by Chad Oliver
“You’re one sweet guy, Earl.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
Earl Stuart turned on his heel and started off. He did not look back to see if the others were following him but he set a slow pace. They could keep up with a little effort and he knew from experience that they would. It was strictly follow the leader, and he was the only leader the expedition had. He had made certain of that.
The light was tricky but he could see all that he had to see. They were on a downgrade, a grassy plain that sloped away toward a small stream. On the far side of the stream, he knew, the land rose sharply. There was a jagged line of cliffs, and the caves were in the cliffs.
There wouldn’t be any trouble until they got on the other side of the stream.
He tested the wind. It was fresh and clean and smelled of flowers and night-damp soil. More importantly, the wind was in his face. The savages couldn’t smell them coming.
He felt good, really good. He had to hold himself in check to keep from breaking into a trot. He was alive, fully alive. He was eager and excited, ready for anything. It wasn’t just the killing. It was being outside with the wind in his face, it was being in command, it was his responsibility for his own actions. In the City, he was like a fish in a bottle. Out here, he felt like a man.
It was a good feeling.
Earl Stuart was not stupid and he was not amoral. He had thought the thing through. He knew what he was doing. It was against the law, but he was convinced that the law was insane. No one had to tell him that the City was dying, rotting like fallen fruit in the sun. He had eyes. He knew the score. The City needed some blood.
He was going after it.
He was no hero. He didn’t kid himself that he was doing it for the City. He didn’t give a damn about the City. He wanted to be out here. He liked what he was doing.
Still, it was pleasant to know that you were right.
And the money came in handy. His inheritance had been ample, but only a fool lived on his capital. His investments weren’t paying off as they would have done in the old days.
In the City, Earl Stuart had expensive tastes.
When he reached the stream, the sun was just lifting over the horizon behind him. It was a great red ball and it threw long shadows. A few of the field birds began to sing. Something big stirred in the grass over to his right. The stream chuckled along in its banks. The water was very clear; he could see the shadowed fish on the bottom.
He did not hesitate. He knew that if he gave them time to think about it he would have trouble getting the mothers into the water. He walked across briskly. The water was cold but not deep. It barely came up to his knees.
He kept on going, more slowly now. He could see the cliffs ahead of him. The face of the cliffs was splashed with sunlight. The caves were black holes, like eyes.
He saw no movement.
They were coming right out of the sun. They would be hard to spot. The men had all been with him before. They knew what to do.
If only the mothers—
One of the girls screamed. It was choked off at once as one of the men grabbed her and covered her mouth. But it had been loud, loud—
Earl spun around. He saw him, running through the grass. A man, half naked, long hair streaming in the wind. He carried nothing but a fish fork. He opened his mouth to shout an alarm.
Earl shot him, neatly, through the ear. The flat crack of the rifle shocked the morning air.
“Down,” Earl said.
He crawled back through the grass to the mother who had screamed. She was still being held. He looked at her. Her eyes were wide and she was trembling violently.
He put the muzzle of his rifle against her chest, hard.
“Let her go,” he said.
The man released her. She stared up at him, frozen.
“He’s dead, he can’t hurt you. Do you understand me?”
The mother nodded.
“If you do that again, I’ll blow a hole through you. Do you understand that?”
She nodded again.
“Tell me you understand.”
“I understand.” Her voice was faint.
He took the rifle away. “Okay, honey. For God’s sake, get a hold on yourself. I know it’s hard the first time you see one. After the fight starts, you scream all you want to. Right now, you keep your mouth shut. Deal?”
She shuddered. “I’m sorry. He was just so—”
He smiled. “That was one of the pretty ones,” he said.
He left her. He crawled forward and lifted his head out of the tall grass. The cliffs looked the same as before. The caves stared at him blankly. There was no sign of life.
“Well?” Doc asked. “What do we do now?”
“Think they heard us?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either. The wind is in our favor; it’s blowing away from the caves. We’ve got maybe a fifty-fifty chance that our friends are still asleep in there. This particular bunch may never have heard a rifle before anyhow. I’ve looked them over with a scanner but I’ve never been in here before. I just don’t know.”
“It’s your decision. You make it.”
Earl took a minute to decide. A mistake now could be costly. The sun was climbing rapidly in the eastern sky, flooding the world with light. They would lose their shadows soon.
“I don’t like fifty-fifty odds,” he said finally. “If they’re ready for us it could get rough. They can hole up in there and we might never get them out. If we go in after them we’re going to get some bloody noses. Damn that woman!”
“Don’t forget our insomniac fisherman. If he hadn’t been out here …”
“He was. We can’t change that. There’s only one thing we can change, and that’s our plan.”
“You mean try again somewhere else?”
“No. We’ve been away too long as it is. This was our objective. We’ll stick to it.”
“You just said—”
Earl cut him off. “You’ve been in caves like that with me. You know what they’re like. Those savages have been using them for generations. There are bound to be connecting passages between them, and there’s always a back way out. It must be up there on top of the cliffs somewhere, up on that plateau. You follow me?”
