The Cold Equations (42 page)

"Good-bye, Captain. I—I sorry."

He turned and went down the hill and across the flat beyond. He looked back when he was almost to the ridge and saw Loper still staring forlornly after him.

* * *

He reached the foot of the ridge and climbed its steep slope. Three natives were waiting for him on top, their long rifles in their hands and the smiles on their faces. The one in the center was Resso, a sub-chief in Selsin's tribe.

"Where would you go, human?" Resso asked in the native language.

"I would go to the sea," he answered in the same language, and told them why. "I ask permission to pass," he said.

Resso rubbed the breach of his rifle, his eyes thoughtful and hard. "Between here and the sea are many by-paths. You might lose your way and be troublesome for us to find in the morning."

He took the long knife from his belt, spun it in the air and caught it by the blade. The three rifles centered on him as he did so.

"This is my only weapon," he said to Resso. "I think I can put it in your throat before I can be killed—but I ask you to let me save the Altairian first and match it against your rifles tomorrow."

Resso spit on the ground. "Tomorrow I will make you eat it before I kill you."

Rider felt a great sense of relief—Resso was going to let him pass . . . 

"I want to ask a favor of you," he said to Resso. "That the Altairians not be harmed."

Surprise showed on Resso's face. "Why should we harm the furry ones? They are only your slaves and not responsible for what humans do."

"Then you promise?"

Resso took a step forward, glowering in quick anger. "Do you have the insolence to question what I say? Be on your way—run, human, and find your hiding place!"

He went, walking past them with the glum thought: This makes Ignominious Exit Number Two. I hope my last one, tomorrow, will have at least a little dignity to it . . .  

* * *

The desert was miles of red iron sand, across which rocky ridges lay like a hundred randomly flung barriers. Some of the ridges were of limestone, honey-combed with natural caves. These he would have to avoid at all costs since they were the lairs of the ten-foot sand hounds.

He was no more than well started when dark came. He had no light and without a blaster he would not dare to use one if he had it. It would attract the attention of sand hounds for miles around.

For the greater part, his way was along relatively clear stretches of the wind-packed sand and his progress was fairly fast. At intervals, however, he came to dense and wide-spreading thickets of the poison-thorned desert vegetation and these he had to bypass with time consuming detours.

Once he almost walked upon a band of wild dragon-beasts, grazing silently in the starlight. Only the good fortune of the wind being in his favor prevented them from detecting him and charging. He had to backtrack and then climb a long ridge to get around them. It cost him an hour of time.

The last of the clouds disappeared from the eastern sky as the storm went its way across the Southern Gulf. He was grateful that it had not swerved inland and turned the dim starlight into total darkness. His time margin would be small, at best.

Shortly before midnight he stopped on a sand dune, to rest for the first time. It was there that he saw a tiny, distant red spark; a signal fire on the hill north of camp. It blinked for several minutes in a code he did not understand, then went out.

When it did not reappear at the end of two more minutes he got up and resumed his journey to the sea.

Not long afterward the sky to the east turned pale; a whiteness that grew swiftly brighter and obscured the eastern stars. It was the dawn of the three moons; the moons that brought the Big Tide with them.

They lifted above the horizon in a flying wedge formation, flooding the desert with cold, white light. He could see well, then, and he hurried faster down the long slopes that led to the sea.

The bright moonlight greatly increased the danger of being seen by a sand hound and he had not gone far when one screamed from somewhere behind him. He stopped, and looked back.

He could not see it but he saw something else when he looked to the rocky ridge west of him; flitting shadow-shapes that seemed to be dragon-beasts were keeping pace with him. He wondered if it would be Resso and the others, making certain he would not be hard to find when morning came. They were gone from view before he could be sure he had not imagined seeing them.

He hurried on again. The character of the desert had changed as the elevation decreased and a dry, wiry grass was replacing most of the vegetation. He changed his course slightly so that he could walk down the center of a shallow valley where it grew the thickest, listening for the sand hound to scream again.

