Intergalactic Stories: 60+ SF Classics in One Edition (Illustrated). Leigh Brackett
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with sheer ecstasy.
The hook lifted out of the hole it had made, but it didn't go away. Campbell raised his head a little. The lower edge of the green light spilled across a pair of sandalled feet. The bare white legs above them were as beautiful as the voice, in the same strong clear way.
There was a long silence. Marah, the man with the hook, turned his face partly into the light. It was oblong and scarred and hard as beaten bronze. The eyes in it were smoky ember, set aslant under a tumbled crest of tawny hair.
After a long time the woman spoke again. Her voice was different this time. It was angry, and the anger made it sing and throb like the Kraylen's drum.
"The Earthman is telling the truth, Marah. Zard sent him. He's here about the Kraylens."
The big man—a Martian Drylander, Campbell thought, from somewhere around Kesh—got up, fast. "The Kraylens!"
"He asked for help, and Tredrick sent him away." The light moved closer. "But that's not all, Marah. Tredrick has found out about—us. Old Ekla talked. They're waiting for us at the ship!"
III
Marah turned. His eyes had a greenish, feral glint like those of a lion on the kill. He said, "I'm sorry, little man."
Campbell was on his feet, now, and reasonably steady. "Think nothing of it," he said dourly. "A natural mistake." He looked at the hook and mopped the blood from his neck, and felt sick. He added, "The name's Black. Thomas Black."
"It wouldn't be Campbell?" asked the woman's voice. "Roy Campbell?"
He squinted into the light, not saying anything. The woman said, "You are Roy Campbell. The Spaceguard was here not long ago, hunting for you. They left your picture."
He shrugged. "All right. I'm Roy Campbell."
"That," said Marah softly, "helps a lot!" He could have meant it any way. His hook made a small, savage flash in the green light.
"There's trouble here on Romany. Civil war. Men are going to be killed before it's over—perhaps now. Where's your place in it?"
"How do I know? The Coalition is moving in on the Kraylens. I owe them something. So I came here for help. Help! Yeah."
"You'll get it," said the woman. "You'll get it, somehow, if any of us live."
Campbell raised his dark brows. "What goes on here, anyhow?"
The woman's low voice sang and throbbed against the pipe walls. "A long time ago there were a few ships. Old ships, crowded with people who had no homes. Little, drifting people who made a living selling their odd handicrafts in the spaceports, who were cursed as a menace to navigation and distrusted as thieves. Perhaps they were thieves. They were also cold, and hungry, and resentful.
"After a while the ships began to band together. It was easier that way—they could share food and fuel, and talk, and exchange ideas. Space wasn't so lonely. More and more ships drifted in. Pretty soon there were a lot of them. A new world, almost.
"They called it Romany, after the wandering people of Earth, because they were gypsies, too, in their own way.
"They clung to their own ways of life. They traded with the noisy, trampling people on the planets they had been driven away from because they had to. But they hated them, and were hated, just as gypsies always are.
"It wasn't an easy life, but they were free in it. They could stand anything, as long as they were free. And always, anywhere in the Solar System, wherever some little lost tribe was being swallowed up and needed help, ships from Romany went to help them."
Her voice dropped. Campbell thought again of the Kraylen's drum, singing its anger in the indigo night.
"That was the creed of Romany," she whispered. "Always to help, always to be a refuge for the little people who couldn't adjust themselves to progress, who only wanted to die in dignity and peace. And now...."
"And now," said Marah somberly, "there is civil war."
* * * * *
Campbell drew a long, unsteady breath. The woman's voice throbbed in him, and his throat was tight. He said "Tredrick?"
Marah nodded. "Tredrick. But it's more than that. If it were only Tredrick, it wouldn't be so bad."
He ran the curve of his hook over his scarred chin, and his eyes burned like candle flames.
"Romany is growing old, and soft. That's the real trouble. Decay. Otherwise, Tredrick would have been kicked into space long ago. There are old men in the Council, Campbell. They think more of comfort than they do of—well...."
"Yeah. I know. What's Tredrick's angle?"
"I don't know. He's a strange man—you can't get a grip on him. Sometimes I think he's working for the Coalition."
Campbell scowled. "Could be. You gypsies have a lot of wild talents and some unique skills—I've met some of 'em. The man that controlled them would be sitting pretty. The Coalition would like it, too."
The woman said bitterly, "And they could always exhibit us. Tours, at so much a head. So quaint—a cross-section of a lost world!"
"Tredrick's the strong man," Marah went on. "Eran Mak is Chief Councillor, but he does as Tredrick tells him. The idea is that if Romany settled down and stops getting into trouble with the Planetary Coalitions, we can have regular orbits, regular trade, and so on."
"In other words," said Campbell dryly, "stop being Romany."
"You understand. A pet freak, a tourist attraction, a fat source of revenue." Again the savage flash of the hook. "A damned circus!"
"And Tredrick, I take it, has decided that you're endangering the future of Romany by rebellion, and put the finger on you."
"Exactly." Marah's yellow eyes were bright and hard, meeting Campbell's.
Campbell thought about the Fitts-Sothern outside, and all the lonely reaches of space where he could go. There were lots of Coalition ships to rob, a few plague-spots left to spend the loot in. All he had to do was walk out.
But there was a woman's voice, with a note in it like a singing, angry drum. There was an old man's voice, murmuring, "Little people like you, my son?"
It was funny, how a guy could be alone and not know he minded it, and then suddenly walk in on perfect strangers and not be alone any more—alone inside, that is—and know that he had minded it like hell.
It had been that way with the Kraylens. It was that way now. Campbell shrugged. "I'll stick around."
He added irritably, "Sister, will you for Pete's sake get that light out of my eyes?"
She moved it, shining it down. "The name's Moore. Stella Moore."
He grinned. "Sorry. So you do have a face, after all."
It wasn't beautiful. It was pale and heart-shaped, framed in a mass of unruly red-gold hair. There were long, grey eyes under dark-gold brows that had never been plucked, and a red, sullen mouth.
Her teeth were white and uneven, when she smiled. He liked them. The red of her sullen lips was their own. She wore a short tunic the color of Tokay grapes, and the body under it was long and clean-cut. Her arms and throat had the whiteness of pearl.
Marah said quietly, "Contact Zard. Tell him to throw the PA system wide open and say we're taking the ship, now, to get the Kraylens!"
* * * * *
Stella stood absolutely still. Her grey eyes took on an eerie, remote look, and Campbell shivered slightly. He'd seen telepathy often enough in the System's backwaters, but it never seemed normal.
Presently she said, "It's done," and became human again. The green light went out. "Power," she explained. "Besides, we don't need it. Give me your hand, Mister Campbell."