“Well, maybe.” Karlsarm didn’t bother to sound skeptical. The Empire wasn’t going to like what the out- backers intended. He turned to Uriason. “I need your help quite urgently, Mayor. This city will be destroyed. Please tell everyone to move out immediately.”
Uriason staggered. Ridenour saved him from falling. His cheeks went gray beneath a puce webwork. “What?” he strangled. “No. You are insane. Insane, I tell you. You cannot. Impossible.”
“Can and will, Mayor. We hold your arsenal, your missile emplacement—nuclear weapons, which some of us know how to touch off. At most, we have only a few hours till a large force arrives from another town or an Imperial garrison. Maybe less time than that, if word got out. We want to be gone before then; and so must your folk; and so must the city.”
Uriason collapsed in a lounger and gasped for air. Ridenour seemed equally appalled, but controlled it better. “For your own sakes, don’t,” the Terran said in a voice that wavered. “I know a good bit of human history. I know what sort of revenge is provoked by wanton destruction.”
“Not wanton,” Karlsarm answered. “I’m quite sorry to lose the cathedral. A work of, art. And museums, libraries, laboratories—But we haven’t time for selective demolition.” He drove sympathy out of his body and said like one of the machines he hated: “Nor do we have the foolishness to let this place continue as a base for military operations against us and civilian operations against our land. Whatever happens, it goes up before daybreak. Do you or do you not want the people spared? If you do, get busy and talk to them!”
Evacuation took longer than he had expected. Obedience was swift enough after Uriason’s announcement. Citizens moved like cattle, streamed down the streets and out onto the airport expanse, where they milled and muttered, wept and whimpered under the bleak light of waning setting Selene. (With less luminescence to oppose, more stars had appeared, the stars of Empire, but one looked and understood how the gulf gaped between here and them, and shuddered in the pre-dawn wind.) Nevertheless people got in each other’s way, didn’t grasp the commands of their herders, shuffled, fainted, stalled the procession while they tried to find their kin. Besides, Karlsarm had forgotten there would be a hospital, with some patients who must be carried out and provided for in an outlying latifundium.
But, one by one, the aircraft filled with humans, and ran fifty kilometers upwind, and deposited their cargoes, and returned for more: until at last, when the first eastern paleness began to strengthen, Domkirk stood empty of everything save the wind.
Now the Upwoods army boarded and was flown west. Most of their pilots were city men, knives near to throats. Karisarm and his few technicians saw the last shuttling vehicle off. It would return for them after they were through. (He was not unaware of the incongruity; skin-clad woodsrunners with dirks at their belts, proposing to sunder the atom!) Meanwhile it held Evagail, Wolf and Noach—his cadre—together with Uriason and Ridenour, who were helping control the crowds.
The mayor seemed to have crumpled after the pressure was off him. “You can’t do this,” he kept mumbling. “You can’t do this.” He was led up the gangway into the belly of the flyer.
Ridenour paused, a shadow in the door., and looked down. Was his glance quizzical? “I must admit to puzzle ment about your method,” he said. “How will you explode the town without exploding yourselves? I gather your followers have only the sketchiest notion of gadgetry. It isn’t simple to jury-rig a timing device.”
“No,” Karlsarm said, “but it’s simple to launch a missile at any angle you choose.” He waved to unseen Evagail. “We’ll join you shortly.”
The bus took off and dwindled among the last stars. Karlsarm directed his crew in making preparations, then returned outside to watch the first part of the spectacle. Beyond the squat turret at his back, the airfield stretched barren gray to the ruined barracks. How hideous were the works of the Machine People!
But when the missiles departed, that was a heart-stopping sight.
They were solid-fuel rockets. There had been no reason to give expensive gravitic jobs to a minor colonial town so far from the battlefront that the Arulians couldn’t possibly attack it in force. The weapons lifted out of their three launchers some distance away… with slow majesty, spouting sun-fire and white clouds, roaring their thundersong that clutched at the throat until Karlsarm gripped his crossbow and glared in defiance of the terror they roused… faster, though, streaking off at a steep slant,, rising and rising until the flames flickered out… still rising, beyond his eyes, but drawing to a halt, caught now by the, upper winds that twisted their noses downward, by the very rotation of the planet that aimed them at the place they should have defended.
