Front matter (continued 2)

She seemed in a great hurry to get away from that bulkhead. Price said, "What's the matter, aren't they human, or something?"

She gave him a look. "You still think it's all a great joke."

"I didn't say that."

"You mean it, though. You still believe the Ei are something we made up to shift the blame from ourselves. Probably you believe we are staging this whole matter to impress you and your chief, so that you will go back and assure your tribesmen it is all true."

This was so uncomfortably close to what Price was thinking that he said involuntarily, "You're entirely too smart for such a pretty girl."

"Sometimes I think," she said between her teeth, "that there is no hope for you people, no hope at all."

Price nodded toward the bulkhead. "The solution is simple enough, isn't it? Let me see them. Then I'll have to believe you."

"Simple enough," said Linna, echoing his words. "Do you think you could stand against them? We have fought them for generations, we have knowledge and experience, and even for us, with all our safe-guards, it is difficult. Only a few, like Arrin, would attempt it, and I saw him this morning. He looks like a ghost."

"And that's why you've never let any Earthmen see an Ei—because they're too dangerous."

"No. It's more simple than that. We have had none to show. These are the first Ei we have captured for a century, at least in this sector of the galaxy. I have never seen one, either. And I don't want to."

She strode off, away from the iron wall across the corridor. Price shrugged and followed her.

"Where are my friends?"

"They're here," she said, indicating the row of doors they were passing. "Quite safe—or as safe as any of us. They'll remain here until—" She hesitated, and Price realized for the first time that she was deeply, genuinely afraid. "Until we see what happens," she finished.

"After that, what?"

"If they're still alive, and we're still alive, and there's still a world, they'll go free, and perhaps they'll be wiser men than they are now."

She would not say any more.

The lift swept them up to the roof. It was late afternoon, intensely hot, with storm-clouds banking in the west. The roof area seemed almost deserted, and only one flier was visible. Linna motioned him into it and climbed in herself. She spoke to the pilot, and he took off immediately. There was no co-pilot. Only Price, and Linna, and one man. Price felt a secret surge of assurance, of power, like when you're riding a streak of luck and the dice can't fall any way but right. He sat quietly, looking out the cabin port.

He saw almost at once that the starships were gone. The whole Vurna fleet must have taken off, shaking the Citadel with their leaving. Probably most of the men had gone with it. The deserted appearance of the Citadel, the lack of guards, the lack of a co-pilot, all pointed to a skeleton force. If we're still alive, and there's still a world, Linna had said. Battle, somewhere out in the far reaches of space? Perhaps. Or maneuvers, or a show of force connected with some galactic game he would probably never know about. It was not really important. What was important was the fact that for the present the defenses of the Citadel were weaker, much weaker.

He sat looking out the port and covertly watching the pilot's hands on the controls. Linna had some kind of a side-arm strapped around her slender waist. Probably a shocker. The pilot had one, too. He considered the problem, and the woods and prairies rolled back underneath.

Linna spoke suddenly, out of a long and somber silence.

"This mission is more important than ever now, Price, or I wouldn't have been allowed to divert even one man from our defences. I beg you, for the sake of your own people, to play fair with me. If there's either help or hindrance in our rear, we must know it. The Ei—"

Now said something in Price's mind. He did not stop to question it. When you're riding a hot streak, let it ride. Never stop to question.

He rose and hit Linna on the point of her pretty chin.

CHAPTER VIII

She dropped in her seat without a sound. Price clawed for the weapon she had at her waist. But the abrupt cessation of her voice had alarmed the pilot. He turned around and then shouted something imperative in Vurna, his hand going swiftly to his own belt.

Price beat him by a fractional second. His hand pressed the trigger and the unfamiliar weapon crackled in his hand, and the pilot fell over, letting his own shocker go skittering to the deck. The aerodyne had not swerved from its steady westward flight. He had been sure, from what he'd seen of its automatic stability, that it wouldn't.

Price straightened up, breathing heavily with excitement. So far, so good.

