Samel said pleasantly, "Shut up that screeching." He shoved the girl aside hard enough to sit her down on the stones and then knelt beside the Captain’s daughter. He pulled her head back by the yellow hair and looked down into her eyes and said:
"But she’s right. Pretty soon there aren’t going to be any more heat-stones at all. Pretty soon we’re all going to die of the cold. But you won’t, you up there on the plateau. You can watch us freeze on the rocks and feel pretty smart about it. And you’ll have the Ship."
He drew his breath in, sharp, as though something hurt him. His horny lids dropped and his lips twisted like a child about to cry with pain. His hand tightened suddenly in the girl’s hair, jerking her head back hard on the taut curve of her neck. He slapped her twice across the face and let her go and stood up, backing off and trembling.
"You’ll have the Ship," he whispered, "for always."
Kirk got up. He felt sick, and there were red clouds across his eyes. The Captain’s yellow daughter. He’d cuffed her himself. Why did this happen to him when somebody else did it? It was a hell of a world and he was lost in it. All he knew was that he wanted to hit Samel hard enough to kill him.
Instead somebody hit Kirk from behind with a sap, not very hard. He fell on his face. From a great distance he heard the girl Sada screaming:
"You and your silly Ship! What does the Ship matter when we’re all going to die?"
"It matters." Samel’s voice was husky and queer. "It’s the beginning and the end. What it has in it belongs to us. It would make us fat and warm and strong, so that we could rule the whole world. My father died trying to reach it, and his father before him, and his father before that. The Ship matters. It’s everything."
It was still in the cave. It was as though his voice had wiped it clean of sound. Kirk shivered. And in the silence the babies cried, a thin wailing lamentation to the cold.
Kirk got up on his knees. "Wait a minute," he said thickly. "Wait, you’re going at this wrong. We all are. Wait, and listen to me."
*
Samel looked at him as though he’d forgotten Kirk existed. Somebody said, "Shall I fix him, Boss?" Samel started to nod, and then something in Kirk’s face changed his mind.
"He put up a good fight out there. Let him talk."
Kirk got his feet under him. His head throbbed, and falling on his bandaged wrist hadn’t done it any good, but at least he could see, and talk. He was scared, because what he was going to say was against everything he’d been taught since he was born, but he had to say it. There might be a lot of things wrong with it, but basically it was right, and he knew it. He knew Jakk Randl would have said it, too.
He did not look at the Captain’s yellow daughter.
"Listen," he said, loud enough so that everyone could hear him. "You’re wrong about one thing. We don’t have heat-stones up there on the plateau. Not the people like me, the little guys, the Hans. We starve and freeze just like you do, and our babies cry just as loud. And we sit, like you do, looking at the Ship and wondering."
He took a deep breath. They were watching him, not believing nor disbelieving. Just listening, feeling him, waiting for something he said to hit them so they’d know whether he was lying or not.
"Some of us have wondered a lot lately, about that Ship. The Officers don’t let us near it. They never have, no nearer than you out here in the gullies. But somebody did get close to it, one man who believed in what he was doing, and he saw...."
He told them what Jakk had seen, thinking about Jakk’s blood running red through his fingers and the fire dying in his eyes.
"I’m a Ship’s man. I’ve been taught to hate and fear you. You killed my friend. But the Officers killed my father, without even trying to save him. And I think we’re fools, we Hans and you Piruts. We’re all just people, with empty stomachs and cold backs and kids that never get warm. Why should we kill each other at those walls?"
He had them. He could hear the mob suck its breath in like one man. Samel’s eyes were hot enough to burn. Kirk cried out:
"It’s the Officers we ought to hate! It’s the Officers who hold the Ship, and hide the heat-stones in it! It’s the Officers we ought to fight, not each other!"
The mob screamed out of a single throat. Out of the tail of his eye Kirk saw the yellow girl spring up. Her hands were clenched and her face was a mask of horror, of hatred and a strange pleading. She was saying something, but the mob yell drowned her words, and when it died down somebody had the girl, holding her arms and her mouth.
"All right," said Samel hoarsely, and licked his lips. "All right. What are you going to do about it? What’s your scheme?"
"I’m going to take you there, the secret way. I’m going to take you to the Ship, so that we can break the Officers and live, together."
He did not look at the Captain’s yellow daughter.
*
The northern escarpment of the plateau fell sheer into a deep gorge. Kirk led them into it, Samel and six hands of Pirut men and the yellow girl with a strip of hide to gag her mouth. The darkness had come down, so thick and black that pupils at their widest spread could hardly make anything from the starshine. They went slowly, but almost without sound.
Kirk watched the dead Ship, thrusting high above them against the cold stars. Presently he stopped and whispered, "Here, I think."
They stopped. Kirk went alone to the cliff wall and felt along it. His hands slipped behind a curtain of moss, into a crack barely big enough for a man’s shoulder. There seemed to be a blank wall beyond, but he felt sideways, and found that Jakk had been right. There was a way.
He went back to Samel. "It’s there. Come on."
"No!" Samel caught his arm. He was looking up, at the broken Ship on the cliff-top, and he was trembling. "Wait," he whispered. "I want to know this, to keep it."
Kirk followed his rapt stare. The Ship, brooding over the plain, dominant even in death. The Ship that had brought them, Officers and Hans, in some strange forgotten way from some forgotten place, and died in the bringing. The Ship, Untouchable....
Kirk shivered, violently. His heartbeats choked him. And then Samel was speaking, no louder than a whisper, to the night and the Ship.
"We came from the sky, following, hunting. It had power and gold in its belly, and they kept us from it. They kept us Outside, away from the Ship, and we starved and froze and waited. And now we’re going in." He caught his breath between his teeth and shuddered. "And now we’re going in!"
Kirk whispered, "What are ‘power’ and ‘gold’?"
"I don’t know. Something in the legend. Something men live for, and die for. We’ll know soon."
"We’ll know soon. Samel, remember the bargain. No killing or plundering among the Hans."
Samel smiled, but the muscles ran hard along his jaw.
"If you’re telling the truth, there won’t be any reason for it. We’ll let the Officers decide whether they die or not." Samel started forward. "The Ship," he said softly, and laughed. "The Ship! "
They went toward the cleft in the rock. Somebody said, "Hey, it’s warm in this gorge!" Kirk realized then that he wasn’t cold, and wondered why. Then he smiled bitterly. Sure. The Officers had found a vein of heat-stones, probably just under the soil where they were standing. The gorge had never been a source of the stones, the crystal rocks that looked just like the ones scattered all over except that they had a tiny light in them and burned you when you picked them up. But the Officers must be getting them from here and taking them up to the Ship, to hoard.
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