The Starcombers
Science Fiction Adventures – December 1956
(1956)*
Edmond Hamilton
illustrated by Bowman

Greedy scavengers of the Universe, they took the dead dreams of ancient races and sold them for junk—until their bitter battle with the cleft-men taught them what dreams are worth!

-

CHAPTER I

	The dark star had only three planets. Perhaps there had been more, in the days of its prime, but if so they had been lost somewhere along the eons-old track of its wandering. The little fleet of four battered, slouching ships had already visited two of them. Now they hung off the innermost world, waiting for word from the scout.

	It came, finally. The voice of Sam Fletcher spoke in the cramped control-room of the Prosperous Hope, faint and unclear because the radio, like

	"There's a good landing place on the plateau. Practically level."

	"Look," said Harry Axe into the mike, "I don't care how level the place is, I want to know is it worth landing. We wasted enough time already on them other two big hunks of nothing."

	Harry Axe was a short, wide man with a roll of paunch over his belt. His coverall was both greasy and ragged, he needed a shave, and his small hairy hands had not really been clean since the last time his mother scrubbed them. He owned the Prosperous Hope outright, and through family connections he had an interest in the other three ships. This made him a big man, but it did not make him a rich one.

	"Come on, Fletch," he bawled, "what do you see down there? Anything?"

	"A hell of a big crack," said Fletcher's distant voice. "Right across the planet. Diastrophism, I guess."

	"What's in it?"

	"Black. Nothing .but black.

	Miles deep."

	"Fletch, are you sober?"

	"Sober?"

	"Yeah. Sober!"

	"Me?" said Fletcher, and laughed.

	Harry Axe clenched his hands and breathed deeply. "Okay. Okay. Are you too drunk to tell me if there's anything worth landing for?"

	"On the plateau there are formations. Square ones. Geometrically square, what's left of 'em. They look to me like foundations, sunk in the rock."

	"Yeah?" said Axe, suddenly eager.

	"Yeah. Big, too. And the probe makes a noise like metal. I'll guide you in."

	"Right. And Fletch—listen, Fletch! Lay off any more of that drinking until we land. Fletch—"

	Silence.

	Axe turned around and kicked his brother-in-law out of the pilot's chair. "I told you to see to it he didn't take no bottle with him. You know what's the matter with you, Joe? You're too damn worthless to live, that's what."

	Joe Leedy stood rubbing his chin. He was built like a tall weed, with pale hair hanging in a thick shock over his fore-head. He said mildly, "I searched him, Harry. But you know Fletch. He's mighty smart about hiding it."

	"He's too smart for the both of you, that's the trouble," said a woman's voice from behind them. "Drunk or sober." She had come in from the main cabin aft of the control room. The bulkhead door stood open at her back and through it came a shrill clatter of children's voices and a smell of stale cooking. She was a young woman, with rather heavy lips and a mass of honey-brown hair hanging over her shoulders. She was proud of her hair. She was proud of the rest of her, too. She wore a faded coverall, pulled in here and unfastened there until she managed to look undressed in it in spite of being completely covered up. Her name was Lucy, and she was Harry Axe's second wife.

	Harry Axe said, "What the hell do you want?"

	"You're too good at kicking people around," she said. She looked at her brother, disgustedly. "Whyn't you kick him back, Joe?"

	Joe shrugged. He said sensibly, "I don't want to get my neck broke, that's why." He went over and sat down at the radio.

	"Are we landing?" asked Lucy.

	"That's a dumb question," said Harry Axe. "What do you think we're doing?"

	"How would I know?" said Lucy. "You expect us to hear through an iron wall? Anyway, they're your kids, not mine. If they get their little heads bashed in, you'll feel it worse than I will."

	She slammed the door and went to help Joe's wife strap the kids into the recoil hammocks.

-

	Far below, between the black star-shot heavens and the blacker world, Sam Fletcher hovered in the scout. He looked around him at the striding suns, blazing blue and crimson, white and gold, all marching in their groups and companies along the galactic road that never changes and is never the same. He looked at the dead sun close at hand, an enormous bulk occluding the stars behind it, faintly glimmering with a ghostly light. He looked at the world beneath.

	He wondered, as he had wondered so many times, What are we doing out here? Why did we ever have to leave Earth, we soft little things of blood and flesh, what crazy obsession drove us out to the stars, the stars that don't want us, that reject us, that kill us? Has one Earth-man ever been happier, really happier, for leaving his own safe world? Have I been happier?

	But it was no use wondering. Long ago Earthmen had started their star-wandering and no matter how painful and purposeless it was, they couldn't go back. He couldn't go back.

	"But I'm doing pretty good," Fletcher said aloud. He had switched off his mike, so no one could hear but himself. "I'm still flying. I'm going to land now, and I'm not going to think of anything."

	He took a small plastic bottle out of its hiding place and drank.

	The plateau was below him in the cold dark. It was near the cleft, but not too near. It was an easy landing.

	Tears welled up in Fletcher's eyes. "Won't there ever be an end?" he asked of no one in particular. "Will I have to fight this out every goddamned time until I die?"

	There wasn't any answer.

	He drank again. In a minute his hands grew steadier on the controls. He opened the mike and began to call the co-ordinates, very slowly and carefully, moving in.

	The four ships began their descending curve, one after the other, toward the dark plateau.

-

	It was noon of a lightless day. The dead sun was overhead, a big round hole in the sky where no stars showed.

	There was a moon, and it was dark too, except for the gleaming and glimmering of reflected light from other suns, far off. The ships were set haphazardly around the plateau. The big machines had been run out of them, and they were already ripping and tearing at the massive foundation walls, their headlights cutting sharp slashes through the airless dark.

	"Kind of makes you think, don't it?" said Lucy, looking out the port. She had changed into another coverall, freshly washed and less faded. Her hair was tied with a ribbon, and she moved with an elaborate lack of self-consciousness, seeming to pay no attention to Fletcher. Over in the corner, nursing her youngest, Joe's wife smiled secretly.

	Fletcher said, "About what?" He was sitting at the table, drinking himself methodically into a stupor. This was his bonus. For twenty-four hours after flying the scout to guide the big ships to a landing he was not expected to work with the other men.

	"Why," said Lucy. "Them buildings. Harry says they must have been miles across, from the size of the foundations. And high, too, to go that deep in the rock that nothing could tear them out." She shook her head solemnly, switching the long thick tail of hair between her shoulders. "Doesn't it make you wonder what kind of people built them, and how they lived in them?"

	Fletcher grunted.

	"I mean," said Lucy, turning away from the window, "it makes you think about time, and living, and dying. Big things."

	She sat down at the table across from Fletcher.

	"Don't you think about anything, Sam," she said, "except drinking?"

	He gave her a foggy but surprisingly intelligent look. "You mean things like Harry Axe's wife?" He grinned and shook his head. "The answer is yes and no. I think about her, yes. But I don't think what she wants me to think about her, no."

	Her face became harder in outline, and her voice was sharp. "Just what do you mean by that crack?"

	"You're a nice kid, Lucy. You don't mean any real harm. You just want a man to drop dead when he sees you." He poured another drink and drank it, still smiling at her. "You want me to be tormented because you belong to Harry and I can't have you." He made a gesture of negation. "Uh-uh. Not me. But you know what, Lucy? Another guy might. Another guy might make you some real trouble with Harry. So you better be careful."

	Lucy's face was flushed now. Her eyes were hot. "What's so special about you, you drunken bum?" she said. "And I'll tell you something, mister. I wouldn't have you if—"

	"What's special about me?" said Fletcher, rising. "I'm dead. Didn't you know that? Been dead for seven—no, nine years. Time flies." He picked up his bottle. "'Bye."

	"You might as well be dead," said Lucy viciously, "for all you mean to me."

	"And that is as it should be," Fletcher said. "I give you the kiss of peace." He bent and kissed her chastely on the forehead. He went out, laughing.

	Lucy pounded her fists on the table. "Who does he think he is?" she snarled. "He makes me so mad—"

	"Hush," said Joe's wife. "The baby's asleep." But her head was bent forward to hide her face, and her heavy shoulders shook.

-

	Sam Fletcher went down the corridor to his bunk in the corner of the main deck supply room. On the way he passed the airlock. The inner door was shut and the red light was on, indicating that the outer door was open. He paused, swaying on his feet, a tall man, lean but strongly built, his face deeply lined and hollow under the cheekbones, his thick brown hair stippled with gray. His eyes were blue, rather vague now, looking with a kind of dark brilliance from under heavy brows. After a minute he set his bottle down and began to fiddle with the airlock 'scope, his head leaned forward against the viewer.

	The 'scope reflected everything visible from this side of the ship. To his right, and extending back across the plateau, he could see the humped and broken lines of the foundation walls—and God, yes, he thought, they do make you wonder. How long have they been here, and what was this world like when they were new? The machines rooted and tore at them, greedy, destructive, seeking out the metal—placed there by somebody, and of heaven only knew what molecular construction, and possibly worth an untold fortune—embedded in the timeless rock and the almost equally timeless plastic material. Tomorrow he would have to go out and root and tear with the others, and there would not be any rest until every scrap of salvage was in the holds of the four ships.

	Salvage ships, they were called on their clearance papers. Scavengers would have been a better term. Whatever time and chance had left behind on the far-flung galactic beaches, they picked up and sold. It didn't matter what—wrecked ships, the bodies of forgotten kings, the siftings of alien middens, the last lost remnants of other days and other dreams. Junk.