He tied Linna's hands and feet securely with her own belt and his handkerchief, and then attended to the pilot. Linna was already beginning to stir, and he propped her up as comfortably as possible, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. He smiled suddenly and said, "I'm sorry. I really am. If there had been any other way, I wouldn't have done it."

He kissed her on the mouth, rather swiftly because he did not have much time, but with a full measure of feeling even so. She sighed, and he thought her lips answered his, but he doubted if that would be so when she came to.

He slipped into the pilot's chair and studied the controls, erasing every other thought from his mind as he remembered what he had learned from watching. The aerodyne was humming straight and steadily on. He had plenty of altitude.

He began to experiment, gingerly, and by the time he was across the river he was satisfied that he could control the craft well enough to get by. It was considerably simpler than learning to drive a car in the old days, and he had a lifetime of flying behind him to give him air-sense. The craft itself was a thing of beauty, topping anything he had ever flown. He angled southward and westward, away from the river, traveling like a bullet.

Linna spoke from behind him. Her voice was very cold and very hard, the voice of a stranger.

"Arrin told me I should have you bound. I left you free on my own responsibility."

Price felt bad about that, and he said so. "Try to look at it from my side, Linna. I have to do what I can for my own people. If you were in my shoes—"

"Go ahead," said Linna. "Talk is obviously useless. I shan't waste any more of it, except to tell you—"

She told him, vividly, what kind of a fool he was, and what she hoped would happen to him before he led all of his fellow-fools to destruction. Then she shut up and would not speak again, no matter how he tried to soften her rage.

The dark green forest, rough-textured like a wool rug, rolled back and away around him, and the sun was swallowed up in clouds. He strained his eyes for the clearing that would mark the Capitol of the Missouris. He was flying by dead reckoning. He had no compass bearing to begin with, and the Vurna instruments were useless to him. The pilot was beginning to come round, but Price knew better than to ask him for instructions.

It was a red light of fires burning on the edge of night that guided him down at last toward the timber-built Capitol. And now at last Linna spoke, because the pilot, looking out, began to yell frantically in Vurna. She translated.

"He says do not cut the down-blast so sharply, or you will crash. That lever—there, under your left hand—ease it back."

Price eased it. He settled down to a rough and ragged landing, just about where the Vurna craft had settled before, when he had been Sawyer's prisoner. Men came out of the houses and along the streets, to stand as they had stood then, to greet their hated over-lords with silence and contempt.

Price jumped out of the craft and approached the fires.

There was a startled cry, and then his name echoed back and forth, and the men closed around him. They were inclined to be hostile, demanding to know where Sawyer was, and what had happened, and how he came to be piloting a Vurna flier. Price shouted for quiet.

"Sawyer's alive. He's a prisoner in the Citadel. So are Burr and Twist. You want to rescue them?"

That startled them. "Listen," Price started, and then he saw Oakes pushing toward him with a small determined-looking group of men.

"Stand back," Oakes demanded. "Stand back, there. This man is a traitor. He betrayed the council, he betrayed Sawyer. If you listen to him, he'll betray you." He turned to Price. "You get back to your Vurna masters. Tell them we're not going to—"

"Oh, shut up," said Price impatiently. "You're not chief here, and you never will be, no matter if you do leave Sawyer to rot in the Citadel." He took the shocker from his belt where he had thrust it. "I stole that flier from the Vurna, and I stole this, too. I'll use it on you if I have to."

Oakes looked ugly, but he hesitated, and Price said, "Some of you, if you want proof of what I say, go look in the flier. Go on."

Several men detached themselves from the crowd and went off at a trot toward the flier. Presently they began to whoop and halloo. They came back carrying the pilot and Linna, who looked at Price with the utmost hatred.

"It looks like a trick to me," said Oakes. "They could have been bound on purpose."

Price said, "Does it look like a trick that every starship of the Citadel fleet took off last night? You must have heard or seen them, even at this distance."

"Yes," said a lean farmer, "streaks of fire in the sky before dawn. I was milking."

