Planet of Adventure Omnibus (24 page)

The innkeeper
relayed the message to the Chaschmen, who in turn spoke to the Blue Chasch.

The response
was a set of glottal sounds. The Blue Chasch descended to the ground,
approached the inn, to stand in a silver-glittering line. The Chaschmen entered
the inn. One bawled, “Which is the man who is chief? Which is he? Let him hold
up his hand!”

Reith thrust
past them and stepped out into the compound. He faced the Blue Chasch, who
stared back at him portentously. Reith examined the alien visages with
fascination: the eyes like small metal balls glistening under the shadow of the
cephalic overhang, the complex nasal processes, the silver morion and filigree
armor. At the moment they seemed neither crafty, whimsical, capricious, nor
given to cruel facetiousness; their mien rather was menacing.

Reith
confronted them, arms folded across his chest. He waited, exchanging stare for
stare.

One of the
Blue Chasch wore a morion with a higher spine than the others. He spoke, in the
strangled glottal voice typical of the race. “What do you do here in Pera?”

“I am the
chosen chief.”

“You are the
man who made an unauthorized visit to Dadiche, who visited the District
Technical Center.”

Reith made no
reply.

“Well then,”
called the Blue Chasch, “what do you say? Do not deny the charge; your scent is
individual. In some fashion you entered and departed Dadiche; and made furtive
investigations. Why?”

“Because I
had never visited Dadiche before,” said Reith. “You are now visiting Pera
without express authorization; however, you are welcome, so long as you obey
our laws. I would like to think that the men of Pera could visit Dadiche on the
same basis.”

The Chaschmen
gave hoarse chuckles; the Blue Chasch stared in gloomy shock. The spokesman
said, “You have been espousing a false doctrine, and persuading the men of Pera
to folly. Where do you derive these ideas?”

“The ideas
are neither ‘false doctrine’ nor ‘folly.’ They are self-evident.”

“You must
come with us to Dadiche,” said the Blue Chasch, “and clarify a number of
peculiar circumstances. Go aboard the sky-raft.”

Reith
smilingly shook his head. “If you have questions, ask them now. Then I will ask
you my questions.”

The Blue
Chasch made a signal to the Chaschmen guards. They moved forward to seize
Reith. He took a step back, looked up at the upper windows. Down came a
fusillade of catapult bolts, piercing the Chaschmen’s foreheads and necks. But
those bolts aimed at the Blue Chasch swerved aside, diverted by a force-field,
and the Blue Chasch stood unscathed. They seized their own weapons, but before
they could aim and fire, Reith unfolded his arms. He held his energy cell. In a
quick sweep of his arm he burnt off the heads and shoulders of the six Blue
Chasch. The bodies sprang into the air by some peculiar reflex, then sprawled
to the ground with a multiple thud, where they lay covered by globules of
molten silver.

The silence
was complete. The onlookers seemed to be holding their breaths. All turned to
look from the corpses to Reith; then, as if by single presentiment, all turned
to look toward Dadiche.

“What will we
do now?” whispered Bruntego the Gray. “We are doomed. They will feed us to
their red flowers.”

“Precisely,”
said Reith, “unless we take steps to prevent them.” He signaled to Traz; they
collected weapons and other gear from the headless Blue Chasch and the
Chaschmen; then Reith ordered the bodies carried away and buried.

He went to
the sky-raft, climbed aboard. The controls--clusters of pedals, knobs and
flexible arms-were beyond his comprehension. Anacho the Dirdirman came up to
look casually into the raft. Reith asked, “Do you understand the working of
this thing?„

Anacho gave a
contemptuous grunt. “Of course. It is the old Daidne System.”

Reith looked
back along the length of the raft. “What are those tubes? Chasch energetics?”

“Yes.
Obsolete, of course, compared to Dirdir weapons.”

“What is the
range?”

“No great
distance. These are low-power tubes.”

“Suppose we
mounted four or five sand-blasts on the raft. We’d have considerable
fire-power.”

Anacho gave a
curt nod. “Crude and makeshift, but feasible.”

