“Kruse, Davenant, Yamagata, aft to the engines,” he clipped. “The rest stay with me. Be ready to take over piloting if I don’t last.”

  “I hope those mechs stay buffaloed.” Kruse’s teeth flashed white. “We’ve used up all our ammunition, you know.”

  His big form wriggled into the crowded engine room.

  “Where the devil will we go to?” asked Yamagata. “This boat isn’t interplanetary.”

  “I don’t know. The Outlaws in the hills, I reckon, if we can find them. What counts right now is getting clear of X.”

  The auxiliary motors purred, turning the rocket’s wheels. It slipped down the corridor and up the airlock ramp. It was useful, having enemies indoctrinated out of all initiative. No one had thought to cut off the automatically opening valves.

  As the boat emerged into dark bitterness, Lyell saw space-suited forms swarming across the ground. “Not a chance to get to the Light,” he said. “Stand by to lift.”

  The rockets flared, tossing the boat skyward. Lyell headed north, switched on the auto-pilot, and began scrambling into one of the space suits. The rest did the same. None was a particularly good fit—a suit should really be individually built—but they would do.

  Stars glittered in the forward view-ports. Falkenhorst slumped with closed eyes, color drained from his face. Yuan studied the radar-scope. His voice floated back to the thrumming hotness of the engine room, over the intercom:

  “Someone coming after us.”

  “Yes, I see him now. Police rocket, and this thing hasn’t a gun to its name.” Lyell’s voice held a groan.

  Davenant did not see what happened. He felt the sudden shock and thunder, felt the hull reel around him and drop like a murdered seraph. Air whistled through the hole amidships, and the unbalanced gyros howled.

  “Hang on!” bellowed Kruse, slapping down his helmet. “Hang on and pray!” They struck with a sundering crash which jerked Davenant’s head almost off his neck. Darkness whirled before his eyes. When he came out of it, Kruse was looking emptily through the engine room door.

  “They’re gone,” he said. “It killed them.”

  Slowly, Davenant crawled from the ruin. The boat had come down in a long glide, smashing itself into a land of bare mountains and reaching snowfields. The three men forward were dead.

  Yamagata went out through the hole torn in the boat’s waist and looked skyward. A distant red flare streaked south.

  “They aren’t landing,” he said. “Be almost impossible to do in this country, and they’ll be needed at home and won’t figure on any survivors lasting long.”

  “Which we won’t,” Kruse answered dully.

  “We can try!” Rebellion lifted in Davenant and brought his head erect. “We’ll lay these men out as well as we can, and then—”

  “Yes?” asked Kruse. “What then?”

  “We start walking,” said Davenant.

  That was how it had started. Now Davenant and Kruse stepped and glided. Two dead men walking across the face of hell.

  -7-

  The gauges said that about thirty minutes of oxygen remained. If it had not been for Yamagata, Davenant and Kruse would have suffocated already. They could stretch out their lives by sitting still, but there was no point to that.

  A ragged edge of hills cut across the face of Jupiter like teeth of blackness. Their shadows streamed enormous before them, hard and sharp over the broken ground. Outside the shadows, there was a rush of light from the primary, chill amber which sparkled frostily off solid ammonia fields and flashed from the ice glaciers in another sawbacked range. When Jupiter was close to full, its radiance was enough for human color vision, though the hues had a dreamlike distortion.

  Near the banded giant, no stars were visible—they were drowned out. When you looked away, you could see them over the sharply curving horizon. They glittered through the tenuous, unbreathable air with a cruel wintry brilliance.

  Even carrying his own weight of suit, oxygen bottles, capacitors, and other equipment, a man was light when gravity was less than a fifth of Earth’s. You learned walking all over again, the first time you were on a low-gee world—a long, flat glide which ate the kilometers.

  You learned to gauge distances when thin air made an object seem closer than it was, while a near horizon tried to make it see farther. You learned to check every joint and valve and connection on your suit before venturing out, when the least failure could choke you, explode you, freeze you solid in minutes. And you learned to have death for a companion!

