The Ship held an ancient secret that meant
life to the dying cast-aways of the void.
Then Wes Kirk revealed the secret to his
people’s enemies—and found that his betrayal
meant the death of the girl he loved.

Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him.

He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.

The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk’s back. He said carefully,

“I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their families.”

His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,

“Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to freeze?” Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking child. She added sharply, “Besides, that’s fool’s talk, Jakk Randl’s talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.”

“Who’s to hear it?” Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.

The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms, guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust that burst when touched.

Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.

Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.

Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.

And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.

The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.

The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter. The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers’, but there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope. Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain’s metal-roofed place highest of all.

Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.

The Ship.

Kirk’s voice was soft in his thick throat. “I would like to kill them,” he said. “I would like to kill them all.”

“Yah!” cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. “All but the Captain’s yellow daughter!”

Kirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.

“Yah!” she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. “I’ve seen you looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to her eyes. You wouldn’t kill her, I bet!”

“I bet I’ll half kill you if you don’t shut up!”

Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.

She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had happened, “Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.”

Kirk didn’t say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil yelled, “Ma!”

The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing stage.

Ma Kirk said, “Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.”

Kirk stopped. “Aw, I wasn’t going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!” He leaned forward to glare at Lil. “And I would so kill the Captain’s daughter!”

The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close to the heat and said wearily:

“You men, always talking about killing! Haven’t we enough trouble without that?”

Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.

“Maybe there’d be less trouble for us.”

Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk’s knee. Her big eyes glowed in the feeble light.

She said, “You men! He’s no man, Ma. He’s just a little boy who has to stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.”

The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil’s thin body was strung tight, quivering to move. “Besides,” she demanded, “what have the Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to kill them—all but the Captain’s yellow daughter?”

Kirk’s big heavy chest swelled. “Ma,” he said, “you make that brat shut up or I’ll whale her, anyhow.”

Ma Kirk looked at him. “Your Pa’s still big enough to whale you, young man! Now you stop it, both of you.”

“All right,” said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have his belly warm, even if it was empty. “Wish Pa’d hurry up. I’m hungry. Hope they killed meat.”

Ma Kirk sighed. “Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the heat-stones.”

“Maybe,” said Kirk heavily, “it all goes to the same place.”

Lil snorted. “And where’s that, Smarty?”

His anger forced out the forbidden words.

“Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship.”

There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word “Ship” hung there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk’s eyes flicked to the curtain over the door and back to her son.

“Don’t you say things like that, Wes! You don’t know.”

“It’s what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way they do? We can’t even get near the outside of it.”

Lil tossed her head. “Well neither do they.”

“Not when we can see ‘em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they haven’t got ways of getting into the Ship that don’t show from the plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don’t know about.”

He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands.

“There must be something in the Ship that they don’t want us to have. Something valuable, something they want to keep for themselves. What else could it be but heat-stones and maybe dried meat?”

“We don’t know, Wes! The Ship is—well, we shouldn’t talk about it. And the Officers wouldn’t do that. If they wanted us killed off they’d let the Piruts in on us, or the shags, and let ‘em finish us quick. Freezing and starving would take too long. There’d be too many of us if we found out, or got mad.”

Kirk snorted. “You women know so much. If they let the shags or the Piruts in on us, how could they stop ‘em before they killed everybody, including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we’re dumb. They’ve kept us away from the Ship ever since the Crash, and nobody knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They think we’d never suspect.”

“Yah!” said Lil sharply. “You just like to talk. Why should the Officers want us killed off anyhow?”

Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.

“There aren’t enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they let their young ones cry with the cold?”

There was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky. His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He’d never talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant...

“Listen!” said Ma Kirk.

Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk’s skin. But there wasn’t any need to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its source.

The great alarm gong by the Captain’s hut.

Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting aside the door curtain.

Ma Kirk said stiffly, “Which way are they coming?”

Kirk’s ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain.

Kirk pointed. “From the west. Piruts, I think.”

Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. “Your Pa went hunting that way.”

“Yeah,” said Kirk. “I’ll watch out for him.”

He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom, where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The baby began to whimper again.

Kirk shivered in the cold wind. “Lil,” he said. “I would, too, kill the Captain’s yellow daughter.”

“Yah,” said Lil. “Go chase the beetles away.”

There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk’s bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.

Men and youths like himself, old enough to fight, were spilling out of low doorways and forming companies on the flat ground. Kirk spotted Jakk Randl and fell in beside him. They stood with their backs to the wind, stamping and shivering, their head-hair and scant fur clouts blown straight out.

Randl nudged Kirk’s elbow. “Look at ‘em,” he said, and coughed. He was always coughing, jerking his thin sharp face back and forth. Kirk could have broken his brittle light-furred body in two. All Randl’s strength was in his eyes. The pupils were always spread, always hot with some bitter force, always probing. He wasn’t much older than Kirk.

Kirk looked up the hill. Officers were running from the huts below the gaunt, dead Ship. They didn’t look so different from the Hans, only they were built a little taller and lighter, less bowed and bunchy in the shoulders, quicker on their feet.

Kirk stepped behind Randl to shield him from the wind. His voice was only a whisper, but it had a hard edge. The baby’s thin, terrible wail was still in his ears.

“Is it true, Jakk? Do you know? Because if they are...”

Randl laughed and shuddered with a secret, ugly triumph. “I crawled up on the peak during the last darkness. The guards were cold and the wind made them blind and deaf. I lay in the rocks and watched. And I saw...”

He coughed. The Officers’ voices rang sharp through the wind. Compact groups of men began to run, off toward the west. The whisper of sound had grown louder in Kirk’s ears. He could hear men yelling and the ringing of metal on stone.

He started to run, holding Randl’s elbow. Grey dust blew under their feet. The drifts of crystal stones sent their sound shivering back at them in splinters. Kirk said fiercely:

“What did you see?”

They were passing under the hill now. Randl jerked his head. “Up there, Wes.”

Kirk looked up. Someone was standing at the doorway of the Captain’s hut. Someone tall and slender and the color of the Sunstar from head to foot.

“I saw her,” said Randl hoarsely. “She was carrying heat-stones into the Ship.”

Kirk’s pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.

The captain’s yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.

It was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards’ pillbox head on. They hadn’t taken it, not yet. But they were still trying, piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.

They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren’t quite dead and it was too bad for the man who climbed on them.

It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone.

He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts. Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You had to keep them from getting onto the plain.

He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work any time, but when the Piruts were raiding...

No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer, was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order.

Pa hadn’t been alone, of course. Frank and Russ went with him. The three of them would have sense enough to keep safe. Maybe they were in the pillbox.

A big raid. More Piruts than he’d ever seen before. He wondered why. He wondered how so many of them had been able to get so close to the pillbox all at once, walking two or three abreast on the narrow tongue of rock under the spears and slingstones.

They poured in through the gates of the stone-walled building, scattering up onto the parapet. There were slits in the rooms below and rusty metal things crouching behind them, but they weren’t any good for fighting. A man needed shoulder room for spear and sling.

It was pretty hot up there. The wall of bodies had built up so high, mostly with shags, that the Piruts were coming right over the wall. Kirk’s nose wrinkled at the smell of blood. He avoided the biggest puddles and found a place to stand between the dead.