On the
afternoon of the following day a pair of rafts drifted high above Pera and
returned to Dadiche without landing. The next morning a column of wagons came
down from Belbal Gap, conveying two hundred Chaschmen and a hundred Blue Chasch
officers. Overhead slid four rafts, carrying Blue Chasch gun-crews.

The wagons
halted a half-mile from Pera; the troops deployed into four companies, which
separated and approached Pera from all four sides, while the rafts floated
overhead.

Reith divided
the militia into two squads, and sent them sidling through the ruins, to the
outskirts of the city on the south and west sides, where the Chasch troops
would make first contact.

The militia
waited until the Chaschmen and the Blue Chasch, moving warily, had penetrated a
hundred yards into the city. Suddenly appearing from concealment, all fired
weapons: catapults, sand-blasts, hand-guns from the Goho arsenal, those taken
from the Chasch corpses.

Fire was
concentrated on the Blue Chasch, and of these two-thirds died in the first five
minutes, as well as half the Chaschmen. The remainder faltered, then fled back
out onto the open steppe.

The rafts
overhead swooped low and began to sweep the ruins with slay-beams. The militia
now took shelter while the rafts descended even lower.

High above
appeared another raft: that which Reith had armed with sand-blasts, then had
taken five miles out on the steppe and hidden under brush. It dropped quietly upon
the Chasch rafts, lower, lower, lower ... The men at the sand-blasts and at the
energetic beams opened fire. The four rafts dropped like stones. The raft then
crossed the city and opened fire on the two companies which were entering the
north and east sectors of the city, while the militia opened fire from the
flanks. The Chasch troops drew back with heavy losses. Harassed by the
bombardment from the air, they broke ranks and streamed off across the steppe
in total disorder, pursued by the Peran militia.

REITH
CONFERRED WITH his victory-flushed lieutenants. “We won today because they took
us light. They still can bring overwhelming force against us. My guess is that
tonight they will organize a strong war party: all their rafts, all their
troops. Then tomorrow they will come forth to punish us. Does this sound
reasonable?”

No one made
dissent.

“Since we are
committed to hostilities, best that we take the initiative, and try to arrange
a few surprises for the Chasch. They have a poor opinion of men, and we might
be able to do them some harm. This means taking our limited fire-power to where
it can do the most damage.”

Bruntego the
Gray shuddered and clasped his hands to his face. “They have a thousand
Chaschmen soldiers, and more. They have sky-rafts and energetic weapons-whereas
we are only men, armed for the most part with catapults.”

“Catapults
kill a man just as dead as energy beams,” Reith commented.

“But the
rafts, the projectiles, the power and intelligence of the Blue Chasch! They
will destroy us totally and reduce Pera to a crater.”

Tostig the
old nomad demurred. “We have served too well, too cheaply in the past. Why
should they rob themselves for the sake of sheer drama?”

“Because that
is the Blue Chasch way!”

Tostig shook
his head. “Old Chasch perhaps. Blue Chasch no. They will prefer to besiege us,
starve us, and take the leaders back to Dadiche for punishment.”

“Reasonable,”
agreed Anacho, “but can we expect even Blue Chasch to behave reasonably? All
Chasch are half-mad.”

“For this
reason,” said Reith, “we must match them caprice for caprice!”

Bruntego the
Gray said with a sniff, “Caprice is the only quality in which we can match the
Blue Chasch.”

The
discussion continued; proposals were set forth and debated and at last agreement
was grudgingly reached. Messengers were sent forth to arouse the population.
Amid some small protest and wailing, women, children, the aged and the
uncooperative were marshaled aboard drays and sent off through the night, to a
dismal gorge twenty miles south, where they would establish a temporary camp.

The militia
assembled with all its weapons, then marched off through the night toward
Belbal Gap.

