Planet Stories Super Pack #2. Ray Bradbury, Nelson S. Bond, Leigh Brackett

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СКАЧАТЬ ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.

      The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter. The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers’, but there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope. Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain’s metal-roofed place highest of all.

      Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.

      The Ship.

      Kirk’s voice was soft in his thick throat. "I would like to kill them," he said. "I would like to kill them all."

      "Yah!" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. "All but the Captain’s yellow daughter!"

      *

      Kirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.

      "Yah!" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. "I’ve seen you looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to her eyes. You wouldn’t kill her, I bet!"

      "I bet I’ll half kill you if you don’t shut up!"

      Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.

      She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had happened, "Ma says will you please not let so much heat out."

      Kirk didn’t say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil yelled, "Ma!"

      The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing stage.

      Ma Kirk said, "Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size."

      Kirk stopped. "Aw, I wasn’t going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!" He leaned forward to glare at Lil. "And I would so kill the Captain’s daughter!"

      The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close to the heat and said wearily:

      "You men, always talking about killing! Haven’t we enough trouble without that?"

      Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.

      "Maybe there’d be less trouble for us."

      Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk’s knee. Her big eyes glowed in the feeble light.

      She said, "You men! He’s no man, Ma. He’s just a little boy who has to stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields."

      The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil’s thin body was strung tight, quivering to move. "Besides," she demanded, "what have the Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to kill them—all but the Captain’s yellow daughter?"

      Kirk’s big heavy chest swelled. "Ma," he said, "you make that brat shut up or I’ll whale her, anyhow."

      Ma Kirk looked at him. "Your Pa’s still big enough to whale you, young man! Now you stop it, both of you."

      "All right," said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have his belly warm, even if it was empty. "Wish Pa’d hurry up. I’m hungry. Hope they killed meat."

      Ma Kirk sighed. "Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the heat-stones."

      "Maybe," said Kirk heavily, "it all goes to the same place."

      Lil snorted. "And where’s that, Smarty?"

      His anger forced out the forbidden words.

      "Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship."

      There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word "Ship" hung there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk’s eyes flicked to the curtain over the door and back to her son.

      "Don’t you say things like that, Wes! You don’t know."

      "It’s what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way they do? We can’t even get near the outside of it."

      Lil tossed her head. "Well neither do they."

      "Not when we can see ‘em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they haven’t got ways of getting into the Ship that don’t show from the plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don’t know about."

      He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands.

      "There must be something in the Ship that they don’t want us to have. Something valuable, something they want to keep for themselves. What else could it be but heat-stones and maybe dried meat?"

      "We don’t know, Wes! The Ship is—well, we shouldn’t talk about it. And the Officers wouldn’t do that. If they wanted us killed off they’d let the Piruts in on us, or the shags, and let ‘em finish us quick. Freezing and starving would take too long. There’d be too many of us if we found out, or got mad."

      Kirk snorted. "You women know so much. If they let the shags or the Piruts in on us, how could they stop ‘em before they killed everybody, including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we’re dumb. They’ve kept us away from the Ship ever since the Crash, and nobody knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They think we’d never suspect."

      "Yah!" said Lil sharply. "You just like to talk. Why should the Officers want us killed off anyhow?"

      Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.

      "There aren’t enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they let their young ones cry with the cold?"

      *

      There was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky. His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He’d never talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....

      "Listen!" said Ma Kirk.

      Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk’s skin. But there wasn’t any need to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its source.

      The great alarm gong by the Captain’s hut.

      Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting aside the door curtain.

      Ma Kirk said stiffly, "Which way are they coming?"

      Kirk’s СКАЧАТЬ