Raiders From the Rings Read online

  As a result, it was a small war instead of a large one. The planet Earth was injured, but the race was not destroyed. Yet the intervention of the Searchers had proven a two-edged sword which even they could not control, and out of the Great War a new division had grown up to split men into warring factions. Hatred and spite and ignorance still outweighed maturity in the minds of men. The forces in space were driven into exile there by their planet-bound brothers. Instead of healing the breach, time opened it wider as the necessities of survival threw fuel on the fire that raged between Earthmen and Spacers.

  Until now, once again, a war of obliteration had begun, and the Searchers knew that somehow, once again, they were forced to intervene.

  • • •

  At first it semed like a fairy story, a fantastic tale without any real connection with the lives of Spacers and Earthmen and no relation to the war that was now being fought. But now, as the mauki’s voice faded into silence and Ben looked across at Tom Barron’s sober face, he knew that they had been hearing no fantasy. They had been hearing plain history, a history none of them had ever heard before, but history nonetheless.

  And now bits and pieces of the story began to fit together with other things Ben had known but had never understood. After that first intervention, with its tragic aftermath of Spacer exile, the Searchers had withdrawn, realizing that no solution had been found after all. But they maintained contact from time to time with certain representatives of the Spacer clan. Great care was taken to select men with more than usual maturity for contact, in hopes that through their leadership some way to repair the rift with Earthmen might be found.

  Ivan Trefon had been one of their contacts. His father before him had been entrusted with one of the belts of power, to enable him to contact the Searchers should contact be necessary, and to allow the Searchers to contact him. And now Ben began to understand the real work his father had been doing, as a leader of the Spacers and as a member of the Council. Guided and directed by the Searchers, Ivan Trefon had spent his life working to bring peace between Earthmen and Spacers. Somehow he too had captured the vision the Searchers had brought with them: a vision of the enormous power for good that lay dormant in human intelligence if only the maturity could be found to control it. Ivan Trefon’s dedication had been fierce and unceasing, yet before his eyes he had seen the clouds of obliterative war gather, goaded on by hate and fear and ignorance.

  It was no wonder, Ben thought, that his father had appeared so defeated and weary at the time of Ben’s last visit to the house on Mars.

  But this time the Searchers themselves were helpless, for all their power. The Great War had appeared a disastrous accident, permitted to occur only through ignorance on the part of men, and the Searchers had decided against their better judgment to intervene to stop it. But now the same pattern seemed about to be repeated; nothing had been learned the first time, and these men of Earth had come no closer to the end of childishness than before. The Searchers now faced the bitter fact that these children could not be forced into maturity. If they were to overcome their flaw, it must be done under their own power. Again and again the Searchers had met to consider new intervention, and again and again the same answer had been reached. Men could leave childishness behind; the Spacer leaders had proven that in refusing to allow the Great War to obliterate the race. And if men could grow to maturity and would not, further intervention would be useless. If Earthmen and Spacers now were bent upon destruction, it was within their power; this time men themselves must make the choice.

  Ben Trefon’s eyes caught the misty blue eyes of his host. “You mean that you refuse to intervene this time,” he said.

  “We have done all that we can,” the Searcher’s voice said in Ben’s ear.

  “But how could this war threaten the entire race?” Ben said. “Spacers might be wiped out, yes, but Earth itself would remain.”

  “If that were true, we would never have drawn you into contact,” the Searcher said. “But your own Spacer fleet command has not been idle. Asteroid Central is under siege, but Spacer ships unable to return there have been massing around Outpost 3 for days, resisting every Earth attempt to disband them. That Spacer fleet has warheads sufficient to reduce Earth to a cinder, should they be launched effectively at close range. And certain of the fleet leaders have prepared a counterattack.” The little creature eyed Ben Trefon sadly. “Your people have never before been vindictive,” he said. “But after the desolation of Mars by Earth ships, there is a spirit of revenge abroad among Spacers. If so much as a single shell from an Earth ship should penetrate the Maze and strike Asteroid Central, a fleet of Spacer ships will depart instantly from Outpost 3, to strike a devastating counter-blow at Earth herself. Spurred by vengeance, there will be no stopping that fleet if it leaves. And our calculations indicate that no living thing will be left on Earth should your warheads be released.”

  There was a long silence. Then Joyce Barron turned to the tiny creature across the room. “This is true, what you say?”

  “We have vision-proof ships observing every sector in the Rings. I am speaking the truth.”

  “But not the whole truth,” Joyce said. “You claim that you will not intervene, and yet right now in this room you are intervening by drawing us into contact. Is that not true?”

  Their host hesitated a fraction of a second. “Your reasoning is sound, of course. We have already intervened, to this extent. But a different kind of intervention than before.”

  “Then why did you bring us here?” the girl cried. “You must have had a reason. Why us? Why not other Earthmen and other Spacers?”

  “Because we are still hoping that this disaster may be stopped,” the Searcher said, “and already you — the three of you — have taken the first critical step to stop it.”

