The long night wore on. Janazik had sent most of his Khazaki out to alert the other loyalists in their hiding places, but only they had a chance of slipping unobserved past the enemy patrols. Humans, obviously alien, slow-footed and clumsy beside the flitting shadows of Khazak, would never get far. They had to wait.
Anse was glad of the opportunity for conference with Janazik, planning the assault on the citadel. Neither of them was very familiar with the layout, but Alonzo, as an engineer on the rocket building project, and old Chiang had been there often enough to know it intimately.
It was impossible that a few hundred warriors armed with the primitive weapons of Khazak could take the stronghold. Its walls were manned by more fighters than that, and there were the terrible Earth-type guns as well. Alonzo had a blaster with a couple of charges, but otherwise there was nothing modern in the loyalist force.
But still that futile assault was necessary—
“It’s taking a desperate chance,” said Dougald Joan. She was young yet, hardly out of girlhood, but her voice had an indomitable ring. The true warriors among the five Earthling families were all Dougald thought Janazik. “Suppose Ellen doesn’t come out of hiding? Suppose she’s dead or—or captured already, in spite of what we think.”
“We’ll just have to try and destroy the rocket then,” said Alonzo. “Certainly we can’t let Volakech get to the Star Ship.” He sighed, heavily. “And the labor of another generation will be gone.”
“It wouldn’t take us long to build another boat,” said his wife. “We know how, now, and we have the industry to do it.”
“There are only a few who really know how to handle and build the Terrestrial machines, and most of them are in the enemy’s hands,” reminded old Chiang. “I’m sure I couldn’t tell you much about atomic engines, even though I was on the Star Ship herself once. If those few are killed, we may never be able to duplicate our efforts. What Terrestrials survive will sink back into barbarism, become simply another part of Khazaki culture.”
“I don’t know—” said Nora.
“I know, because I’ve seen it happen,” insisted Chiang. “In the fifty years since we were marooned here, two generations have been born on Khazak. They’ve grown up among Khazaki, played with native children, worked and fought with Khazaki natives, adopted the dress and speech and whole outlook of Krakenau. Only a few in this third generation have consciously tried to remain—Terrestrial. I must admit that Masefield Carson is one such. Ellen is another. But few others.”
“Would you have us wall ourselves out from the world?” asked Anse with a bridling anger.
“No. I don’t see how the situation could be helped. We are a minority in an alien culture with which we’ve had to cooperate. It’s only natural that we’d be more assimilated than assimilating. Even at that, we’ve wrought immense changes.”
* * * *
Janazik nodded. The stranded Terrestrials had found themselves in an early Iron Age civilization of city-states, among a race naturally violent and predatory. For their own survival, they had had to league forces with the state in which they found themselves—Krakenau, as it happened. Before they could build the industry they needed, they had to have some security—which meant that they must teach the Krakenaui military principles and means of making new weapons which would make them superior to their neighbors. After that—well, it took an immense technology to build even a small spaceship. The superalloys which could stand the combustion of rocket fuel required unheard-of elements such as manganese and chromium, which required means of mining and refining them, which required a considerable chemical plant, which required—How far down do you have to start? And there were a hundred or a thousand other requirements of equal importance and difficulty.
Besides, the Terrestrials had had to learn much from scratch themselves. None of them had ever built a rocketship, had ever seen one in action even. It was centuries obsolete in Galactic civilization. But gravity drives were out of the question. So—they’d had to design the ship from the ground up. Which meant years of painstaking research ... and only a few interested humans and Khazaki to do it. The rest were too busy with their own affairs in the brawling barbaric culture.
Ten years ago, the first spaceboat had blasted off toward the Star Ship—and exploded in mid-acceleration. More designing, more testing, more slow building—and now the second one lay ready. Perhaps it could reach the Star Ship.
The Star Ship—faster than light, weightless when it chose to be for all its enormous mass, armed with atomic guns that could blast a city to superheated vapor. Whoever controlled that ship could get to Galactic stars in a matter of weeks. Or could rule all Khazaki if he chose.
