He was half wild himself with the drunkenness of destruction and every new row of trees that went crashing under fanned him to new heights of furious joy. It was intoxicating to think of the long labors and the endless months of effort that had gone into the planting of this orchard. He drank in the scent of crushed fruit and ruined trees, and it was like the scent of strong whiskey in his nostrils. A man could be drunk on the very thought of the destruction he was wreaking now upon his enemies.
He howled louder and drummed with his knees upon the mighty, oblivious neck.
“Smash ‘em down, you juggernauts! Roll ‘em under!”
Ahead of him, beyond the ruined orchards, lay the fields. Clinging tight to his terrible mount, Morgan began to measure his course. Eventually he would have to dismount. That was going to be tricky.
He couldn’t go down. Not into that thundering charge. He would have to swing off the lead bull’s back, and that meant something he could swing to, something higher than the Harvester.
The herd crashed through the last line of trees and the cornfields stretched before them, silvery under the stars. Shouting, Morgan lay forward on the great neck and urged the Harvesters on. Soft ground churned under their hoofs and they plowed forward floundering and roaring until their gait adjusted to this new element of destruction. Morgan yelled with a drunken joy. He was the mightiest man alive.-He wielded the thunderbolts like Jove himself, hurling his great herd down the fields.
To his right, in the town parallel with the galloping Harvesters, he saw lights begin to go on, heard shouts of alarm and presently the rhythmic clang of a bell swinging wildly in the church steeple. He roared with furious laughter. Drive him off Loki, would they? Let them try! He bellowed a wordless challenge to the clanging bell.
Far ahead of him he saw a row of serith trees at the end of the fields. He would swing off upon one of those strong curved boughs when he reached them, for they marked the end of his journey. When the herd passed those trees, his job would be finished.
He looked back, clenching his hands hard upon the bosses he held. After him thundered the Harvesters, a terrifying melee of tossing heads, streaming beards, rippling, sleek flanks in the strong starlight. He could see the ruined orchards they had charged through, and behind them now a widening stretch of ruined fields, every blade and grain trampled into the carbon-blacked soil in a swath of total destruction. He laughed exultantly. Plow up Loki planet, would they? Plant his wild and lonely valleys with corn?
Tonight he was beating those alien, crops back again into the soil they had invaded. The very planet shuddered under the thunder of the charge he led. He knew how the centaurs must have felt, who were half gods—
There was a furtive motion back there along the edges of the broken trees. He turned his head and saw more of it bordering the fields parallel with his course. He was leading his herd along the outskirts of the town now, and the row of serith trees swept closer and closer. He had no time left to concern himself with that furtive motion, because the end of the ride was almost upon him, but he didn’t like it. He didn’t understand it. Something was afoot he had not allowed for—
The serith trees, distinct in the starlight, were rushing toward him, expanding with a startling illusion of rapid growth as the herd swept nearer. He gathered his muscles taut, gauged his leap—
Between him and the trees lightning and thunder exploded with blinding suddenness. Dazed, half-stunned by it, Morgan could only clutch the antennae-bosses in a paralyzing grip and cling like death itself to the plunging neck he rode.
Under him he felt the whole enormous bulk of the bull shudder in a violent convulsion, shudder and leap and seem to turn in midair. When it struck the ground again the whole valley must have shaken with the impact. Morgan gripped hard with knees and hands, dulling the bull’s perceptions as much as he could, but not enough, not enough.
The world was reeling around him, standing up edgewise upon the horizon like the world below a turning plane. It whirled upon the pivot of the Harvester’s drumming hoofs, and the herd whirled with it. There was more stunning, tremendous noise, but behind them now, bursting out in crazy roarings along the edge of the trampled fields.
Barkers. Ultrasonic guns bellowing at full sonic range.
So that was it, Morgan thought, shaking his dazed head. There hadn’t been lightning in the thunder at all. It was merely his shocked senses that filled the lightning in. Gripping the lead bull hard, he looked back and saw what he had half-known, all along—a row of lemon-colored heads edging the field, long pale robes flickering in the starlight, dull metal shining as the Barkers roared.