“If you’re suggesting that we crawl in through the back door, you’ve just lost your doctor. I’m not going in there.”
“None of us are going in there. Get the fuzz out of your brain, Doc. That’s where they come out.”
“Why do they do that? Just to be agreeable?”
“Do I have to draw you a picture? If some of us attack from the front and dump enough slugs into those caves, they’ll try to get the women and the kids out. They always do. When they come out up on top, the rest of us will be waiting for them.”
“I don’t like it, Earl. We’ve got to stick together. There aren’t enough of us to play army.”
“We’ve got ten men. That’s five to stay here with the mothers and four to come with me. It’s the only way.”
“It’s the only way to get eaten alive. There are too many of them—”
Earl Stuart smiled. “We’ve got the rifles, remember?”
“That’s what General Custer said.”
Earl controlled his temper with difficulty. Doc’s historical allusions always annoyed him. He didn’t care what some Greek general had said. He had wasted too much time already.
“I’ll divide up the men. I’ll take four with me and go back for a sled. You’ll stay here with four men and the mothers. Keep your heads down, understand? When we’re ready up on top I’ll set off a flare. Then you move up and start shooting. Got that?”
“I still don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it. Just do it.”
Earl moved quickly, picking the four fastest men.
“Let’s go,” he said.
It took him a little more than half an hour to reach the sleds. He had made no effort at concealment,
trotting all the way. If they had been seen leaving, so much the better. The savages couldn’t know how many of them there were. They would stay put for a while.
He was covered with sweat. It was going to be a hot day and he wasn’t used to moving around in the direct sunlight. He gave his men a breather and they all loaded up on water.
“Don’t drink too much,” he said finally. “It will slow you down. Everyone ready?”
The four men nodded. They looked tired and nervous but they would settle down when the shooting started. They were good men as men went these days.
“Okay. One sled. No talking after we land. I don’t want any stupid shooting. Pick your targets and make sure before you fire. Let the men and the older children go as long as they’re just trying to get away. Don’t shoot any more than you have to. When you do shoot, aim for the women with kids and don’t miss. Head shots are best. Those women are murder when they’re wounded. Any questions?”
There were no questions.
Earl took the controls and the sled lifted silently into the warm morning air. He kept it low, moving in a circular pattern that would bring him over the plateau from behind. The sky was blue and cloudless; visibility was perfect. Even at the sled’s speed he saw two small herds of grazing animals. The game was coming back….
He had no trouble at all. He took the sled up when he got over the plateau. He hovered a moment, looking down. He could see Doc and the others waiting in the grass. He could see the little stream, sparkling like a ribbon of glass. He spotted the back exit to the caves in less than a minute. It was concealed by boulders and brush at ground level but it was nakedly exposed from the air.
He landed the sled and deployed his men. It was very hot now. The sun was burning his skin.
He fired off his flare. It burned a red streak into the sky and popped into a miniature, drifting sun. He swung his rifle into position and waited.
The shooting started at once. The shots sounded small and lost in the dying wind. They wouldn’t be doing much damage, not at that range. But Doc would be moving up quickly now. High caliber rifle fire at a hundred yards or so ought to sting a hide or two in the caves. The slugs would ricochet against those rocks….
Earl’s finger curled around the trigger. He liked rifles; rifles were good and solid and reliable. Bullets were more selective than rays and beams, and against savages armed with spears there was no need for fancy equipment.
He felt a pleasant excitement that tightened his belly. It was always like this. It wasn’t exactly a joy in killing, a taste for slaughter. It was at once simpler and more complex than that.
It was the thrill of the hunt.
There was nothing like it.
He waited, listening as the shots moved closer. Doc was really pouring it in now.
Soon, soon—
Now!
A man ran out of the exit hole. He was old and bent, his long hair a dirty gray. A filthy animal skin was draped around his skinny waist. His mouth was open, showing his stained and broken teeth. He was so close Earl could smell the rancid grease in his hair and the sweat on his body.
Earl held his fire.
A second man stumbled out, a younger man this time. He had been hit in the right shoulder. His whole right side was dark with blood. He carried his stone-tipped spear in his left hand. His eyes were hurt and wild. He fell, picked himself up, and staggered away.
Earl let him go. He wouldn’t last long anyway. As long as they didn’t see his men stationed behind the rocks it would be foolish to fire before he had a target. It would just drive the rest of them back into the caves, and that was the last thing he wanted.
The children came next, pouring out of the hole like silent, scurrying rats. They were naked, all of them, naked and splotched with body sores. Children, so many children! There must have been fifty of them. Earl doubted that there were that many half-grown kids in the whole City.
They let the children pass. They were too old.
All but one.
A boy ducked around a rock and came face to face with one of Earl’s men. He stopped dead in his tracks. He tried to turn to run away but the man clubbed him with his rifle butt before he could move. The boy fell, his head squashed like a melon.
