Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959

by The Dark Destroyers (v1. 1)

  "He insulted me mortally," Spence defended himself. "What would you have done in my place?"

  "You just saw what I did when I was insulted. I took it and stuck to more important business. We can find out things more valuable than whether this chief—Megan's your name, isn't it?—can beat me in a rough-and-tumble with machetes. It's a whole lot more to the point to find out whether the human race can beat the Cold People."

  "We can beat them," snapped Spence, as if sharp assurance could settle the question. "They never showed any really unthinkable superiority in warfare. Wherever they came from.”

  "Wherever they came from, they were just an expedition far across space," finished the young man for him. "They were travelling light, a small payload on a long-distance space-spanning vehicle. The weapons they brought probably aren't anywhere near the best they know about." He spread his big hands. "I see them like a detail of police going out to handle a big unarmed mob in the old days. I've heard about such things. They took pistols and nightsticks and tear-gas bombs. If these didn't do the trick at once—if the mob fought back, maybe gave the police detail real trouble—up came reserves, maybe with machine guns. If it turned into a revolution, there were big guns and tanks and planes. All right; our ancestors were defeated with only the small arms of the Cold People, and we've fallen a long way from what we were then."

  "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."

  CHAPTER II

  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 w
ith 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.

  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.