“Do you want me to come along?” asked Phil.
“No. Thanks anyway. I’ll go alone. See you.”
“Then good night.”
I hiked back along the way, coming at last to the clearing. I set up the lantern at one end of the place, so that it reflected upon a stand of small trees, and I moved to the other end.
I collected some stones and slung one at a tree. I missed.
I slung a dozen more, hitting with four of them.
I kept at it. After about an hour, I was hitting with a little more regularity. Still, at fifty meters I probably couldn’t match Hasan.
The night wore on, and I kept slinging. After a time, I reached what seemed to be my learning plateau for accuracy. Maybe six out of eleven of my shots were coming through.
But I had one thing in my favor, I realized, as I twirled the sling and sent another stone smashing into a tree. I delivered my shots with an awful lot of force. Whenever I was on target there was much power behind the strike. I had already shattered several of the smaller trees, and I was sure Hasan couldn’t do that with twice as many hits. If I could reach him, fine; but all the power in the world was worthless if I couldn’t connect with it.
And I was sure he could reach me. I wondered how much of a beating I could take and still operate.
It would depend, of course, on where he hit me.
I dropped the sling and yanked the automatic from my belt when I heard a branch snap, far off to my right. Hasan came into the clearing.
“What do you want?” I asked him.
“I came to see how your practice was going,” he said, regarding the broken trees.
I shrugged, reholstered my automatic and picked up the sling.
“Comes the sunrise and you will learn.”
We walked across the clearing and I retrieved the lantern. Hasan studied a small tree which was now, in part, toothpicks. He did not say anything.
We walked back to the camp. Everyone but Dos Santos had turned in. Don was our guard. He paced about the warning perimeter, carrying an automatic rifle. We waved to him and entered the camp.
Hasan always pitched a Gauzy—a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough. He never slept in it, though. He just used it to stash his junk.
I seated myself on a log before the fire and Hasan ducked inside his Gauzy. He emerged a moment later with his pipe and a block of hardened, resinous-looking stuff, which he proceeded to scale and grind. He mixed it with a bit of burley and then filled the pipe.
After he got it going with a stick from the fire, he sat smoking it beside me.
“I do not want to kill you, Karagee,” he said.
“I share this feeling. I do not wish to be killed.”
“But we must fight tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“You could withdraw your challenge.”
“You could leave by Skimmer.”
“I will not.”
“Nor will I withdraw my challenge.”
“It is sad,” he said, after a time. “Sad, that two such as we must fight over the blue one. He is not worth your life, nor mine.”
“True,” I said, “but it involves more than just his life. The future of this planet is somehow tied up with whatever he is doing.”
“I do not know of these things, Karagee. I fight for money. I have no other trade.”
“Yes, I know.”
The fire burnt low. I fed it more sticks.
“Do you remember the time we bombed the Coast of Gold, in France?” he asked.
“I remember.”
“Besides the blue ones, we killed many people.”
“Yes.”
“The future of the planet was not changed by this, Karagee. For here we are, many years away from the thing, and nothing is different.”
“I know that.”
“And do you remember the days when we crouched in a hole on a hillside, overlooking the bay at Piraeus? Sometimes you would feed me the belts and I would strafe the blazeboats, and when I grew tired you would operate the gun. We had much ammunition. The Office Guard did not land that day, nor the next. They did not occupy Athens, and they did not break the Radpol. And we talked as we sat there, those two days and that night, waiting for the fireball to come—and you told me of the Powers in the Sky.”
“I forget. . . .”
“I do not. You told me that there are men, like us, who live up in the air by the stars. Also, there are the blue ones. Some of the men, you said, seek the blue ones’ favor, and they would sell the Earth to them to be made into a museum. Others, you said, did not want to do this thing, but they wanted it to remain as it is now—their property, run by the Office. The blue ones were divided among themselves on this matter, because there was a question as to whether it was legal and ethical to do this thing. There was a compromise, and the blue ones were sold some clean areas, which they used as resorts, and from which they toured the rest of the Earth. But you wanted the Earth to belong only to people. You said that if we gave the blue ones an inch, then they would want it all. You wanted the men by the stars to come back and rebuild the cities, bury the Hot Places, kill the beasts which prey upon men.
“As we sat there, waiting for the fireball, you said that we were at war, not because of anything we could see or hear or feel or taste, but because of the Powers in the Sky, who had never seen us, and whom we would never see. The Powers in the Sky had done this thing, and because of it men had to die here on Earth. You said that by the death of men and blue ones, the Powers might return to Earth. They never did, though. There was only the death.
“And it was the Powers in the Sky which saved us in the end, because they had to be consulted before the fireball could be burnt over Athens. They reminded the Office of an old law, made after the time of the Three Days, saying that the fireball would never again burn in the skies of Earth. You had thought that they would burn it anyhow, but they did not. It was because of this that we stopped them at Piraeus. I burnt Madagaskee for you, Karagee, but the Powers never came down to Earth. And when people get much money they go away from here—and they never come back from the sky. Nothing we did in those days has caused a change.”
“Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse,” I told him.
“What will happen if this blue one dies?”
“I do not know. Things may worsen then. If he is viewing the areas we pass through as possible real estate tracts, to be purchased by Vegans, then it is the old thing all over again.”
“And the Radpol will fight again, will bomb them?”
“I think so.”
“Then let us kill him now, before he goes further, sees more.”
“It may not be that simple—and they would only send another. There would also be repercussions—perhaps mass arrests of Radpol members. The Radpol is no longer living on the edge of life as it was in those days. The people are unready. They need time to prepare. This blue one, at least, I hold in my hand. I can watch him, learn of his plans. Then, if it becomes necessary, I can destroy him myself.”
He drew on his pipe. I sniffed. It was something like sandalwood that I smelled.
“What are you smoking?”
“It comes from near my home. I visited there recently. It is one of the new plants which has never grown there before. Try it.”
I took several mouthfuls into my lungs. At first there was nothing. I continued to draw on it, and after a minute there was a gradual feeling of coolness and tranquility which spread down through my limbs. It tasted bitter, but it relaxed. I handed it back. The feeling continued, grew stronger. It was very pleasant. I had not felt that sedate, that relaxed, for many weeks. The fire, the shadows, and the ground about us suddenly became more real, and the night air and the distant moon and the sound of Dos Santos’ footsteps c
ame somehow more clearly than life, really. The struggle seemed ridiculous. We would lose it in the end. It was written that humanity was to be the cats and dogs and trained chimpanzees of the real people, the Vegans—and in a way it was not such a bad idea. Perhaps we needed someone wiser to watch over us, to run our lives. We had made a shambles of our own world during the Three Days, and the Vegans had never had a nuclear war. They operated a smoothly efficient interstellar government, encompassing dozens of planets. Whatever they did was esthetically pleasing. Their own lives were well-regulated, happy things. Why not let them have the Earth? They’d probably do a better job with it than we’d ever done. And why not be their coolies, too? It wouldn’t be a bad life. Give them the old ball of mud, full of radioactive sores and populated by cripples.
Why not?
I accepted the pipe once more, inhaled more peace. It was so pleasant not to think of these things at all, though. Not to think of anything you couldn’t really do anything about. Just to sit there and breathe in the night and be one with the fire and the wind was enough. The universe was singing its hymn of oneness. Why open the bag of chaos there in the cathedral?
But I had lost my Cassandra, my dark witch of Kos, to the mindless powers which move the Earth and the waters. Nothing could kill my feeling of loss. It seemed further away, somehow insulated behind glass, but it was still there. Not all the pipes of the East could assuage this thing. I did not want to know peace. I wanted hate. I wanted to strike out at all the masks in the universe—earth, water, sky, Taler, Earthgov, and Office—so that behind one of them I might find that power which had taken her, and make it too, know something of pain. I did not want to know peace. I did not want to be at one with anything which had harmed that which was mine, by blood and by love. For just five minutes even, I wanted to be Karaghiosis again, looking at it all through crosshairs and squeezing a trigger.
Oh Zeus, of the hot red lightnings, I prayed, give it to me that I may break the Powers in the Sky!
I returned the pipe again.
“Thank you, Hasan, but I’m not ready for the Bo Tree.”
I stood then and moved off toward the place where I had cast my pack.
“I am sorry that I must kill you in the morning,” he called after me.
Sipping beer in a mountain lodge on the planet Divbah, with a Vegan seller of information named Krim (who is now dead), I once looked out through a wide window and up at the highest mountain in the known universe. It is called Kasla, and it has never been climbed. The reason I mention it is because on the morning of the duel I felt a sudden remorse that I had never attempted to scale it. It is one of those crazy things you think about and promise yourself that someday you’re going to try, and then you wake up one morning and realize that it is probably exactly too late: you’ll never do it.
There were no-expressions on every face that morning.
The world outside us was bright and clear and clean and filled with the singing of birds.
I had forbidden the use of the radio until after the duel, and Phil carried some of its essential entrails in his jacket pocket, just to be sure.
Lorel would not know. The Radpol would not know. Nobody would know, until after.
The preliminaries completed, the distance was measured off.
We took our places at the opposite ends of the clearing. The rising sun was to my left.
“Are you ready, gentlemen?” called out Dos Santos.
“Yes,” and “I am,” were the replies.
“I make a final attempt to dissuade you from this course of action. Do either of you wish to reconsider?”
“No,” and “No.”
“Each of you has ten stones of similar size and weight. The first shot is, of course, given to he who was challenged: Hasan.”
We both nodded.
“Proceed, then.”
He stepped back and there was nothing but fifty meters of air separating us. We both stood sideways, so as to present the smallest target possible. Hasan fitted his first stone to the sling.
