Loketh’s head turned, those blank eyes regarded Ross. And their depths were troubled, recognition of a sort returning. The Hawaikan threw up one hand in a beseeching gesture and then went to his knees in the corridor.
“Great One! Great One!” The words came from his lips in a breathy hiss as he groveled. Then his body went flaccid, and he sprawled face down, his twisted leg drawn up as if he would run but could not.
“Foanna!” The one word came out of the walls themselves, or so it seemed.
“Foanna—the wise learn what lies before them when they walk alone in the dark.” The Hawaikan speech was stilted, accented, but understandable.
Ross stood motionless. Had they somehow seen him through Loketh’s eyes? Or had they been alerted merely by the Hawaikan’s call? They believed he was one of the Foanna. Well, he would play that role.
“Foanna!” Sharper this time, demanding. “You lie in our hand. Let us clasp the fingers tightly and you shall be naught.”
Out of somewhere the words Karara had chanted in the Foanna temple came to Ross—not in her Polynesian tongue but in the English she had repeated. And softening his voice to his best approximation of the Foanna singsong Ross sang:
“Ye forty thousand gods,
Ye gods of sea, of sky—of stars,” he improvised.
“Ye elders of the gods that are,
Ye gods that once were,
Ye that whisper, yet that watch by night,
Ye that show your gleaming eyes.”
“Foanna!” The summons was on the ragged edge of patience. “Your tricks will not move our mountains!”
“Ye gods of mountains,” Ross returned, “of valleys, of Shades and not the Shadow,” he wove in the beliefs of this world, too. “Walk now this world, between the stars!” His confidence was growing. And there was no use in remaining pent in this corridor. He would have to chance that they were not prepared to kill summarily one of the Foanna.
Ross went to the well, went down the ladder slowly, keeping his robe about him. Here at the next level there was a wider space about the opening, and three door panels. Behind one must be those he sought. He was buoyed up by a curious belief in himself, almost as if wearing this robe did give him in part the power attributed to the Foanna.
He laid his hand on the door to his right and sent it snapping back into its frame, stepped inside as if he entered here by right.
There were three Baldies. To his Terran eyes they were all superficially alike, but the one seated on a control stool had a cold arrogance in his expression, a pitiless half smile which made Ross face him squarely. The Terran longed for one of the Foanna staffs and the ability to use it. To spray that energy about this cabin might reduce the Baldy defenses to nothing. But now two of the paralyzing tubes were trained on him.
“You have come to us, Foanna, what have you to offer?” demanded the commander, if that was his rank.
“Offer?” For the first time Ross spoke. “There is no reason for the Foanna to make any offer, slayer of women and children. You have come from the stars to take, but that does not mean we choose to give.”
He felt it now, that inner pulling, twisting in his mind, the willing which was their more subtle weapon. Once they had almost bent him with that willing because then he had worn their livery, a spacesuit taken from the wrecked freighter. Now he did not have that chink in his defense. And all that stubborn independence and determination to be himself alone resisted the influence with a fierce inner fire.
“We offer life to you, Foanna, freedom of the stars. These other dirt creepers are nothing to you, why take you weapons in their cause? You are not of the same race.”
“Nor are you!” Ross’s hands moved under the envelope of the robe, unloosing the two hidden clasps which held it. That bank of controls before which the commander sat—to silence that would cause trouble. And he depended upon Ynlan. The Rovers should now be massed at either end of the canyon waiting for the force field to fail and let them in.
Ross steadied himself, poised for action. “We have something for you, star men—” he tried to hold their attention with words, “have you not heard of the power of the Foanna—that they can command wind and wave? That they can be where they were not in a single movement of the eyelid? And this is so—behold!”
It was the oldest trick in the world, perhaps on any planet. But because it was so old maybe it had been forgotten by the aliens. For, as Ross pointed, those heads did turn for an instant.
He was in the air, the robe gathered in his arms wide spread as bat wings. And then they crashed in a tangle which bore them all back against the controls. Ross strove to enmesh them in the robe, using the pressure of his body to slam them all on the buttons and levers of the board. Whether that battering would accomplish his purpose, he could not tell. But that he had only these few seconds torn out of time to try, he knew, and determined to use them as best he could.
One of the Baldies had slithered down to the floor and another was aiming strangely ineffectual blows at him. But the third had wriggled free to bring up a paralyzer. Ross slewed around, dragging the alien he held across his body just as the other fired. But though the fighter went limp and heavy in Ross’s hold, the Terran’s own right arm fell to his side, his upper chest was numb, and his head felt as if one of the Rover’s boarding axes had clipped it. Ross reeled back and fell, his left hand raking down the controls as he went. Then he lay on the cabin floor and saw the convulsed face of the