Others had seen them, too. And now a note of excitement crept into their voices.

"What's it mean? What's happened there? What are you after?"

"The Citadel is stripped," he said. "And I know where the fire-control is that commands the Belt. With this flier I can land right on the Citadel without being challenged. I can take some of you with me, and we can knock out those weapons. You can walk right in, with no more opposition than brave men ought to be able to handle. You—"

"Price," said Linna, in a voice of absolute horror, "you don't know what you're doing. The fleet has gone out to fight the Ei. Arrin forced some information out of the captives—the Ei fleet is somewhere outside this solar system, and our fleet's out to intercept it."

The terror in her voice increased. "But if the Ei forces evade our fleet and strike directly at our base here—don't you see, only our great missile-batteries around the Citadel can defend Earth! If you storm the Citadel, there'll be no defenses at all."

He said, "Linna, I know you believe in the Ei. Probably most of your people do. But you've never seen one, in a century no one on Earth has seen one. They're a myth, a political stratagem, that's all."

She shook her head, groping desperately for words. "Don't follow him!" she cried out to the men. "Don't listen to him. We're fighting for your lives and safety too. Don't be so mad as to stab us in the back now!"

They looked at her in the firelight, the flint-faced men who were weary of Star Lords. Then, without paying Oakes any attention at all, they looked at Price.

"He's right," drawled one of them. "The star-spawn have given us the lie about the Ei too long. Ain't a kid on Earth believes it."

Linna's head bent hopelessly forward, and she turned away. She still believes it, every word, thought Price. Poor Linna. He would have given anything to comfort her.

But there was no time for comfort, no time for anything but planning. He said,

"You've heard, you know this chance may never come again—are you with me?" And they answered, Yes!

"All right," said Price. "All right, we've got to have a council, to make plans, and then we'll have to move fast to strike before the fleet comes back. Who are your leaders after Sawyer?"

Five or six men came forward, district sub-chiefs. One of them nodded his head toward the two Vurna.

"What'll we do with them?"

"Treat them well," said Price sternly. "They're your assurance of Sawyer's life." He didn't know whether they were or not, but he didn't want Linna to suffer even discomfort because of him. He added, "Make sure they don't talk to anyone, though. And remember, there was a traitor at the big council. You'd better all keep a look-out, for signals and communication-devices. And now let's talk."

The council lasted far into the night. Price's biggest problem was to persuade the tribesmen not to bring their guns.

"The metal-detector units on the flying-eyes would spot you before you'd gone ten miles into the Belt, and I can't take the control-room that far ahead. It couldn't possibly be held that long, and no matter how we might smash the weapon-controls they'd have time to patch them up and use them on you. You'll have to infiltrate the Belt on all sides, keeping under cover, and get within striking distance before I land on the Citadel. Besides, against the Vurna shockers, your guns aren't much more use than your hunting bolos. We'll try and give you better weapons, once we're inside."

"Of course," said one leathery-faced sub-chief, "when you've got us and the Ohios and Kentucky's and the rest all in the Belt, it would be a mighty easy thing for you to give them word at the Citadel, and have us all wiped out at once, like that."

Price said harshly, "It's up to you, whether you want to take the gamble or not. If I'm on the level, you can take the Citadel and get the Star Lords off your back. If I'm not, you're dead. But you won't get a chance like this again. Make up your minds."

They made them up.

"How shall word be sent in time to the other tribes? It'd take days for a man on horseback to get around to the east and north."

"I'll take the word," said Price. "In the flier. By sundown tomorrow, there'll be men from every tribe ready to move into the Belt. And pick me half a dozen seasoned men to go along, under a sub-chief. Half a dozen men you can trust for the fate of the whole attack."

The leathery old chief, whose name was Sweetbriar, said quietly, "I'll pick you six, and I'll go along."

His gaze locked with Price's, and Price smiled.

"I'll give you the shocker," he said. "You can use it any time you see fit. And that should convince the other tribes they can count on me."