	Fletcher looked at the machines, and again he wondered why men had ever bothered to struggle their way out to the stars. For this was all the struggle came to in the end, sordid money-making things like this. And all the men who had dreamed and died in that struggle, so that Harry Axe and others like him could pick the bones of far-off worlds!

	He looked away from the machines, across the infinitely desolate wilderness of rock where nothing stirred in the windless, endless night, to the edge of the cleft at the extreme other end of his field of vision.

	A figure, pale silver against the stars, was standing there at the edge of nothing, looking at the ships and the activities of men.

-

CHAPTER II

	Fletcher thought, I am drunk and this thing I am looking at is not possible.

	The figure remained, un-moving, at the edge of the cleft. It seemed quite small, almost childlike. The universe around it was very large, very dark.

	Fletcher swayed away from the viewer. There were vac-suits in the locker. In five minutes he was in one, and through the airlock, and stepping out on the bare rock.

	The figure was still there.

	Fletcher walked toward it. He had not opened his helmet radio, so the voices of the men working the machines did not reach him, and he walked in utter silence. When he turned his. back on the plateau he could no longer see the ships or the lights, and it was as though they did not exist. His footsteps were soundless as in a dream.

	The figure saw him.. He knew that because it started slightly, becoming alert and watchful, poised for flight. He held out his hands to. it. The black rock stretched between, and he moved over it in tall strides, smiling, forgetting that the creature, whatever it might be, could not possibly see his face.

	It was a human sort of a creature in outline, all in pale silver. Like himself, he thought, it was armored against the airless cold.. Its head was silvery, blank and featureless, as anonymous as his own bubble-head of dented alloy.

	When he was no more than forty feet from it, it turned suddenly and was gone.

	"No, no!" he called to it. "Wait!" His voice boomed inside his helmet. He remembered that his radio was not working, and he switched it on without stopping to wonder whether the creature could receive hum even so, or understand him if it did. He ran toward the lip of the cleft, shouting, "Wait! Wait!"

	He stood on the edge of nothing, and swayed, and almost fell.

	A dreadful vertigo came over him. He flung himself back from that shocking brink, and gasped and trembled, bathed in cold sweat. Presently he got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl forward, placing his hands carefully. When he reached the edge again he was flat on his belly. He looked down.

	And down.

	And still down, and there was no end to his looking.

	He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried again.

	There were stars in the bottom of the cleft. Not bright and clear like the ones overhead, but misty, burning with an unsteady flicker.

	Fletcher became immensely excited. "Wait!" he cried. "Listen, do you live down there?"

	But there was no answer. He thought he saw a silver mote moving on the cliffs below him, but it was such a brief glimpse, and not repeated, that he could not be sure.. He lay where he was, hypnotized by the depths and the drowned stars.

	Harry Axe and Joe Leedy and a man named Zakarian from one of the other ships—Zakarian was married to a sister of Harry Axe's first wife—came and crept gingerly to where they could grasp Fletcher's feet, and pulled him back. They got him well away from the edge. Then Harry Axe said, "What's the matter with you, you got the dee-tees? Who were you shouting at?"

	"There's air down there," said Fletcher wonderingly.

	"Ah," said Zakarian. "He's drunk."

	"Look for yourself," said Fletcher. "You can see the distortion. There's some kind of lights down there, I don't know what. Depends on how far away they are."

	"I thought you said there was nothing there but black," said Axe.

	"That was from space. This is from a lot closer." Fletcher jerked his arm impatiently from Axe's grasp. "They could be house lights. They could be fire-holes, or volcanoes. All depends."

	"House lights?" said Joe Leedy, on a shrill note that was not quite laughter.

	"Well," said Fletcher, "they must live somewhere."

	"Who?" said Axe.

	Zakarian snorted. "Who? Why, the folks he was shouting at, naturally. The little green men." He gave Fletcher a shove toward the Prosperous Hope. "Go on, now. Sleep it off."

	Fletcher began to move toward the ship. But he said with quiet dignity, "There was someone watching us. I frightened him away, but he'll be back. It's just possible that these walls we're tearing up are sacred relics or something, and the people down there may object. If I were you, I'd keep an eye out."

	Harry Axe grumbled and swore, but there was a note of uneasiness in his voice. He had had trouble of that kind before. "All right," he said. "Joe, you stick around for a while. If anything comes up out of that hole, you let me know."

-

	Joe Leedy sighed and ambled back toward the cleft. Fletcher entered the ship, took off his vac-suit, and went to bed.

	The dark sun slid down the sky, following even in death the pattern set for it in the beginning. A short while after it had set, Joe Leedy came back from the cleft bearing a small limp body under his arm, like a lean hound with a rabbit.

	Fletcher heard the commotion of men coming into the ship. He dragged himself heavily cut of sleep, out of his bunk, and went yawning and slouching down the corridor to the main cabin. There was quite a crowd there, and a bedlam of noise. The kids' shaggy heads and sharp faces kept poking between the legs of the men, and the men swatted them absently out of the way, like flies. Fletcher pushed his way through to where Harry Axe and Joe Leedy Were laying something out on one of the bunks. It was about four and a half feet long.

	I told you, didn't I?" said Fletcher.

	Nobody answered him. Somebody said, "Is it human?"

	"How the hell do I know if it's human?" asked Harry.

	It's all covered up, ain't it?" He gave the small figure a yank, and it flopped bonelessly. "Whatever it is, it sure looks dead. Listen, Joe Leedy, I'm telling you, if you killed it you can take the consequences."

	"Ah," said Joe, "I just tapped him on top the helmet. He wasn't disposed to be neighborly, so let him take the consequences. Anyway, he ain't dead." He bent closer, fingering the silvery material that clothed the body. The head was covered too, as Fletcher remembered, by a helmet that pretty well concealed the face. Joe Leedy whistled, and said, "Will you look at this stuff, now."

	Everybody crowded forward to look.

	"Ain't nothing to it," Joe Leedy said. "Like cobwebs. Bet you the whole suit don't weigh more'n five pounds, helmet and all."

	Somebody whistled. Zakarian began to finger the stuff, too. He and Joe and Harry Axe all looked excited.

	"Some kind of plastic," Zakarian said. And added, "I think. I never saw nothing like it before."

	"How much," said Harry Axe, "do you reckon stuff like that would fetch? I mean, supposing they could figure out what it is, and duplicate it, how much would you reckon?"

	"You don't own it," said Fletcher. "He does. And he needs it to get home in, if he's still kicking."

	"Yeah," said Harry, hungrily. "If. Let's see what else he's got on him."

	They began to paw at the belt and pouches of the suit, getting in each other's way. Fletcher leaned closer, and his eyes narrowed. Suddenly he moved, very fast. He hit Harry Axe on the point of his jaw and knocked him backward, and at almost the same time he butted Joe Leedy aside and into Zakarian. Zakarian swore and stumbled back into the crowd and Joe fell on his hands and knees.

	Fletcher was still moving forward. With both of his big hands he grabbed the silver-clad arm of the stranger, but as quick as he was it was not quite quick enough. A hissing white beam shot from a tube in the stranger's hand. It hit a man standing close beside the bunk and burned a hole through his shoulder, and flamed on into the chest of another man standing behind him.

	They both screamed. The crowd began to break wildly in all directions. Fletcher was on his knees now beside the bunk, forcing the arm of the stranger upward so that the hissing beam splashed off the ceiling in gouts of white fire.

	"Hit him," said Fletcher between his teeth, panting. "Hit him, for chrissake."

-

	Joe Leedy, his face absolutely colorless, scuttled up and hit the silver helmet with a short length of pipe. The body inside the suit writhed convulsively and partially relaxed. Joe Leedy hit it again, and Fletcher said, "That's enough."

	He was still on his knees beside the bunk, but now he held the tube in his own hand. It was still hissing white fire. He stared at it, holding it stiffly erect toward the ceiling.

	"Shut it off," said Zakarian.

	Fletcher said, "I don't know how."

	Harry Axe came out of his daze and shouted, "Look out, you're burning a hole in the roof."

	"I can't help it," said Fletcher calmly. "Let me alone."

	He began to turn the tube with the fingers of one hand, holding it in the other, and frowning at it intently. The two men who had been hit lay on the deck and moaned. Everybody else was frozen, watching Fletcher.

	The thick plate of the over-deck glowed and brightened.

	Very delicately, Fletcher poked a finger at a small indentation in the tube. It went out.

	He let it drop on the floor. He went over to Harry Axe and took hold of the front of his coverall. He was shaking violently. He put his face close to Harry's, and said, "You're a fool, Harry. You're a thieving, greedy fool. It's a wonder we weren't all killed because of you."

	"Can I help it," growled Harry Axe, "if the little so-and-so was shamming?" He twisted away from Fletcher, rubbing his jaw. "Joe," he yelled angrily, "why weren't you watching him? I thought you said you knocked him out."

	Joe said, "We shoulda searched him first thing, Harry. Fletcher is right. Come on, let's make sure he don't do it again. And get that fire-shooter out of the way 'fore one of the kids gets hold of it."

	This time they tied the stranger's hands behind him and took away everything that could be removed. Then they sat him up and tied him bodily to a stanchion.

	"That ought to hold him," said Harry Axe. "The little rat."