I watched him wind it rapidly through the air behind him, and suddenly his arm came forward.
There was a crashing sound in back of me.
Nothing else happened.
He’d missed.
I put a stone to my own sling then and whipped it back and around. The air sighed as I cut it all apart.
Then I hurled the missile forward with all the strength of my right arm.
It grazed his left shoulder, barely touching it. It was mostly garment that it plowed.
The stone ricocheted from tree to tree behind him, before it finally vanished.
All was still then. The birds had given up on their morning concert.
“Gentlemen,” called Dos Santos, “you have each had one chance to settle your differences. It may be said that you have faced one another with honor, given vent to your wrath, and are now satisfied. Do you wish to stop the duel?”
“No,” said I.
Hasan rubbed his shoulder, shook his head.
He put the second stone to his sling, worked it rapidly through a powerful windup, then released it at me.
Right between the hip and the ribcage, that’s where it caught me.
I fell to the ground and it all turned black.
A second later the lights came on again, but I was doubled up and something with a thousand teeth had me by the side and wouldn’t let go.
They were running toward me, all of them, but Phil waved them back.
Hasan held his position.
Dos Santos approached.
“Is that it?” asked Phil softly. “Can you get up?”
“Yeah. I need a minute to breathe and to put the fire out, but I’ll get up.”
“What is the situation?” asked Dos Santos.
Phil told him.
I put my hand to my side and stood again, slowly.
A couple inches higher or lower and something boney might have broken. As it was, it just hurt like blazes.
I rubbed it, moved my right arm through a few circles to test the play of muscles on that side. Okay.
Then I picked up the sling and put a stone to it.
This time it would connect. I had a feeling.
It went around and around and it came out fast.
Hasan toppled, clutching at his left thigh.
Dos Santos went to him. They spoke.
Hasan’s robe had muffled the blow, had partly deflected it. The leg was not broken. He would continue as soon as he could stand.
He spent five minutes massaging it, then he got to his feet again. During that time my pain had subsided to a dull throbbing.
Hasan selected his third stone.
He fitted it slowly, carefully . . .
He took my measure. Then he began to lash at the air with the sling. . . .
All this while I had the feeling—and it kept growing—that I should be leaning a little further to the right. So I did.
He twirled it, threw it.
It grazed my fungus and tore at my left ear.
Suddenly my cheek was wet.
Ellen screamed, briefly.
A little further to the right, though, and I wouldn’t have been hearing her.
It was my turn again.
Smooth, gray, the stone had the feel of death about it. . . .
I will be it, this one seemed to say.
It was one of those little premonitory tuggings at my sleeve, of the sort for which I have a great deal of respect.
I wiped the blood from my cheek. I fitted the stone.
There was death riding in my right arm as I raised it. Hasan felt it too, because he flinched. I could see this from across the field.
“You will all remain exactly where you are, and drop your weapons,” said the voice.
It said
it in Greek, so no one but Phil and Hasan and I understood it, for sure. Maybe Dos Santos or Red Wig did. I’m still not certain.
But all of us understood the automatic rifle the man carried, and the swords and clubs and knives of the three dozen or so men and half-men standing behind him.
They were Kouretes.
Kouretes are bad.
They always get their pound of flesh.
Usually roasted.
Sometimes fried, though.
Or boiled, or raw. . . .
The speaker seemed to be the only one carrying a firearm.
. . . And I had a handful of death circling high above my shoulder. I decided to make him a gift of it.
His head exploded as I delivered it.
“Kill them!” I said, and we began to do so.
George and Diane were the first to open fire. Then Phil found a handgun. Dos Santos ran for his pack. Ellen got there fast, too.
Hasan had not needed my order to begin killing. The only weapons he and I were carrying were the slings. The Kouretes were closer than our fifty meters, though, and theirs was a mob formation. He dropped two of them with well-placed stones before they began their rush. I got one more, also.
Then they were halfway across the field, leaping over their dead and their fallen, screaming as they came on toward us.
Like I said, they were not all of them human: there was a tall, thin one with three-foot wings covered with sores, and there were a couple microcephalics with enough hair so that they looked headless, and there was one guy who should probably have been twins, and then several steatopygiacs, and three huge, hulking brutes who kept coming despite bullet-holes in their chests and abdomens; one of these latter had hands which must have been twenty inches long and a foot across, and another appeared to be afflicted with something like elephantiasis. Of the rest, some were reasonably normal in form, but they all looked mean and mangy and either wore rags or no rags at all and were unshaven and smelled bad, too.
I hurled one more stone and didn’t get a chance to see where it hit, because they were upon me then.
I began lashing out—feet, fists, elbows; I wasn’t too polite about it. The gunfire slowed down, stopped. You have to stop to reload sometime, and there’d been some jamming, too. The pain in my side was a very bad thing. Still, I managed to drop three of them before something big and blunt caught me on the side of the head and I fell as a dead man falls.
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