The Super Barbarians (18 page)

“Two, up till a few moments ago,” came the crackling reply. “A Geluid mortar shell just landed on the emplacement of one of them according to our reports. It was noticed they were tracking round to aim at the city.”

Another crash followed. This time there were screams, and the building we were on shook, loosening some roof tiles.

Olafsson clung to the mike. He barked a question which made no sense to me at all. He said, “And the ship?”

“Look overhead—you should see it any moment!

Olafsson raised his eyes to the low overcast of cloud. I followed the example automatically. “I hope that’s right,” I heard him say. “If it is, with only one of the guns firing on us, well be out of here before much harm is done. And—oh, look at that! Did you ever see such a beautiful sight?”

I never did.

Dipping down through the clouds with the grace of a shining fish in clear water, there came the huge, mile-long belly of an interstellar ship. It seemed that the whole world paused, irresolute, to stare at the sky. Had I not heard Olafsson say what he had just said, I’d have thought that this was a party of avenging Vorra corning to raze the Acre.

But when I looked down, I saw that the Acre’s buildings had come to life with people. They swarmed on the roofs like ants, thousands upon thousands of them, stretching their arms up and crying welcome to the ship as it drifted bubble-light down, down, down to the level where it halted on its antigravity stabilizers, all the hatches were opened, and the coiled wire ladders fell for us to climb into the sky like an army of Hebrew prophets entering a chariot of fire.

M
Y MIND SWARMED
with questions beyond number. I had some of my memory back—but not all, not even the most important
part! Or perhaps I had never known the answer to these questions. Now I had to know them. I’d risked my life, I’d done some small work towards the success of this fantastic operation—I was entitled to know the truth now!

But who to ask? I could not trouble the hard-faced yet smiling men who seemed to be supervising the loading of the vast human cargo. I could not trouble Olafsson; the moment he scrambled into the ship he dashed away on important work. And the people coming up after us—the ordinary, weary, weak but marvelously happy people of the Acre—they would not know any more than I did.

Once I was aboard, no one took any further notice of me. I was free to wander as I wished. I did wander, for the sake of knowing I was in a ship owned by and obedient to men of Earth instead of the Vorra. It was one of their ships, of course. It had obviously been stolen. How this miracle had been accomplished was another of the questions I wanted to ask someone. But turnabout is fair play; I thought of the mummy in the yellow spacesuit, and hoped that somehow, some day, we would be able to tell that mummy’s surviving friends how we had turned the tables on the Vorra.

If I could only find someone to explain it to me first!

My wandering brought me into another of the big holds, open hatches in its floor, through which the people of the Acre were climbing to freedom. As I came in, pushing past others who had come aboard after me and were now going further inship, I saw that there was trouble on one of the hanging ladders.

One of the men supervising the work turned and caught sight of me as he knelt to reach down into space. “You!” he said. “Got a casualty here—give us a hand!”

I hurried forward and knelt beside him, reaching down.
I almost fell with the shock as I saw who was struggling to get over the rim of the hatch—Ken Lee, Marijane’s brother, his left arm hanging by his side and a smear of blood spreading on his shirt.

He did not wince, although the pain of being dragged over the edge of the hatch by his two arms must have been terrible, and used me as a crutch to get to the side of the hold where first aid workers had set up their equipment. I was peeling off the bloody shirt when I felt a touch on my arm and glanced round. It was Marijane.

“Is he all right?” she demanded. Ken had closed his eyes, the better to resist the pain. He opened them and smiled at her before closing them again. Marijane squatted beside him to help me with the delicate job of cleaning the wound.

“What happened?” she asked him. He replied without looking at her.

“I was near the last of the shells that fell in the Acre. I don’t know what’s in there, but it’ll be messy. Shell casing, bits of rock—who knows what? Easy now!”

He half-rose as pain stabbed him. I snatched a capsule of anaesthetic gas from a passing medical orderly; it was only after I’d broken it under Ken’s nose that I realized the orderly was Kramer, grinning like a boy.

The work of dressing the wound went ahead.

“I’m glad you’re safely here, Gareth,” Marijane said after a while. “I heard someone say he thought you’d been shot on the roof.”

“They tried, and they missed,” I said.

“It must be awful for you only to know half of what’s going on,” she said. I nodded. “How much can you remember?”

“Much less than I believed.”

“Why the civil war was so important, for example?”

“To—well, to upset things on Qallavarra, I guess.”

“But not only that. To make certain that no one was in a position to give orders for this ship to be intercepted, of course.”

In the distance someone yelled, “Hatches tight! Lift!* And there was a booming metalic slam all down the ship. We felt nothing, of course; the ship had its own gravity.

But we knew we were on our way.

“How was it stolen, anyway?” I demanded.

“By the cleverest consignment ever sent out from Earth disguised as essential goods for the people of the Acre.”

I blinked at her.

“Yes! The cargo! This time, the cargo which this ship lifted off Earth consisted of a robot programmed to steal away control of the ship from its Vorrish crew! And it did. It blew the locks to space as it settled into orbit around Qallavarra, it got rid of the bodies of the crew, it set a course into atmosphere which brought it out over the Acre, it opened its hatches and let down the ladders which it had previously installed; it cleared away the cargo that was no good to us. It did everything.”

“And the Vorra never suspected,” I said. I felt chilled with awe at the magnitude of the scheme.

“Of course they didn’t, the poor stupid fools.” Marijane finished the dressing expertly, and indicated that I should help her lay her brother down full length on the floor where he would be more comfortable.

