CHAPTER VI

I came gradually out of a scarlet fog into a jet-black well. My head, which was aching abominably, was pillowed on something soft and warm and slightly moving. I heard mutters of guttural voices, the slap of waves on metal. I licked my dry lips and tasted salt. Blood? No, ocean salt. We were at sea. I was a little chilly. I shivered, tried to see something, and made out the dim figure of a person above me. The sky was moonless and inky. I was lying with my head in this person's lap. I breathed deep and said quietly, "Nessa?"

"Yes, Ray."

I didn't have words. I reached up and touched her face with my fingers, and she bent and we kissed. "You okay?" I said then.

"I'm okay," said Nessa. That was all. For now, that was enough.

"Anybody near us?" I looked up at her tense face.

"I am," said Skagarach. He moved into my vision, and I sat up, head pounding, and stared at him until I could make out his foxy features. "I'm sorry," he said under his breath. "Cuff is on the primitive side. So are we all ... but there ought to be limits. There was no sense in hitting you."

"I don't get it," I said. "Why is that big murder-machine the first leader, and not you, Skagarach?"

"Ah," he said. "Ah, yes. Some of us wonder about that too." For all his obvious intelligence, he was a sucker for a one-two compliment to the jaw.

"That was an awful belt he gave me," I said. Something had just occurred to me. "It kind of addled my brains. Lord, I'd like to hit him back for that!"

"Ray?" said Nessa uncertainly. She knew me for a strictly non-aggressive joe since I'd quit football.

"I feel--I feel furious," I said, and I hissed it low and aimed it at Skagarach. "I never had so much yearning to pulverize someone."

Skagarach leaned over and peered into my eyes. "Don't sit on it," he said. "Let it fume, let it rage. It may well be the primal anger. Let it have its way. Only--I don't suggest you hit Cuff."

"Not with my fists, anyway," I agreed. "Maybe with a gun butt."

"Let the rage bubble," he said, laughing almost without sound. "You'll do, Ray Rollins; I believe you'll do." He sat down, staring ahead.

I found Nessa's hand and squeezed it reassuringly. She must have been baffled by the things I'd said. Then I took up with Skagarach where I'd left off on the beach. "All this hand-to-hand combat rot," I said. "Where will that get you--us? Dealing with rockets and space stations, and doing it with submachine guns, after all. It's race suicide."

"You're thinking on the wrong tack. We are the primeval beings, yes; and we're facing, and prepared to use, the farthest reaches of scientific achievement. But look, Ray: if an intelligent caveman came among a group of moderns, and saw a gun lying there, and was taught how to use it, which would be the bright thing to do--snatch it and use it on them, or wade in with his fists?

"We intend to blot out Homo sapiens and we shall do it. But not with stone clubs, not with revolvers. No, we'll lay hands tonight on man's greatest weapon, the only weapon which can be turned against the whole globe: the space station. You object to our primitive methods. You're not thinking deeply enough. The pure science of the station, the rockets and the VTO tugs buffaloes you. You can't see a horde of men with handguns and grenades capturing those awesome devices."

"That's right, I can't."

"Why not? There is no more problem here than there is attacking a bank vault, or an outpost of soldiers. So far as the government knows, there is no secret army within its borders! They haven't the faintest notion that _we_ exist, an army of manlike non-men.

"It's the broad conception that stumps you, Ray. So picture each operation by itself. The storming of the rocket ports--by quite adequate troops of ours, well-armed and savage. Then the towing of the rockets, by VTO tugs, to Pompey Island--this done by technicians and scientists who are not men, but Neanderthals. Then the locking of the space station to the rockets, and the takeoff for outer space. Sixty of us in these boats, plus twenty waiting with other musters at the rocket stations will man that moon. From attack on Pompey to blast-off from Terra should take from one to three hours."

"You are insane," said Nessa in a shocked voice.

"No," said Skagarach seriously, "we are sane. But we have fought for the existence of our race through too many thousands of years, in too many lands and too many ages, to have mercy now that our hour is at hand."

* * * * *

I felt as though I'd been dropped into icy water. Skagarach wasn't kidding. And Bill Cuff was worse than he.

And I had lied to them. I could picture in brain-shattering detail what they would do to Nessa when they discovered that; for my lie could blow up their whole scheme. They'd torture her, not me, for they needed me. I looked at the thought and I couldn't stand it.

I did the most cowardly thing a man could do: I stood up and betrayed my country, my world, and my entire breed. But I did it because I knew exactly how much I could take before I cracked--and while I might withstand their worst for a little while, they would inevitably do things to Nessa which I could not take.

"Skagarach," I said, "I won't try to fool you. I don't have any dawn memory. As far as I know I never ranged the fens or slew the upstart Man in the ages past." I was talking like him. He was an overwhelming personality. "But I know this: I feel a terrible, inchoate anger against almost everything. I think it must be what you call the primal rage. And I also feel a hell of a strong kinship with you, if not with Bill Cuff. I lied to you. My brother and the space station aren't on Pompey. They're on Odo Island."

"Well," he said easily, "well, I thought you might have been trying to outwit us. I thought we might have to flay your woman an inch at a time to make you talk. But by God, that knock on the cranium fixed you! Congratulations--and welcome to the Old Companions." He chuckled. "If you wonder why we trusted your first word to such an extent, I'll say that we knew the moon was on one of these islands. We knew that if it wasn't Pompey, it wouldn't be too damned far." He started forward in the boat. "I'll change our course," he said.

And it was at that moment that I realized something. I had turned traitor because I couldn't let my wife be maltreated. I had counted on a feeble plot, a one-in-a-thousand chance that I would be able to beat the Old Companions; and I'd known quite well that I was only excusing myself for my craven weakness. Only now did I remember that the real answer, the only thing a _man_ could have honorably done, was to kill Nessa and myself immediately--to grip her and leap into the sea, and dive deep and deeper until we both drowned. Then my wife would have been safe from them, and I would be dead with a clean conscience.

But it was much too late to think of that now.

I flung myself down beside her, put my arms around her waist, and began softly and vividly cursing myself for the prize fool and the biggest yellow-livered skunk of all time.