Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 (2 page)

 
          
Five chiefs sat
around a council fire
near the midreach of the
Orinoco
River
, in a clearing among the lush lofty trees
that had repossessed that land since Cold People's raiders had discouraged
farming. Six had originally gathered to confer; but the sixth—a blackbearded
leader of a fish-spearing clan—had proved both bull-headed and hot-headed.
Early in the proceedings he had argued fiercely with the self-appointed
chairman; accusations and insults had boiled up, and finally a duel with
cutlasslike machetes. The others had seen fan-play with amiable appetite, and
now the
blackbeard
was dead, lying yonder under a
strewing of broad green leaves.

 
          
The
victor in the affair finished wiping his blade by thrusting it repeatedly into
the moist, dark earth. Then he polished it bright against his ragged cotton
trousers and returned it to the leather loop that was fastened to his belt to
do duty for a scabbard.

 
          
"And
now," he announced, "the meeting will come back to order."

 
          
The
others nodded agreement, and looked at him with the admiration of fighting men
for a fighting man. He wore rings in his ears and a tattered red scarf around
his head, like a pirate of the old days; but his lantern jaw and his accent
were traditional Yankee. His grandparents had been among nine survivors who
made their escape from
Lynn
,
Massachusetts
, in the first dreadful days of the Cold
People's invasion.

 
          
"As
I was saying before that rude interruption," he went on dryly, "I
calculate the majority of us
is
agreed on the
alliance." His bright eye flicked toward the silent form under the leaves.
"I ought to say the
thing's
unanimous by
now."

 
          
"Yes,"
said the others. "That's right." They were savage and hairy and
variously armed, with a general air of confidence in violent situations. Like
their chairman, they resembled figures in a melodrama about pirates.

 
          
"Good-d,"
said the chairman, grinning with hard lips. "Who's got a word on his
crowd? Are you sure your folks will go along with" what we've
decided?"

 
          
"I
can speak for my outfit and those outfits upriver," volunteered a
swarthy-jowled fellow named Megan. "Three or four of the chiefs talked to
me just before
I
came to this
meeting. They're with us in this, Spence. They're waiting right now for me to
come back and report on what the council decided."

 
          
"Good-d,"
said the chairman again.
"What about you others?"

 
          
Another
chief promised support from neighboring clans, and another. Spence grinned
again, with happy pride.

 
          
"With
our bands and those others who say they'll throw in with us, we've got a strong
alliance to start with," he said.
"Enough of a
bunch, with good able chiefs, to bring in more.
One after another, those
gangs and groups back in the country will fall in line."

 
          
Megan
glanced at the body away from the fire.
"How about his
folks?
How will they feel about their chief getting—eliminated?"

 
          
"I
was figuring about that," nodded Spence, and spat in the fire.
"They'll be lacking a chief, so maybe they can come in with my bunch. I've
got in mind they might be happy to have a sensible head of things instead of
just a mouthy, fight-picking one. Any comment on having
them
join my band?"

 
          
"It
is so moved," said Megan.

           
"Seconded," put in his
neighbor at the fire.

           
"Anybody opposed?"
inquired Spence. "The ayes have
it,
his band will
be invited to join mine. I'll just appoint all of us as a committee to drop in
on them and tell them what happened, and how they can do the smart thing.
Won't be much of an argument, I calculate, with five chiefs
talking."
He spat again. "I'm beginning to think our troubles
are just about over."

 
          
"Not
quite," said a voice from behind him.

           
Spence spun around and came smoothly
to his feet. His hand slid, as if by its own impulse, to the hilt of his
machete.

 
          
There
was a stir of motion in the thicket of broad leaves from which had been plucked
the makeshift shroud of the recent arguer. Out into view moved a tall young
man.

 
          
"Huh,"
said Spence.
"Thought you'd gone."

           
The young man wore leather sandals
and a pair of patched shorts of coarse-woven cotton. His lean body and
smooth-shaven face were sunburnt almost to the color of his sandals, making the
blue of his well-set, wide-open eyes the more startling. His shock of black
hair and the strength of his chin, with the big straight nose and sharp-planed
cheekbones, together with his gaunt height, might have suggested what young
Abraham Lincoln probably looked like. No weapon rode at his belt—only a pouch
of catskin tanned with the fur on.

 
          
Spence
stuck out his thin jaw and glared disconcertingly. "I brought you to this
meeting to make a report on that expedition of yours up north," he
growled. "You're not a chief; you don't have any voice in this council. I
thought you'd made your report and gone, anyway."

 
          
The
tall youngster grinned, with no trace of abashment. "I'd started to leave,
all right," he said, "but that fight boiled up."

 
          
"Just
call it a little parliamentary debate," Spence bade him.

           
"Then that little parliamentary
debate boiled up. So I waited yonder in the bushes to watch it. Then I stayed
on, and I couldn't help but hear what you said afterward."

