Pravdivy’s scowling face, but the other was too fast and the first blow didn’t seem to stop him at all.

  They went down together on the red sand, rolling and fighting like savage cats.

  In seconds the Earthman knew that it was all he could do to defend himself. It took all his strength and skill to ward off the hands and feet and knees that were trying to cripple or kill him; twice the Izgnannik came sickingly close to carrying out his promise to gouge out Denning’s eyes, and more than once he came within an inch of getting one of the bone-breaking holds in which he was obviously practiced. Denning fought only to protect himself, pinning all his hope on what he thought he had. heard when his one punch landed; the whistling gasp of Pravdivy’s breath going out into the thin air.

  The fury of battle was in both of them, sustaining their bodies against the terrific combustion of oxygen, but it couldn’t go on. Denning’s blood roared in his ears, a numbness began to take his limbs, and for all he could do his breath began to go out in little puffs. There came a moment, then, when he knew with a hopeless clarity that he could not ward off the Martian’s next try at a killing grip.

  Then that next try came, and he broke the threatening hold. And through him, giving him a last burst of strength, surged the knowledge that Pravdivy was weaker than he. Denning twisted convulsively side-wise, like a dying fish, feet he could no longer feel thrusting against the torn sand of the arena, and brought the other beneath him, one arm twisted under.

  He had him now, that first punch had done it, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Denning shook free and, with a mighty effort, rose shakily to his feet.

  But he could hardly see the unmoving circle of warriors or the rocks or the sky: a cramping sickness was in his stomach, and his knees felt like rubber as his lungs struggled uselessly to suck in the tenuous air. Then everything was blotted out by roaring black dots, and he went down to his knees in the sand, trying to brace him
self with arms that were lifeless clubs.

  He was barely conscious that they were lifting him with rough swiftness, and that a respirator mask was slipped over his head. All at once, though, his breathing could work again, and he gulped great breaths; his head began to clear, his brain recovering from oxygen starvation.

  They were still supporting him as a figure appeared before him; it was the golova, arms still folded impassively beneath his enveloping cloak. The bearded chieftain said solemnly:

  “You have conquered, man of Earth.” He said mush zhemny, instead of shemnik, “Earthling.”

  “That blow to the pit of the stomach is a trick that a man might well learn.”

  With an effort, Denning shook off the men who were holding him up, and stood alone, swaying a little, but he stood. He grinned with boyish abandon behind the life-giving mask; at this moment life was very sweet, for never before had he come quite so close to dying.

  “Now is the law of war fit for Earthmen, O chief?” he asked softly.

  “You have won the battle,” reiterated the golova. “Now it is your right to be accepted as a warrior of the Izgnanniki.”

  Denning stood there for a little while, silent, savoring the delight of breathing again and the familiar catharsis of victory. It was a little funny, that offer; the Izgnarinik chief didn’t seem to think for a moment that anyone, even an Earthman, might not find it an honor.

  Well, wasn’t it? he asked himself quizzically.

  The body of Pravdivy still lay, sprawled in ungainly fashion on the sand, in the midst of the arena. Denning had killed a warrior with his bare hands, he had proved to these men of a fighting race that he was worthy to be one of them. That was something, after all. He realized suddenly that the Izgnanniki were men of his own kind, such as he had never found on Earth. On Earth, in the swarming cities, they loved money and women and ease; not one of them could know what it was to win in the draka besvozdushnaya and know yourself the better man according to the desert law.