It did so, much closer than before. Two more answered it from farther back, then a third. Which made four of them racing toward him, each of them like a reptilian ten-foot greyhound with the claws of a tiger and the teeth and jaws of a young tyrannosaurus.

He lighted the grass at his feet, then started two more fires on each side of the first one. Within that short time the tinder-dry grass was burning in a solid wall of flame, pushed down the valley by the wind at increasing speed and spreading wider as it went.

* * *

He had to run to get in front of it and then run still faster to keep ahead of it. Through the choking smoke he could see nothing except the red blaze of fire behind him but he heard the sand hounds screeching in frustration beyond it. The sound of their fury faded as he ran on, and then was gone.

A mile farther on he angled to the left, to the rim of the valley where the grass was too thin to burn, and there he rested until his hard panting had subsided. Then he walked on again; to hurry faster and faster as the three moons neared the zenith. Shortly after they had passed the zenith it would be sunrise and the Big Tide would reach the Sea Cliffs.

He saw no more of the phantom dragon-beasts, but the smoke from the valley he had fired lay like a pall across the desert and visibility was limited.

The eastern sky was lightening with the first glow of dawn when he saw the distant gleam of moonlight on the ocean. The delays during the night had been greater than he had thought—there would be no time margin, at all.

He went the rest of the way in a fast trot, the rope ready in his hand.

The sea to the east was flat and calm when he reached the ragged top of the Sea Cliffs but the pale violet of dawn had turned into a vivid blue-white. Sunrise and the Big Tide were at hand.

He looked down over the edge of the cliffs, down the sheer face of them where the crevice reached up for two hundred feet before it dwindled into nothing, and saw the red-shelled horrors grouped in a thick mass at the bottom. Laughing Girl was above them, wedged tightly in the crevice as far up it as she had been able to climb. It had not been far; the groping claws of the topmost Elephant Crabs were cracking together only inches below her.

He had already tied a series of knots in the end of the rope so she could grip it firmly between her teeth. He dropped the knotted end over the cliff and gave the rope a flip to guide it toward the crevice.

He glanced again to the east, at the calm, flat sea, and in that instant its horizon abruptly swelled and lifted up and became a mountain rushing toward him.

The Elephant Crabs were spilling apart, scrambling to positions of safety where they could anchor themselves against the rough rock surface and be protected by the thick armor of their shells. Laughing Girl was suddenly alone in her refuge, a small black huddle that watched the coming of the Big Tide in frozen helplessness.

The rope was snaking down the crevice as fast as he could play out the coils. He whistled at her as the rope neared her. She jerked up her head, almost falling in her surprise, and greeted him in her native language; a word that was like the joyous yelp of a pup. Then the end of the rope reached her and she seized it between her teeth.

* * *

He hauled up on the rope, bringing it back hand over hand, while Laughing Girl clawed at the rock to help all she could. She disappeared from his sight where the cliff became vertical and the thin, hard rope was almost impossible to grip tightly as her full weight went upon it.

The tide raced inward as he struggled with the rope; the forefront of an oceanic plateau. Between it and the cliffs the beach and sea below lay like a valley, then a narrow basin, then suddenly a vanishing canyon—

* * *

Laughing Girl's head popped into view and she came pawing and scrambling over the edge of the cliff. She dropped the rope and leaped toward him in ecstatic welcome.

"You come for me! You—"

The tide struck the cliffs with a thunderous roar, making the earth shake. He seized Laughing Girl by the scruff of the neck and dropped flat to the ground, where he could lock his free arm around a projection of rock. A solid mass of water was flung high into the air by the impact, to descend upon them with a smashing force that knocked the breath from his lungs and bruised his face against the rocks. He held grimly to the rock and Laughing Girl as the mass of water poured back over the cliff, ripping and tearing at him as it tried to take them with it.