	"I don't know," said Fletcher. "How would you feel if you came to after a knock on the head and saw a bunch of hairy apes tearing away at you?"

	Axe ignored that. Zakarian was helping to haul the wounded away, and Joe's wife was herding the young ones off. Lucy had come to stand between Harry and Fletcher.

	"That looks like blood inside his helmet," she said, and pointed to the man's head.

	"Hey," said Joe, "it does. Maybe we better get that helmet off."

	They got it off, wrenching at the unfamiliar but quite simple fastenings.

	For a minute nobody spoke. Then Lucy muttered, "He looks so wild" She stepped back, half sheltering herself behind Harry.

-

	Yes, thought Fletcher, wild—and starved. He did not know what he had been expecting to see. Something childlike, perhaps, to match the size. At any rate, he was shocked by what he did see. It was a man's face, losing nothing of strength in its smallness. The cast of it was alien, but not so much so as many Fletcher had seen that were still classed as humanoid. The bone structure was very sharp, moulded in hard arching curves that left the eyes and the cheeks deep-hollowed. The skin was chalk white. The hair was a kind of smoky color that might have been natural, or another color gone gray. It was rough hair, roughly cut. There did not seem to be any beard, but the face was not young. The lines were deep, and the mouth was bitter. Two little runnels of blood had come from the nostrils.

	The eyes were open and watching. And they were what upset Fletcher the most. There was a black intelligence in them, a human anguish, a cold and purely animal intention to survive no matter what. Fletcher had a swift intuitive vision, not in detail but only in mood, of the kind of world a man would have to be born into to develop that particular expression. The mood was enough. He hoped he would never know the details.

	But Harry Axe was a business man. He held the helmet in his hands, light as a sunbeam but unmarked by the blows of Joe Leedy's pipe. He caressed it, and his face was animated with many thoughts.

	"Make friends with him," he said suddenly. "Tell him we're sorry. Wipe his nose for him, give him a drink, some grub—anything he wants." He looked at them, "You stupid or something? Don't you know a good thing when you see it?"

	"Yeah," said Joe Leedy slowly, "I do. And this ain't it."

	"How much metal are we gonna get out of them walls?" said Harry. "Enough to fill maybe two ships at the most.

	How much will it bring when we get it on the market? Maybe plenty. We hope so. But maybe not so much. Maybe not enough to buy your wife a hair-ribbon. Ain't that so, Zak?"

	Zakarian and several other men had joined the group. Zakarian nodded and said it was so.

	"All right. But you take this helmet, this suit he's wearing. Think what they'd be worth.

	Not salvage, what they call junk, but something good right now. Something they'd pay real money to get hold of. We want to trade with him. We want to find out how they make this stuff. We want to see what else his people have got that we can latch onto. Don't you see the possibilities? We might even start a legit business, run it up into a fortune. It's been done. Maybe we found ourselves a real gold mine this time." He leaned forward, smiling ingratiatingly at the little man. "See? Friend. Friend. Get that?"

	The little man looked at him with those bright, cold, deadly eyes.

	Fletcher said, "Oh, get out of the way, Harry. Lucy, can I have some warm water and a towel? A clean one. And then some food, anything you happen to have handy."

	Hunger, physical and chronic, was stamped in every gaunt line of that too human, too desperately animal face.

	With the towel and the warm water Fletcher gently sponged the blood from the man's skin. The flesh under his fingers was rigid as marble, and the body did not stir. He smiled and spoke quietly, but there was no response, no yielding. He put the basin aside and took the bread Lucy brought him and held it out. Still there was no response. It occurred to Fletcher that the man might never have seen bread before. He broke off a piece and put it in his own mouth and ate it. Then he held it out again, and a new light came into the man's eyes.

	"Untie his hands," said Fletcher.

	They were untied, and he put the bread into them. The man felt it and smelled it. He broke off a piece and tasted it. Then he ate, hungrily, but like a man with some standard of manners, not like a beast. When he was finished Fletcher offered him more, and he took it, looking at Fletcher with a sudden flash of grim humor that was startling. It was as though he said, All right, damn you, since I'm here I might as well get something out of it.

	"There," said Harry Axe, "you're getting through to him. Good boy, Fletch. Go on."

	"Don't be in such a rush," Fletcher said. "Relax."

	Now, while he ate his bread, the man was looking at the cabin and the things that were in it. His gaze lingered only briefly on the men, the women, the children. What he was interested in was things. Something speculative and cunning came into his face, and was quickly hidden, so quickly that only Fletcher caught it. And then the man's attention returned to the men around him, and especially to Harry Axe.

	Suddenly he smiled, and spoke.

-

	Harry Axe was elated. The little man's words were so much gibberish, but Harry nodded violently, smiled to his back teeth, and said, "Friends, friends, all friends. Understand?" To Fletcher he said, "Now we're getting somewhere."

	Yes, thought Fletcher, but where? He watched the stranger closely.

	The little man spoke again, slowly. He pointed to out-side, and then he pointed down. He indicated far down. Harry said, "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Down in the cleft." The little man pointed to himself, and then held up his hands, clenching and straightening the fingers a number of times. He made an all-inclusive gesture. "He means himself and his people," said Fletcher. "I don't know what system of arithmetic he uses, but he could mean anything from fifty to five thousand."

	Harry Axe held out the helmet. He pointed to the silvery suit covering the man's body. He made various gestures indicative of transference, and wound up setting the helmet on his own head. It was far too small, and sat ludicrously on top of his shaggy skull. The little man laughed, almost. He, too, made gestures of transference, and then pantomimed eating, his teeth coming together with a hungry snap.

	"I think," said Fletcher, "he means he and his people will trade with us for food."

	"Ah," said Harry. "Ah, that's it. That's what I wanted." He took the foolish-looking helmet off his head and gave it back to the little man, nodding and grinning. Then he began to stride up and down.

	"I want everything we can spare out of every ship. I want it loaded in the scout, right away. Don't matter what, so long as it's food. If you got anything spoiled, now's the time to get rid of it. Fletch, you get the scout fueled up. Now, while we're gone, I want the rest of you to get all the metal you can out of them walls and loaded up, so's we can leave in a hurry if we have to. Understand? Hop to it."

	Zakarian and Joe Leedy and the others went out. Harry Axe looked at Fletcher, who had not moved. He said, "You got a question?"

	"No," Fletcher said, "a statement." He glanced at the little man, who sat quietly with his helmet in his lap, thinking his own thoughts. "I think you're crazy to go down there."

	"What's your reason?"

	Lucy had come up beside Hairy. Now she leaned against him and looked at Fletcher with her eyes half closed and her lips thrust out. "He's a coward, that's his reason," she said.

	"Yeah?" said Harry. "How would you know?"

	She laid her head against Harry's shoulder, still looking at Fletcher. She smiled. "A man that'll try and steal another man's wife when his back is turned has got to be a coward, ain't he? Otherwise he wouldn't sneak about it."

	From across the cabin, Joe Leedy's wife said sharply, "Why, Lucy Axe! That's a lie and you know it."

	"You mind your own business," said Lucy fiercely. She rubbed her head against Harry's shoulder.

	Harry looked from her to Fletcher and back again, confused between doubt and the beginnings of rage.

	Fletcher shook his head. "It is a lie, Harry, and she does know it. And I'm sorry she told it. I guess I was wrong about her. She does want to make real trouble." He looked at Lucy. "You might have waited until we got back. If we do."

	"Go on," said Harry Axe, his voice getting loud. "I told you to fuel up that scout."

	Fletcher shrugged. He went out.

	The little alien bent his head over his helmet and smiled.

-

CHAPTER III

	The scout rose up from darkness into darkness, and then plunged down again into utter night.

	From this angle it appeared that the planet was split into two separate parts by the cleft, with stars showing distantly on the other side. Fletcher felt a wave of vertigo as the black walls towered up, many miles apart but definitely, solidly enclosing the small ship between them. It was like diving between the two halves of a world, and it gave him the suffocating feeling that some delicate balance might be upset, by the intrusion of the scout, causing the halves to fall together.

	The scout was sluggish from being overloaded with plastic crates of food—the ships' people were going to be on reduced rations all the way home, if Harry Axe succeeded in his trading. Harry sat beside Fletcher, in the co-pilot's chair. Joe Leedy and Zakarian were in the seats behind. The little man from the cleft sat between Fletcher and Harry Axe, in a jury-rigged seat, so that he could direct them. He seemed tense and anxious. Fletcher could feel the vibration of his strong wiry body as he shivered from time to time, either from fear or nervousness. He kept his head thrust forward toward the port, and his eyes probed the darkness constantly.

	"He looks to me," said Fletcher, "as though he's expecting plenty of trouble."

	Harry grunted. "He's just scared. He's probably never been in a ship before." He looked sidelong at Fletcher. The wheels of speculation going around in his head were almost audible.

	"I hope you're right," said Fletcher.

	"What makes you think I'm not?" said Harry, unnecessarily belligerent. "Seems to me you're all of a sudden getting awful smart for a drunken bum with no spaceman's papers. You wouldn't have a job if it wasn't for me."

	"True," said Fletcher. His face showed no expression beyond that of watchful care as he handled the ship. "Quite true. But it doesn't alter the facts."

	"Facts," said Harry. He added a short word. "You don't know any more facts about this guy than I do."

	"I know one more," said Fletcher. "It was written all over him in letters ten feet high. You think you're leading him on to the slaughter.

