Raiders From the Rings Read online

  He had listened for several minutes before he realized that he was not understanding the words.

  There was no question that words were being sung. They were clear and distinct in every syllable, and they seemed to match perfectly the eerie minors and halftones of the lament. For a moment Ben thought his ears were playing tricks on him, because the words were almost familiar, almost understandable — but not quite. He had the feeling that if only he could listen more intently he might be able to distinguish them, but even as he listened he realized that this was not so. Nor was he the only one — he saw the look of wonder and confusion on Tom’s face and knew the Earthman could not distinguish the words either.

  A long while later the singing faded into silence, and the two stood staring at each other. Without a word Ben rewound the tape and played it again. Still the words remained obscure.

  “I don’t understand it,” Tom Barron said finally, breaking the silence.

  “Neither do I,” Ben said.

  “But what language is it?”

  “I never heard it before in my life. But this is one of the keys my father spoke of.”

  “But what good is it? What does it mean, and why is it so important for you to guard it?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said thoughtfully. “At least, not now.” He took the tape out of the player, wrapped it carefully in the pouch and slipped it into his pocket. “If the tape and the belt are keys my father was keeping, what does that suggest to you?”

  “That there’s a lock somewhere that they will open,” Tom Barron said.

  “Yes,” Ben Trefon said softly. He stood silent for a moment, still hearing the mauki chant ringing in his ears. Then he shook his head and started for the door. “Yes,” he said again. “For once I think you are one hundred per cent right.”

  5

  THE PHANTOM SHIP

  IT WAS ALMOST dark when Ben Trefon and Tom Barron returned to the little scout ship. As the sun sank below the ridge of hills on the horizon the sky had turned a glorious purple; now it was fading to velvet black, pierced by a myriad of stars. Already the cold night wind was boring down from the north as the temperature of the thin Martian atmosphere plummeted, and already the first sprinkling of red dust and sand whirled in eddies around the ruins of the once great house as the desert moved in to reclaim its own.

  Joyce had food prepared for them, and Ben Trefon and his two prisoners ate in gloomy silence. None of them had any appetite. Ben sat apart from the Barrons, scaring through the view screen at the darkening landscape.

  When it was too dark to see any more, he turned away. “So that’s the end of it,” he said with an edge of bitterness in his voice. “For three hundred years that house has stood there. It was built the hard way, with muscle and sweat. None of your great building machines to help. The foundations were chiseled and blasted out of bedrock, and the stone for the walls was carried up from the rim of the Rift and laid in the walls piece by piece. Three hundred years, and now a heap of rubble.”

  The Barrons joined him in front of the view screen. Since the visit to the vault Tom had been strangely subdued, hardly talking even to his sister, and the girl’s face was pale.

  “So that was your home,” she said finally.

  Ben nodded.

  “I didn’t believe you, at first. It just didn’t seem possible that Spacers would have homes. I always thought of them as wandering from place to place like the Arabs on our own deserts.”

  “There isn’t so much difference,” Ben Trefon said. “After all, the space between the planets is a desert, a lot more barren than any desert you’ve ever seen on Earth. And even your Arabs have oases, don’t they? Places they return to, places to stop and rest, places with water and shade and comfort.” He pointed toward the ruins of the house below. “I can remember the great gatherings we had in those halls,” he said. “Spacers from all over the solar system would stop here, and they would always be welcome. The women were always singing here, and the children had plenty of room to run.” Ben smiled. “I can remember when I was very small, maybe five or six, I found one of the old Martian tunnels, down there in the Rift. It must have run for miles back into these hills. I searched and searched, because I’d heard stories of underground chambers filled with diamonds and guarded by dragons. Of course, those were only stories — the chambers were used as water reservoirs to provide moisture for the crops when the runoff was over, back when the Martians were here. They must have been a brave people, but bravery wasn’t enough. They finally died. And now we’re gone, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Joyce Barron said softly.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ve lost your home. I — I’m not sure our pilots knew what they were destroying.”

