Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959

by The Dark Destroyers (v1. 1)

  "Cold People?"

  "No, Chief, human people. Folks like us—well, not exactly. They're dressed different, anyway. And they started in busting down trees and bushes and tearing off branches, to throw over their ship and hide it in that litde hollow."

  "Hide it?" repeated Megan. "Sounds as if they want to surprise us. Well surprise them."

  He walked in among the thickest of his people. "All right, the retreat's delayed," he rapped out. "Pass that word along. Stay here, ready to leave if we have to. Now, where's that lookout who saw them? How many would you say there were?"

  The man shook his head. "Don't know exactly. Maybe two dozen or so. Men and women both."

  "Men and women," another villager said after him. "That doesn't sound like trouble-making."

  "We don't know," Megan decided harshly. "Anyway, I want thirty fighting men. You come. You, you." Swifdy he chose his force. "Bows, machetes, and maybe a dozen guns. But nobody fires a gun unless I give the order. I don't want to waste any cartridges, hard as it is to make powder and mold bullets."

  In businesslike fashion, Megan marshaled the armed party in a double column, and sent ahead as a scout the member of the lookout patrol who had brought news of the ship. Taking advantage of trails known to them all, they quiedy approached the hollow where the craft had set itself down.

  "Open order," said Megan sofdy to his subordinates. "Take the word along. We'll advance through the trees, but watch me for a signal to halt."

  Smoothly the men executed the movement. They were all practised hunters and trailers, and barely rustled the thick green leafage through which they moved. Finally Megan snapped his fingers for a halt, and his lieutenants stopped the line under cover just above the hollow. Megan waited until his advance scout returned.

  "Someone in that gang I know from somewhere," the scout said. "You know him, too, but I can't think of his name. Big, black-haired, rangy—I'd heard he took a lone prowl up north . . ."

  "Darragh," said Megan. "Hmmm. If it really is Darragh

  . . . Wait here until I've gone forward while you count sixty.

  Then move the rest of the boys after me, ready for trouble if

  trouble begins." ,(

  Alone the chief went forward. He found himself moving down slope into the hollow. People moved there among trees. They seemed to be stacking foliage high. Megan, too, recognized Darragh, stripped to the waist and gesturing in command.

  "Well, 111 be damned," grunted Megan to himself; then, at the top of his voice. "Darragh! Is that you?"

  Darragh turned toward him, and Megan came into the open. At once Darragh ran toward him like a sprinter in a race. Only a few weeks ago, Megan remembered, he and Darragh had talked about fighting a duel. His hand moved to loosen his machete in its scabbard.

  But Darragh's face was shining with happy relief. "Just the man I hoped to meet first," he said when he came close. "I've got lots to tell you."

  "I imagine you have," said Megan drily. "I hear you came in a Cold-People air machine."

  "Yes. Captured one. Captured two, as a matter of fact, but this is the one I brought back."

  "How did you fly it?"

  "I learned how. But I've got some new friends to introduce."

  "Wait a second," growled Megan. "If you stole that rig, there'll be more of them coming after you. You'll bring a whole fleet of them down to blast us out of these jungles."

  But Darragh shook his head. He looked confident.

  "They tried to chase us, and they were catching up. Then, somewhere—it must have been about where middle Tennessee used to be—we put the blast on one of their dome cities."

  "Blast?" repeated Megan. "What kind of a blast?"

  Megan's men had approached, and held their line to watch and listen.

  "We used that explosion ray of theirs. Look, here's one of the small weapons." Darragh held it out. "We captured some of them, and the ship has a larger one. We figured out the discharge mechanism, and tore that dome to pieces. The ships that were chasing us circled down to help or observe where their friends were in trouble, and I took that occasion to veer off to westward and not cut back south until I was out of their sight. I think that gave them a false notion of which way we were headed. Anyway, we're hiding the ship we brought and—but here comes Miss Brenda Thompson. Brenda, I want you to meet Chief Megan."

  Within the hour, signals were going forth from Megan's village. Operators employed the rickety radio sending set, trying to contact all communities within reach. To supplement this somewhat untrustworthy means of communication, smoke signals rose on the observation hill, and the swiftest runners sought nearer villages, from which went out fresh runners with messages.

  The formal council opened its session on the first Tuesday in October, and was tended by an even dozen leaders. Spence, first preacher of counterattack, was prominent in the forefront of the gathering. The chiefs present represented perhaps four thousand persons, and could speak for thousands more.

  The Orinoco leaders had been immediately impressed by the scientific knowledge the freed captives had inherited from their professor-forebears and learned from their former jailers, and Spence and the others could not but admire the good looks and manifest intelligence of Brenda Thompson. She stood with Darragh while Megan, as host chieftain, welcomed his allies and then turned the meeting over to Darragh.

  That tall adventurer spoke with confidence and effect. He told of his journey and adventures and observations. With promptings from Brenda, he explained the principle of the explosive ray and what could be surmised about the green power-radiation. He exhibited a small ray-thrower, and showed its bleak destructive potency by blasting a tree into vapor before their eyes. He promised a tour of the captured ship and a lecture on how it operated. Other baleful mysteries of the Cold People, their fortresses and their ways of life he described.

  The listening chiefs were interested and -sespectful. But Spence, long the most active and influential of them, seemed both critical and apprehensive. Finally he asked the question that all the others hoped to hear answered.

  "Darragh, I remember when you and I last talked together. You promised that you'd ieam something to help us conquer these Cold People. You make them sound stronger and more numerous than we ever imagined. All right—if you have a plan of attack, what is it?"

  "My plan of attack is not to attack," replied Darragh.

  "Wagh!" grunted the bronzed Capato, sitting with three other Indian chieftains. "What kind of talk is that?"

