But when the missiles departed, that was a heart-stopping sight.
They were solid-fuel rockets. There had been no reason to give expensive gravitic jobs to a minor colonial town so far from the battlefront that the Arulians couldn’t possibly attack it in force. The weapons lifted out of their three launchers some distance away… with slow majesty, spouting sun-fire and white clouds, roaring their thundersong that clutched at the throat until Karlsarm gripped his crossbow and glared in defiance of the terror they roused… faster, though, streaking off at a steep slant,, rising and rising until the flames flickered out… still rising, beyond his eyes, but drawing to a halt, caught now by the, upper winds that twisted their noses downward, by the very rotation of the planet that aimed them at the place they should have defended.
And heavenward flew the second trio. And the third. Karlsarm judged he had better get into shelter.
He was at the bottom of the bunker with his men—tons of steel, concrete, force-screen generator shutting away the sky—when the rockets fell; and even so, he felt the room tremble around him.
Afterward, emerging, he saw a kilometers-high tree of dust and vapor. The command aircraft landed, hastily took on his group and fled the radioactivity. From the air he saw no church, no Domkirk, nothing but a wide, black, vitrified crater ringed in with burning fields.
He, shook, as the bombproof had shaken, and said to no one and everyone: “This is what they would do to us!”
Running from the morning, they returned to a dusk before dawn. The other raiders were already there. This was in the eastern edge of wilderness, where hills lifted sharply toward the Windhook Mountains.
Ridenhour walked some distance off. He didn’t actually wish to be alone; if anything, he wanted a companion for a shield between him and the knowledge that two hundred light-years reached from here to Lissa and the children, their home and Terra. But he must escape Uriason or commit violence. The man had babbled, gobbled, orated and gibbered through their entire time in the air. You couldn’t blame him, maybe. His birthplace as well as his job had gone up in lethal smoke. But Ridenour’s job was to gather information; and that big auburn-haired Evagail woman, whom he’d met not unamicably while she was still captive, had appeared willing to talk if she ever got a chance.
No one stopped Ridenour. Where could he flee? He climbed onto a crest and looked around.
The valley floor beneath him held only a few trees and they small, probably the result of a forest fire, though nature—incredibly vigorous when civilization has not sucked her dry—had covered all scars with a thick blanket of silvery-green trilobed “grass” and sapphire blossoms. No doubt this was why the area had been set for a rendezvous. Aircraft landed easily. Hundreds of assorted tools must have been stacked here beforehand or stolen from the city, for men were attacking the vehicles like ants. Clang, clatter, hails, cheerful oaths profaned the night’s death-hush.
Otherwise there was great beauty in the scene. Eastward, the first color stole across a leaf-roof that ran oceanic to the edge of sight, moving and murmuring in the breeze. Westward, the last few stars glistened in a plum-dark sky, above the purity of Windhook’s snow-peaks. Everywhere dew sparkled.
Ridenour took out pipe and tobacco and lit up. It made him hiccough a bit, on an empty stomach, but comforted him in his chilled weariness. And in his dismay. He had not imagined the outbackers were such threats.
Neither had anyone else, apparently. He recalled remarks made about them in Nordyke and (only yesterday?) Domkirk. “Impoverished wretches… Well, yes, I’m told they eat well with little effort. But otherwise, just think, no fixed abodes, no books, no schools, no connection with the human mainstream, hardly any metal, hardly any energy source other than brute muscle. Wouldn’t you call that an impoverished existence? Culturally as well as materially?”
“Surly, treacherous, arrogant. I tell you, I’ve dealt with them. In trading posts on the wilderness fringe. They do bring in furs, wild fruits, that sort of thing, to swap, mostly for steel tools—but only when they feel like taking the trouble, which isn’t often, and then they treat you like dirt.”
But a much younger man had had another story. “Sure, if one of us looks down on the woodsrunners, they’ll look down right back at him, But I was interested and acted friendly, and they invited me to overnight in their camp… Their songs are plain caterwauling, but I’ve never seen better dancing, not even on Imperial Ballet Corps tapes, and afterward, the girls—! I think I might get me some trade goods and return some day.
“Swinish. Lazy. Dangerous also, I agree. Look what they’ve done every time someone tried to start a real outpost of civilization in the mid-wilderness. We’ll have to clean them out before we can expand. Once this damned Arulian war is over—No, don’t get me wrong, I’m not vindictive. Let’s treat them like any other criminaclass="underline" rehabilitation, re-integration into society. I’ll go further; I’ll admit this is ,a case of cultural conflict rather than ordinary lawbreaking. So why not let the irreconcilables live out their lives peacefully on a reservation somewhere? As long as their children get raised civilized.
“If you ask me, I think heredity comes into the picture. It wasn’t easy to establish the Cities, maintain and enlarge them, the first few centuries on an isolated, metal-poor world like this. Those who couldn’t stand the gaff opted out. Once the disease and nutrition problems were licked, you could certainly live with less work in the forests—if you didn’t mind turning into a savage and didn’t feel any obligation toward the civilization that had made your survival possible. Later, through our whole history, the same thing continued. The lazy, the criminal, the mutinous, the eccentric, the lecherous, the irresponsible, sneaking off… to this very day. No wonder the outbackers haven’t accomplished anything. They never will, either. I’m not hopeful about rehabilitating them, myself, not even any of their brats that we institutionalized at birth. Scrub stock!
“Well, yes, I did live with them a while. Ran away when I was sixteen. Mainly, I think now, my reason was—you know, girls—and that part was fine, if you don’t wonder about finding some girl you can respect when you’re ready to get married. And I thought it’d be romantic. Primitive hunter, that sort of thing. Oh, they were kind enough. But they set me to learning endless nonsense—stuff too silly and complicated to retain in my head—rituals, superstitions—and they don’t really hunt much, they have some funny kind of herding—and no stereo, no cars, no air-conditioning—hiking for days on end, and have you ever been out in a Freehold rainstorm?—and homesickness, after a while; they don’t talk or behave or think like us. So I came back. And mighty draggle-tailed, I don’t mind admitting. No, they didn’t forbid me. One man guided me to the nearest cultivated land.
“Definitely an Arulian influence, Professor Ridenour. I’ve observed the outbackers at trading posts, visited some of their camps, made multisensory tapes. Unscientific, no doubt. I’m strictly an amateur as an ethnologist. But I felt somebody must try. They are more numerous, more complicated, more important than Nine Cities generally realize. Here, I’ll play some of my recordings for you. Pay special attention to the music and some of the artwork. Furthermore, what little I could find out about their system of reckoning kinship looks as if it’s adopted key Arulian notions. And remember, too, the savages—not only on this continent, but on both others, where they seemed to have developed similarly. Everywhere on Freehold, the savages have grown more and more hostile in these past years. Not to our Arulian enemies, but to us! When the Arulians were marshalling in various wilderness regions, did they have savage help? I find it hard to believe they did not.”