  “But why should you be sorry?” Ben said. “You should be proud. This must have been their first objective, and your ships did a fine job on it. It looks to me like they made a clean sweep, blotted out everything they could see.”

  “It just doesn’t seem right,” Joyce said.

  “Why not? This is your war. Why be sorry when you win the first battle hands down?”

  “But your people forced the war,” the girl said.

  “How?” Ben Trefon said bitterly. “How did we force it? We tried and tried to make peace with you, but you wouldn’t listen. Can you blame us for trying to stay alive? Did you ever see us killing and maiming and pounding cities to rubble on any of our raids? We could have, easily enough, but we never did.”

  “You hadn’t done that yet,” Tom Barron broke in. “But we knew it was coming sooner or later. That was obvious to everybody. We knew it was just a matter of time, until you had your war machines finished and your army of monsters trained and ready to invade us. What else could we do but fight back, when we knew that was coming?”

  “What are you talking about?” Ben said.

  “The Spacer invasion, of course. You didn’t really think that we would stand by and wait for you to unleash your monster hordes against us, to slaughter us or turn us into slaves? Do you really blame us for turning and fighting?”

  Ben Trefon stared at the sandy-haired youth. There was no mistaking the utter sincerity in his voice, but the words made no sense. “Monster hordes? Invasion? What are you saying?”

  Tom Barron shook his head angrily. “Look, can’t we stop pretending now? We know what you people have been doing all these years. We know what you’ve been planning, we’ve known it for decades. So why try to pretend it isn’t true now? We’re your prisoners, we can’t do anything, but at least we can be honest.”

  “But I’m not pretending,” Ben exploded. “I don’t even understand what you’re saying.”

  “Are you going to pretend that you haven’t been raiding us for centuries?”

  “Well, of course we’ve been raiding you.”

  “And stealing our women?”

  “That’s true, too,” Ben said.

  “You bet it’s true. Spacers have kidnaped women on every raid they’ve ever made. Thousands and thousands of girls, and not one of them ever came back.”

  Ben Trefon scratched his jaw. “What’s that got to do with monsters?”

  Tom snorted in disgust. “We may not know much about space navigation, but we aren’t stupid. We’ve had enough radiation accidents and nuclear wars to know about the mutants that result, and we know about the radiation in space. You’ve got to be using Earth women for something, and we can put two and two together.”

  Ben stared at him, wondering if he had heard right. His first impulse was to laugh, but the desperate sincerity in Tom’s voice stopped him. He isn’t making this up as he goes along, Ben thought. He actually believes what he’s saying. Suddenly a dozen puzzling little things began to make sense: Tom Barron’s desperate move to try to prevent his sister’s kidnaping, his obvious suspicion of Ben, his questions about laboratories on Mars and his assumption that Ben would kill him when he was first captured — suddenly it began to make a horrible kind of sense.
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  “Wait a minute,” Ben Trefon said. “Wait a minute now. Tell me again so I’m sure I’ve got this straight. What do you think we are?”

  “You mean you yourself?”

  Ben shook his head. “I mean Spacers in general.”

  “We know what you are,” Tom Barron said.

  “Do you think we’re human?”

  Tom hesitated. “Human, yes. But changed. Without any atmosphere to protect you, you get hard doses of cosmic radiation, and that makes changes. Some of the Earthmen who went into space and came home again were changed, and had monsters for children.”

  “What kind of monsters?” Ben broke in.

  “Creatures with two heads, creatures that could hypnotize just by looking at you, creatures that could read minds, I don’t know what else. The government never did publish deatils.”

  “And you thought I was a monster in disguise,” Ben said. “That was why you wanted to feel my hands and face.”

  “I thought it was possible,” Tom said stiffly. “Hypnosis can blind people and make them see things that aren’t really there.”

  Ben nodded grimly. It fit, every bit of it. A simple truth, but completely misinterpreted, twisted and distorted by the telling and retelling until it was turned into utter falsehood. “And these laboratories,” Ben went on. “Tell me about them. Where are they supposed to be, and what’s supposed to be happening in them?”