  They stared at the tiny elfin creature, and then at each other as the Searcher continued.

  “You may be the only three humans alive who can succeed where we have failed.”

  • • •

  Hours later, after they had been escorted out of the Searchers’ ship, back through the cleft in the rock and into Ben Trefon’s little S-80, the three friends still were not certain that they had fully understood the responsibility that had suddenly fallen on their shoulders. Their memory of the encounter with the Searchers already had taken on a dreamlike quality, and as they sat and talked through the long hours, neither Ben nor the Barrons could be entirely certain that the encounter had not been a strange kind of delusion that they had shared together.

  The Searchers were gone. Their escort had turned away from them at the entrance hatch to the S-80, and then vanished as though a light had been switched out. The tools Ben and Tom had left out were still where they had dropped them when they first became alarmed about Joyce’s disappearance, and everything since seemed slightly blurry in their memories.

  And yet they all remembered quite clearly the haunting strains of the mauki chant and the strange story it had told, preserved for them on the ancient tape.

  “I just don’t understand,” Joyce said when they were back in the ship with the hatch closed behind them. “You and Tom had listened to that tape before, and couldn’t understand it. How did we understand it in there?”

  “It was being translated for us,” Ben said. “There’s no other explanation. We were hearing it through the Searchers’ ears. And yet we weren’t reading their minds. I’m sure that the tape was necessary for us to understand at all.”

  Tom stuck his hands in his pockets. “Remember what he said before he started playing it — that hearing it would demonstrate something to us. Maybe he was trying to show us what two intelligent races in co-operation could do that neither could do alone.”

  Ben nodded. “I thought of that. There never has been any real success in our scientists’ attempts to study extrasensory perception. It has always seemed as if men have had half a talent, and were missing the other half, somehow. And if another race of creatures somew
here had the other half — ” He paused, shaking his head. “It could mean almost anything. Our bodies are limited by the temperatures and environments we can survive, but our minds aren’t. Even the speed-of-light barrier to star travel might fall away, if another intelligent race could help us away from our bodily limitations. Maybe our intelligence, here in our solar system, is just a tiny piece in a huge puzzle.”

  “But what did the Searcher mean about stopping the war?” Joyce said. “He made it seem that we were the only ones who could hope to do anything.”

  “Don’t you see?” Tom said excitedly. “Where else have Earthmen and Spacers joined hands and learned the truth about each other? Nowhere else. Yet you and I and Ben know that this war is pointless folly. There isn’t a single valid reason for it, if each side knew the truth about the other. And that was what the Searchers were trying to tell us, that somehow we have to tell both sides the truth and make them believe it just as we do.”

  “It sounds good,” Ben said, “but how? I don’t have any power among my people, even if I could get to Asteroid Central, and that would mean running the Maze right under the nose of five hundred Earth ships. And as for you convincing your people — oh, it’s hopeless. Who would believe us? How could we tell them a story like this and get anybody even to listen?”

  “You already know the answer to that,” Joyce Barron said quietly. “We can get people to listen just the way the Searchers got us to listen.”

  Ben frowned. “I don’t follow you.”

  “There was a ship that came back from a reprisal raid, years ago,” Joyce said. “An Earth ship, one of the ‘pirates’ you spoke of. They kidnaped a mauki and her five-year-old boy, and then destroyed the boy and tried to get the mauki back home. It didn’t work; they fell into a trap, and a Spacer ship boarded them and recaptured the mauki. But the reason they were trapped was because the mauki was singing.”

  Ben looked skeptical. “How could that have been a trap?”

  “You’re used to mauki chants. You’ve heard them all your life, and still you stop and listen, don’t you?”

  “Well, I suppose I do.”

  “Yes. And when that woman in that ship began to sing, every crewman stopped what he was doing to listen.”

  They stared at her in silence. Then Ben said, “She’s got it, Tom. She’s got the answer. If we can find a way to put it to work in time.”

  9

  THE MAZE

  BIT BY BIT, then, a plan evolved from their council of war. It was a slender thread to hang upon, but at least it was a beginning. Time after time Ben shook his head hopelessly and they nearly discarded the whole idea; it was almost suicidally risky, and even should the first steps succeed, there was no real hope that it would work when the chips were really down. It would be a desperation move, and there would be no turning back once they had started.

  But time after time they came back to face the plain facts: feeble as it might be, it was the only conceivable plan that could work. Already things had moved too far and too fast. There would be no time for negotiating, no time to try a little at a time to get across to people on Earth and in space the awful implications of this war. It had to be done swiftly and surely, in terms that nobody could possibly misunderstand.

  “We’ll only have one chance,” Tom said gloomily, looking up at Ben and his sister. “We’ve got to be certain it’s worth the risk.”

  Ben nodded. “It’s worth it. My father never stopped to worry about the risk. That was why he had a belt to wear.”

  “Then let’s get moving. There isn’t time to waste.”