	You're not. He's leading you."

	"Bull," said Harry. "Just fly your little ship, Fletch. Stick to your business, and I'll stick to mine."

	Joe Leedy and Zakarian stirred uneasily, looking at each other. Fletcher did not answer Harry. The cabin became silent, except for the partially muffled blasting of the jets.

	The ship entered atmosphere.

	It was so thin and tenuous at first as to be practically un-noticeable. But as the scout spiralled lower and lower between those colossal walls that were the riven body of a world, the air became thicker—thicker and warmer. Drops of mist condensed briefly on the ports and were dispelled by the defrosters. The last of all the atmospheric envelope of a living World, Fletcher thought, drained off into this relatively tiny puddle at the bottom of a crack. The warming had to come from underneath, and he wondered again about those foggy stars. Volcanic fire, probably. But he could not ask the stranger. He could only wait.

	The ship dropped lower, and lower still. The quality of sound in the cabin had changed. It was not only inside, but outside as well. There began to be red glowings far below, scattered and ill-defined, as though someone had smeared bloody fingers across the night.

	The little man caught Fletcher's arm and gestured imperiously toward the left.

	Fletcher altered his course, rather gingerly. The rock walls were somewhere around seventy miles apart, as near as he could guess, and he should have plenty of room, but he didn't want to count on it. He didn't know what kind of pinnacles were below.

	He swung lower, slowly, feeling his way.

	A vast white cloudy shape came swooping out of the darkness. It was bigger than the ship. It cried hoarsely, in such a mighty voice that the men could hear it even through the hull and the jet-roar. The little man screamed in a wild panic of fear. There were words in his screaming, prayers, curses, supplications, or directions on how to fight the thing—Fletcher never knew. He saw the black blaze of the little man's eyes and knew that whatever the thing was it was an enemy. And then it hit.

-

	The scout flipped over on its side. There were confused cries from the men. The cabin ports were obscured on one side by a whitish living mass covered with some sort of downy growth that might have been fur or feathers. The fabric of the ship was shaken, violently.

	Fear, cold and enormous, filled every atom of Fletcher's being except for one small portion of his brain that continued to function all by itself, undisturbed. It told his hands what to do, and they did it. They slapped the firing keys for the steering jets, the landing jets, the brake jets. Not in any particular order, just all of them, and in quick succession. The scout shuddered, its frame groaning in protest. The whitish, living substance enwrapping the ports was thrown into terrible agitation. There was a great crying out, and then the ports were clear again, and the scout righted itself, and Fletcher saw something frail and shrunken go fluttering down into the obscurity below.

	The little man sat rigid, clinging to his chair, his teeth bared and his flanks heaving.

	"For God's sake," said Harry Axe. He said it several times. "What was that?"

	Fletcher said sourly, "I'm just a dumb slob. Ask him." He felt sick. He would have turned tail and run for the cold free emptiness above, if he had not been so mad at Harry Axe.

	"Well, whatever it was, it's gone. Hurry it up there, Fletcher. Go where he tells you." Harry Axe mopped his face on his shirt-sleeve. He was white around the lips. He turned around, and Joe Leedy said in a weak voice, "I think we oughta go back."

	"We killed the thing, didn't we? We can kill anything that tackles us. Anyway, if these little runty guys can live here, we ought to be able to stand it for a few hours, to get our fortunes made. Go on, Fletcher."

	Fletcher said between his teeth, "I wouldn't turn back now if you begged me." He punched the little man. "Where?" he asked, making gestures. The little man looked at him with a new respect. He pointed, and Fletcher flew that way.

	He kept his own watch now for big white shapes in the sky. He did not see any more, but he thought this was probably temporary, and he wondered what other forms of life had evolved to meet the challenge of existence in the cleft.

	It did not cheer him any to note that the little man was as vigilant and nervous as ever.

	The scout dropped lower.

	A heavy red smudge became localized some two or three miles away to Fletcher's right. It flickered and flared unsteadily. Presently he was able to make out a group of three squat cones with fire coming out of their tops. They shed light over the surrounding country much in the manner of gigantic flambeaus, and Fletcher thought he saw something else. He thought he saw a very large building in the plain below the cones, caught and half crushed in the terminus of a lava field.

	He pointed at it inquiringly. The little man gave it a brief glance, shook his head, and motioned Fletcher on.

	Joe Leedy, though, was curious. "Must of been a lot of people living there once," he said. "That looks to be a good mile broad, if it was all in one piece."

	"Remember the bearings on it," said Harry Axe to Fletcher.

	"Why?"

	"Ought to be a lot of salvage there. We might bring one of the ships down."

	Fletcher said, "It beats me, Harry, why you aren't a millionaire?"

	The scout passed out of the fire-lit area into darkness again. But it was a darkness in which other torches burned. The little man looked and peered and pondered, and then fastened on one of them as a beacon. He nodded to Fletcher. The scout closed on its destination, whipping through occasional veils of steam and smoke that rose up from cracks in the dark rock.

	"How come so much of this volcanic stuff?" asked Zakarian. "I thought this world was dead."

	"You're right down in the heart of it here," said Fletcher. "The last faint ember." He shivered. There was something about this place that made him wish desperately he didn't have to land in it.

	The little man swept his arm down and spoke excitedly. The men all leaned forward.

-

	There was a single cone ahead, higher than the three they had passed. It breathed a glorious plume of fire. A rocky plain spread out at its foot, and on the plain, well beyond the farthest flow of lava, stood a building.

	It was made of the dark rock of this heartworld. It was large. A mile, two miles square—it was hard to judge in that flickering light, and from the air. Big, anyway. It did not look very high, but Fletcher realized as he came closer that that was only because it was so broad that it looked squat by comparison.

	There was something wrong with it. Lights—white and steady window lights, as contrasted with the volcanic glow—showed from one part of it. The rest of it was dark, and in the dark portion Fletcher thought he could see irregularities of outline, and hollow-nesses where the fire-glow gleamed through.

	The little man was making emphatic gestures downward.

	"Well," said Harry Axe roughly, "what are you waiting for?"

	With very great reluctance, Fletcher picked the smoothest place he could see that was handy and set the scout down, about fifty yards from the building.

	Instantly the little man jumped up. He went to the lock door, in a fever of impatience. His eyes shone with a hard, triumphant light. Fletcher said, "If I were you I'd hold onto him, Harry. At least until we see how the land lies."

	Harry hesitated. The little man looked quickly around at the faces of the four Earth-men. Then he smiled. He held out his helmet to Harry Axe and pointed to the food crates, and toward the building. He talked, and smiled, and made many gestures.

	"If we hang onto him," said Harry Axe, "how can he get his people out here to trade?" He nodded to Joe Leedy. "Open the lock. Let's get things moving."

	Joe Leedy opened the lock. A smell of sulfur crept in and mingled with the air of the ship. The little man scrambled out. He crouched down under the hull and peered carefully at the sky and the land around him. Then he darted across the plain, running. As he went, he voiced a peculiar shrilling cry.

	Zakarian was pointing out the forward viewport, over Fletcher's shoulder.

	A great glare of light had burst suddenly from the roof of the building, illuminating the small running figure of the man, waking a sullen gleaming from the surfaces of the rock, like moonlight on black water, and casting into sharp relief the tiny figures of men who stood on the roof, dwarfed by the hulking shapes of the things they stood by.

	Things that could not possibly, Fletcher thought, be anything but weapons.

	Zakarian said in a tight, sharp voice, "M a y b e we shoulda hung onto him, Harry."

	Beads of sweat had appeared on Harry Axe's forehead.

	But he said loudly, "I told you, it's all right. I'd as soon brought a bunch of women as you three! Relax now, will you?"

	"You might as well relax," Fletcher said. "They've got us, if that's what they want. They could knock us over before we were ten feet off the ground,"

-

CHAPTER IV

	Fletcher and Joe Leedy stood outside the ship, but close to it, so they could jump in through the lock on a second's notice.

	Harry Axe had been gone well over half an hour, shipboard time. The weapons, of whatever sort they were, had not spoken from the building. The little man had come back quite soon with two other men. They brought things with them—a silvery suit of armor and a helmet, some beautiful jewelled ornaments, two or three small mechanisms. They gave these to Harry Axe and made him understand that they were present. Then, very graphically, they pantomimed a situation.

	The ship and the building were some distance apart. There were many people in the building who wished to trade, but they would not venture out because the ship was small and could not hold them, and there was danger on the plain. Great things, both flying and walking, were constantly hungry, constantly hunting.

	Fletcher made a question about the roof weapons-, and the little men made more flapping and humping motions to indicate that the weapons were a defense against their enemies. Remembering the white shape that had caught them in the sky, Fletcher did not doubt that for a moment. But he still did not like the look of them.

	The little men then made it plain that they wished the Earthmen to bring their goods inside the building, where it was safe.

	Harry Axe, holding his gifts in his thick arms, and especially fingering the ornaments with the queer jewels, smiled cunningly and agreed to take a part of his stock into the building. He made it very plain that if anything happened to alarm his friends the ship would take off at once, and return not with food but with destructive bombs.

	"We ain't only got a little blasting powder," Harry said, chuckling, "but how are they gonna know that? Zak, you and Joe go and sit on that pile of crates, with your guns out. That's it. That'll give 'em the idea. Fletch, you help me load the toter."

	They loaded the toter, a small power-driven cart for hauling light loads, with as many crates as it would carry.