  The minds of the two surviving Engineers had grown so dim with the steady slogging that when the gunshot came it almost killed them. Davenant saw a spurt of snow and chipped ice before his feet and stared at it in a dull kind of wonder. He didn’t hear anything except the whisper of wind past his helmet, for the air was too lean. Another slug pocked the low bluff to his right.

  “Down!” yelled Kruse. “They’re shooting at us!”

  He nose-dived for the ground, and a bullet whipped past the spot where he had stood. Davenant followed a movement of blind instinct. Ammonia-crystal snow feathered up to blind his face-plate, he pawed at it while his body tried to dig itself into rock.

  Kruse touched helmets with him. “Radio silence, man! They may have a direction finder. We’ve got to speak by conduction. No, this way—” He led an awkward belly-crawl toward the nearest of the little craters which scarred the valley floor.

  Davenant shuddered. For a moment he was uncontrollably afraid, his muscles knotted immovably against the expected leaden blow. Then, the very condition of hysteria triggered reactions which had been built into his mind during his long training. Suddenly he was without fear, his body keyed to a high adrenal pitch, his thoughts like cold lightning at night. He slipped after Kruse and wallowed down into the fluffy snow which filled the crater.

  The Venusian hunched low, snarling into the empty sky. “If they pin us here for another half hour, we’re done,” he said.

  A black outline showed above a ridge of ice, just for a second before ducking down again. “Cincs?” asked Kruse. “Have they tracked us down after all?”

  Davenant considered. “No. If that were a Cinc, we’d be dead by now. He’d have an infrared ’scope on his rifle, and even with our heaters tuned down to where I’m glad I’m not a brass monkey, we’d show up like a bonfire against this temperature.”

  The big man blinked, a little surprised at Davenant’s coolness. It would have surprised Davenant, too, if he had had time. He was fumbling with his pack, getting out the general unit which the discipline of years had made him carry from the wreck. General units were expensive, and Engineers were supposed to save money for the Order whenever it was humanly possible.

  “Outlaws, then,” said Kruse. “And how the devil are we going to convince them we’re friendly?”

  Slowly Davenant’s thick-fingered gloves worked on the unit, plugging in jacks and turning dials. It ran off his own capacitors, and took its time about warming up in the Ganymedean chill.

  He answered Kruse abstractedly. “We’re not friendly with the Outlaw, you know. We’re only trying to establish contact out of desperation, and—” A flicker appeared on the screen. “Here we go!”

  A man in the field, who might have to work hundreds of kilometers from camp, couldn’t pack twenty different meters and detectors. He needed a single device, rugged and portable, which could be adjusted to perform twenty different functions.

  Davenant had simply connected the thermopile with the galvanometer, blinkered the lens to provide sharp directionality, and come up with an infrared spotter. It wouldn’t directly show men crouched behind rock and ice, but it would show rising currents of air, heated by their suits. Cautiously, he swept it around the horizon.

  “Two,” he said after a minute. “One’s sitting over in back of that ridge, the other circling behind us. I think he wants to get a vantage point from the top of that bluff and shoot down at us. Now, any ideas?”

  “Mmmm—yeah. Let’s get the circler. His friend won’t be able to see what happens. We can get up on the bluff fast and wait for him.”

  A few minutes later, the Outlaw—he could be no other—crept over a final rise and toward a position where he could look down into the valley. A large form sprang on him from a crag, pinioning him. Another leaped at the same time from the nearly impenetrable shadow of a cave, grabbed the leads from his capacitors, and yanked them out before he could send a cry for help.

  The man struggled wildly. It was hard for Kruse to hold him, here where weight counted for so little. Davenant got out his pliers and unscrewed the short aerial of the Outlaw’s helmet radio. Only then did he plug the capacitors back into the suit circuit.

  Kruse’s helmet was tight against his prisoner’s. “We don’t want to cut off your juice permanently and freeze you,” he said, “but we might have to unless you behave yourself…Get his gun, Hall.”

  Davenant could not hear that, but he had already picked up the weapon. To his surprise he saw that it wasn’t a rifle, after all, but some kind of bolt-action smooth-bore, obviously homemade, though it used percussion caps. He covered the Outlaw until Kruse got some wire and bound the man’s ankles together. Then the Venusian took the gun and stood up.