 
          
"What
do you mean, what we said afterward?" challenged Spence.

 
          
"That business about your troubles being over."
The young man grinned again. "Your troubles are just beginning, if I may
say so."

 
          
All
five chiefs scowled as one.

           
"You may say so, all
right,"
said
the swarthy-faced Megan witheringly,
"but it won't get you anywhere."

 
          
"And
it won't get you anywhere to think your troubles are over," was the
good-humored rejoinder.

 
          
Spence
frowned. "You're not saying what I meant. It isn't that
all
our troubles are over. It's just
that the greatest difficulty—the forming of an alliance . . ." He
gestured, somewhat vaguely. "We've made the biggest step toward fighting
the Cold People. We can get ready for the next step now."

 
          
"Get
ready to fight the Cold People?" prompted the young interloper.
"Get ready to advance . . . which way—north or south?
I've heard somebody say that their main base is somewhere on
Antarctica
."

 
          
"We
go north," said Megan grimly. "Well meet them there!"

 
          
"And when you meet them, what?"
The lean young
face had lost its smile and grew dark. "Stop and do some thinking, you
chiefs. Each one of you has a band, a whole community, depending on you for
sensible judgment."

 
          
"And," amplified Spence, hitching up the belt that held
his machete, "you think our judgment isn't sensible."

 
          
"I
think that
it's
fifty years since the Cold People came
to Earth. I think that they whipped the nations of Earth in about fifty hours.
And I think you've forgotten what it is to be beaten and smashed."

 
          
"Hum,"
grunted Megan. "Speaking of getting beaten and smashed, young man, how
would you like to ..."

 
          
"If
you and I and the others have forgotten," went on the other,
"wouldn't we learn about it all over again, as soon as we got within their
reach?"

 
          
"Talk
about your own fathers and grandfathers being whipped," snarled a bronzed
man with a fine hooked nose. He was Capato, a Venezuelan Indian who governed a
federation of native villages. "My people never got whipped by the Cold
ones."

 
          
"That's
because your people never fought them," flung back the tall youth.
"You're on the point of fighting them now, and you'll get your bellyful.
Maybe nobody will get back from the fight to say how bad the whipping
was."

           
"All right, sonny," put in
another. "You're full of criticisms. What do you have in the way of
sensible advice?"

 
          
"Stop
and think, I say again. If the Cold People beat us once, when they had barely
landed and were only catching their breath—if we got knocked off our perch just
when we thought we were firm on it—what will they do this time, when they're
the entrenched defenders and you're the attackers?"

 
          
"You're
just a damned defeatist," sniffed Spence. "I'll give him a better
name than that," sneered Megan.
"A coward."

 
          
The
tanned face turned toward Megan, the young lips drew back to bare white, even
teeth. Two big hands closed into fists. Megan moved a pace away and slid his
machete out of its loop.

 
          
"He's
unarmed," said Capato quickly. "You can't kill an unarmed man,
Megan."

 
          
"Lend
him your stabbing-iron, then," growled Megan.

 
          
Capato
put his hand to his own weapon, but the young man gestured in refusal.
"I'll just pass that insult," he said slowly. "Let it he for the
time being. Samebody asked if I had any sensible advice. Why don't we all sit
down?"

 
          
Suiting
the action to the word, he squatted on his sandaled heels beside the fire.
Spence stared at him a moment, then dropped into his own place. The others,
too, sat and waited.

 
          
"Just
now," resumed the young scout, "there are a lot of other things to do
than fight duels. Duels don't solve anything. That chief who was killed is
already a problem. The whole bunch of you are' going to have to go and explain
to his people."

 
          
"He
insulted me mortally," Spence defended
himself
.
"What would you have done in my place?"

 
          
"You
just saw what I did when I was insulted. I took it and stuck to more important business.
We can find out things more valuable than whether this chief—Megan's your name,
isn't it?—can beat me in a rough-and-tumble with machetes. It's a whole lot
more to the point to find out whether the human race can beat the Cold
People."

 
          
"We
can beat them," snapped Spence, as if sharp assurance could settle the
question. "They never showed any really unthinkable superiority in
warfare.
Wherever they came from.”

           
"Wherever they came from, they
were just an expedition far across space," finished the young man for him.
"They were travelling light, a small payload on a long-distance
space-spanning vehicle. The weapons they brought probably aren't anywhere near
the best they know about." He spread his big hands. "I see them like
a detail of police going out to handle a big unarmed mob in the old days. I've
heard about such things. They took pistols and nightsticks and tear-gas bombs.
If these didn't do the trick at once—if the mob fought
back,
maybe gave the police detail real trouble—up came reserves, maybe with machine
guns. If it turned into a revolution, there were big guns and tanks and planes.
All right; our ancestors were defeated with only the small arms of the Cold
People, and we've fallen a long way from what we were then."