	"Okay," said Harry casually. "You come with me."

	Fletcher grinned, but with the lips only. "No thanks, Harry. I might forget and turn my back on you."

	Harry's face got dark. The three little men—the one still in his light armor, the other two dressed in what looked like synthetic cloth, oddly dyed and patterned and wrapped anyhow around their sinewy bodies—peeped at him curiously as they pushed past into the lock.

	Joe said, "Oh, now, Harry, cool down. I've known Lucy longer than you have, and I know what she's up to. Fletch ain't interested—"

	He stopped with a word stuck halfway in his mouth. A screeching hissing roar tore at his eardrums, ripped at already tender nerves. Fletcher spun around to see a tongue of white fire lick out from the roof, toward a steam-veiled crevice just on the edge where the artificial blaze of light faded into the fire-shot gloom.

	He could not see anything there.

	The little men began to talk together, urgently. They came back in and smiled and pulled Harry with them, reassuring but hastening him at the same time. Fletcher said, "You'd better go. Your market looks impatient."

	"All right," Harry said, and glanced meaningfully at Joe Leedy and Zakarian. "Take care of things for me."

	And he went away, taking the toter with him. The three men looked after him.

	"What do you think?" said Zakarian.

	Fletcher shook his head. "They have faces like wolves."

	"You don't think they'll kill him, do you?" said Joe.

	"No," said Fletcher, and added, "not right now."

	But the time dragged on, and presently Fletcher climbed out of the lock and stood there, and in a minute or two Joe Leedy joined him.

	"Queer place, ain't it?" said Joe, and shivered.

	It was more than that, Fletcher thought. It was obscene and terrifying, the dark distorted negative of a normal world. Overhead the sky was a narrow rift between two towering slabs of blackness, that seemed from this angle to lean toppling together. The air was thick with sulfurous smells. It eddied with currents, now hot from the mouth of volcanoes, now bitter cold Sucked down from above, laced perpetually with fumes and vapors. The red, flickering glare of the fire-cones pulsed and waned, making the whole naked landscape quiver like the unsteady imaginings of a dream.

	The monstrous building reared up, a black cliff with regular rows of lights. High up on its top the weapons stood, with the tiny men beside them, and the floodlights glared, flat against the fire-glow.

	Last stand of life on a planet. Fletcher thought it would have been better to perish cleanly on the surface when at last the sun went out, instead of clinging on in this freak pocket down in the bared vitals of the world. He thought how long it takes a sun to die, long and long after its planets. He thought how long that building must have stood, and how many generations had lived there, born to this night that would never know a morning.

	Something passed overhead with a ponderous thundering of wings.

	The men shrank back into the mouth of the lock, but whatever it was went on, keeping wide of the watchers on the roof. But now Fletcher was aware of sounds, and the cleft was full of them. The deep uneasy mumbling of volcanoes turning in their sleep, the hiss of steam, the stealthy creeping whisper of movement, unseen and of unguessable origin, the crying of ungodly voices.

	"Let's get back inside," said Fletcher, in a kind of psychic panic "This is too much for me.

	But Joe said sharply, "Wait—he's coming."

-

	A portal had opened low in the face of that lighted cliff, and Harry Axe was coming out of it with ten or a dozen of the little men. He had the toter with him. It was heaped high with a wobbly load, and two of the men ran along beside it to keep the pile from falling off. Harry Axe ran ahead guiding it, shouting. His voice reached them, jubilant, ringing off the rock and the building wall. "Look what I got! Look here!" The others grabbed him and made him be still, and the men on the roof were agitated, bending to peer beyond the circle of their lights.

	Harry Axe tan across the rock plain to the ship. His face was flushed. He was laughing and breathing hard, and his eyes glittered.

	"They're crazy," he said. "Crazy, I tell you. They'd give their own skins off their backs if I wanted 'em, to get food." He was shaking with excitement. "You never seen such a place as that inside. Come on, come on, help me throw this stuff in the scout and then load up again."

	Several of the little men had each brought a folded-up framework of metal. They were unfolding these now, very quickly, into small wheeled carriers. Even while they did this they watched the sky and the plain. The others acted as a guard.

	Harry Axe was pitching things helter-skelter into the lock and leaving it to Fletcher and Joe Leedy to deal with them. And all the time he pitched, he talked.

	"Crazy. Give away their wives, their daughters. They are starving in there, get it? Anything for food. We've really hit it. Look at that stuff!"

	Fletcher looked at it while he stowed it away. More of the silvery armor, the light alloy helmets. More ornaments and fabrics. More artifacts, more delicate things of metal and wire and crystal and incomprehensible uses. The lot was worth, to the scavengers, a genuine fortune, not only in the relatively paltry worth of gems but in the new processes and principles intrinsic in the manufactured articles.

	He wondered what they might be worth to the people of the building.

	"Bring those cases out," said Harry Axe. "Every last one of 'em. Hurry it up. Get 'em moving—"

	He was in a fever. Zakarian began to heave cases from the pile and pass them to Joe Leedy, who passed them to Fletcher in the lock, who handed them down to Harry Axe. The little men moved in to help. Pretty soon one of them was in the lock with Fletcher, and then two or three more were in the ship, including the original one Joe Leedy had caught up on the surface. They worked fast. Their faces were intent, their words few and short. Outside, the cases were being piled on the carriers.

	"Come on," cried Harry. "Hurry it up!"

	They hurried. But the stack of crates in the ship was only a little more than half transferred when a huge bawling broke out in the darkness, and at once the snarling beams snapped out from the roof batteries, probing along the edges of the light.

	The faces of the cleft-dwellers tightened. They all stopped what they were doing and waited, poised for instant flight or action, their hands on the firetubes at their belts.

	The Earthmen stopped, too.

-

	A thing like a mountain heaved into sight. It moved slowly, as a mountain would move, and it bawled as it came, in the kind of a voice a mountain might have. Fletcher, peering out of the lock, thought he could see a head on a thick high neck, a head shaped square and rough as a boulder, and a great jaw hanging to it like the scoop of a power shovel.

	The weapon-beams found it. White fire sparked and flashed, and the mountain floundered heavily aside, but it was not killed. It lay quiet behind a ridge of rock and watched.

	The little men grabbed up cases and threw them out of the ship.

	The mountain piped, boomed, and charged.

	Harry Axe jumped in through the port. "Good God," he said. "That thing'll crush us. It'll crush the ship." He shoved past Fletcher and made for the pilot's chair. "Come on, let's get out of here. Fast, for Godsake!"

	Outside the white beams struck again, and this time the mountain rolled completely over, a stunning and titanic vision, but still it was not dead. It flopped back behind its ridge and sulked, making the cliffs ring with its hunger and its rage.

	Harry Axe, his hands shaking, began to paw at the controls. The little man who had guided them here went up to Harry. He shook his head and pointed to the stack of crates still remaining. His fellows were still passing them out as fast as they could while Zakarian and Joe Leedy stood petrified.

	Harry reached around without even looking and gave the little man a backhanded blow. "Get 'em out of the ship," he said. "Hell with 'em. It's not worth getting killed for."

	From where he sat on the deck, the little man burned two neat holes through Harry Axe's wrists, one to each arm.

	Harry screamed. He looked at his wrists and then he clapped them between his knees and rocked back and forth. He began to cry.

	The little man moved, very fast. Joe Leedy already had his gun out, because of the huge thing outside. He almost fired it, but not quite. The fire-tube made a hole through his chest on the left side, and he died in the middle of a step, without making a sound.

	In the same instant one of the other two little men inside the ship hurled a plastic crate at Zakarian's head from the back and brought him down.

	In the lock, Fletcher had whirled around, his gun out. He sprang forward to where he could get a clear shot into the cabin, but like Joe Leedy he had no time. With ferocious swiftness, the little men outside swarmed into the lock and took him from behind.

	They bore him down by sheer weight of numbers to the deck, hanging to his arms and legs, battering at his head. He thought they would kill him, but they did not. He kicked and struck and rolled, but the violent blows on his head were making him sick and faint, and their powerful little bodies held him tight.

	All right, he thought, hearing their quick animal breathing through the gathering dark. All right, if that's what you want, you can have it.

	He relaxed and became utterly limp.

	The little men grunted, and hauled him out of the lock.

	They dumped him in a heap at one side, and took his gun away, and left him there.

	The hungry mountain boomed and sobbed behind its ridge of rock.

-

CHAPTER V

	What happened after that happened with the same grim, fierce speed.

	Fletcher saw it. At first he watched through the dark edge of unconsciousness, lying still on the hard stone. The figures of the little men jumped and leaped between the ship's lock and the carriers, bearing crates, stacking them. As soon as one of the carriers was full, the man who had brought it went running away with it toward the building. The white beams snapped and crackled from the roof at intervals, holding the mountain at bay. Fletcher smiled. What a crazy nightmare, he thought. I'll have to remember the details when I wake up.

	A blinding stab of pain went through his head. There was a running of blood in his mouth. No nightmare, he thought. This is for real. Poor Joe. Poor Joe Leedy, he's dead.

	The mountain danced ponderously in an agony of frustration, and now there was a new sound overhead. A sound of wings.

	Cringing, Fletcher looked up and saw a monstrous white shape flapping, and then another, and another, delta-formed, with long out-thrust necks. The beams from the roof shot now into the sky, and the things made a horrid screaming, wheeling heavily like monstrous gulls around the carcass of a fish.

