LITMIR.BIZ

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Captain said, "I’m sorry, Kirk. I heard a lot of what you said; too much to dare turn you loose just now. Perhaps in solitary we can talk sense into you."

      Kirk stood quite still, not moving anything but his eyes. The four Hans were big and they had knives. Kirk shrugged and fell in with them. The girl walked ahead, between the Captain and the Third.

      Nobody said anything. They went together up the stone steps.

      *

      They had taken the wounded off the wall, out of the wind. The rock below was clean of bodies, and the last of the men were coming back up the ladder.

      Kirk felt queer. He wasn’t like himself at all. It was as though he had fragments of ice inside his head, all jumbled. Then suddenly they fell into place, clear and frozen and unalterable, without any help from him at all.

      He moved, very fast. Faster than ever before in his life, caught the Captain’s gun.

      His two hands thrust out, one against the Captain, the other against the Third, and sent them staggering. He charged through between them, gathering the yellow girl in to his chest firing as he went. The antique gun went dead on the third shot, and he threw it away.

      A knife slashed across his shoulders, but it was short. Men began to yell. He knocked one away from the ladder head and pushed the struggling girl over and let her drop, so that she had to catch the rungs. He whirled, swinging, and sent two men sprawling back into the ones behind. Then he leaped over, dropping down the side of the ladder hand over hand.

      He passed the girl, climbed onto the ladder behind her so that no one could sling stones at him, and began pulling her down by the foot. She tried kicking, but it was a long drop to the rock, and after she’d slipped a couple of times she stopped that and went on down.

      Men were howling at him from above. They started to climb onto the ladder. Kirk yelled at them, threatening to throw the girl off. They stopped. Presently Kirk felt the cold rock underfoot.

      The minute he was off the ladder a man climbed over the wall and started down. Kirk yelled at him to go back, then got hold of the bottom of the ladder and pushed out. The yellow girl got out her knife again and slashed at him. She hadn’t opened her mouth once.

      Kirk dropped. The knife bit his shoulder, not very deep. He straightened up suddenly, swinging his open palm. It caught the girl over the ear. She fell backward away from him, rolling over on the rock. The knife flew out of her hand. Kirk heard it skitter along and then vanish over the gully edge.

      He pushed hard on the ladder. It gave, and the man at the top began scrambling up again, fast. He only just made it, dangling half of him in the air, when the ladder fell. The light aluminum struts it was made of sent clashing echoes flying in the wind.

      It was the only ladder they had. They’d have to bring one from one of the other pillboxes before they could climb down and get it. Kirk looked up at the men lining the wall, yelling, waving things.

      Just about here Pa must have stood, looking up.

      He turned and hauled the dazed girl to her feet and started off down the tongue of rock. He didn’t hurry. There was no need to hurry. The young strength of the girl was pressed against him, thigh and hip and chest. It burned, in some queer way.

      He watched the yellow hairs rub and tangle with his golden ones. The muscle started twitching under his eye again.

      He had to cuff her twice more to keep her quiet, before they were safely off the naked rock. He got her down the length of two gullies, well out of sight of the pillbox. She was still a little groggy, and very busy keeping her footing in the pebble drifts. They started down a third cut that angled off. Then, quite suddenly, she fell.

      Kirk stopped. He put out a hand to help her up, and then took it back again. He looked at his feet and surlily, "Get up."

      "I can’t. Where are you going?"

      "I don’t know. Just somewhere to think, and plan. I’ve got to figure this out."

      She thought about that. He could see her wide golden shoulders tremble. He wanted to touch them. After a while she said:

      "Why did you take me? Why won’t you let me go?"

      "They’d have killed me on the rock if I hadn’t had you. And when I go back...."

      She brought her head up. "You’re going back ?"

      He laughed at her. "Did you think you could get rid of me that easy? I told you I’d made a promise. I’m going to keep it, and you’re going to help me. I can buy a lot with you."

      Her pupils were little hot pinpoints. "I see. You don’t care how many people you hurt, do you, as long as you can be a big man and keep your promise."

      He said roughly, "Get up."

      "All right." She nodded, casually. "I’ll get up."

      She did. She got up fast, like a rocksnake uncoiling, and she had a big stone in her right hand. She let it go, straight for his head.

      Kirk jerked himself aside, but he was too late. The rock grazed him above the ear. He staggered, trying to see through a curtain of hot and flashing lights.

      His earcups, working instinctively by themselves, brought him the sound of naked feet scrambling away over the pebble drifts.

      Feet. And then something else....

      Kirk yelled. He tried to shake the lights away, and yelled again.

      "Stop! Look out—shags! "

      *

      He heard her stop. He began to be able to see again. She was poised halfway up the head wall of the cut, her ears twitching. For a long time they stood that way, not moving, listening to the wind and the rolling pebbles and the soft padding feet of things that were hungry and hunting them.

      She began to move, almost without sound, back to him. Her lips formed the word "Two," and her yellow head jerked back the way she had been going. Kirk nodded. He pointed off to the left and held up three fingers. Then he turned and started down the gully. The girl stayed close beside him. She was breathing rapidly and her pupils swelled and shrank. They showed no fear.

      Looking at them, Kirk thought of Lil. Lil was right. She did have pink lids to her eyes, and they were beautiful.

      The shags followed them, two behind, three beside them beyond a thin wall of rock.

      Kirk had never been in the outer gullies before. He was too young. But he’d heard Pa and the older men talk about them from the time he was old enough to crouch beside the heat-stones and listen.

      Out here there were shags and scavenger rats and once in a while a rocksnake. Men of the settlement never hunted beyond the fringe. Beyond that was forbidden ground and Piruts. Nobody knew just where the Pirut colony was any more. Nobody wanted to know.

      Kirk’s ears were stretched, sifting the tiny shattered echoes. His spread pupils sucked in every bit of the dim grey light. His body hair was erect so that even his skin acted as a sensory organ, feeling the bodies of the shags behind them.

      They were getting close.

      The gully ended. Beyond it was a little space of tumbled rock with other gullies opening into it, and then a cliff built of great tilted slabs of grey stone.

      Kirk pointed to the cliff and started to run, with the yellow girl beside him. Wind slashed sharp and thin across them. The echoes whispered like many tongues and Kirk fought them and heard the two shags come onto the plain behind them, running.

      The other three came out of the parallel cut. They came fast, and because of the curve of the plain they were a little ahead of the two humans.

      The girl said between her teeth, "We can’t make it."

      She was right. Kirk picked out the biggest boulder he could see and dashed for it. The leading shag was breathing on the girl’s heels as he hauled her up after him.

      They

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