"Should," said Sweetbriar, nodding. "Now we'd better reckon up our distance. As I see it, this'll work out something like a big beat, and if we don't all get there together, we might better have stayed home."

They settled all the details, the forced marches by night, the meager weight of food each man was to carry. Price managed to get an hour's sleep before he took off in the pre-dawn gloom to rouse the other tribes. When he slept he dreamed of an iron mountain, impregnable, crowned with destruction, watching incessantly with a thousand eyes. In the dream, he knew that no mere men could ever take it.

CHAPTER IX

The aerodyne flew high in the black night, toward the Citadel. Above there were clear stars. Below there were heavy clouds laced with lightning, hiding the earth. Hiding the Belt, and the lines of men who moved in it, among the dark trees, in the wind and the rain.

One full night had passed, and another was drawing to its close. Before the sun went down again it would be all over, one way or the other.

Price was in that state of exaltation that comes at a certain point of prolonged tension without rest, where you move a little bit outside your body and above the ground, detached from every normal consideration, and everything seems to go with a clear headlong rush, as though a single initiating act has set an inevitable series of reactions going, and all you have to do is keep pace with them. He had not slept much, but he was not tired. The aspect of the Citadel roof, the round red circle of the lift and the controls thereof, the symbol marking the proper level, the shape and size and position of the fire-control center, burned brightly in his mind. Their set and proper sequence did not permit of any obstacles.

Sweetbriar sat beside him in the co-pilot's place. He held the shocker in his gnarly hands, and from time to time he turned it over or stroked its smooth and unfamiliar shape. So far he had not had any occasion to use it. He had stood beside Price in a dozen wooden-built towns, helping him harangue a dozen doubtful chiefs, or sub-chiefs, around the perimeter of the Belt. He had not slept much, either, but his eye was brilliant and steely as a hawk's. If the sensation of flight frightened him, he had not shown it in any way.

The six men of his picking sat quietly in the cabin. They might have been the same six men Price had first met when he landed in the Belt, woods-rangers, hunters of deer and wild cattle, all speed and muscle, born fighters. They were as lax as idle hound-dogs now, when there was nothing to be done. They, too, had mastered whatever fear they had had of flying.

The storm below was moving rapidly toward the east, over a broad front. Price could easily have outflown it, but he did not, only keeping high enough above it to get a sighting on the Citadel when it came into visual range. He was grateful for the storm. It seemed like an omen of good fortune. It would cover the advance of the tribesmen from the west, and it would cover his own landing, if he paced it properly. A thick night would make it easier to get his attacking party onto the lift, and perhaps even below, before it was realized that they were not Linna's party returning.

Poor Linna. He had seen her for just a minute before he left the Capitol of the Missouris. He had wanted to make sure she was safe and comfortable, and he had wanted to try once more to make her understand how he felt.

"I'm not your enemy, Linna," he had said. "Believe that. After this is all over—"

"If you take the Citadel," she had answered, "it won't matter who is anybody's enemy. You and I will both be victims of the Ei. If you don't take it—you'll be dead, and so will your crazy army, and how long will they let me live after that? Either way, both of us lose."

And she had sounded so quietly despairing, that he had almost lost heart.

But not quite.

Starshine and the lower flarings of lightning showed him a gleam of dark metal far down in the night. He spoke to Sweetbriar and pointed. The old man peered, squinting, and the six hunters roused themselves and peered also.

"Don't look like much from here," one of them said.

Price did not dispute him. Perhaps it was just as well for his army of seven not to have too clear a look at the fortress they were planning to invade.

He hung for a little time in the high quiet air, watching the storm front roll like a wave. When it had almost reached the distant gleam of metal he said sharply,

"All right, now!"

And he dropped the aerodyne whistling down the sky.

The wild air-currents caught him, boiling ahead of the storm and over it. For one horrible moment he thought he had lost control of the aerodyne. It pitched and skittered and tossed, throwing him against his seat-belt until his ribs cracked and his flesh felt as though it was cut through. The tribesmen were now frankly and vocally terrified. Then the built-in stabilizers and Price's own flier's brain took hold again, and the whirling-leaf motion steadied to a rough and racking but controlled descent.