	Fletcher inched back under the curve of the ship's hull.

	The little men sent the last carrier racing over the plain. They brought the last of the crates out, working with indomitable fury under the menace of the larger creatures who would also give anything for food. They stacked the last crates on the toter, less than a full load, and then they hauled Harry Axe out, reeling and sagging like a man half dead, and threw him on the load, and all the time the hissing beams played like lightning over their heads.

	Fletcher moved swiftly and silently, under the stern. The main tubes showed a cluster of round black holes above his head.

	The little men drove Zakarian out of the ship and put him beside the toter.

	Fletcher reached up and grasped the edge of the lowest tube and pulled himself into its charred-smelling, pitted mouth.

	The little men dragged out the body of Joe Leedy.

	Squirming himself around in his narrow quarters, Fletcher managed to turn so that he could see out. The little men were hunting for him. Their voices were brusque and angry. Two of them, meanwhile, were pulling Joe Leedy's body, like a long rag doll, out a little way toward the hungry mountain.

	The fire-beams went into a perfect frenzy of flaring. Great voices howled and screamed. A white shape dipped down and a beam caught it fairly and crumpled it up. It fell thrashing, and instantly the cumbersome beast behind the ridge charged out and began to feed.

	The two men dropped Joe Leedy and ran as fast as they could back toward the ship. And now it seemed that there was no more time to look for Fletcher. Probably they thought he was already dead and eaten. They bunched up around Zakarian and the loaded cart, and went away at a terrific pace toward the building. The fire-beams from the roof threw a protective cover over them, the perimeter constantly drawing in behind them as they ran.

	Two vast white shapes came down and began to quarrel over what had been left for them. And Fletcher was left alone.

	The weapons fell silent. The floodlights went out. The dim fire-glow lit the plain with its red flickerings. The living mountain crunched and fed. The two white screaming brutes tore alternately at the body of Joe Leedy and at each other. Fletcher wanted to weep for Joe Leedy, but there were no tears in him. There was only rage and terror.

	He thought, unless they've booby-trapped the ship, I can get back in it and fly up out of here. I can take a chance.

	He thought, Harry Axe deserves what he's getting. The hell with him.

	Then he thought about Zakarian, who didn't deserve it, and he thought about facing Zakarian's wife and Lucy Axe. He could imagine what they would think, and say, if he came back up alone.

	Fletcher didn't think about any of these things more than a second. They just went through his head while he was climbing quietly out of the tube. Underneath all the thoughts was a hard core of purpose. It was not entirely a lofty purpose. Part of it said, Zakarian's a good guy and I can't just leave him.

	But the bigger part of it said, Lucy's damn lie has got me boxed and if I go back alone now they'll think I killed the others and they'll very likely kill me for it. So I've got to get them out of there and take them back with me.

	And he'd have to do it without help. It was no use going back up and calling for a massed attack on the cleft-dwellers. All he would be doing would be to get four slow clumsy ships loaded with women and children into the range of those spitting fire-beams. And as Harry himself had said, all they had was a little blasting powder.

-

	He crept away from the creatures on the plain who were too busy just for that few minutes to notice him. He crept as fast as he could, hugging himself into hollows in the rock, creeping on all fours when he had to cross a high spot. He headed for the cliff-wall of the building, with its regular rows of lights. He made the angle of his going wide, so that when he actually reached the building he would be at the part of it where there were no lights.

	On the way he passed the end of the steaming crevice at which that first shot from the roof had been made. Something pale and unrock-like lay beside the crack about halfway along its length. Fletcher hesitated, and then went cautiously toward the object.

	It was the body of a man, with the head burned neatly off it.

	The body was small. The clothing and weapons remaining on it were similar to but not identical with the clothing and weapons of the men who came from the building. Fletcher crouched beside it, thinking.

	They would hardly have killed one of their own people. And one of their own people would hardly have been lurking in this crevice. Probably, then, the dead man was from some other building in the cleft. Remembering the one destroyed by the lava flow, Fletcher knew that there had been other buildings once. Perhaps there still were, and perhaps they were like warring city-states opposed in this brutal fight for survival, spying, raiding back and forth, destroying each other with the cold fierceness of necessity.

	He wondered how much this man had seen, and whether he had been alone. The steam-veiled, sulfur-reeking crevice led into a little narrow "gorge that wound away suggestively, but did not give him any answers. He hoped the man had been alone, because if he had had a companion, and the companion had gone for reinforcements, it could make the already impossible task of getting to Harry and Zakarian a good deal harder.

	Distastefully, Sam Fletcher reached out and took the fire-tube from the belt of the dead man. The booming of great wings overhead warned him just in time, and he fled away among the veiling mists. Behind him came the flop of a heavy body settling and then a sound of crunching. He ran, as hard as he could, toward the dark part of the building, forgetting caution, forgetting everything but a blind need for a place to hide.

	He gained the wall. But it was solid and unbroken, and the windows were all high above his head, fifty or sixty feet high. There was no way in, and the surface felt like glass under his hands, impossible to climb. He remained pressed against it, his heart hammering, listening, flinching, feeling death everywhere, in every sound and smell. Then he began to move along the wall, farther and farther away from the lights, into the abandoned darkness.

	The building was very large. It was almost as large as the ones these same people, or their forebears, had built on the surface in the final days. Fletcher followed it for a mile, and perhaps a little more, and then he turned a corner? Another length of wall, like the face of a black mountain, stretched away in front of him, and now the tall cone with its plume of fire was in full view. The red light was stronger here. Fletcher crept in it, hugging the wall, feeling exposed and obvious. And still there was no way in, no hiding place.

	He went on because there was nothing else to do.

-

	Miles of windows, blank and blind, giving back a flat pale glimmer from the firelight. Walls of black stone, long and high, fortress walls unconquerable from without, but defeated from within by the slow attrition of time and the dying out of a people.

	Emptiness and desolation.

	He went on, a tiny figure toiling through a dark dream.

	He reached the second corner, the one farthest from the section still inhabited and so probably the first abandoned and the longest neglected.

	And there was a break in the wall.

	Some volcanic tremor had run a fissure right up into the foundation and cracked it. A part of the wall had subsided, and a part of the roof had fallen, making what amounted to a narrow chimney in the cliff. Fletcher sobbed and began desperately to climb.

	Clutching and sliding, panting, sweating, clawing, Fletcher made his way to the top of the rubble fall and found a little opening barely big enough to crawl through. He crawled, very cautiously, envisioning a plunge through broken floors into depths below. Dim light flickered through the window-holes, showing him a floor tilted and torn away at one corner, but otherwise apparently sound. He stepped on it, and it held. He was inside.

	He went to the corner of the room farthest from the break and sat down and stayed there for a bit, feeling the safety around him. Gradually his breathing eased and he stopped trembling, and then he got up again. He found a broad doorway, and went through it.

	And now he saw that the ruin of this building-city was greater than he had thought.

	The massive outer walls had stood firm, a tribute to their long-gone builders. But there had been inner collapses. Whole blocks had fallen together, and the fire-glow poured through the gaps in the roof, immensely far above Fletcher, lending a faint illumination to parts of what was left.

	Fletcher looked at those holes to the outdoors, and shivered. But there was no sign that the creatures of the cleft had moved in. Only the flying things would be able to, and the honeycomb of rooms and halls, and the relatively—for their huge wings—cramped areas of the shafts would not appeal to them.

	He stopped at intervals, anyway, to listen, but he could not hear anything but the quiet of the building, the countless thousands of its rooms still intact, their walls enclosing silence, their floors untrod, the myriad functions for which they had been built forgotten. It was an oppressive silence. It made him aware of the hopeless existence these people had led and still did lead, what was left of them, foredoomed, with their world dying under them. It made him wonder why they fought to live at all. It made him wonder why anybody did.

	He prowled the long corridors that were like streets, moving up and down from level to level as he was forced to by fallen rubble or by the need to keep going in a particular direction. Sometimes he went in total darkness, feeling his way. Sometimes there was the flickering glow of that ominous torch to show him what he passed. The private apartments with their doors standing all ajar or fallen from the hinges, and their windows to the "street" no longer interested in who went by. The public gathering places, with transparent fronts, sometimes spreading very wide, sometimes not, with the faded lettering of signs still there to tell what the places had once been and were no longer. The bits and pieces of furniture, of personal belongings, all the rags and wreckage that people leave behind when they go. The beautiful things, torn and fallen to rot or defiantly surviving in imperishable stone, the dreaming faces of men and women, the statue of a laughing child, colors, shapes, incomprehensible structures of silver wire and gleaming metal rods. The utilitarian things, great hulking functional shapes that had once pumped light and life to all this teeming city-state, dissolving slowly into rust. The factories, mills, synthesizing plants, all quiet.

	He began to notice that you could tell where each successive abandonment of a sector had ended, by the barrier walls. These seemed to be a later development, occurring as Fletcher got closer to the inhabited part. Perhaps there had not been any strife between the city-states in their earlier days. Perhaps they still felt their brotherhood in the legion of the condemned. But later, as the shrinking population had withdrawn, they had built massive bulkheads behind them, against possible invasion from their own rear.

	These ancient bulkhead walls were breached now, and Fletcher had no trouble getting through them. But he began to worry.

