Gann reacted without thought. He twisted the crystal of that old laser to maximal intensity, steadied the tube on the rocks of the cairn, and fired into those dreadful flashing eyes. They exploded.
The pyropod bellowed in agony. Its eyes were gone—eyes or eyelike structures; actually, Gann knew, they were more like laser search gear. But whatever they were, they were gone now, burst like the shattered hull of a subtrain when the field of its tunnel fails and the fluid rock crushes it. The pyropod drove blindly up and away, squalling until its sound was cut off like the dropping of a curtain.
It had passed beyond the atmosphere into space. Blind and wounded, it would not, Gann thought, be back. And a blessing that was, since an orange light was blinking on the laser gun, warning him that the fuel cell was fully exhausted.
He knew there were other pyropods still out there, somewhere beyond the veil of air. He could see their faint red sparks circling, and the blue trails of their fiery exhausts. They veered all at once, and drove in toward the retreating comet tail of the pyropod he had wounded. There was a puff of incandescent vapor. . .
Dimly Gann realized that its mates had destroyed the wounded one, torn it open and were now wheeling and diving, fighting for their shares of the kill. But he had no time for them. The spaceling had tumbled to earth halfway across the little reeflet, and Gann stumbled and leaped across the red-scaled rocks to find it.
It was lying at the edge of Harry Hickson's little plantation, spurting glowing yellow blood across the green moss. Beside it was its rider, bent over the terrible wound, trying with both hands to stanch the flow of blood.
The rider was a girl. Hickson had been right. It was the girl in the photograph he had displayed.
The spaceling moaned and shuddered as Gann drew near, its voice a faint, inarticulate sob. The girl was sobbing too.
"Can I help?" said Boysie Gann.
The girl, Quarla Snow, turned quickly, startled. She stared at Gann as if he were himself a pyropod, or some more fearsome monster from legend. There was fright in her eyes—and yet, queerly, thought Gann, almost relief as well, as if she had expected something even worse. It was the expression of a man who finds himself confronted by a wolf, when he expects a tiger.
"Who are you?" she demanded. Her voice was low and controlled. She was tall and strong, but very young.
"Boysie Gann," he said. "And you're Quarla Snow. Harry Hickson told me you'd be here."
Her hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes widened in fear. For a moment she seemed about to run; then she shook her head in a pathetic gesture and turned back to the spaceling.
Its golden blood had ceased to flow, its body to move. The sounds it had uttered were still.
"Sultana's dead," the girl said softly, as if to herself.
"I'm sorry," Boysie Gann said inadequately. He glanced aloft—the pyropods were out of sight entirely now—then back to her. Quarla Snow's face was lightly tanned, almost to match her honey-colored hair. She was nearly the color of her spaceling. Her white coveralls were splashed with that golden ichor, her hands dripping with it. Yet she was beautiful.
For a moment a buried emotion trembled inside Boysie Gann, a memory of Julie Martinet and the taste of the fresh salt surf on her mouth when he kissed her on the beach of the little Mexican resort, Playa Blanca, long ages ago when they had said good-by. This girl did not in the least resemble Julie Martinet. She was blond where Julie had hair like night; she was tall, and Julie tiny. Her face was broad, friendly, and even in her sorrow and fear it showed contentment and joy in life, while Julie Martinet was a girl of sad pleasures and half-expressed sorrows. Yet there was something in both of them that stirred him.
He said hastily, "Those things may be back. We'd better do something about it."
The girl's tears were drying on her cheeks and her expression had become more calm. She looked down at the dead gun in Gann's hands and half smiled. "Not with that, Boysie Gann. It's empty."
"I know. We'd better get back to Hickson's cave. He may have left other charges."
"Left them? But I thought you said he was here!" The shadow fell over her face again, her eyes bright and fearful.
"He was, yes. But he's gone. Disappeared. I don't know where."
The girl nodded absently, as if she were too dazed to take in what he had said. She dropped to her knees beside the dead spaceling and stroked its golden head. "Poor Sultana. I'll never forgive myself. When I got your signal I . . . well, I was frightened. I didn't know what to do. Dad was gone on an emergency call. He'd taken our ship, and ... I decided to ride Sultana out here by myself."
Her mouth set white for a moment. "I didn't really think of any danger. There aren't many pyropods in these clusters any more—been hunted out years ago, though they keep straying back. But I'd outrun them on Sultana often enough before. I didn't think about the fact that she's . . . that she was . . . getting old."
She stood up and touched Gann lightly on the arm, a gesture of reassurance. "But you're not to worry. We aren't marooned here; Dad will come for us in the ship as soon as he gets home. I left a message."
Gann nodded. "So he'll wait awhile," he said, comprehendingly, "and then, if you haven't returned in—what? a day or so? Then he'll come looking for you."
But Quarla Snow shook her golden head, her expression unreadable. "No. He won't wait. Not even a second. I said in my note that Harry Hickson's old distress signal had come. He'll be here as fast as his ship can bring him, to see who sent Harry's signal."
Gann stared. "Harry did. Harry Hickson. I told you!"
"I know you told me," the girl said, her voice calm but with an undercurrent of wonder and of fear. "But you see, it couldn't have been Harry. I—no, wait. I'll show you."
And she turned and led him away from the cultivated little field, back up to the red-scaled crest of rock, where he had rested his laser gun on the cairn of rocks to fire at the pyropod. "See?" she said, touching the cairn.
He bent closer to look, and there on the lowermost rock, on one half-smoothed face of a boulder, was a faint scratching of carved letters, whittled out a line at a time with a laser gun, almost invisible unless you knew just where to look:
Harry Hickson Died of a fusorian infection Deneb light his way.
"You see?" said the girl. "Harry could not have sent the message. He died here three years ago."
All this was months before the Writ of Liberation. On Earth the old Planner sat in silent, joyous communion with the Planning Machine. In solarian space the great Plan cruisers arrowed from satellite to planet, from asteroid to distant Spacewall post, carrying the weapons and the orders of the Machine to all the far-flung territories of the Plan of Man. On the island of Cuba, in the Body Bank, a Nigerian ex-Tech-nicorps man, broken for inefficiency, gave up the last of his vital organs to serve some more worthy servant of the Plan, and died. (His name had once been M'Buna. He had been captured and court-martialed for desertion.) A girl named Julie Martinet, in a dormitory hall far below the surface of the Peruvian Andes, sat with stylus in hand deciding on which letter to write—one to the man she loved "but had not heard from"; the other an application for special duty in the service of the Machine.
And out on the Reefs, in the sprawling hundred-orbed community called Freehaven, Machine Major Boysie Gann began to understand that his greatest opportunity for service—and his greatest hope of reward!—had been handed to him on a silver platter.
For he was at large in Freehaven, the very heart of the Reefs of Space. And he knew, or thought he knew, a way to get back to the worlds of the Plan.