No wonder Carson and Volakech had struck now, before the rocket boat was launched. When they had the ship—
But only Ellen knew the figures of its orbit and the complicated calculations by which the boat would plot a course to get there. A bold warrior might make a try at reaching the ship by seat-of-the-pants piloting, but he wouldn’t have much chance of making it. So Ellen, and the rocket boat, were the fulcrum of the future.
“Strange,” mused Chiang. “Strange that we should have had that accident….”
They had heard the story a hundred times before, but they gathered around to listen; there was nothing else to do while the slow hours dragged on.
“We were ten, all told, five men and their wives. Exploratory expeditions are often out for years at a time, so the Service makes it a policy to man the ships with married couples. It’s hard for a Khazaki to appreciate the absolute equality between the sexes which human civilization has achieved. It’s due to the advanced technology, of course, and we’re losing it as we go back to barbarism—”
Anse felt a small hand laid on his arm. He looked down into the dark eyes of DuFrere Marie. She was a pretty girl, a little younger than he, and until he’d really noticed Ellen he’d been paying her some attention.
“I don’t care about equality,” she whispered. “A woman shouldn’t try to be a man. I’d want only to cook and keep house for my man, and bear his children.”
It was, Anse realized, a typical Khazaki attitude. But—he remembered with a sudden pity that Carson had been courting Marie. “This is pretty tough on you,” he muttered. “I’ll try to see that Carse is saved…. If we win,” he added wryly.
“Him? I don’t care about that Masefield. Let them hang him. But Anse—be careful—”
* * * *
He looked away, his face hot in the gloom, realizing suddenly why Masefield Carson hated him. Briefly, he wished he hadn’t had such consistent luck with women. But the accident that there was a preponderance of females in the second and third generations of Khazaki humans had made it more or less inevitable, and he—well, he was only human. There’d been Earthling girls; and not a few Khazaki women had been intrigued by the big Terrestrial. Yes, I was lucky, he thought bitterly. Lucky in all except the one that mattered.
“—we’d been a few weeks out of Avandar—it was an obscure outpost then, though I imagine it’s grown since—when we detected this Sol-type sun. Seeing that there was an Earth-like planet, we decided to investigate. And since we were all tired of being cooped in the ship, and telescopes showed that any natives which might exist would be too primitive to endanger us, we all went down in the lifeboat.
“And the one-in-a-billion chance happened ... the atomic converters went out of control and we barely escaped from the boat before it was utterly consumed. We were stranded on an alien planet, with nothing but our clothes and a few hand weapons—and with our ship that would go faster than light circling in its orbit not ten thousand kilometers above us!
“No chance of rescue. There are just too many suns for the Galactic Coordinators to hope to find a ship that doesn’t come back. Expansion into this region of space wasn’t scheduled for another two centuries. So there we were, and until we could build a boat which would take us back to our ship—there we stayed!
“And it’s taken us fifty years so far….”
Pragakech came in with the rain glistening on his fur and running in small puddles about his padding feet. “We’re ready,” he said. “Every warrior whose hiding place we knew has been contacted.”
“Then we might as well go.” Janazik got up and stretched luxuriously. His eyes were like molten gold in the murky light.
“So soon?” Marie held Anse back with anxious hands. “This same night?”
“The sooner the better,” Anse said grimly. “Every day that goes by, more of our friends will be found out and killed, more places will be searched for Ellen, Volakech’s grip on the city will grow stronger.” He put the spiked helmet back on his head, and buckled the sword about his mailed waist. “Come on, Janazik. The rest stay here and wait for word. If we’re utterly defeated, such of us as survive will manage to get back and lead you out of Krakenau—somehow.”
Marie started to say something, then shook her head as if the words hurt her throat and drew Anse’s face down to hers. “Goodbye, then,” she whispered. “Goodbye, and the gods be with you.”
He kissed her more awkwardly than was his wont, feeling himself a thorough scoundrel. Then he followed Pragakech and Janazik out the trapdoor.