	He clambered on through that gigantic ruin, going more and more cautiously as he knew he must be approaching the inhabited part. His windings and twistings had brought him close to the outer wall again, and the sudden blazing-on of floodlights outside struck like lightning through the windows, startling him. He looked cautiously out, but he could not see anything but the volcano and the flat brilliance of the lights glaring on the bare rock. The ship was opposite the other corner of the building, and he could not see it from here. He went on, hounded by a sense of imminent change, and a feeling that all this journey had been for nothing and that very likely he would die in this great black man-built mountain. He found an avenue leading straight to where he wanted to go, and he followed it until it ended in a blank wall.

	Fletcher tried rooms on either side. He tried other avenues, and in desperation he tried other levels. Everywhere the barrier wall faced him, and this one was not breached.

	There was no way through.

	And now he heard the sounds of battle from the plain.

-

CHAPTER VI

	The roof-batteries spoke, with a hiss and a snarl. Other voices answered, some shrill and spiteful, others very deep, and every time the deep ones coughed Fletcher could feel the building quiver, ever so slightly. Once the noises started they never stopped, but only built and increased until the sheer violence of sound was stunning.

	Apparently the little man with no head had indeed had a companion, and apparently the companion had gone for reinforcements. He must have known that food of some kind was being unloaded from the strange ship—of course food, because what else was there in life to arouse that much energy and excitement, to make men defy the charging mountain and the flapping creatures of the sky? Probably he had believed that the men of this rival building had established contact with a source of supply outside the cleft—an unavoidable assumption—and that the source might well be constant. At any rate it was an advantage too great for any city to allow another city to acquire and keep to itself.

	So there was an all-out battle going on, and Harry Axe and Zakarian were still prisoners on the other side of an impassable wall, if they weren't already dead. And he, Fletcher, stood helpless in the middle of the mess, and what was he going to do about it?

	The building quivered, slightly but ominously. The weapons talked.

	Fletcher thought of the roof.

	The batteries were there, and men were there to operate them, which meant there had to be ways for the men to get there. And if the men were very busy watching the enemy below, they might not see one man creeping quietly over the roof from the abandoned area behind them.

	It was worth trying.

	He worked his way up to the topmost level and presently he found a hatch. It was ingeniously made, easily opened from the inside, impervious from without. He opened it, and emerged onto the roof.

	He lay flat on his belly. Back of him stretched the enormous expanse of the building-top, a dark plain riven with gaps and fissures much like the rock on which it stood. At one side was a low parapet guarding the edge." Before him was the segment where the batteries stood in a bristling row, served by little urgent mobs of men, and where the floodlights blazed.

	Above him, in the sulfurous sky, wide wings beat and hungry cries resounded, and every few minutes one of the roof-batteries would send a beam of fire shooting upward to keep the brutes away.

	He risked a glance over the parapet, because it was important for him to know how the battle was going. He could see only part of the periphery from here, the midget enemy with mobile batteries—the size of toys as seen from up here—half concealed in cracks and gullies, banging away at the wall. They did not seem to have made much headway, and a number of their batteries were out of commission. He thought the defenders were winning, and he was sorry, because if the battle stopped it was going to make things a lot harder for him.

	Perhaps a hundred yards away he saw an open hatch, and made for it. No one noticed him. Fletcher could not see anybody below. Probably those whose duty it was to man the roof were already up here, and there was no reason for anyone else to be on the top level. He took the chance and swung down.

	He was alone in a long broad hall, brightly lighted, dusty, and defended with weapon-emplacements. No one was at them now. The emplacements looked unused.

	Holding the fire-tube he had taken from the dead man ready in his hand, Fletcher began to work his way down through the building. He was in a curious state of desperation, where both fear and courage become words without meaning. He didn't even think about them any more. He was like a man who for one reason or another has got himself caught in a strong current and has now no choice but to go along with it, holding himself up from minute to minute as best he can.

	The levels were all lighted, all silent and dusty with cluttered corridors and sagging-open doors, with junk and rubbish deposited in corners and against walls by the passing eddies of time. The air smelled of sulfur and decay.

	Fletcher went down, by winding ramps and stairways.

	A new smell began to intrude on the sulfurous air—the universal and unmistakable smell of human squalor. Shortly afterward, Fletcher heard voices.

-

	He became cautious and cunning now, darting in and out of doorways, peering through intercommunicating windows. The voices sounded as though they were below him, but they seemed also to come from up ahead. Finally he found a glass front in the wall that showed a balcony. The door was open, and the voices were quite loud. Fletcher ventured onto the balcony, and looked over the railing, his body crouched down behind a pillar.

	There was a huge space below. Probably it had been intended as an amphitheater or stadium for public games, and there were spectators' balconies, of which this was one, in tiers above the floor. The floor was full of people, mostly women and children, with a very few old men. Fletcher thought that this was the community gathering-place in times of trouble, well in the heart of the inhabited area, where the non-combatants would be safest.

	There were, as nearly as he could judge, about three thousand of them. The empty balconies, that could have accommodated ten times that number, hung over them in gloomy mockery, but the people did not seem to notice. They seemed cheerful, talking busily, nursing babies, doing small tasks they had brought with them. They did not seem in the least worried about the safety of the building. Probably they had been through this before, many times, and nothing had ever happened, and so nothing ever would.

	The children ran and chased each other and made noise and cried and carried on mock battles in the lowest balcony.

	To them, all this was natural. This was home. They had been born into it, and there was no other. It was good.

	They were very tiny children, and there were not many of them.

	There seemed to be a concentration of activity among the youngsters at one place in the lowest balcony, where the only young man in the place stood guard over a stall, motioning the children away with half-tolerant impatience. Fletcher could not see who was in the stall behind him, but he was pretty sure he knew.

	He marked the place mentally and began his tortuous secret windings again, around and down.

	The fact that the men were busy on the building's defenses, and the rest of the population was concentrated in the amphitheater, made it possible for Fletcher to get where he wanted to go unseen. And this living part of the building was worse than the dead. Everywhere it stunk of poverty and the breakingdown of things. Everywhere was a letting-go and a forgetting. Machines were broken, walls and doors defaced, articles of art and usage tossed into corners, so that this once-splendid building, constructed in magnificent defiance by a proud race, had become no more than a filthy tenement housing a degenerate remnant that had lost even the urge to keep itself clean. He imagined that the power units and the synthesizing plants were fully automatic and self-serving, and he imagined that when anything did finally break down it stayed broken, so that they would have constantly fewer services and supplies, including metal manufactures and cloth, and especially the synthetic foods that must be the staples of their diet. He had a brief and terrible vision of how it would be some day when the last handful of people would be forced out of a building totally dark and dead, to hunt the monsters of the cleft and be hunted, all dumb hapless brutes together.

	The children shrieked faintly at their games, and laughed.

	The noise of battle, ominously for him, appeared to slacken. He crept hurriedly along a dirty avenue, beside a dirty wall, toward a broken door in a transparent front made opaque by the smudging of hands and an accretion of greasy dust. He stuck his head carefully around the door.

	The row of stalls was slightly below him, and the one he wanted was off to his right. Harry Axe was out of sight but Zakarian was there. He could just see his head, over the dividing wall.

	Zakarian turned, moving his head in the slow hopeless way of an animal that already knows his cage is tightly barred. He saw Fletcher. His eyes went wide, and his mouth opened. Frantically, Fletcher shook his own head and gestured for silence.

	He got it. Not only from Zakarian, but from outside. The batteries had ceased to fire, on both sides.

	And now the people in the amphitheater grew silent, too. Even the children stopped their playing. They listened.

	A man came running in from the other side, through an entrance on the floor level. He shouted triumphantly. A great burst of sound went up from the women and the old men. They laughed and waved their fists. The children screamed like young hawks. And then they began to move out of the amphitheater. The enemy was gone, the attack had failed and the battle was over, and they were returning to their homes.

	Trapped in the doorway, Fletcher looked for a place to hide and couldn't see one.

-

	Then he noticed that they were all leaving by the lower entrances. In a few minutes, probably, all these levels would be swarming with families, but in the meantime the guard was lounging with his back to Fletcher, and there might be an outside chance—

	So far outside that it was hopeless, but after all, that was what he had come for.

	He went on his hands and knees through the door and along under the back partition of the stalls.

	The avenues below were full of movement and voices. The men were coming back from their posts at whatever defenses they had on the ground level. The men from the roof would be down, too. Fletcher groaned to himself and crawled on.

	He raised up and looked directly into the stall. Zakarian was there, his hands and feet bound, his body hunched up in a tense anguish of suspense. The guard was now standing several feet away from the front of the stall, as though tempted to go after the rest of the people.

	Harry Axe was not there.

	The amphitheater was empty. The guard turned suddenly and came back to the stall, as though he had made up his mind to stay. He saw Fletcher. His small hard mouth came open and his lungs expanded, and it was the last breath he ever drew. Fletcher shot him, inexpertly but fatally, with the fire-tube.

	He leaped into the stall and began to tear at the bonds on Zakarian's wrists, and all the time the voices talked and shouted and the people moved in the halls and on the ramps and stairs.

	"Where's Harry?" he asked.

	Zakarian was crying. "I thought you were dead," he said. "I thought we were all goners." His hands were free now and he began to fumble wildly at his ankles, getting in Fletcher's way. "Fletch, we gotta hurry."

	"Yes," said Fletcher, "but where's Harry? Did they kill him?"