Reith, Traz
and Anacho remained in Pera. The cage containing the Green Chasch warriors had
been swathed in cloth and loaded aboard the raft. At sunrise Anacho took the
raft aloft and sent it sliding in that direction toward which the Green Chasch
sat staring: north by east. Twenty miles passed beneath, and another twenty;
then Traz, who sat watching the Green Chasch through a peephole, cried out, “They
are turning, twisting about-toward the west!”

Anacho swung
the raft toward the west, and a few moments later a Green Chasch encampment was
discovered in a grove of grass-trees beside a swamp. “Don’t approach too closely,”
said Reith, examining the camp through his scanscope. “It’s enough to know that
they are here. Back to Belbal Gap.”

The raft
returned south, skimming the palisades which faced west toward the Schanizade
Ocean. Passing over Belbal Gap, they settled upon a vantage point overlooking
both Dadiche and Pera.

Two hours
passed. Reith became increasingly fretful. His plans were based upon hypothesis
and rational supposition; the Chasch were a notoriously capricious race. Then
from Dadiche, to Reith’s vast relief, came a long dark column. Looking through
his scanscope Reith saw a hundred drays loaded with Blue Chasch and Chaschmen,
as many others carrying weapons and crates of equipment.

“This time,”
said Reith, they take us seriously.” He scanned the sky. “No rafts visible.
Undoubtedly they’ll send something up for reconnaissance, at the very least ...
Time to be moving. They’ll be coming through Belbal Gap in a half-hour.”

They took the
raft down to the steppe and landed several miles south of the road. They rolled
the cage to the ground, pulled away the covering cloth. The monstrous green
warriors sprang forward to peer out across the landscape.

Reith
unlocked the door, slipped back the bolt and retreated to the raft, which
Anacho at once took into the air. The Green Chasch sprang forth with
ear-splitting yells of triumph, to stand like giants. They rolled their
metallic eyes up at the raft, raised their arms in gestures of detestation.
Turning swiftly north, they set off across the steppe, at the stiff-legged
Green Chasch jog.

Over Belbal
Gap came the drays from Dadiche. The Green Chasch stopped short, stared in
wonder, then jogged forward to a clump of Bart-furze and stood immobile, almost
invisible.

Down the
track came the great days, until the line of vehicles stretched a mile across
the waste.

Anacho slid
the raft up a dark gully, almost to the ridge, and landed. Reith searched the
sky for rafts, then looked out across the panorama to the east. The Green
Chasch, among the gartfurze copses, could not be seen. The war force from
Dadiche was a menacing dark caterpillar crawling toward the ruins of old Pera.

Forty miles
north the Green Chasch were camped.

Reith
returned to the raft. “We’ve done what we can. Now, we wait.”

The Blue
Chasch expedition approached Pera, broke into four companies as before and
surrounded the deserted ruins. Energetic beams were aimed at suspected
strong-points; scouts ran forward under cover of the weapons. They gained the
first tumble of concrete blocks, then, drawing no fire, paused to regroup and
to select new objectives.

Half an hour
later the scouts emerged from the city, herding before them those folk who,
from obstreperousness or simple inertia, had elected to remain in Pera.

Another
fifteen minutes passed while these persons were interrogated. There was a
period of indecision as the Blue Chasch leadership took counsel among
themselves. Clearly the empty city was an unexpected development, and posed a
perplexing dilemma.

The companies
which had circled the city returned to the main force; presently all started
back toward Dadiche, disconsolate and grim.

Reith
searched the northern waste for movement. If there was validity in the theory
of telepathic communication between the Green Chasch, if they hated the Blue
Chasch as furiously as reported, they should now be appearing on the scene. But
the steppe spread away into the northern murk empty and devoid of movement.

Back toward
Belbal Gap moved the Blue Chasch war-force. From the dark green gart-furze,
from copses of laggard bush, from salt-grass clumps, apparently from nowhere,
erupted a horde of Green Chasch. Reith could not comprehend how so many
warriors, riding gigantic leap-horses, had approached so inconspicuously. They
hurled themselves upon the column, striking ten-foot arcs with their swords.
The heavy weapons on the drays could not be brought to bear; the Green Chasch
raged up and down the line doing carnage.