LITMIR.BIZ

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the cleft was a shaft leading up, tool-shaped here and there, with rusty metal bars set in the rock. Kirk led the way. There was no sound made loud enough to be heard over the wind that blew across the plateau. Kirk and Samel came up out of the shaft and took the two guards from behind easily enough, and went on to the Ship.

      Just for a moment, looking down across the plain, thinking about Ma Kirk and Lil and the little ones, Kirk was scared. He’d let the Piruts in. If Samel didn’t keep his word, if anything....

      But nothing would go wrong. There was no reason for it to. He was telling the truth, and once the Ship was broken into there was no quarrel between the Piruts and the Hans. They were allies against the Officers.

      He remembered what he’d said to Lil, about the Captain’s yellow daughter.

      Samel left a guard behind and went into the Ship.

      Darkness and cold and the smell of a place that hasn’t been used or lived in for a long, long time, and the grit of rusty metal under bare feet. They went very slowly, and the yellow girl whimpered in her gag.

      They couldn’t really be silent, slipping and blundering in blackness too thick even for their eyes, over buckled deck plates and around broken walls. Somebody heard them and called out, and the yellow girl struggled like a speared shag.

      Kirk shivered and the palms of his hands were wet. He could feel the Ship like a living presence in the dark.

      The somebody called again, with fear in his voice. They stumbled down a long, tilted passageway and came into a little room with a great gash in it looking out over the gorge. There was a barred door in one wall, and a man sitting in front of it over a tiny box of heat-stones.

      The Captain.

      He got up, a lean grey man moving with dignity. He didn’t drop his spear, but he didn’t try to use it, either. He didn’t say anything. His eyes took them in, in the dull glow of the heat-stones—Kirk and Samel and the Piruts, and then the yellow girl, gagged and held by the arms. His eyes blazed, then. Kirk’s heart jolted. It was just the way Pa might have looked at Lil.

      He said roughly, thinking of Pa, "Don’t try anything, and you won’t get hurt. I’ve made a pact with the Piruts. There’s to be no more fighting and we take the Ship together, share and share alike. The Officers can obey, or take what’s coming to them. Where are the heat-stones?"

      The Captain stared at him. His face had no expression. He said, "Let my daughter go."

      Samel started forward. The Captain raised his spear. "Let my daughter go!" The Piruts raised their weapons. Samel looked around the room, at the single door behind them, and grinned.

      "Sure," he said. "Why not? Let her go."

      They let her go. She tore off the gag and ran to her father and stood by him, glaring at the Piruts with hot black eyes. Neither one said anything.

      "All right," said Samel lazily. "Now where are the stones?"

      "There." The Captain pointed at the tiny box at his feet. "Those are all the heat-stones there are in the Ship."

      Kirk cried, "That’s a lie!"

      The Captain looked at him. "Tell your friends to go and search."

      "What about that door behind you?"

      "There are no stones in there."

      Kirk laughed. The laugh was not pleasant. He was thinking of the cold huts of the Hans and the thin babies that cried, and Jakk Randl dying on the pillbox wall, telling him what he’d seen.

      "You lie. You bring the stones up out of the gorge and hide them here. Jakk Randl saw your daughter doing it."

      "There was only a tiny pipe of stones in the gorge. This is almost the last of them. We used them rather than take from the community supply."

      Samel smiled his lazy smile and started toward the barred door. His eyes had a queer wild shine to them. The Captain cried out:

      "Wait! Wait, and let me speak!"

      Samel looked at the door and his breath made a little sob in his throat. "All right," he said hoarsely. "I can wait."

      He wasn’t thinking about the heat-stones so much then. He was thinking of the words of the legend, power and gold.

      The Captain said quietly, "You can kill me, and go on. But I ask you not to. I ask you to believe me. There are no heat-stones in that room. The bar hasn’t been lifted since the Crash. I ask you not to violate a sacred trust."

      Kirk scowled and looked at the bar. It didn’t look as though it had been lifted since the Crash. He began to be uneasy.

      Samel spoke silkily. "Sacred trust, eh? Something that belongs to us, the Piruts. Something we’ve waited for, longer than anyone knows."

      The Captain nodded. He seemed very tired. "I should have remembered that. The Legend grows a little hazy.... You Piruts caused the Crash. You followed our Ship and attacked it, and in the battle your own ship was destroyed. You made land somehow in little ships carried inside the big one. After we crashed you tried again to take what is in the Ship, and we drove you out into the gullies and kept you there."

      "Ever since," answered Samel huskily. "Starving and freezing."

      "We’ve starved and frozen, too, all of us—Officers and Hans alike. But we had a sacred trust in this Ship. We’ve guarded it. I think at first the Officers of that day thought that someone would come from—from wherever the Ship came from, and take them back. No one ever did. And in the struggle to live, everything has been lost. The only thing left is the knowledge that we Officers had a duty, a trust, and we’ve guarded this door night and day since the Crash."

      "What’s behind it?" asked Samel. "What’s behind it?"

      "Even that is lost."

      Samel laughed and started forward. He caught the Captain’s half-raised spear in his hands and broke it and pushed him away with the yellow girl. He took hold of the bar and lifted. Kirk and the packed mass of Piruts swayed forward like one man.

      It fought him. He heaved on the bar, and sweat ran dark on his red body-hair and the veins stood like ropes on his forehead, but the rust held. Samel struggled, crying like a child.

      Kirk thought: "He told the truth, the Captain did. No heat-stones, and I’ve let the Piruts in." He began to shiver. He started to shout—

      The bar screamed like a man in torment and swung back in Samel’s hands, and the door was open.

      *

      The pale glow of the heat-stones filtered through the opening. Kirk saw a box with black marks on it—DANGER. ATOBLAST HIGH EXPLOSIVE—and above that a much smaller box made of metal, on a shelf. The black marks on the first box didn’t mean anything to anybody. The father of the Captain’s great-grandfather had remembered that there was such a thing as reading.

      Samel reached out and took the smaller box, which was at eye level, and locked with a heavy lock, and sealed. He put it down and took the Captain’s broken spear and tore the lock away.

      The Captain and his yellow daughter stood like dead things, watching. Kirk’s heart was pounding in his throat. The secret of the Ship, the sacred thing, the gold and power that had caused the Crash—

      Samel’s big red hand pulled out a flat bundle of metal sheets, marked with marks like the first box.

       Treaty of Alliance between the Sovereign Earth and the Union of Jovian Moons, providing for Earthly colonization and development of the said Moons, and mutual aid against Aggressor Worlds.

      A single sheet fell out of the bundle. "... have taken the precaution of sending the treaty secretly in a ship of colonists, in care of the captain who knows nothing of its nature. It has been rumored that our mutual enemy, the Martio-Venusian Alliance, may try to intercept it, possibly with the aid of hired pirates. This would, as you know, mean war. It is my prayer that the treaty will

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