	"Kill him?" said Zakarian, his voice rising to a thin shriek. "Kill him! You know what that bastard done? He made a deal with 'em. That's what they wanted with us, they wanted us to fly the scout up with some of their men in it, so they could get inside the ships by surprise and take all the food that was left. And Harry's gonna do it."

	He stood up, kicking the cord away from his feet. He started to run, and Fletcher caught him. Zakarian looked at him as though he was an enemy.

	"My wife and kids are up there," said Zakarian. He struck at Fletcher. "Let me go!

	Fletcher shook him. "Stop it," he said savagely. "We'll get out. Harry's going to fly the scout up for them?"

	"They're gonna pay him and let him go. He thinks he'll make a fortune and save his own skin. How could he turn down a bargain like that?" Zakarian tried to shake Fletcher off. "Let go!"

	"You turned it down," said Fletcher.

	"What do you think I am, a goddamn murderer? Listen, maybe you didn't hear what I said. Harry made a deal. They just got it settled when that attack started. Now they will go as soon as they can get their men together."

	"Yes," said Fletcher. "I heard you." He felt sick. He felt hopeless, and bitterly enraged. He felt unclean to be a human being and of the same species as Harry Axe.

	He felt like giving up.

	Zakarian was still talking. "We gotta get to the scout, Fletch. If we beat 'em to it, we can maybe stop them—"

	"Yes," said Fletcher. "Sure. That's all we have to do."

	Zakarian fell silent. He watched while Fletcher went and got the fire-tube from the belt of the dead guard, and he took it in his own hand when Fletcher gave it to him.

	They went out into the corridor.

	There were voices and movement, but no one was in sight yet. In frantic haste now, Fletcher led the way up a winding ramp to the level above, and then to the level above that, and still up, until the voices grew fainter below. Fletcher did not know whether the men had come down yet from the roof, and whether in any case they would use this ramp or another one. He decided that he might as well assume that there was no danger of meeting anyone, because if they did not get to the scout before Harry did, and if the scout took off without them, they were dead anyway. They ran up and up into the quiet heights of the building, and no one saw, and no one stopped them.

	They came to the topmost level, and found the hatches closed. Fletcher opened one. They climbed onto the roof, and it was dark and empty in the glow of the burning volcano.

	"Hurry," said Zakarian. He was gasping for breath, stumbling as he ran. "Hurry."

	"This way," said Fletcher, and made for the hatch he had left open. They slid through it into the abandoned rooms, and Fletcher closed it behind them.

	"Hurry," Zakarian said.

	"Patience," said Fletcher. "It's a long way yet."

	He stood thinking for a moment. There was no time to go back all the way he had come, and no need. From the inside you might find a way out closer at hand. He set off across the building, close to the barrier wall, toward the side where the ship was.

	The transverse avenues were dark, and a thousand miles long, and it took them a thousand years to reach the other wall, and all the time they knew it was too late.

-

	They looked out the high windows, onto the plain.

	"It's still there," said Zakarian. "Look, the scout's still there!"

	"What's holding them up?" muttered Fletcher. Then he looked down closer to the building and saw that the field of battle was being cleaned of its dead by the mighty hungry ones, the scavengers, the blood-brothers of Harry Axe.

	"Come on," said Fletcher. "We got to go down now, lower. Keep watch for a long chain, anything that's long and still strong enough to hold us."

	They went down, racing, stumbling, staggering, falling, down spiral ramps and steep stairs, in and out of the empty halls and rooms, through the silence and the dim flickering light. They found a coil of beautiful silvery cable, light, unrusted, in the corner of a huge room that had once served as maintenance depot for part of the power system. They carried it with them, down to the bottom-most row of windows.

	The scout was still there on the plain.

	Zakarian cried, "There's some windows here smashed already!"

	The battering of the attackers' weapons had done that much damage. anyway. Fletcher looked out. The beasts had not gone away but they would have to risk them. They made one end of the cable fast and threw the other out, and slid down it to the open rock below.

	They ran toward the ship, keeping low on the hollows of the rock.

	The beasts were roaming now, looking for more food, quarrelling ferociously among themselves, white-winged horrors and mountains that walked and bawled.

	They ran, two little dark figures in the night, and then they crouched down between rocks as the roaring and stamping came toward them.

	"We're never gonna make this," said Zakarian.

	And Fletcher, crouching, thought, No we can't.

	And he thought, God, what a way for a world and a people to come to their slow ending ...

	The floodlights came on, slamming their flat glare across the plain, throwing the beasts into hideous relief. Fletcher and Zakarian froze as the roof batteries came alive, spitting white fire among the brutes, driving them back where there was nothing left now to eat. Fletcher noticed that none of the creatures was actually hit. It one had been killed, all the others would have stayed to devour it. They flapped and floundered reluctantly, out beyond the circle of the light.

	The door in the building wall opened. Harry Axe was coming out of it, and with him were six of the little men.

	Zakarian began to curse.

	Fletcher pulled him out of the shelter of the rocks and they ran toward the scout, keeping low, keeping the rocks between them and the building.

	They were inside the scout when Harry Axe and the others came.

	Zakarian closed the lock door behind them so they could not get out again, and he and Fletcher both fired into the massed group of them in the lock chamber, with Fletcher shouting, "Don't hit Harry, he's got to go back with us!", and Zakarian's face a mask of deadly hate. Harry screamed and fell on the floor of the lock and crawled toward them like a broken snake, crying, "What are you trying to do?" Over him and behind him the hot bright beams played, and the little men died.

	And Fletcher thought, "You poor starved little bastards, I don't want to kill you but I don't want to die myself so I have to, I have to—"

	But it was over in seconds, and only death and a smell of seared metal in the lock chamber. Fletcher knocked the tube out of Zakarian's hand. "No," he said.

	"What's the matter with you?" Harry Axe was saying. "Didn't you know what I was doing? I was just blurring them. I was going to get help. Didn't you understand that?"

	Fletcher kicked him, not hard, merely with a weary contempt. "Get up," he said.

	Harry got up. He sat in one of the seats and Zakarian watched him. Fletcher closed the inner door on the bodies in the lock. He sat down at the controls.

	The batteries on the building roof obligingly cleared the sky for the scout as it rose up. Naturally. Their own men were aboard.

-

CHAPTER VII

	The four rusty rattling ships were far out in space, away from the world of the dark star.

	In the main cabin of the Prosperous Hope, Fletcher sat at the table with a bottle and a glass in front of him. Harry Axe sat at the other end of the table, his bandaged wrists stretched out on the soiled, scarred top. Lucy stood beside him. Her face was flushed, her eyes narrow with anger. Zakarian sat in one of the bunks, with his arm around his wife. They had moved in so Zakarian could take Joe Leedy's place, and Joe Leedy's widow had been moved out to one of the other ships 60 that she would not kill Harry Axe.

	Harry was saying, "I'm sick and tired of this goddamn badgering. I told you I never meant to do what I promised them little thieves. I was only gonna get help."

	"Help for who?" said Zakarian. "Don't try to lie to me, Harry. I was there. I saw your little piggy eyes bug out when they handed you that pocketful of stones."

	He pointed to a glittering heap in the center of the table. Then he leaned over and put his face close to Harry's.

	"If you was only bluffing them," he said, "why didn't you tell me that? They couldn't understand what we said. You'd have had me to help you when the time came. But no, you never peeped a word. You just pouched them stones and practically licked their hands. You let 'em take off, so's I wouldn't try to stop you."

	The other men who had come aboard for the council looked at Harry Axe and said, "What have you got to say to that?"

	Lucy Axe looked at Harry and at the heap of shiny stones and her eyes burned.

	"He don't have to say nothing," she said shrilly. "He's the boss. Zak's lying on him. He's jealous because Harry brought back all that stuff." She turned to Fletcher. "And as for him—"

	Zakarian reached out and slapped her. "You've made enough trouble with your tongue," he said evenly. "You go sit down somewhere."

	The men asked Harry, "What have you got to say?"

	Harry shook his head, rocking from side to side. "I'm sick. They tortured me, can't you see that? You think a man can go through what I been through and not be sick? You ought to let me alone."

	Lucy said furiously, "You get up and give 'em hell, Harry. They can't treat you that way. You're the boss."

	But Harry only sat and rocked and said that he was sick.

	Lucy said to Fletcher, "It's your fault. You drunk, you—"

	Fletcher said slowly, "I'll tell you something. Nine years ago I was officer on the Starbright when she crashed in landing. I was one of three survivors. I saw the men, the women, the children, the babies, that died trying to reach the stars. Trying to reach the stars! That's when I started drinking."

	He reached out and took the •bottle and poured himself one drink and drank it. Then he put the cork back in the bottle and pushed it down the table to Harry Axe.

	"And this," said Fletcher, "is where I stop."

	Lucy began to cry. She turned and hit Harry as hard as she could across the face, and then she ran out of the cabin.

	Later, alone at the controls, Fletcher looked out at the stars and nodded to them. He knew, now, why all those men and women and children and babies had died, why so many Earthmen had died of this crazy obsession for stars.

	You could be sensible. You could cling close to home, to comfort, to your own safe little world. The people of the cleft had done that, long ago, and he had seen their ending. No. In the madness of Earthmen was a greater wisdom.

	The starcombers would go on their wandering way, but they would go now without him. He was going on out to the stars again.

	He knew now where he belonged, and why.

The End
sleipnir 3/04/2012