He could not see anything now but the solid blackness of the storm-clouds, until the lightning flared and lit the rain-swept barren below with a vivid light, brief but enough to guide him. He had judged carefully, and he let the main wind-drift carry him until the wall of the Citadel showed up huge and startling in the glare of a striking bolt. He hung rocking over the roof until another one showed him the painted circle of the lift. Then he set the aerodyne down hard right beside it.

There was no need for any talking. The instructions had all been thoroughly discussed before. Price and the seven tribesmen were out and across the intervening few feet of roof and onto the lift and going down before the next flare of lightning broke.

The men breathed heavily, their throwing ropes in one hand, their knives in the other. Sweetbriar glanced at the shocker. Then he gave it to Price and unhooked the weighted bolo from his own belt, swinging it gently.

There had been no alarm.

Price watched the symbols gliding past on the guide-strip. When the right one showed he pushed the proper stud and waited. The lift stopped. The automatic door slid back. They moved fast, out into the corridor.

Only one man was in sight, going somewhere with a sheaf of papers in his hand. He stopped, and his eyes widened, and his mouth opened. Price fired the shocker. The man fell down and the papers scattered all over the floor. Price began to run. His own shoes made a quick sharp patting on the plastic surface. The moccasins of the hunters made no sound at all. He counted the doors, and then turned for a last glance at Sweetbriar and the men. Their eyes were very bright and the edges of their teeth showed. Sweetbriar nodded.

Price flung open the door.

And it was easy, easier than he had dreamed. The four technicians in their uniforms of dull gold turned and stood startled and staring for as long as a man might catch his breath, and that was time enough. Bolos wrapped around three of them like flying snakes and brought them down, and the fourth fell under the shock-beam.

"Shut the door," said Price, and one of the hunters shut it.

Price knocked out the other three with the shocker, and the hunters bound them. There was a rack of side-arms in one wall, with several shockers in it. Price handed them out and then turned his attention to the batteries of firing-studs. The hunters stood staring at the moving pictures of the stormy Belt reflected in the scanner screens, until Sweetbriar sent them to guard the door.

There were service-hatches below the waist-high control panels. Price got one open and studied the wiring, panting more with excitement than exertion. It was only a few minutes until the pre-arranged time of attack. But he must not trip the firing relays accidentally in trying to de-activate them. He was afraid to start pulling wires indiscriminately.

But where the individual leads ran back to join the primary cable they passed through a series of switches. It seemed logical to Price that these were safety cut-offs to be used during maintenance, and that they would cut off the nameless destructive engines on the roof.

He had nothing better to go on, and time had almost run out. He opened one of the switches, and glanced swiftly at the screens. Nothing happened. He flipped open the others fast, and ripped the wires loose from the board. Then with a metal chair he smashed the studs.

As he finished, Sweetbriar shouted suddenly. "There they come—and right on time!"

Price, sweating, looked up. Sweetbriar and the hunters were eagerly gazing at the screens.

They showed the storm-swept Belt and they showed small dark figures in it—hundreds of them—thousands—tribesmen running toward the Citadel.

An alarm-bell rang somewhere in the Citadel. Instantly other bells echoed it, a distant confusion of alarms.

"Out of here fast," Price cried. "This is the first place the Vurna will be coming. If we can get down through, we can help the others."

They ran back out of the room, back down the corridor past the unconscious man who still lay on the floor. Whatever happened now, the tribesmen pouring across the Belt were safe from the weapons on the roof.

Without warning the lift-door opened right in front of them and five green-clad Vurna came spilling out of it.

There was no chance to use shockers or bolos either—they were so close to each other that it was hands and fists. They struggled, gripping and striking at each other, their feet slipping on the smooth floor, with the clamor of bells in the background.

A new note was added to that clamor. A dim sound of yelling voices, many of them surging up from the lower part of the Citadel.