  “I’m going after the other fellow,” he said.

  “Isn’t that—dangerous?” objected Davenant.

  “Of course, but look at your oxy gauge. We haven’t many minutes left, at the rate we’ve been using the stuff. And I’ve had stalking experience back home, which I doubt you have. See if you can talk this one over.”

  The tall figure slipped down the ridge and was lost to sight.

  Davenant huddled beside the captive, touching helmets. He heard only hoarse breathing for awhile, and looked into a gaunt, hook-nosed face nearly hidden by long, tangled hair and beard. The suit, he noticed, was an old model, and bore signs of much handmade repair.

  The Outlaw subsided a little. He could have thrown his arms around Davenant, but he could not have held the Engineer for long. He sat back with animal patience to wait a better chance.

  “Who are ye?” he asked. His English was barbarously accented, but clear enough. “Be ye gardamn Cincs?”

  “No. The Cincs were after us. We were looking for an Outlaw community where we can get help. We’re men of the Planetary Engineers.”

  That conveyed nothing to the man, but he nodded grudgingly. “Ye’re no Jovian, I see. Earth?”

  “Only in a way. My Order exists apart from any planet. We work for all. But the Cincs hunted us down, anyway.” Davenant paused, decided a half-truth was his best bet. “We want revenge on them. Perhaps your people can help.”

  “Mebbe new Cinc trick.” It was a savage growl, with a lifetime’s bitterness in the words.

  “We want to be shown to your village. Let us talk to your chief or whoever—”

  “No! Die first.”

  Davenant smiled nastily. “I don’t see any signs of motor transport,” he said, “so you must have walked from your home. You must have at least enough oxy to get back on. If necessary, we’ll take your bottles for ourselves and follow your trail. But we’d rather let you guide us.”

  “Not enough oxy. We got caches, ye never find, ye die too.”

  “At least,” said Davenant mildly, “we’ll die trying.” He was faintly surprised at his own ruthlessness. But the Order came first. More persuasively he went on, “What harm can it do if you guide us? What could two men do against a whole village? We have news for your chief which will make him glad. You have nothing to lose.”

  The Outlaw lapsed into a sullen silence. After awhile Kruse came back, prodding another man before him.

  “I sneaked behind and got the drop on this’n,” he explained. “Now what should we do?”

  Davenant examined the weapon taken from the new captive. It was a sort of spring-steel crossbow shooting metal quarrels. In this gravity and air pressure, such a device would have plenty of range. It could easily pierce a suit of space armor and the man within it. The main drawback would be the low rate of fire.

  His respect for the Outlaws went up another notch.

  “First,” he said, “we take these boys’ spare oxy bottles for ourselves. My air’s getting thick. Then we talk them into guiding us, or if they won’t we leave them here.”

  It took some persuasion before an agreement was reached, but then the trek got started. Once the men tried to lead them astray, but Kruse, who had spotted the faint signs of their earlier passage, forced them back onto the true trail.

  It was a long walk, and Davenant felt weak with hunger toward its end. He thrust the awareness out of his mind and whipped his flagging body into new energy. Once they stopped at a carefully disguised cairn and took out some fresh oxygen containers. There must be a lot of caches spotted throughout this country.

  That would explain how the Outlaw patrols managed to range so far.

  Davenant wondered with a certain chill what would happen when they reached the village. He had heard stories about these barbarians which, even allowing for exaggeration by their enemies, were not reassuring.

  -8-

  Near the north pole of Ganymede, the Godwin Mountains rose steep and cragged, tormented black walls which shimmered darkly under the radiance of Jupiter. A monster system of glaciers capped them, spilling down gashed ravines and across the lower plateaus. The yellow light was cold on their slippery backs.

  Kruse, Davenant, and their prisoners halted between two peaks which thrust above the ice and covered them with shadow. A slope fell away beneath them to a narrow, crater-like depression, and on it they could see the outlines of human figures.

  “Let’s go,” muttered Kruse.

