Gary shrugged. “That’s a chance we take.”
The Hellhounds separated, spreading out to left and right, angling out to
come at the ship from two directions.
“You better get into the lock,” said Gary. “Grab hold of the closing lever
and be ready. When I come, I may have to move fast. There’s no telling what
these gents are fixing to uncork.”
But even as he spoke, the two reptiles charged, angling in at a burst of
speed that almost made them blur, a whirlwind of dust spiraling up behind
them.
“In we go!” yelled Gary.
He heard Caroline’s feet beating a tattoo on the steps.
For a split second he stood there, still facing the charging Hellhounds,
then whirled and leaped up the steps, catapulting himself into the lock. He
saw Caroline swinging the lever down. The ladder ran up into its seat and
the lock slammed home. Through its closing edge he caught sight of the
beasts as they swung about in a skidding turn, cheated of their kill.
Gary wiped his forehead. “Close thing,” he said. “We almost waited too
long. I had no idea they could move that fast.”
Caroline nodded. “They figured that we wouldn’t. They saw a chance to catch
us at the very start. Remember how they waddled. That was to make us think
that they couldn’t move too fast.”
The voice said to them: “This is no way to fight.”
“It’s common sense,” said Gary. “Common sense and good strategy.”
“What is strategy?”
“Fooling the enemy,” said Gary. “Working things so that you get an
advantage over him.”
“He’ll be waiting for you when you come out. And you’ll have to come out
after a while.”
“We rest and take it easy,” said Gary, “while he tears up the ground
outside and wears himself to a frazzle. And we do some thinking.”
“It’s a lousy way to fight,” the voice insisted.
“Look,” said Gary. “Who’s doing the fighting here?
You or us.”
“You, of course,” the voice agreed, “but it’s still no way to fight.”
They sensed the mind withdraw, grumbling to itself.
Gary grinned at Caroline. “Not gory enough to suit him,” he said.
Caroline had sat down in a chair and was staring at him, elbow on her knee,
chin cupped in her hands.
“We haven’t much to work with,” she declared. “No electricity. No power. No
nothing. This ship is deader than a doornail. It’s lucky the lock worked
manually or we’d been goners before we even started.”
Gary nodded in agreement. “That voice bothers me the most,” he said. “It
has power, a strange sort of power. It can stop a spaceship dead in its
tracks. It can fix guns so that they won’t work. It can blanket out
electricity; Lord knows what else it can do.”
“It can reach into the unknown of space and time,” said Caroline. “Into a
place no one else could even find and it did that to bring us here.”
“It’s irresponsible,” said Gary. “Back on Earth we’d call it insanity but
what you and I would term insanity may be normal here.”
“There’s no yardstick,” said Caroline. “No yardstick to measure sanity. No
way in which one can establish a norm for correct behavior or a correct
mentality. Maybe the voice is sane. Maybe he has a purpose and a method of
arriving at that purpose we do not understand and for that we call him
crazy. Every race must be different, must think differently… arrive at
the same conclusion and the same result, perhaps, but arrive at them
differently. You remember all those beings that came to confer with the
Engineers. All of them were capable, perhaps more capable than we.
Independently they might have been able to arrive at the same solution as
we and perhaps much more easily and more effectively… and yet the
Engineers sent them home again, because the Engineers could not work with
them. Not because they were not capable, but because they thought so
differently, because their mental processes ran at such divergent tangents
that there was no basis for co-operation.”
“And yet we thought like the Engineers,” said Gary.
“Enough like them, at any rate, that we could work together. I wonder why
that is.”
Caroline wrinkled her forehead. “Gary, you are certain these goblin things
out there are the same race that came to the city of the Engineers?”
“I would swear it,” Gary told her. “I got a good look at the one that was
there. It sort of… well, burned itself into my mind. I’ll never quite
forget it.”
“And the voice,” said Caroline. “I wonder if the voice has anything to do
with the goblins.”
“The goblins,” said the voice, “are my pets. Like the dogs and cats you
keep. A living thing to keep me from loneliness.”
It did not surprise them to hear the voice again and each of them knew then
that they had been waiting for it to speak up again.
“But,” protested Caroline, “one of the goblins came to the city of the
Engineers.”
The voice chuckled at them. “Of course, human thing, of course. As my
representative, of course. For I must have representatives, don’t you see.
In a material world, I must be fronted for by something that can be seen,
that can be perceived. I could not very well go to a meeting of that great
importance as a disembodied voice, as a thought stalking the corridors of
that empty city. So I sent a goblin and I went along with him.”
“What are you, voice?” Caroline asked. “Tell us what you are.”
“I still don’t think,” said the voice, “that what you are doing is a good
way to fight a duel. I think you’re making a great mistake.”
“What makes you think so, Butch?” asked Gary.
“Because,” the voice said, “the Hellhounds are building a fire under your
ship. It will be just a matter of time until they smoke you out.”
Gary and Caroline glanced swiftly at one another, the same thought in their
mind.
“No power,” said Caroline, weakly.
“The heat absorption units,” Gary cried.
“No power,” said Caroline. “The absorption cells won’t work.”
Gary glanced toward the forward vision ports. Thin streamers of smoke were
curling up outside the glass.
“The mushrooms burn well,” the voice told them, “when they get old and dry.
There are lots of old and dry mushrooms around. They’ll have no trouble in
keeping up the fire.”
“Like smoking out a rabbit,” said Gary, bitterly.
“You asked for it,” the voice declared.
“Get out of here!” yelled Gary. “Get out of here and leave us alone, can’t
you.”
They sensed it leave, mumbling to itself.
Like a bad dream, Gary thought. Like a Wonderland adventure, with he and
Caroline the poor bewildered Alice stumbling through a world of vast
incredibility.
Listening, they could hear the crackling of the fire. Now the smoke was a
dense cloud through the forward ports.
How do you fight when you have no weapon? How do you get out of a
spaceship-turned-into-an-oven? How do you think up a smart dodge when your
time is numbered in hours, if not, indeed, in minutes?
What are weapons?
How did they start?
What is the basic of a weapon?
“Caroline,” Gary asked, “what would you say a weapon was?”
“Why,” she told him, “that seems simple to me. An extension of your fist.
An extension of your power to hurt, of your ability to kill. Men fought
first with tooth and nail and fist and then with stones and clubs. The
stones and clubs were extensions of man’s fist, an extension of his muscles
and his hate or need.”
Stones and clubs, he thought. And then a spear. And, after that, a bow,
A bow!
He swung on his heel, walked rapidly back along the ship, jerked open the
door to the supply cabinet. Rummaging inside it, he found the things he
wanted.
He brought them out, a fistful of wooden flagpoles, each with small flags
fastened to one end, the other end steel-tipped for easy sticking in the
ground.
“Explorer flags,” he explained to Caroline. “You go out on an alien planet
and you want to be sure that you can find your way back to the ship. You
plant these things at intervals and then follow them back to the ship,
picking them up as you go along. No chance of getting lost.”
“But…” said Caroline.
“Evans figured he was going to use this ship to go to Alpha Centauri, He
took some of these things along, just in case.”
He placed the steel-shod tip of one of the poles on the floor, threw his
weight against the top end. It flexed. Gary grunted in satisfaction.
“A bow?” asked Caroline.
He nodded. “Not too good a one. Not too accurate. Maybe not too strong.
When I was a kid I used to go out into the woods and whack me off a