“Maybe?” Meek said doubtfully.
Meek patted the Prowler’s rocky shoulder gently, filled with wonder. In some unguessed time, in some unknown sector of space, the Prowler had been fashioned by an alien people. For some reason they had made him, for some reason they had left him here. Abandonment or purpose?
Meek shook his head. That would be something to puzzle over later, something to roll around in his brain on some monotonous flight into the maw of space.
Space! Startled at the thought clanging on his brain he jerked a quick glance upward, saw the bleak stars staring at him. Eyes that seemed to be laughing at him, cruel, ironic laughter.
“Stiffy,” he whispered. “Stiffy, I just thought of something.”
“Yeah, what is it?”
Stark terror walked in Meek’s words. “My oxygen tank is better than half gone. And the ship is wrecked. …”
“Cripes,” said Stiffy, “I guess we just forgot. We sure are behind the eight ball. Somehow we got to get back to Asteroid City. And we got to get there quick.”
Meek’s eyes brightened. “Stiffy, maybe. … Maybe we could ride the Prowler.”
Stiffy backed away. But Meek reached out and grasped his arm. “Come on. It’s the only way, Stiffy. We have to get there and the Prowler can take us.”
“But … but … but. …” Stiffy stammered.
“Give me a leg up,” Meek ordered.
Stiffy complied and Meek leaped astride the broad metal back, reached down and hauled Stiffy aboard.
“Get going, you flea-bitten nag!” Meek yipped, in sudden elation.
There was reason for elation. Not until that moment had he stopped to consider the Prowler might object to being ridden. Might consider it an insult.
The Prowler apparently was astonished, but that was all. He shook his head in bewilderment and weaved his neck around as if he wasn’t quite sure just what to do. But at least he hadn’t started to take the place apart.
“Giddap!” yelled Stiffy, bringing the butt of his pistol down.
The Prowler jigged a little, then gathered himself together and started. The landscape blurred with speed as he leaped a mighty boulder, skipped along a narrow ledge around a slick-faced mountain, skidded a hairpin turn.
Meek and Stiffy fought desperately to hang on. The metal back was slick and broad and there weren’t any handholds. They bounced and thumped, almost fell off a dozen times.
“Stiffy,” yelled Meek, “how do we know he’s taking us to Asteroid City?”
“Don’t fret about that,” said Stiffy. “He knows where we want to go. He read our mind.”
“I hope so,” Meek said, prayerfully.
The Prowler whished around a right angle turn on a narrow ledge and the distant peaks wheeled sickeningly against the sky.
Meek lay flat on his belly and hugged the Prowler’s sides. The mountains whistled past. He stole a look at the jagged peaks on the near horizon and they looked like a tight board fence.
Oliver Meek fought manfully to get back his composure as the Prowler pranced down the main street of Asteroid City.
The sidewalks were lined with hundreds of staring faces, faces that drooped in astonishment and disbelief.
Stiffy was yelling at someone. “Now, doggone you, will you believe there is a Prowler?”
And the man he yelled at didn’t have a word to say, just stood and stared.
In the swarm of faces, Meek saw those of the Reverend Harold Brown and Andrew Smith and, almost as if in a dream, he waved jauntily to them. At least, he hoped the wave was jaunty. Wouldn’t do to let them know his knees were too weak to hold him up.
Smith waved back and shouted something, but the Reverend Brown’s jaw hung open and he seemed too wonder-struck to move.
This, thought Meek, is the kind of things you read about. The conquering hero coming home astride his mighty charger. Only the conquering hero, he remembered with a sudden twinge, usually was a young lad who sat straight in the saddle instead of an old man with shoulders hunched from thirty years of poring over dusty ledgers.
A man was stepping out into the street, a man who carried a gun in hand and suddenly Meek realized they were abreast of the Silver Moon.
The armed man was Blacky Hoffman.
Here, thought Meek, is where I get it. This is what I get for playing the big shot … for being a smart alec, for remembering how cards shouldn’t be dealt and for shooting a man’s gun out of his hand and letting myself be talked into being a marshal.
But he sat stiff and as straight as he could on the Prowler and kept his eyes on Hoffman. That was the only way to do. That was the way all the heroes did in the stories he had read. And doggone, he was a hero. Whether he liked it or not, he was one.
The street was hushed with sudden tension and the very air seemed to be crackling with the threat of direful happenings.
Hoffman’s voice rang crisply through the stillness.
“Go for your blasters, Meek!”
“I have no blasters,” Meek told him calmly. “Your hoodlums took them from me.”
“Borrow Stiffy’s,” snapped Hoffman, and added, with a nasty laugh: “You won’t need them long.”
Meek nodded, watching Hoffman narrowly. Slowly he reached back for Stiffy’s gun. He felt it in his hand, wrapped his fingers tightly around it.
Funny, he thought, how calm he was. Like he had been in the Silver Moon that night. There was something about a gun. It changed him, turned him into another man.
He didn’t have a chance, he knew. Hoffman would shoot before he could ever get the gun around. But despite that, he felt foolishly sure. …
Hoffman’s gun flashed in the weak sunlight, blooming with blue brilliance.
For an instant, a single fraction of a second, Meek saw the flash of the beam straight in his eyes, but even before he could involuntarily flinch, the beam had bent. True to its mark, it would have drilled Meek straight between the eyes … but it didn’t go straight to its mark. Instead, it bent and slapped itself straight
