The Devils Asteroid | Page 5

who wore the armor he had stripped from the dead Martian. "You were chief, and what you said goes. But you're not chief now--you're just the man who murdered four of us!"
"Mmm--yes," growled one of the lower-fallen listeners, a furry-shouldered, buck-toothed clod named Wain. "That blast almost got me, right behind Haldocott." His eyes, grown small, gleamed nastily at Parr. "We ought to condemn this man--"
"Please," interposed Sadau, who alone remained friendly to Parr, "it's for the chief to condemn." He looked to Varina Pemberton, who shook her head slowly.
"I feel," she ventured with her eyes on Parr, "that this ought to be left up to you as a voting body."
Shanklin sprang to his feet. "Fair enough!" he bawled. "I call Parr guilty. All who think like me, say aye!"
"Aye!"
"Aye!"
"Aye!"
They were all agreeing except Sadau, who looked shrunken and sad and frightened. Shanklin smirked.
"All who think he should be killed as a murderer--"
"Hold on," put in Varina Pemberton. "If I'm chief, I'll draw the line there. Don't kill him."
Shanklin bowed toward her. "I was wrong to suggest that before a woman. Then he's to be kicked out?"
There was a chorus of approving yells, and all save Sadau jumped up to look for sticks and stones. Parr laid his hand on the club he had borne in the skirmish that day.
"Now wait," he said clearly and harshly, and the whole party faced him--Sadau wanly, the girl questioningly, the rest angrily.
"I'm to be kicked out," Parr repeated. "I'll accept that. I'll go. But," and the club lifted itself in his right hand, "I'm not going to be rough-housed. I've seen it happen here, and none of it for me."
"Oh, no?" Shanklin had picked up a club of his own, and grinned fiercely.
"No. Let me go, and I leave without having to be whipped out of camp. Mob me, and I promise to die fighting, right here." He stamped a foot on the ground. "I'll crack a skull or two before I wink out. That's a solemn statement of fact."
"Let him go," said Varina Pemberton again, this time with a ring of authority. "He wears that armor, and he'll put up a fight. We can't spare any more men."
"Thank you," Parr told her bleakly. He gave Shanklin a last long stare of challenge, then turned on his heel and walked away toward the thickets amid deep silence. Behind him the council fire made a dwindling hole in the blackness of night. It seemed to be his last hope, fading away.
He pushed in among thick, leafy stems. A voice hailed him:
"Hah!"
And a figure, blacker than the gloom, tramped close to him across a little grassy clearing.
"You! They drive you out?" a thick, unsure voice accosted him.
Parr hefted his club, wondering if this would be an enemy. "Yes. They drove me out. I'm exiled from among exiles."
"Uh." The other seemed perplexed over these words, as though they stated a situation too complicated. Parr's eyes, growing used to the darkness, saw that this was a grotesque, shaggy form, one of the degenerate outcasts from the village. "Uh," repeated his interrogator. "You come to us. Make one more in camp. Come."
* * * * *
Among tall trees, thickly grown, lay a throng of sleepers. Parr's companion led him there, and made an awkward gesture.
"You lie down. You sleep. Tomorrow--boss talk. Uh!"
So saying, the beast-man curled up at the root of a tree. Parr sat down with his back against another trunk, the club across his knees, but he did not sleep.
This, plainly enough, was the outcast horde. It clung together, the gregariousness of humanity not yet winnowed out by degeneration. It had a ruler, too--"Tomorrow boss talk." Talk of what? In what fashion?
Thus Parr meditated during the long, moonless night. He also took time to examine once more his captured armor. Its metal plates, clamped upon a garment of leatheroid, covered his body and limbs, even the backs of his hands, as well as his neck and scalp. Yet, as he had decided before, it was no great protection against violence. As clothing it was superfluous on this tropical planetoid. What then?
He could not see, but he could feel. His fingers quested all over one plate, probing and tapping. The plate was hollow--in reality, two saucer-shaped plates with their concave faces together. They gave off a muffled clink of hollowness when he tapped them. When he shook the armor, there was something extra in the sound, and that impelled him to hold a plate close to his ear. He heard a soft, rhythmic whirr of machinery.
"There's a vibration in this stuff," he summed up in his mind. "What for? To protect against what?"
Then, suddenly, he had it.
The greatest menace of the whole tiny world was the force that reversed evolution--the vibration must be designed to neutralize that