They staggered erect as it drained away and ran. A second mass of skyward-flung water came too late to do more than drench them. They stopped a little farther on, along the top of a low ridge.

Behind them the sea growled and rumbled as it surged against the cliffs. Laughing Girl looked back, trembling a little.

"I thought you had forgot me, Boss. I was scared, and I wait and wait . . ."

"Everything is all right, now," he said. "You won't ever have to go under the Sea Cliffs again."

He was tired, weak with near-exhaustion. He wiped the salty water from his face and saw, as something that was no longer of importance, that the sun was up. His job was done, his last duty carried out, and the thing that would happen next was something inevitable and beyond his control. He saw that his knife was gone, washed into the sea—but that no longer mattered, either.

"You will go home now," he said to Laughing Girl. "Don't wait for me. Loper will probably be starting on his way to meet you in a few minutes. He'll tell you about the things that have happened in the past two days. From now on the two of you will do whatever he thinks is best for you."

Her eyes were wide in alarm before he had finished, anxious and questioning.

"What are wrong, Boss? What are going to happen to you—prease, what are wrong?"

* * *

A slow, muffled thudding came from the east and he looked into the bright blaze of the sun to see the dragon-beasts trotting down the ridge toward him. There were six of them and even against the sun he could see the gleam of battle helmets and the long rifles across the saddles.

"Go home!" he ordered. "Right now!"

She looked from the approaching war party back to him and flung up her head in defiance as Loper had done.

"No! You know they come to kirr you—I can terr. I stay!"

"There are things you don't yet understand, Girl," he said. "For my sake, go now. Run."

"I—" She hesitated, her sense of duty and sense of loyalty conflicting. The loyalty won. "No! I not go!"

He could not permit her to stay. When the natives shot him down she would attack them with a fury that only her own death could stop.

He stepped forward and hit her; a hard, open-handed blow alongside the jaw that sent her rolling. She got to her feet with amazement and hurt in her eyes and he made his tone harsh and ugly:

"I'll not order you but this one more time—
go home!
"

She obeyed, her tail drooping as she started across the swale. She stopped once, to look back at him, and he motioned her on with a curt gesture.

She was gone from sight when the natives reached him. Resso was not with them—it was Selsin who rode in the lead.

They stopped before him in a semi-circle and regarded him silently, the mocking smiles on their faces.

"It is sunrise," Selsin said.

"It is," he agreed.

"We followed you last night. I wanted to know if you told the truth about going to save the furry one."

"And now," he said, "I want to know if Resso told the truth when he said she and her mate would not be harmed."

"He did."

There was nothing more to say, then. He waited, wondering if they were deliberately delaying his execution in the hope of seeing him weaken under the tension.

Selsin spoke again:

"Your superior and his aide escaped in the flier shortly after you left. The fire signal at midnight said they had landed on one of the Northern Islands and were firing steadily at a school of bladder fish. They seemed to think the fish were an attacking party."

He had the impression that Selsin and the others were amused. He could understand why—but for himself there was only a sick feeling of shame and the thought:
So they wouldn't even leave those kids their blasters?
 

"It is sunrise," Selsin said again, "and there is no reason to wait any longer. Do you have anything to say?"

"Nothing," he answered, and braced himself for the impact of the bullets.

But the long rifles were not lifted. Instead, Selsin swung down from the saddle and came up to him.

"The furry one—Loper—came to me before dark and told me what you had said to him on the hill. Didn't you know that what you were doing was more proof of good intentions than all the promises in the world?"

"I don't understand," he said.

"You claimed from the beginning that humans respected other forms of life and kept their promises to them—but words are only little noises. You proved what you had claimed when you spent what was to be the last night of your life in keeping the promise you had made to a being who was far less human than even my own race."

"But the camp—" He did not dare believe what Selsin's statements implied. "They were to be killed at sunrise—"

"I ordered the attack postponed until your actions could be judged. Now, there will be no attack."