They were driving the herd, and Morgan with it. But where?
He knew before he turned. The whole simple plan was perfectly clear to him, so clear he realized what a fool he must have been not to see it all along.
Low houses flashed by the Harvester’s shoulders. Morgan turned in time to see the sprawling buildings of Ancibel Key fanning out on both sides as he led the herd between them straight toward the main street of Ancibel Key.
Crazily he roared at them to halt. But his own voice was drowned in his throat by the bellow of the Barkers to their rear and the deafening thunder of hoofbeats as Harvesters and rider together swept forward into Ancibel Key in one terrible, annihilating tide.
The murderous rage of utter impotence rose strangling in Morgan’s throat, rage with everything that existed. He hated the bull beneath him, and the Harvester herd they led. He hated the running settlers he could glimpse between buildings ahead. He hated the clangor of the churchbell shouting out its alarm. His mind ached with a fury of hatred for the man from Venus who had tricked him into this, and for all the men who lined the fields outside the town, lashing on the herd with roaring Barkers.
But most of all he hated Jaime Morgan, the blundering fool who rode headlong to his own destruction, and Ancibel Key’s.
In the crash and crackle of ruined buildings the Harvester herd poured through Ancibel. Dust swirled blindingly as the plastic walls buckled in and the arched roofs thundered down. It was a nightmare of disaster in the dark, with rainbows of rising dust around every streetlight, so that Morgan could scarcely see or breathe.
He had incoherent glimpses of running men, shouting and beckoning to one another and vanishing again into darkness. Directly before him, in a rift in the dust and the dark, he saw a settler drop to one knee, throw a rifle to his shoulder, and squint upward at the man who rode the leading bull—
Something like a red-hot wire laid itself along Morgan’s shoulder. He swung himself sidewise upon the gigantic neck he rode, and the kneeling man and the alley he knelt in swept backward and away like a fragment in a dream.
When Morgan righted himself again, his knees were trembling. His grip on the antennae-bosses felt less sure. A new terror flooded through him. He could not cling to this desperately precarious perch forever, and he knew it. But his chance of swinging off the bull lay far behind, and distance lengthened between with every stride of the Harvesters.
He remembered Sheml’li-hhan again.
And still the dust swirled and the buildings along both sides of the ruined street crackled and crashed anew before the shoulders of the stampeding herd. Men’s shouts and the thin, high screams of women, and deep-throated clangor of the churchbell echoed above the planetshaking thunder of drumming hoofs.
Harvesters had been known to run for days, once the hypnotic compulsion of a stampede gripped them. They might run until they dropped. Long before that happened, Morgan’s grip would slack upon the beast he rode. Thinking of it, he felt his sinews shiver anew with the effort at holding firm.
He had to swing off somehow, and he had to do it soon.
That was nonsense, of course. What was the use of prolonging by a few minutes the death that was bound to take him when the infuriated settlers reached the man who was flattening their town? Too many must have recognized him already, up here in the rider’s seat upon Juggernaut. How many men and women
had gone down already under this rolling avalanche, and how many lay smashed under the ruined houses?
He took cold comfort from the thought that it was mostly business houses and gambling dens along this main street, no residence. Some had died already. Some must have died. And if one life was lost, the Jetborne would hang him whether the settlers did or not.
Stunned with the noise and the vibration that pounded through him, dazed with his own anger and dismay, blinded with the swirling dust, he looked up at last and saw rising before him above the dust and the film of reflecting lights the five tall shining towers of spaceships at the port ahead. He was near enough now to see the ladder dangling from the nearest, and a flicker of faint hope stirred anew in his mind.
The ships were one manmade thing that could withstand even a charge of maddened Harvesters. He even grinned faintly, thinking how the Jetborne would scurry in ignominious flight when this tossing avalanche pounded through the field.
The five ships poised like the fingers of a steel-gloved hand above the town, as if some gigantic figure leaned with one negligent hand upon Loki, watching a small human drama play itself out to its insignificant climax.