I obeyed, staring at her. I said, “All this talk of the Vorra as poor stupid fools!” I exploded. “After what they’ve done to us, after—”

I broke off. She was looking at me in astonishment She said, “Do you mean you—But you can’t possibly!”

“What?” I said. “I can’t what?9

There was a footfall behind me. I heard Olafsson’s voice speak my name. He said, “Shaw! Glad I found you. I imagine you have lots of questions.”

“I’ve been getting answers from Marijane,” I said harshly. “But the last one didn’t satisfy me.”

I explained. I told him about the mummy in the yellow spacesuit, about the shaman, about the Vorrish pretence that they had built these ships themselves. Olafsson heard me out with a faint smile playing round his mouth.

When I finished, he said, “Oh yes, we know about that cult. It’s a lot of nonsense of course.”

“Nonsense?” I echoed, bewildered. “But I saw—that mummy in a spacesuit—”

“Manufactured,” Olafsson said briefly. “Look, you’re perfectly right to say that it’s unbearable to the Vorra to admit they didn’t build their ships and weapons themselves. The plain fact is they didn’t, either. But think it over! How, by what conceivable means could they have stolen them from a superior culture? How could a bunch of semifeudal barbarians have conquered a fleet of interstellar spaceships armed with weapons superior even to ours on Earth? They couldn’t!”

“Which means,” Marijane said in a small clear voice, “that the ships were given to them.”

“And the cult you discovered, with the mummy in the spacesuit as its symbol, was invented by the soldiers of Qallavarra as part of a heroic mythology concerned with their imaginary victory over a nonexistent enemy,” Olafsson finished. “A kind of fictitious battle-honor for the corps to wear on its standard.”

“Given?” I said after a long time. I-hardly recognized my own voice. “But—who gave the ships to them?”

“We don’t know yet,” Olafsson said, stern now and commanding. “As we work it out, somewhere in the galaxy is a race of intelligent beings, very far advanced, very powerful and very, very cruel. A race which can treat the Vorra as subjects for a kind of vast laboratory experiment, and not care how much people like us of Earth suffer in consequence.

“We presume that one day it occurred to these intelligences to find out what would happen if a planetful of barbarians were suddenly provided with a fleet of starships and weapons to match. Their choice of subject fell on the Vorra. And they will probably come back in a century or two to find out the results. Or maybe they’ve lost interest, or maybe they got the data they were after and couldn’t be bothered to clear up the mess they’d left behind.

“And the poor silly Vorra, struggling to make sense of a situation which was none of their doing—too greedy to renounce what they’d been given, too backward to make the most of it, too uncivilized to understand it. Always they are hoping that they will somehow catch up. That’s why they’ve taken such an interest in us, have tried to copy us however much it went against the grain of their natural barbarian instincts. For here we were, people like themselves—obviously, much more like them than the makers of these ships—and we had invented spaceships for ourselves, we almost defeated them in battle, and no matter how they tried to beat us down we kept coming up again.

“But it would have taken too long to wait for them to admit they wanted to be taught by us. Because, you see, the makers of the ships might come back. We doubt if it will be sooner than a century from now. When they do return,
though, we want to be able to show them what we think of them. We want to speak to them in terms they understand.

“So were going back to Earth. It’ll take a while to clear up the leavings of the Vorra, but by the time we land we can expect to have reduced them to isolated pockets of resistance. There won’t be any co-ordinated help for them from home now—not until the civil war dies down, and that will take months, possibly years. And since they occupied us, we’ve learned every trick they know and invented plenty of our own. Do you know anything about Earthly history?”

The sudden question took me by surprise. I’d been standing with closed eyes, listening—feeling the facts socket home in the places waiting for them, feeling my memory return to wholeness as I relearned the truths which I had hidden with the aid of oblivon from the Vorrish interrogators—and had thereby hidden from myself. It was a wonderful sensation.

I fumbled for an answer. I said, “Of course, but what in particular?”

“Once, the Mongols invaded and conquered China, a horde of barbarians overrunning a great and ancient civilization. As a badge of servitude they imposed the pigtail on their Chinese subjects. And within two hundred years the pigtail was proudly worn by the highest mandarins in the land. It’s a slow way to win a war. But it’s the only way a war has ever stayed won, and it’s the kind of war—this is the best thing about it—it’s the kind of war in which the better side is bound to win.”

Someone came hunting for Olafsson and called him away to attend to some problem which arisen among the refugees. When he had gone, I stood silent for a long time thinking about the makers of the ships—the people (people?) out
there in the galaxy whose vast cold intellect regarded us as mere animals.

They were obviously rich beyond imagining if they could casually give away such a fleet as Earths whole industry could never have built. They were obviously powerful if they could use planets as laboratory benches for their experiments. How could we hope to match them, even in a hundred years? Might they not wipe us out in a fit of disgust for making their experiment go astray?

Of course not. An experiment is made for the sake of results, whatever they may turn out to be. If you don’t want to see the results, it’s best net to experiment at all. I remembered a very old story indeed, about a psychologist who put a monkey in a closed room and alter a while peeped through the keyhole to see what the monkey had got up to.

And on the other side of the keyhole he saw the monkey looking at him.

I found myself chuckling., I said to the air, “Here’s looking at you!”

“What?” said Marijane, her head cocked on one side, eying me quizzically. There was a little smile on her lips.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking. Say, I have an idea. Let’s go and look around this ship. After all, it’s Earth’s first interstellar vessel on her maiden trip, and its quite an occasion.”

She laughed and turned to walk by my side. I took her hand in mine.

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