  "At least, we won't attack the way you mean," Darragh elaborated. "I'll try to sum up as simply as I can."

  "Make it one word," Capato half-joked.

  "All right, one word," said Darragh: "Nuisance!"

  There was a silence, and the chiefs gaped. Then Spence snikered. "Nuisance? You've been a big nuisance in the past, young fellow, but what are you getting at?"

  "It began when I was poked all over by mosquitoes on Haiti," said Darragh. "I wished then that the mosquitoes would get interested in the Cold People instead. Later, I talked about it to Brenda here. And we got to a sort of rationalization."

  "We're waiting for the rationalization," Spence prodded him.

  "I’ll give it to you, in the form of a parable. How about letting me talk without interruption?"

  "Go on, boy," Megan bade him.

  "It's a matter of history," went on Darragh, "about how the Swedes moved into old New Jersey and tried to settle it. They were a hard-bitten, stubborn lot, those Swedes. The Indians made a fight for their home country, and got licked."

  "I'm not that kind of Indian," spoke up Capato defiantly.

  "The Dutch came afterward, and attacked the Swedes. They got driven back. Then the English came into New Jersey the strongest power so far. They gave the Swedes a hard time but couldn't root them out."

  "And then?" inquired Spence.

  "And then the Swedes moved on."

  "You said they hadn't been licked," Capato reminded.

  "Not
by the Indians or the Dutch or the English. But there were the New Jersey mosquitoes. That was an army of nuisances that wouldn't stand up and fight and be swatted. The mosquitoes just buzzed and bit and flew out of reach,-and came back and heckled and prodded and made life miserable. Finally the Swedes did the only thing they could do—they packed up and moved away."

  He waited for comment. Again Spence was the one who spoke. "You sound as if you want us to be mosquitoes."

  "That's exacdy what I want us to be." Darragh paused again, making sure that he had the attention of all the chiefs. "Look at it like this, gendemen: We have some of their secrets, enough of those secrets to make trouble."

  "Trouble!" whooped Spence in high disdain. "Those litde handtype throwers. It's as if you'd stolen a few pistols, and left the enemy with the heavy artillery."

  "We have scientists here, and I've brought more with me," Darragh replied. "We have both rays in captured mechanisms —the white and the green. Our scientists can study them and make bigger, more powerful projectors. And we have a captured ship and know how to fly it. We can make more in our shops, we can build and equip shops to turn them out. These things will give us the wings and the sharp bill to do our mosquito raiding."

  "I still don't see what you're driving at," drawled Spence. "Talk up, Darragh. "We're used to straight-forward reports at these councils."

  "We lie low until they forget about us somewhat," Darragh explained. "Their guard will relax. Meanwhile we'll be preparing. Well send envoys out to all free peoples—maybe clear around on the other side of the world, there must be communities there. We'll prepare down to the last minute. "We'll organize for what we must do. Then, fully equipped and disciplined and ready, we'll sally out..."

  "And start by blasting those forts you say they're building in the West Indies!" cried Capato with warrior relish.

  But Darragh shook his head. "On the contrary," he said, "we'll not bother their southern posts any more than we have to. The way I see it, those advance defenses are subordinate. They depend on the larger strongholds—like the one these folks got away from—for food and garrisons and orders. Well get into their main concentrations and hit those, the ones in the extreme frigid north and south."

  Spence had been thinking, lean chin on lean hand. Now he looked up and nodded. "Darragh, that's not a bad idea," he granted. "Maybe we could even set fire to the woods around their settlements, get a heat up that would sweat them the way they don't like."

  "Brenda, make a note of what Chief Spence said about those fires," said Darragh. "Now, gendemen, we can plan and implement a hundred ways to harass them. Maddening and damaging ways—the sort of things that will cause them labor and weariness and confusion."

  "Yet they're mighty powerful," reminded a chief.

  "Powerful, yes," agreed Darragh. "but, powerful as they are, they're in a fairly bad fix here, on a world that's mosdy impossible as regards its climate. Except at the north and south poles, they have to live in sealed domes and refrigerate them. Whenever they venture into the open, they must put on insulated armor. I've got samples of that, too. So, even with peace on Earth, life is almost too hot for the Cold People. If we could lift the temperature for only a degree or so everywhere a Cold Creature is, we'd have them in an unendurable situation." He looked around and wagged his head. "Well, gentlemen, what do you say? Shall we make old Mother Earth too hot to hold them—literally and figuratively?"

  Megan whooped approval, and others took it up. Megan sprang up from where he had been sitting. "Gendemen of the Council," he said, "I want to make a motion. I hereby move that we here and now form a policy of nuisance warfare and aggression along the lines that have been suggested by Mark Darragh, and that we name Darragh to this council of chiefs."

  "I second that motion," Capato howled back.

  "Wait!"

  That was the voice of Spence, also rising to his feet. His eyes snapped, his teeth flashed. "I want to amend the motion," he announced. "I've operated as the hit-or-miss head of this alliance long enough, and I offer my resignation."

  "But, Spence!" protested Megan. "We didn't mean to make you mad or go over your head or anything."

  "Who's mad?" demanded Spence. "I'm not. What I say is, I offer an amendment. Let the motion be stated that we here and now appoint Mark Darragh as head of this council of chiefs, with full power as military commander of all the forces we can muster."

  "Why . . ." began Darragh.

  "You stay out of this; you aren't a member of the council yet," Megan laughed him down. "All right, Spence I accept your amendment. What about the second?"

  "I seconded the first motion, and I second the second. Let's vote!"

  "All in favor say aye, and to hell with the noes!" Megan cried.

  Spence grasped Mark Darragh's hand, but Brenda was hugging Darragh before the eyes of all of them.