Up, up the hill beyond the town the Harvester herd went thundering. Now the last buildings had fallen behind, and the shouts grew thin and, the lights of Ancibel fell away. Up and over the hill-crest swept Morgan’s mount. He drew himself together for a final desperate effort as the ground dropped away again and the galloping bull plunged forward down the slope toward the ships.
Small figures in uniform drew up at the edge of the field, firelight flashing on leveled guns. Ultrasonics whined into the herd briefly, but it was only a gesture and Morgan knew it as well as the others did. The tremendous vitality of the Harvesters, plus their terrible momentum, made any hope of killing the beasts preposterous. Even dying, the herd would still overwhelm the Jetborne at the edge of the field.
An invisible broom seemed to catch them as the foremost bulls plowed forward. Still firing futilely, they scattered and vanished.
Now the tall ships swept toward Morgan with nightmare speed. He saw starlight glimmer on their lifted heads and firelight on the long, smooth swelling of their flanks. He saw the rope-ladder dangling from the nearest, and as the herd surged onward, dividing among the gigantic columns of steel and closing again like black water around their fins, he drew himself together, waited his moment—
And leaped.
In midair for one timeless instant his faith shook. He could not be sure he would make it. Sheml’li-hhan’s face swam before him, every feature vivid in his mind’s eye. Then his hands closed on the rope and its hard burning as it jerked through his fingers dispelled the doubt and the illusion instantly.
He held on with all his strength, feeling his arms drag at the sockets of his shoulders. At the same moment he let go with his gripping knees and felt the mighty neck of the Harvester drop away below him, felt the thunder of the herd shake the very air as he hung swaying and turning above that trampling torrent.
The weakness of exhaustion was waiting to pour like water along his muscles the instant he let them go slack. He didn’t dare relax. He locked both hands on the rope, pawed the air with his feet, found a rung at last and hung there blind and deaf and shivering, while the river of the stampede surged by under him forever. He shut his eyes and held his breath and clung for dear life, never dearer than now in spite of the perils still ahead of him. A long, long lifetime went by.
The thunder was in his head, and would probably never stop again. Time took on a bewildering fluidity. He couldn’t tell if it was his own blood pounding in his ears, or the pounding of the herd. It seemed to him that he heard men shouting very near by, just under him perhaps, in that twenty feet of space separating him from the galloping herd. But how could there be men down there? All initiative seemed to have drained out of him and he could only hang tight to the ropes and wait for his head to clear.
Under his hands the rope jerked violently, almost hurling him loose. Painfully he clung. Again it snapped. This time he opened his eyes and peered down stupidly past his own shoulder.
A ring of pale, upturned faces regarded him from below. It seemed to him that he still heard the Harvesters thundering by, but the beating was in his own ears, for the herd had gone. After it, upon the very heels of the last, the men from Venus came.
Starlight made their sleek, pale hair look white below him. He saw firelight glint upon the heavy carboys they carried, and on the length of rifle barrels.
Then the rope he clung to jerked violently again, and he lost one handgrip and swung in perilous midair, staring down without comprehension. What was happening? Why?
He saw two of the pale-haired men gripping the ladder’s dangling ends. He saw them give the ropes another vicious shake.
They were trying to throw him off the ladder.
Morgan shook his head in a trite and futile effort to get the fog out of it. Some things, at least, were clear. Shining Valley hadn’t lost a moment. In the very wake of the stampede he and his men must have looted the settlement of their treasure. Before Ancibel could pull itself together after this shattering blow, the crew from Venus would be loaded and aspace with their loot. It had all worked with machinelike precision. And they were winding up one unimportant detail now—
The ladder snapped again and the rung Morgan stood on flew out from under his groping feet. He hung by his hands, cursing helplessly. They had cheated him all down the line, then. From the very first, when they swindled him out of his precious cargo, to this moment when they seemed about to cheat him of his very life, they’d had the upper hand. It wasn’t enough to drive him through Ancibel and use him as an instrument of outright murder—for he know men had died under that juggernaut of Harvesters. Now they were going to loot him of the money he had taken and probably shut his mouth forever. Bitterly he remembered Warburg’s warning. It had been true, of course. Jaime Morgan was no match for these wily and devious men.