The first woman came out. Her coarse hair was cut short, almost shaven. Her breasts were scarred. She had a stone plug in her lower lip. She had no child.
Earl waited, his pulse pounding.
The rest of the women emerged into the sunlight, grunting. Young and old, fat and thin—they all looked hard. They all stank. They moved fast, muscles gleaming in their naked skins. They scuttled like spiders.
Earl counted rapidly. Five of them, five of them with babies in their arms. Five! That was more than enough. That was more than he had hoped for. That was a fortune!
He leaped to his feet, steadied his rifle at his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. He got one of the mothers in the back of the head with his first shot. She fell, dropping her child. The baby cried when it hit the ground. Another woman turned and started back for it. Earl shot her in the chest.
He whirled, his dark eyes narrowed. There was one target still on her feet. She was running fast, back toward the cave. He dropped her with two shots before she made it. Her baby was old enough to crawl. Incredibly, it tried to crawl away from its dead mother, into the cave.
Earl ran over and snatched it up in his left arm. The baby cried piercingly, doubling its tough little body and wetting on Earl’s arm. Earl ignored it.
“Okay,” he hollered. “We’ve got ’em! Ed, throw some shots along that path to keep them running. The rest of you open up into that cave. We don’t want the rest of them out here!”
The rifles growled in a steady barrage. The warm air was still now and filled with the acrid fumes of blue gunsmoke. Already, the flies were settling on the fallen bodies.
Earl gave it two full minutes. That was a lot of slugs, even for a self-loader. There wouldn’t be anything else coming out of that hole for a while.
“Enough!” he yelled. “Get those kids on the sled and hold on tight!”
He handed his baby to Ed, which gave Ed two. He grabbed the controls, checked quickly to make sure all was secure, and lifted the sled into the air.
He took it easy. The babies were the important thing now. He had to get them to Doc and the waiting mothers and then he had to get them all back to the sleds.
He grinned. He couldn’t miss now!
Behind him, the sun burned down on the rock-strewn plateau above the cliffs. A green lizard poked its head out and scurried over one of the motionless bodies. Far up in the blue sky, black shapes wheeled and began to drift down the warm currents of the air.
The dark hole of the cave was empty and silent.
They had no further trouble.
Most of the savage men were still in the caves but they made no attempt to come out. They were deep in the interior caverns, those that were still alive, and they would stay there at least until nightfall. Whatever they felt, they could not fight now, not even for their children. They couldn’t get close enough to fight.
Earl landed the sled and Doc and the mothers took over. Doc gave preliminary shots to the five babies, calming them down and getting rid of some of the bugs. The mothers claimed the infants for the trip back to the City. They had one mother too many but Earl took care of that, ruling that the girl who had screamed would have to do without. She was miserable, but she was too frightened to argue.
If she behaved herself, she would still have a chance when they got to the City. They would put the names of the mothers into a random selector and one of them would get to keep a child. That was what brought the mothers here.
The mothers wanted to try to nurse the babies right away; all of them had been treated so that their milk would be ready. Earl had faced that problem before.
“Get moving,” he said. “We can’t stay here. You can nurse them tonight, on the sleds. If we’re attacked out here in the open we may have
to run for it. If we do, we’ll leave the babies behind and you’ll never see them again.”
He did not have the remotest intention of abandoning a couple of million dollars, but his threat got the mothers moving toward the stream. The mothers were completely transformed, cooing and stroking their smelly infants with a happiness that was beyond anything they had ever imagined. They had forgotten all about being tired.
Earl sent one of the men up in the sled. It would do no harm to have a lookout. He stayed on the ground himself, right behind the mothers. He wasn’t going to let the babies get out of his sight.
Suddenly, he was exhausted. He knew what was the matter with him.
He was starting back toward the City.
He kept his feelings to himself. The mood of the others on the expedition had swung full circle. They had accomplished their mission and they were on the way home; they were carefree and full of bounce. Earl Stuart had to force himself now. It was not easy to be different, to be always out of phase, but he had learned to live with it.
He felt a kind of sympathy for the babies he had stolen. Poor devils, they didn’t know what they were getting into.
He broke one of his rules, taking the sleds into the air before dark. He wanted to get away from those caves, just in case. They flew all night, chasing a new moon of silver, and holed up during the daylight hours. They were in the air most of the next night as well, landing before dawn within sight of the City’s brilliant glare.
All that day they remained hidden.
After midnight, they walked the last few miles to the concealed tunnel.
Earl Stuart took them through the tunnel.
When they came out of the tunnel, Owen Meissner’s security agents were waiting for them, and that was that.
Helen Sanderson looked for a ray of hope and didn’t find it.
She was oddly calm, almost relaxed. Two weeks ago, when the syndicate had told her that the expedition had failed and there would be no baby at any price, she had gone into hysterics.
That was over now.