The Best of Lester del Rey

amusement as she finished her dressing in frenzied haste.

Then she brushed back her hair and was herself again. She smiled with forced amusement of her own. “Maybe I will, Captain. That overdose of antidepressant I gave you won’t last forever.”

He prowled and turned toward the living quarters. It was a fine crew he had left! He’d heard once that since the Collapse all men were neurotic in some way, while psychiatry had turned from a science to a farc’e. They bore out the theory. Kayel had an Oedipus complex, Ferad had turned to gluttony and hidden a good brain to avoid responsibility, and Siryl walled herself in with scorn for all men because she couldn’t be one! Maybe their whole civilization was at fault. The people of the village had seemed as relaxed as if they’d just finished a course in electro-leucotomy that somehow left them with no loss of volition.

He found a seat at the table and watched Siryl slide in beside Kayel, who tried to hide his excitement at the favor behind a labored puffing at his pipe. Skora had joined them and was seated near Ferad. He had been explaining something about one of the students at the school having trouble with something god had revealed

to him. Now the old mail smiled and reached toward a bowl of fruit in the center of the table.

“I’ve never thought of eating fruit, but I decided to try it,” he said. “I hope it’s good. When I found from god that most of the worlds like more than simple cereals for breakfast, I tried to find the type of fruit that was best.”

Derek began peeling one of the big fruits, wondering how much of that he was supposed to believe. The marel-fruit grew only on Feneris, where its export was the chief industry. He tasted the aromatic sweetness, surprised to find it fresh and fully ripe.

“It must be at least a hundred thousand light-years to Feneris,” he suggested, trying to keep his voice casual.

Skora nibbled carefully. A smile of pleasure appeared on his lips and he fell to busily. “Good. Excellent. We’ll have to adopt this. Feneris? It’s farther than that. But the fruit grew on many worlds before the sun blasting, and still grows on a few in this sector. We found from god where to get it and sent one of the boys who needed the exercise.”

“Then you have space ships!” Derek’s fruit fell to his lap as he came to his feet, his hands gripping the edge of the table. If it came from another planet of this system, it might not mean they had faster-than-light travel, but still…

Skora shrugged apologetically. “I’m afraid not, Derek. Vanir is a simple world. We have only our god and his power. The work of building space ships has always seemed too great for its reward. You’ll find us quite primitive from your views, I’m sure.”

“But—”

Siryl cut in, using Universal. “Stop it, Derek! Don’t violate any verbal taboos here, if you want to get out alive!”

“But he knew the distance to Feneris and about other planets!”

“Folk songs and sagas!” She switched back to Classic, apologizing to Skora.

Derek let it drop, but he wasn’t satisfied. The exotic fruit grew only in a saturated atmosphere, which this

planet didn’t have. This might not be a colony of the enemy or have its own space ships, but that was no proof that ships couldn’t stop here—enemy ships. With his luck, anything odd would almost certainly prove to be dangerous. He chewed on his thoughts bitterly, along with the pancakes Lari brought them.

This god of theirs might even be one of the enemy, using some strange technology to create near miracles that the villagers could only believe were magic. In that case, word of their capture must be winging back to the enemy planets. It would be only a matter of time before one of the squat, black ships landed here!

Derek got up abruptly, making hasty excuses and signaling for Kayel to follow. This was no time to waste on speculation. The ship was their only means of escape, and it had to be put in some kind of operating condition. .

Siryl followed them as Derek voiced his suspicions to Kayel. The little man’s eyes bulged and his face turned ashen as the captain poured out his doubts. The psychologist snorted in disgust.

“Stop exercising your persecution complex!” she snapped. She shook her head, putting on her superior smile of tolerance. “You men! A few things you can’t understand and probably some changes in the language we haven’t caught yet, and you picture bogy-men under every rock! There isn’t a trace of inferiority feeling here, as there would be if they’d run into a superior culture!”

Ahead of them lay the ship, and Derek saw a figure standing beside it. He broke into a faster walk, until he recognized it as Michla. The man waved at them and went back to whatever he was doing. As they came nearer, Derek saw that he was running his fingers over a large, odd-shaped stone plate with more of the curlicues on it.

“Incantations on a charm. He’s probably sure the ship is a form of life that can be commanded with the right spell,” Siryl said with satisfaction.

Michla pulled the disk to him, holding it against his chest with one hand. The other hand went out to touch the side of the ship.

As he lifted his arm, the twenty thousand tons of the Sepelora lifted a foot off the ground and began moving steadily forward beside him. He carried it along easily, heading toward a section of wasteland half a mile away.

4

By the time they reached the Sepelora, Michla had picked up his strange plow and was busy at the far end of the field. Derek fumbled his way into the ship and began switching on the strain gauges while Kayel watched. There was no evidence of harm.

“Antigravity!” The physicist’s voice was an awed whisper. “I always thought it was impossible with less than tons of equipment! And generated in the whole of the ship at once!”

Derek swung to face Siryl, but she was recovering and there was no humility in her. “Hypnotism, you mean! They must have worked on us while we slept and made us think the ship was in the other field, when it was here all along. We saw it there, and saw it being moved, by posthypnotic suggestion. Lots of primitives have some knowledge of hypnotism.”

“Make it magic and I’ll buy it,” Derek told her. “That’s a good explanation for what you can’t understand, too.”

She started to say something and then checked it. Finally she turned toward the airlock. “All right. Let them fool you. I’m going to go back to Lari. Primitive women are always easier to handle than their men. They’re less organized.”

She went out and through the fields, carefully avoiding the sight of the depression where the Sepelora had first lain. Derek and Kayel fell to work on the ruined space-denial generators and what stores were left to them.

By all standard methods, it was hopeless. Yet Kayel began sketching and checking among the small power tools. He seemed to gather momentum, now passing orders to Derek with a certainty that he showed only when working in his own field. “It won’t be good,” he admitted. “I’m having to compromise. But I think we may be able to combine enough of some of the new theories with the first methods ever used. We won’t make better than fifteen light-years an hour, but it should get us to one of the border planets.”

It was meaningless to Derek. But if they could leave, he was willing to try it. They worked on, grinding and shaping by methods that had been lost from practice for over a century. Some of the work would be trial and error, with no chance to estimate the time it would take. But it helped to take their minds off the primitives who could handle forces that civilized science couldn’t touch.

Ferad came out finally to call them in to dinner. It was already growing dark, and there was a fine rain falling. Derek stared up through it. He had looked out fifteen minutes before and had seen no clouds in the sky. There still were none he could see, but the water dropped at an. increasing rate as they moved out of the wasteland onto the cultivated fields. In the village, the covers of the water tanks were off. Derek wasn’t surprised