"The tribes are in!" shouted Sweetbriar. "By God, I—"

He was knocked back by a flailing green arm. His Vurna antagonist scrabbled to get his shocker out of his belt. Price desperately kicked out at his own personal foe and banged him back against the metal wall. He saw the silver head bang the wall, and the man sagged at the knees.

Price rushed and knocked up the shocker now levelled at Sweetbriar. The hunters yelped, their eyes blazing. It was their kind of a fight. They liked it. After a sullen lifetime, they were using their fists on the Star Lords and they liked that.

The surge of sound from levels underneath told of a far bigger melee down there, spreading through the Citadel. And then that sound, and the small, personal noises of their own staggering fight, were cut across by a brutal authoritative new sound.

A hooting, loud and commanding, getting louder by the second, braying like the voice of doom through the vast iron pile.

The two Vurna still left on their feet tried to turn and run down the corridor. The hunter's bolos brought them down quickly.

Sweetbriar's leathery old face was wild and startled as he got to his feet. "What the hell—"

"That's the Vurna's big battle-stations siren!" Price said. "They're a bit late with it. Come on!"

He and the hunters began to look for stairs, racing swiftly along the deserted corridors. They found some at last, and sped downward, level after level.

Bellowing, deafening in volume now, the siren kept hooting.

It could not drown out the tumultuous uproar that filled the lower levels. Price and the hunters were met suddenly by a mass of tribesmen boiling up from the ground level. They were screaming, laughing, capering in the halls, dragging with them one or two captured Vurna—triumphant victors, dancing down a hated power under their moccasined feet. Their hair and beards and their clothing were still dripping wet with rain.

They swept up Price and Sweetbriar and the six others in their advancing front, pounding their shoulders, hugging them.

"We did it! We got 'em!" they cried. "We took the Citadel!"

"Is it all over?" asked Price incredulously. "So soon?"

"That mighty caterwauling did it," said a red-bearded man. "All of a sudden they quit fighting and began to run, like it was a signal, but they couldn't get away from us. I heard they got old Arrin hisself down there, in a big room, cussing and crying fit to bust."

"Where's Sawyer?" somebody shouted, and Sweetbriar took up the cry. Price said,

"Somewhere on this level, I think. Get a Vurna that speaks English and make him show you. It'll save time."

He pushed on through them to the stairs, and fought his way down. He wanted to see Arrin. He wanted to see the pride of the Citadel humbled, broken.

Tribesmen rioted through the corridors, smashing things like happy children. They directed him to a vast sunken room that Price knew must be the very heart and soul of the Citadel, its reason for being. It was an overpowering place of screens and towering panels and complex equipment. But these screens looked far beyond Earth, showing starry spaces, burning suns and unimaginable dark abysses. From here the Vurna had watched the whole sector of outer space, and these complex controls must be the triggers of the mighty missile-batteries outside the Citadel, the weapons that could strike fast and far into the void.

Here there was a guard to keep out the roisterers. The soberer of the tribesmen had a sensible concern for the possible results of tampering with these incomprehensible but obviously mighty powers. They were afraid the whole Citadel might blow up with them in it. A few technicians were still being hustled out as Price entered.

A number of the chiefs were in here, and Arrin was with them, but he was neither cursing nor crying. He was standing between two muscular tribesmen, facing the chiefs, and his face held such an agony of despair and terror that Price was shaken by it.

"What must I do," he was saying, "to make you understand? That warning came from our fleet. The Ei have evaded it in the Centaurus Gulf, and are sweeping in toward Earth. If we don't defend the Citadel—"

He broke off as he saw Price come up. Then he said bitterly, "I congratulate you. Few men can say that practically single-handed they destroyed a world."

One of the chiefs asked Price, "Is Sawyer with you?"

Price shook his head. "They've gone to free him now. He'll be here in a few minutes."

"Oh my God," said Arrin softly. "Don't let them free the Ei. Even two of them at large here—we'd have no hope at all, with their fleet coming." He looked at Price and Price's confident scorn drained slowly out of him leaving a nasty void. Nobody, Vurna or not, could counterfeit what he saw in Arrin's eyes.