And heavenward flew the second trio. And the third. Karlsarm judged he had better get into shelter.
He was at the bottom of the bunker with his men—tons of steel, concrete, force-screen generator shutting away the sky—when the rockets fell; and even so, he felt the room tremble around him.
Afterward, emerging, he saw a kilometers-high tree of dust and vapor. The command aircraft landed, hastily took on his group and fled the radioactivity. From the air he saw no church, no Domkirk, nothing but a wide, black, vitrified crater ringed in with burning fields.
He, shook, as the bombproof had shaken, and said to no one and everyone: “This is what they would do to us!”
Running from the morning, they returned to a dusk before dawn. The other raiders were already there. This was in the eastern edge of wilderness, where hills lifted sharply toward the Windhook Mountains.
Ridenhour walked some distance off. He didn’t actually wish to be alone; if anything, he wanted a companion for a shield between him and the knowledge that two hundred light-years reached from here to Lissa and the children, their home and Terra. But he must escape Uriason or commit violence. The man had babbled, gobbled, orated and gibbered through their entire time in the air. You couldn’t blame him, maybe. His birthplace as well as his job had gone up in lethal smoke. But Ridenour’s job was to gather information; and that big auburn-haired Evagail woman, whom he’d met not unamicably while she was still captive, had appeared willing to talk if she ever got a chance.
No one stopped Ridenour. Where could he flee? He climbed onto a crest and looked around.
The valley floor beneath him held only a few trees and they small, probably the result of a forest fire, though nature—incredibly vigorous when civilization has not sucked her dry—had covered all scars with a thick blanket of silvery-green trilobed “grass” and sapphire blossoms. No doubt this was why the area had been set for a rendezvous. Aircraft landed easily. Hundreds of assorted tools must have been stacked here beforehand or stolen from the city, for men were attacking the vehicles like ants. Clang, clatter, hails, cheerful oaths profaned the night’s death-hush.
Otherwise there was great beauty in the scene. Eastward, the first color stole across a leaf-roof that ran oceanic to the edge of sight, moving and murmuring in the breeze. Westward, the last few stars glistened in a plum-dark sky, above the purity of Windhook’s snow-peaks. Everywhere dew sparkled.
Ridenour took out pipe and tobacco and lit up. It made him hiccough a bit, on an empty stomach, but comforted him in his chilled weariness. And in his dismay. He had not imagined the outbackers were such threats.
Neither had anyone else, apparently. He recalled remarks made about them in Nordyke and (only yesterday?) Domkirk. “Impoverished wretches… Well, yes, I’m told they eat well with little effort. But otherwise, just think, no fixed abodes, no books, no schools, no connection with the human mainstream, hardly any metal, hardly any energy source other than brute muscle. Wouldn’t you call that an impoverished existence? Culturally as well as materially?”
“Surly, treacherous, arrogant. I tell you, I’ve dealt with them. In trading posts on the wilderness fringe. They do bring in furs, wild fruits, that sort of thing, to swap, mostly for steel tools—but only when they feel like taking the trouble, which isn’t often, and then they treat you like dirt.”
But a much younger man had had another story. “Sure, if one of us looks down on the woodsrunners, they’ll look down right back at him, But I was interested and acted friendly, and they invited me to overnight in their camp… Their songs are plain caterwauling, but I’ve never seen better dancing, not even on Imperial Ballet Corps tapes, and afterward, the girls—! I think I might get me some trade goods and return some day.
“Swinish. Lazy. Dangerous also, I agree. Look what they’ve done every time someone tried to start a real outpost of civilization in the mid-wilderness. We’ll have to clean them out before we can expand. Once this damned Arulian war is over—No, don’t get me wrong, I’m not vindictive. Let’s treat them like any other criminal: rehabilitation, re-integration into society. I’ll go further; I’ll admit this is ,a case of cultural conflict rather than ordinary lawbreaking. So why not let the irreconcilables live out their lives peacefully on a reservation somewhere? As long as their children get raised civilized.