  “No!” One of the captives spoke in a harsh whisper. “Services goin’ on. Sentries ’d shoot us first, check later. We gotta wait.”

  Squinting against the chill unreal haze of Jupiter light, Davenant saw that the people below were drawn up in ranks, facing a block of native stone where half a dozen worshippers were going through ritual gestures. Poking his helmet aerial forward and tuning up his radio, he caught, faintly, a deep-voiced chant:

  God-home, God-home, hear our askin’.

  See, we stand with sacrifice—

  Shocked, he looked southward, and up to the enormous face of the planet. It was at the full now, sprawling tremendously across heaven, the Red Spot like a single watching eye.

  “Is that your god?” he breathed.

  “God is in Jupe and Jupe is in God,” answered the barbarian with a peculiar note of reverence in his voice.

  O Zeus, could you know! Davenant imagined Olympian laughter ringing hoarsely through the mountains.

  “They caught a man in the last raid on Y,” said one of the prisoners. “Look!”

  They could see a man struggling in the grip of four others. A tiny puff of freezing vapor came from him, he went limp, and was hurled up on the altar stone. Davenant retched.

  Forcing his mind back toward an impersonal clarity, he wondered about the development of Outlaw culture. How long ago had their revolt and exodus taken place—eight years? That didn’t seem like time enough for this much degeneration.

  But then, Ganymede wasn’t Earth. The psycho-social effect of alien conditions had yet to be measured. Huddling, hiding, waging a doomed war for three or four generations, the hill men would rapidly have forgotten their intricate, highly specialized civilization. The barrenness and cold of the landscape would have entered their souls.

  He turned over what little he had learned about them in X. A religious colony forced to alter its ways of living and thinking in order to survive, forced yet further by prophet-dictators whose “revelations” had involved radical social change and increased their own power. Yes, it would be unstable, it would have its Old Believers.

  The introduction of controlled mutation had led to mutiny and civil war, the dissenters had been defeated and fled into the wilderness. There they had hidden, skulked, and raided lonely settlements. Without books, without leisure, they would rapidly have become barbarians. The stories about cannibalism and human sacrifice seemed justified, but Davenant tried hard not to think of them as the monsters they were considered to be. They were human beings, lonely and desperate and driven close to madness, but they had the same potential as anyone else.

  Besides, he thought, it was pretty obvious that the Cincs had been pulling their punches in the war. A concerted effort could have wiped out the hillmen long ago, but an external enemy was too useful.

  “Seems to be breaking up down there,” observed Kruse.

  They waited until the scene was deserted, then moved cautiously down the slope and across the open ice. One of the Outlaws spoke with a note of glee.

  “Might’s well put down yer gun. Ye’re covered now.”

  Sweat buckled along Davenant’s ribs. He tried to look into the farther shadows, but they were too dense. A voice in his earphones said, “Stand where ye be!” A quarrel chipping the glacier near his feet added emphasis. They halted and stood waiting, their hands aloft.

  Three men came into view, weapons leveled. “That ye, Gil? Fooled ’em here, eh? Good going!”

  “We—” Davenant licked his lips. They felt sandy. “We came here on purpose. We’re not Cincs or Hounds. We’re from Earth, and we want to see your chief.”

  There was a skeptical silence. One of the new arrivals picked up the dropped gun and crossbow and touched the Engineers suits.

  “Not Cinc make,” he grunted. “But they’re clever devils.”

  “All we want—”

  “I know, I know. Shuddup. Ye’ll get yer chance—mebbe.”

  As Davenant walked up the farther ridge, with guns at his back, he saw half a dozen figures appear with—brooms, by space! He felt a mental wobbling until he realized they were carefully smoothing out footprints and all other trace of the recent crowd around the altar.

  There was no path. Slipping and stumbling, groping through blindness of shadow and dazzled by Jupiter’s radiance, the party made a slow way through the crags. It seemed a long while before they were halted by other sentries. There was a low-voiced colloquy, and then the two Engineers were herded toward a cave mouth, a great gullet of blackness in an overhanging cliff. A machine-gun nest was dug in just beyond.