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

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      Everybody enjoyed that. Sada called him a name and turned her back. Samel’s black eyes came back to the yellow girl.

      "You won’t tell who you are. That means you’re somebody. An Officer’s daughter, likely. Maybe even the Captain’s."

      Some flicker in the girl’s eyes must have told him he’d hit home. He jumped up and shouted, "Hey! All of you, look here! We’ve got somebody—we’ve got the Captain’s daughter!"

      The mob stirred and moved in. People began to shout, to curse and make animal noises of sheer hate. For a minute Kirk thought he and the girl were going to be torn apart. He shivered violently, and the hate was so strong in the air he could smell it.

      Samel pulled out his sling lazily and loaded it. The sweep of his arm stopped part of the crowd, and the rest quieted down enough to hear him say:

      "Hold it! Sit down, you fools! The girl’s gold. We can buy things with her."

      Kirk didn’t get that word ‘gold’, but he understood the rest of it. It was what he had told her, himself.

      He wished the babies would stop crying. It was hard to hate these people so much when you knew they had kids just like the one at home, wailing in the cold.

      The mob relaxed sullenly. The Captain’s daughter spoke suddenly, very clear across the muttering quiet of the crowd.

      "You can’t buy your way into the colony with me. They’ll kill me, like they did the three Hans, only this time they won’t wait as long."

      She was telling the truth. Samel didn’t like it, and Kirk liked it even less, but she was. The muscle twitched under Kirk’s eye. It was a hell of a world. You couldn’t keep straight in it at all.

      "All right," said Samel. "But we can buy heat with you. And maybe before we do we can get some things out of you, free." He moved in close to her, staring down with sultry eyes. He said huskily, "And don’t think we can’t, baby. And don’t think we wouldn’t enjoy it!"

      She shivered, but her eyes didn’t flinch. She told him steadily, "If it’s about the Ship, you can do what you want and go to hell with it."

      "I watched you up there on that rock," said Samel slowly. "Both of you. You have guts, all right. But I wonder...." He let his gaze slide down over her long, arrogant body. "It would be a pity to spoil that."

      *

      The girl Sada pushed her way out from the crowd.

      "You big red son of a she-shag! Look at us! Look at this lousy cave, and those boxes of heat-stones that wouldn’t keep a rat-pup warm, and then think of these swine sitting up there on their plateau, fat and happy, toasting their feet! They drove us out here to starve and freeze. They’re robbing the gullies of heat-stones. Listen to those kids crying! They haven’t been warm since they were born, and whose fault is it? And you worry about spoiling that yellow vixen!"

      Samel said pleasantly, "Shut up that screeching." He shoved the girl aside hard enough to sit her down on the stones and then knelt beside the Captain’s daughter. He pulled her head back by the yellow hair and looked down into her eyes and said:

      "But she’s right. Pretty soon there aren’t going to be any more heat-stones at all. Pretty soon we’re all going to die of the cold. But you won’t, you up there on the plateau. You can watch us freeze on the rocks and feel pretty smart about it. And you’ll have the Ship."

      He drew his breath in, sharp, as though something hurt him. His horny lids dropped and his lips twisted like a child about to cry with pain. His hand tightened suddenly in the girl’s hair, jerking her head back hard on the taut curve of her neck. He slapped her twice across the face and let her go and stood up, backing off and trembling.

      "You’ll have the Ship," he whispered, "for always."

      Kirk got up. He felt sick, and there were red clouds across his eyes. The Captain’s yellow daughter. He’d cuffed her himself. Why did this happen to him when somebody else did it? It was a hell of a world and he was lost in it. All he knew was that he wanted to hit Samel hard enough to kill him.

      Instead somebody hit Kirk from behind with a sap, not very hard. He fell on his face. From a great distance he heard the girl Sada screaming:

      "You and your silly Ship! What does the Ship matter when we’re all going to die?"

      "It matters." Samel’s voice was husky and queer. "It’s the beginning and the end. What it has in it belongs to us. It would make us fat and warm and strong, so that we could rule the whole world. My father died trying to reach it, and his father before him, and his father before that. The Ship matters. It’s everything."

      It was still in the cave. It was as though his voice had wiped it clean of sound. Kirk shivered. And in the silence the babies cried, a thin wailing lamentation to the cold.

      Kirk got up on his knees. "Wait a minute," he said thickly. "Wait, you’re going at this wrong. We all are. Wait, and listen to me."

      *

      Samel looked at him as though he’d forgotten Kirk existed. Somebody said, "Shall I fix him, Boss?" Samel started to nod, and then something in Kirk’s face changed his mind.

      "He put up a good fight out there. Let him talk."

      Kirk got his feet under him. His head throbbed, and falling on his bandaged wrist hadn’t done it any good, but at least he could see, and talk. He was scared, because what he was going to say was against everything he’d been taught since he was born, but he had to say it. There might be a lot of things wrong with it, but basically it was right, and he knew it. He knew Jakk Randl would have said it, too.

      He did not look at the Captain’s yellow daughter.

      "Listen," he said, loud enough so that everyone could hear him. "You’re wrong about one thing. We don’t have heat-stones up there on the plateau. Not the people like me, the little guys, the Hans. We starve and freeze just like you do, and our babies cry just as loud. And we sit, like you do, looking at the Ship and wondering."

      He took a deep breath. They were watching him, not believing nor disbelieving. Just listening, feeling him, waiting for something he said to hit them so they’d know whether he was lying or not.

      "Some of us have wondered a lot lately, about that Ship. The Officers don’t let us near it. They never have, no nearer than you out here in the gullies. But somebody did get close to it, one man who believed in what he was doing, and he saw...."

      He told them what Jakk had seen, thinking about Jakk’s blood running red through his fingers and the fire dying in his eyes.

      "I’m a Ship’s man. I’ve been taught to hate and fear you. You killed my friend. But the Officers killed my father, without even trying to save him. And I think we’re fools, we Hans and you Piruts. We’re all just people, with empty stomachs and cold backs and kids that never get warm. Why should we kill each other at those walls?"

      He had them. He could hear the mob suck its breath in like one man. Samel’s eyes were hot enough to burn. Kirk cried out:

      "It’s the Officers we ought to hate! It’s the Officers who hold the Ship, and hide the heat-stones in it! It’s the СКАЧАТЬ