  Tom Barron shook his head. “Nobody on Earth has ever found out where they are, but we know what they are. You’d have to have breeding places for your monsters, places to experiment until you could breed the kind of invasion army you wanted.” The Earthman’s voice was bitter. “I don’t know why I’m wasting my time talking. You already know all this. But at least you seem to be halfway human — can’t you see how we feel?” He looked up at Ben. “Think about it for a minute. Think how you’d feel, living down there, if you knew that any minute, any hour, any day or year, raiders might be coming down to carry off your own sister to breed monsters with. Think how you’d feel!”

  There was a long pause as Ben looked from Tom Barron to his sister and back again. He could see the truth now, so simple that it was ridiculous, yet twisted into a horrible nightmare in his prisoners’ minds. He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t imagine how I’d feel, no matter how hard I try. You see, I’ve never had a sister, and neither has any other man born in space. Not one of us. Never.”

  • • •

  Outside the ship the wind was howling now, and they could hear the rattle of sand beating against the metal hull. There was a scraping sound as some desert creature scurried under the ship for shelter against the wind. Tom Barron’s face darkened angrily. “I’m not joking,” he said. “I’m dead serious. If you’re going to sit and laugh we can stop talking right now.”

  “If you think I’m laughing, you’re wrong,” Ben said. “All I’m saying is the truth — the only truth there is in this whole fantastic monster story of yours.”

  “Then what do you mean that you have no sisters?” Tom said.

  “I mean just exactly that.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because all the children born to Spacers are male,” Ben Trefon said. “In all our history, no Spacer has ever fathered a female child. Boys, yes. Girls, never.”

  The Barrons stared at each other. “But that doesn’t make sense!” Joyce protested. “No people could ever survive without — ” She broke off in mid-sentence, her eyes widening.

  “You’re so right,” Ben said. “Without women, we would grow old, and die, and that would be the end of us. And that is the reason why we kidnap women on every raid. There’s no other way for us to survive in space.”

  There was a long silence. Then Joyce shook her head in confusion. “I just don’t understand,” she said. “How could you possibly have boys but not girls?”

  “Because of the gene changes in Spacer men,” Ben said. “That part is true, you see. There are changes caused by cosmic radiation. The first men in space were damaged, but there were no mutants. The damage was invisible and silent: a tiny change in the cells that reproduce life, actually in just one chromosome pair in those cells, but it was a consistent change that happened every time to every man who came into space. Oh, there were a few other changes. I’m only eighteen, and I’m already graying fast; I’ll be white-haired before I’m twenty. And we seem to live a little longer than the average Earthman — our scientists say that our body cells don’t age quite as fast, which helps make up for the high death rate from accidents in space. But these are minor things. The change in the sex-determining chromosomes is something else altogether.”

  “You mean the X-Y pair?”

  Ben Trefon nodded. “In Earthmen, women carry a complete pair of chromosomes to determine the sex of the child, while men carry an incomplete pair. One of their X chromosomes is already incomplete — the Y chromosome. When a child is conceived, a combination of an X with an X becomes a female child, while an X and a Y results in a male child.”

  “Well, anybody knows that,” Joyce Barron exclaimed. “That’s simple high-school genetics.”

  “But it’s also Earth genetics,” Ben said. “In space the single X chromosome that men carry is damaged. Our scientists still don’t know how, exactly; some of the genes in the X chromosome are just put out of commission, so that the X behaves like a Y. And as long as Spacer men can provide only Y chromosomes, they can never father girls, only boys.”

  “Then you mean that all of the women who have been kidnaped from Earth have become Spacer wives?” Tom said.

  “Not all of them. No girl has ever been forced to become a mauki, and there are always a few who refuse to marry, but not very many. For most of them our life has become their life, and they are as loyal to us as any Spacer man.”

  “But where do the mutants come from?”