  The first impediment was staring them in the face already. The ship was still disabled. With renewed energy Tom and Ben tackled the repair work again, and now Joyce worked with them, driven by the same sense of urgency the others felt. During rest periods they talked, filling in details of the plan as best they could. It seemed incredible to them now that they had once mistrusted each other; now they were haunted by only one fear: that disaster might strike before they could get moving, that they might put their plan into action only to discover that they were too late.

  But on the third day after their encounter with the Searchers, news came from an unexpected direction. The ship’s radar picked up a signal, revealed a small ship moving at a tangent in toward the asteroid, and Ben’s tentative recognition signal brought a jubilant response. A few moments later another Spacer S-80 was landing, piloted by a tall, white-haired man who greeted Ben with a hearty embrace as soon as he saw who he was.

  It was Elmo Peterson, chief mechanic of the House of Trefon before the raid on the Earth ships.

  The reunion was a happy one, Elmo had been one of the men who had broken free from the planet, carrying a cruiser-full of refugees with him, when the raid had begun. Once they had been safely interned on one of the outposts he had picked up an S-80, and now was cruising the Rings for stragglers, directing them on to Outpost 3 to join the fleet that was gathering there.

  “But what about Asteroid Central?” Ben wanted to know.

  “It’s touch-and-go,” the white-haired Spacer said. “The snakes can’t break through the Maze, but they have ships in there so thick a frontal assault against them wouldn’t stand a chance. Nobody would have believed they could have manned such a fleet, but they have. We’ve lost three squadrons that have hit them trying to break the siege. Another attempt would just be suicide. So we’re working out an alternative.”

  “You mean an assault on Earth itself,” Ben said.

  The big man gave Ben a sharp look. “As a matter of fact, that’s the plan. Get them at the roots. They have everything they own tied up in this armada out here, with only the shakiest defenses back home. If they can’t break the Maze, they can still starve us out of Central sooner or later. So while they’re sitting there waiting for something to happen, we plan to move in on their home ground.”

  Ben nodded. “And what do you plan to do when you get there?”

  “Play the game by their rules,” Peterson said. “You saw what they did to Mars. Well, Mars is going to look like paradise when we get through with the planet Earth. Every factory, every city, every storage dump, every road junction — they don’t realize how many ships we will have outside Central when all the stragglers are in. We’re still rounding up ships heading in from Ganymede and Europa and Titan. When we move those ships in against Earth, our friends out here aren’t going to have any place to go home to.” The big Spacer eyed the Barrons with distaste, then looked back at Ben. “We’ll want you and your ship with us, naturally. But we don’t have any use for this pair.”

  Ben hesitated. It was an unexpected complication, and a tough one to get around. “What does the command on Central have to say about this?” he asked cautiously.

  Elmo Peterson spread his hands. “They don’t know about it. The snakes have cut off communication completely; we haven’t gotten a message through for days.”

  “And who’s commanding your fleet?”

  “Tommy Whisk.”

  “You mean he’s going along with this plan?” Ben asked. astonished.

  “Not because he likes it, you can bet on that,” Elmo said. “You know Tommy Whisk. But now even he thinks it has to be done. We’ve got to break this siege somehow.”

  Ben nodded, thinking furiously. He had known Tommy Whisk from years before, when he had been one of Ivan Trefon’s closest friends on the Spacer Council. It was incredible that the elderly Navajo would be a party to a mass attack on Earth unless he truly believed it was a last desperate hope to break the siege. On the Spacer birth rolls Thomas Many-whisker was listed as one of a long line of wise Spacer leaders, and he was known to retain much of the ancient stolidity, patience, and perseverance that had always been so characteristic of his people.

  And if Tommy Whisk were in command of the outlying Spacer fleet, he would welcome any approach to a peaceful end of the war. Ben struck his palm with his fist. “Look,” he said to Elmo. “The Council on Asteroid Central would
want to know before any raiding fleet goes off half-cocked.”

  “Yes, if they could be told. But how? Tommy has tried every way imaginable to get word through. There just isn’t time left to try any more.”

  “But suppose there was a way,” Ben said.

  “Tommy would surely want to know it.”

  “All right,” Ben said. “Help me get this crate spaceworthy again, and I’ll get word to Asteroid Central.”

  Elmo blinked at him. “By magic, maybe?”

  “Not quite. I’ll run the blockade.”

  “That’s no good. It’s been tried.”

  “I’ve got a way to make it work. And I won’t bring any Earth ship through with me, either. Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll have word back to you from the Council.”

  The big Spacer shook his head. “Ben, you’re talking about a suicide run. You wouldn’t stand a chance. And, anyway, Tommy’s orders were specific. I’m supposed to bring back any Spacer I run into to help build up the fleet.”

  “I think this is more important,” Ben said. “I think Tommy would agree.” He hesitated a minute, then took the plunge. “Go back and give him a message from me. Tell him I have my father’s belt. I think he’ll understand. Tell him to give me twenty-four hours. If he hasn’t had word direct from Asteroid Central by then, tell him to go ahead. Because if I can’t do it in twenty-four hours, he’ll know it can’t be done.”