"Do you wish me to go on my knees and beg?" whispered Arrin. "I'll do it. Only go up and stop them from opening that bulkhead."

And Price knew suddenly that he must do that.

He turned and ran back along the hall and up the stairs, pushing and kicking his way past the knots of tribesmen who wanted to congratulate him for what he had done, and all the way there was a chill unpleasant thing riding his back, and its first name was Doubt, and its second, Fear.

Was it possible, just barely possible, that the Vurna had been telling the truth all the time?

Uproar on the prison level guided him through a maze of corridors, to an obligato of breaking doors. He turned a corner. Burr and Twist and Sawyer were free. They formed part of the fore-front of a group that was swarming down the hall systematically breaking down the cell doors. Two Vurna guards lay prone, and a third man, probably the English-speaking guide, was trying to crawl away unnoticed, his face ashen with fear.

The bulkhead was open.

A man's voice neighed suddenly in terror. Then another, and another, and the tribesmen were rolled back upon themselves as by the blow of a great hand, as the fore edge of the group turned and burst its way to the rear. There was a moment of wild panic. Price stood flat against the wall and watched brave men run by him sobbing. And then a wave of force, so cold and alien that it revolted the last small atom of his human self, hit his mind like the back-blast of a bomb.

Two dark forms stood in the corridor.

They were taller than men. At first Price thought they were shrouded in black like old monks, with cowls over their heads. But as they moved he saw that the cowls and the floating draperies edged with a thin translucent gray were their own substance, quivering, shifting, gliding around some unguessable central core of being. He could not see whether they had faces under the black folds, and eyes in the faces, but he could feel them watching him. He could feel their minds stripping him and tearing away his feeble defenses, leaving his own mind naked and helpless before them.

And these were the Ei. These were the Big Lie of the Vurna.

Only they were real!

He could not stand them any longer. He ran.

They all ran. It was a compulsion. Run. Cry panic. Clear the Citadel and get away!

He looked back and the Ei were behind them, gliding soundlessly along the hall.

Run. Get away....

And then Price and the others, fleeing in the next corridor collided with the chiefs who were hurrying to find out what had happened. They still had Arrin with them, a prisoner.

"Out," said Sawyer thickly, his voice a hoarse croak. "Get out, fast—"

Arrin's voice cracked like a silver whiplash. "Yes, run. Because they're making you, because their minds are too much for you! Run, and let them have the Citadel, and when their fleet comes, let them have the Earth!"

That stopped them. The horror they felt at that thought surged up so strong that the frantic compulsion to flee lessened a little. But behind them, somewhere back in the corridors, they would be following....

Arrin raged and mocked them. "We saved you from the Ei two generations ago, when Ei ships had smashed your defenses and they were ready to move in. We moved in first, we've held them back, but now you've let them in! So run!"

"Good God!" said Sawyer, his face stricken. "Then it was all true, what you told us about the Ei. It was true all the time!"

Price did not, like the other Earthmen, have a lifetime's thinking to revise. He grabbed Arrin's shoulders.

"Can we face them?" he cried. "Can we kill them?"

"They can be killed," Arrin said. "Their minds can hold many—but not an unlimited number. If we all rush them, many of us, there is a chance...."

Price yelled down the corridors, "What are you running from? There's only two of them. We're going back! We're going to pull them down!"

The tribesmen, their first horror a little abated, by sheer reaction from shame of their own terror, exploded into sudden rage.

"There's only two of them—come on!"

And then of a sudden they were all of them running back down the corridors, jostling, crowding, screaming, Price with Arrin beside him, with old Sweetbriar ahead, with Sawyer shouting in hoarse anger. A mob, not an army, a mob urged forward by its own horror.

Around the corner, and into the corridor where the two black shapes came gliding fast. And it was like walking into night and death, into bitter black winds and the stabbing of cruel swords, as the might of alien minds blasted at them.