  “From your own imagination, nowhere else. There aren’t any mutants. Not one. Nowhere. No army of monsters in space getting ready to invade Earth.”

  Tom Barron was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “But our scientists … they actually saw mutant children of men who had been in space.”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t think they did, not really. In the days after the Great War everyone on Earth was bitter, and thousands of lies were told, even by scientists. There must have been some Earthmen who believed that what the Spacers had done was good, and wanted to let them come home. They had to be convinced that exile was the only fate the conspirators deserved. And if people listen to a lie long enough, they come to believe it. Even intelligent, well-trained scientists can have blind spots, as far as the truth is concerned.”

  Joyce Barron stood up and made some coffee in the galley. The three sat drinking it in silence Presently the girl said, “If what you are saying is true, you had to kidnap women from Earth. It wasn’t a matter of choice, but sheer necessity.”

  “That’s right,” Ben Trefon said. “We have always held to a rigid quota — only enough women to marry Spacer men as they reached maturity.”

  “And there never has been an invasion of Earth planned? There’s nothing for Earth people to be afraid of?”

  “There never has been. There isn’t.”

  “But that would mean that this war, right now, is pointless,” Joyce said.

  “Pointless and foolish. Based on false premises, on nothing more than ignorance and superstition,” Ben said.

  “I wish we could believe you,” Tom said. “If this is true, it would mean that Joyce has nothing worse to fear than becoming a Spacer’s wife.”

  “That’s right,” Ben replied. “But it means something else, something that you haven’t thought of. You couldn’t have thought of it when you boarded the ship, and by now the damage is done.”

  Tom looked startled. “Damage?”

  “If you want to call it that. At least, you’ve crossed a line
since you came aboard. We’ve been in space a little too long for you to turn back. Whether you like it or not, you’re a Spacer now, just like me.”

  • • •

  It was not yet dawn when Ben Trefon lifted the little S-80 up into the Martian sky and turned its nose southeast into the sunrise. Below them the desert surface soon became distinct, and Ben began moving the ship close to the surface in a wide zig-zagging path, searching mile upon mile of the surface as it became visible.

  “If we move East, we can take advantage of the most sunlight,” he said to Tom, who was watching the view screen with him while Joyce prepared the morning meal. “By the time we reach the nightline again, we will have covered all the inhabited part of the planet. There are no houses in the polar regions, and I know the locations of most of the spacer houses and plantations in the temperate and equatorial zones. This way we can find out very quickly what, if anything, is left.”

  There had been little sleep for any of them that night. For hours through the Martian night they had talked, without embarrassment, without holding back anything. Ben had told them of the Spacers’ life, of the great Spacer stronghold at Asteroid Central where the major schools, drydocks, laboratories and factories were to be found, of the nomadic life the Spacers led, of their homes scattered across the solar system, and of the things that they had hoped and dreamed of. And Joyce and Tom had told Ben of their life on Earth’s crowded surface, as citizens born and raised on the mother planet.

  There had been much to talk about, and it had been a strange conversation, sometimes hot with anger, sometimes confusing, sometimes dazzlingly revealing as they searched for some sort of common ground for understanding. First they needed to find things that they could agree upon. Then they searched out their differing beliefs about each other, the falsehoods and superstitions that had made up the greatest bulk of the things that they “knew” about each other.

  It was a frightening and eye-opening conversation for all concerned. Many of the things that were “common knowledge” on Earth about Spacers and their life made Ben’s skin crawl, yet he found that there were many things that Spacers “knew” about Earthmen that seemed to fill the Barrons with horror and amazement as well. Ben discovered that his own mental picture of Earth as a vast military garrison-state, with its powerful government police, its injustice, its cruelty and its dictatorial tyranny simply did not jibe with the picture Tom and Joyce drew of their world: a gathering of free nations united in terror and desperation against a frightful threat from the skies, yet a world in which the rights of individuals were jealously guarded, a world in which the everyday life of most of the people was happy, with the same breadth of human emotions and the same concern for human dignity that had always marked the Spacer culture.