His hands on the rope went numb. He swung dizzily. He couldn’t let go to reach his gun. It took both hands to cling. Suddenly he knew without any doubt that he was old. Civilization had been too much for Jaime Morgan.
The rope jerked under his grip again and his failing hands let go. For a long moment he hurtled outward through dark air. The stars turned remotely above him, Sirius a diamond glitter in the Jet-Ship constellation and the stag-bison picked out in white fire upon infinity.
The ground was a good twenty feet down. He struck it hard.
He knew how to fall, of course. He’d taken worse falls than this and bounced up again ready for anything. He’d had to learn that. But this time he hit the ground stunningly and lay dazed for an interval he could not gauge at all.
Rough hands rolled him over, tore at his pockets. He felt his gun rasp out of its holster and heard the crackle of credit-notes ripped free.
“Is he dead?” somebody asked in the fluting foreign speech he understood only imperfectly.
Morgan heard his own voice say, “No!” suddenly and harshly. He levered himself to a sitting position with painful effort. He still could hear the thundering echoes in his head, and the spacefield tilted before him. He looked up into a ring of incurious faces. Behind them the hurried activity of loading went on half-heeded. He knew one face.
Shining Valley smiled down at him, pale as paper in the starlight. Morgan glowered savagely, full of fury and entirely without hope. Never before had his mind and his body failed him together in a crisis. If he couldn’t outguess an opponent, he could outfight him. Now he was helpless. He swore at Valley uselessly in middle-Martian.
“You’re a hard man to kill, Jaime Morgan,” Shining Valley said. “You’ve had good luck—until now.”
Morgan cursed the man in lilting Venusian, knowing futilely that he was getting the inflections so wrong the phrases were probably innocuous.
Valley smiled. “You helped me to my goal, Morgan. I’ll reward you for it. There are dead men back in
Ancibel, and you’d swing for that unless I save you.” He lifted a boneless hand toward the collar of his robe, where the men of his race carry their thin, straight throwing-knives. His own subtlety made him smile wider. “You shall not hang for murder,” he promised.
“You will!” Morgan snarled. “The Jetborne’ll get you, Valley. They’ll—”
“They’ll do nothing,” Valley assured him. “They can’t.” His glance swerved to the hurried loading that went on beyond the ring that circled Morgan. “Thanks to you,” he said, “their hands will be tied. We’ll load the cargo you helped us get, and ship it because you cleared the field for us. The sale of it will pay our protection on Loki for as long as we choose to stay here. Your Jetborne take their orders from authority like the hirelings they are. This, however, is no concern of yours, my friend. Very little is, any longer.” He gave Morgan a sweet, cold smile and touched the knife-hilt.
“Rufe Dodd will get you,” Morgan promised him, hearing his own voice crack with anger that bordered on despair. “Nobody’s orders will stop him when he finds out what—”
Shining Valley laughed abruptly. “You think not, Morgan? Then wait a moment! Perhaps you’d like a word with Dodd—while you can still speak.”
Morgan regarded him fixedly, paying little attention to what the man from Venus said. It made no difference. He was wishing without hope that there was some way he could kill Valley. He formed a shapeless and not very practical plan. In the last moment before the throwing-knife was drawn, he thought he would launch himself at Valley’s knees and drag him down within reach.
His own legs might not hold him, and his arms still quivered from the long strain of the ride, but with any luck at all he ought to be able to wreak some dirty work on Valley’s smooth face before they killed him. Pie thought with reminiscent pleasure of the technique of eye-gouging, and his right thumb suddenly twisted in the dust, a small motion that meant nothing to anyone here but himself. He was grinning thinly in anticipation when Valley’s shout startled him.
Collected Fiction Page 730