Tribesmen screamed and fell, clawing at their own heads. The mass behind forced over them, forced the reeling first wave right into the unimaginable shapes.

"Pull them down!"

Price was in the screeching fore-front now and he closed his eyes and struck with his knife at the cloudy darkness of a cowl.

A cold like that of outer space struck through him and he staggered, fainting and falling, and his mind closed on the awful sight of packed men swaying and pulling and striking at the two tall cowled shapes, mobbing them, beating them down.

When Price opened his eyes he was in another corridor and old Sawyer was slapping his face with rough hands.

"Yes," said Sawyer thickly. "They're dead. And a good many men dead with them, and some others that act like their brains are dead."

He shook his head, a little wildly. "To think it was true all the time—"

Whoom! came a deep sound from outside the Citadel. And then more of them, in quick succession. Whoom! Whoom! Whoom!

"Arrin—" said Price, getting weakly to his feet.

"He's down in that room, with his men," said Sawyer. "And they're turning loose on that Ei fleet out in space."

And now the great missiles from the launchers outside the Citadel were going out so fast that the sounds of them could not be counted.

Price said, "Then you let him—"

"Let him?" repeated Sawyer. "We asked him! Do you think we want a whole fleet of—of them—reaching Earth?"

By the time Price and Sawyer got down to the missile-control room, the deadly messengers were all on their way.

Arrin and his men watched the screens, and would not turn from them. Price, and the tribesmen, saw only burning stars and dark space in those screens—and then, finally, a little crackling of pin-prick flares running like a swarm of fireflies in the dark void. Then nothing.

Arrin turned.

Sawyer said, painfully, "Did they—?"

"Yes," said Arrin. "We caught them—but none too soon. Our fleet out there will mop up any Ei ships that survived."

He added, with slow weariness, "We've won a battle—not a war. The Ei are many. But this outpost world is safe. And we'll press them back and back—"

Sawyer looked at Price. Price said, "Don't be so damned proud. Go ahead and say it."

Sawyer said to Arrin, "Seems like we were wrong about some things. About you Vurna. We're hoping things'll be different between us, now."

"They can be," Arrin said.

"They will be, if you want it."

The old Chief of the Missouris asked, "Now it's all cleared up, just who was the traitor among us? Was it Oakes?"

For the first time, a little smile touched Arrin's face. "Do you really want to know, now it's over?"

Sawyer grunted. "Guess not." He looked around the other chiefs, and then stuck his gnarled hand out in the oldest gesture of Earth, and Arrin took it.

Price and Linna stood next day on the roof of the Citadel and watched the tribesmen going home.

There was, there had always been, a stiff-necked pride in the men of Earth. They went away with their heads up, not looking back. But, at the edge of the distant forest, there was a face turned and the flash of a handwave before they went into the trees.

"They'll come back," Price said. "A few of them at first—then more and more, to learn. A few years will make all the difference."

He thought that the sons of Earth and the sons of the stars would together stand upon many far worlds. The long war against the Ei would end some day, that dark and alien tide would be rolled back, and Earthmen would do their share. But that was all to come.

Linna was saying earnestly, "And the people of your own hidden colony in the west—they will join us too?"

Price looked at her. "There is no colony, Linna. I came alone from the west."

"But your clothes—your plane—where did you come from?" She was startled, her eyes wide and wondering.

"I'll explain all that later. You won't believe it, at first. I hardly do myself."

And, thinking of the strange freak of force and chance that had snatched him from the older Earth, Price felt a last pang of nostalgia for that lost world of long ago. That time when, safe on their cozy little planet, men had dreamed of space and stars—it seemed now like a long-dead idyll of youth.

The Earth of those days could never come again. The wider galaxy had crashed in upon it, and terrible and magnificent realities had shattered the youthful dreams, and it was a different and sterner planet that was joining the community of star-worlds. Who knew what awaited it on that wider, cosmic stage? His hand tightened on Linna's. Of their own tiny part in that vast future, he felt suddenly very sure.