not draw it as I walked forward to meet the chief.
'We are friends,' I said. 'You see, I am not afraid of you. Would I have given you the three guns and the ammunition had I been a Kapar? Would I have let that man back there live if I had not known that he was a Unisan?'
The chief shook his head. 'That is right,' he said. 'You would not have given us the guns and ammunition had you been a Kapar. But how do you know this man is not a Kapar?' he added suspiciously.
'Because he is the brother of a friend of mine,' I explained. 'He was shot down behind the Kapar lines and he took the uniform from a Kapar he had killed to use as a disguise, because he knew that he was in Kapar country.'
About this time Balzo Jan crawled out of the after cockpit dressed in the blue suit, boots, and helmet of a Unisan fighting man.
'Does he look like a Kapar?' I asked.
'No,' the chief said. 'You must forgive us. My people hate the Kapars, and they are hungry.'
With Balzo Jan's help I had the engine repaired and we were ready to take off a little after noon; and when we rose into the air the starving villagers stood sad-eyed and mute, watching us fly away toward a land of plenty.
As we rose above the mountains that lay between us and the coast I saw three ships far to our left. They were flying in a south-westerly direction towards Kapara.
'I think they are Kapars,' said Balzo Jan, who was far more familiar with the lines of Polodian ships than I, having spent most of his lifetime looking at them.
Even as we watched, the three ships turned in our direction. Whatever they were, they had sighted us and were coming for us.
If they were Unisans, we had nothing to fear; nor for that matter did we have anything to fear if they were Kapars, for my ship could out fly them by a hundred miles an hour. Had they been as fast as ours, they could have cut us off, for they were in the right position to do so. We had been making about four hundred miles an hour and now I opened the throttle wide, for I did not purpose taking any chances, as I felt that we wouldn't have a chance against three Kapars, with three or four guns apiece, while we only had two. I opened the throttle, but nothing happened. The engine didn't accelerate at all. I told Balzo Jan.
'We shall have to fight, then,' he said, 'and I wanted to get home and get a decent meal. I have had practically nothing to eat for three days.'
I knew how Balzo Jan felt, for I had had nothing to eat myself for some time, and anyway I had had enough fighting for a while.
'They are Kapars all right,' said Balzo Jan presently.
There was no doubt about that now; the black of their wings and fuselages was quite apparent, and we were just about going to meet them over the island off the southern tip of Unis. We were going to meet right over the last and largest of the three islands, which is called the Island of Despair, where are sent those confirmed criminals who are not to be destroyed, and those Unisans whose loyalty is suspected, but who cannot be convicted of treason.
I had been fiddling with the engine controls, trying to step up the speed a little, when the first burst of fire whistled about us. The leading ship was coming head-on toward us, firing only from her forward gun, when Balzo Jan sent a stream of explosive projectiles into her. I saw her propeller disappear then, and she started to glide toward the Island of Despair .
'That's the end of them,' shouted Balzo Han.
Quite suddenly and unexpectedly my motor took hold again, and we immediately drew away from the other two ships, which Balzo Jan was spraying with gunfire.
We must have been hit fifty times, but the plastic of our fuselage and wings could withstand machine-gun fire, which could injure us only by a lucky hit of propeller or instrument-board. It is the heavier guns of combat planes and bombers that these fast, lightly armed pursuit planes have to fear.
'I hate to run from Kapars,' I shouted back to Balzo Jan. 'Shall we stay and have it out with them?'
'We have no right to throw away a ship and two men,' he said, 'in a hopeless fight.'
Well, that was that. Balzo Jan knew the rules of the game better than I; so I opened the throttle wide and soon left the remaining Kapars far behind, and shortly after, they turned and resumed their flight toward Kapara.
There are two pilot seats and controls in the front cockpit, as well as the additional controls in the after cockpit. However, two men are seldom seated in the front cockpit, except for training purposes, as there is only one gun there and the Unisan military chiefs don't believe in wasting man power. However, the seat was there, and I asked Balzo Jan to come up and sit with me.
'If you see any more Kapars,' I said, 'you can go back to your gun.'
'Do you know,' he said, after he had crawled up into the forward cockpit and seated himself beside me, 'that we have been so busy since you first discovered me climbing into your ship that I haven't had a chance to ask you who you are. I know a lot of men in the fighting service, but I don't recall ever having seen you before.'
'My name is Tangor,' I said.
'Oh,' he said, 'you're the man that my sister discovered without any clothes on after a raid several months ago.'
'The same,' I said, 'and she is mourning you for dead. I saw her at the Harkases the night before we took off for this last raid.'
'My sister would not mourn,' he said proudly.
'Well, she was mourning inwardly,' I replied, 'and sometimes that's worse for a woman than letting herself go. I should think a good cry now and then would be a relief to the women of Poloda.'
'I guess they used to cry,' he said, 'but they don't any more. If they cried every time they felt like crying, they'd be crying all the time; and they can't do that, you know, for there is work to do. It is war.'
Chapter Eleven
IT IS WAR! That was the answer to everything. It governed their every activity, their every thought. From birth to death they knew nothing but war. Their every activity was directed at the one purpose of making their country more fit for war.
'I should think you would hate war,' I said to Balzo Jan.
He looked at me in surprise. 'Why?' he demanded. 'What would we do with ourselves if there were no war?'
'But the women,' I said. 'What of them?'
'Yes,' he replied, 'it is hard on them. The men only have to die once, but the women have to suffer always. Yes; it is too bad, but I can't imagine what we would do without war.'
'You could come out in the sunshine, for one thing,' I said, 'and you could rebuild your cities, and devote some of your time to cultural pursuits and to pleasure. You could trade with other countries, and you could travel to them; and wherever you went you would find friends.'
Balzo Jan looked at me sceptically. 'Is that true in your world?' he asked.
'Well, not when I was last there,' I had to admit, 'but then, several of the countries were at war.'
'You see,' he said, 'war is the natural state of man, no matter what world he lives in.'
We were over the southern tip of Unis now. The majestic peaks of the Mountains of Loras were at our left, and at our right the great river which rises in the mountains south of Orvis emptied into the sea, fifteen hundred miles from its source. It is a mighty river, comparable, I should say, to the Amazon. The country below us was beautiful in the extreme, showing few effects of the war, for they have many buried cities here whose Labour Corps immediately erase all signs of the devastating effects of Kapar raids as soon as the enemy has departed.
Green fields stretched below us in every direction, attesting the fact that agriculture on the surface still held its own against the Kapars on this part of the continent; but I knew at what a price they raised their crops with low flying Kapar planes strafing them with persistent regularity, and bombers blasting great craters in their fields.
