let the limp body fall and crouched there, holding his throbbing head in his hands. He knew he was crying, and couldn’t stop. His skin burned, and he was cold to the marrow of his bones.
Suddenly he looked at Lehn out of bright, fever-mad eyes. “Very well,” he whispered. “I won’t die. You can’t kill me, you and Thekla, and you go on believing I betrayed you. I’ll take you back, you two, and fight it out. I’ll keep the Nahali from taking the fort, so you can’t say I sold it out. I’ll make you believe me!”
From somewhere, far off, he heard Thekla laugh.
*
MacIan huddled there for some time, his brain whirling. Through the rain-beat and the fever-mist in his head and the alternate burning and freezing that racked his body, certain truths shot at him like stones from a sling.
Thekla had a gun that shot a stream of electricity. A gun designed for Nahali, whose nervous systems were built to carry a certain load and no more, like any set of wires. The low frequency discharge was strong enough to kill a normal man only under ideal conditions; and these conditions were uniquely ideal. Wet clothes, wet skin, wet ground, even the air saturated.
Then there were metal and rubber. Metal in his belt, in Lehn’s belt; metal mesh, because the damp air rotted everything else. Rubber on his feet, on Lehn’s feet. Rubber was insulation. Metal was a conductor.
MacIan realized with part of his mind that he must be mad to do what he planned to do. But he went to work just the same.
Ten minutes later he left the hut and crossed the soaking clearing in the downpour. Thekla had left the liha -tree for a hut directly opposite Lehn’s; he rose warily in the doorway, gun ready. His sly black eyes took in MacIan’s wild blue gaze, the fever spots burning on his lean cheekbones, and he smiled.
“Get on back to the hut,” he said. “Be a pity if you die before the Nahali have a chance to try electro-therapy.”
MacIan didn’t pause. His right arm was hidden behind his back. Thekla’s jaw tightened. “Get back or I’ll kill you!”
MacIan’s boots sucked in the mud. The beating rain streamed from his white hair, over his craggy face and gaunt shoulders. And he didn’t hesitate.
Thekla’s pointed teeth gleamed in a sudden snarl. His thumb snapped the trigger; a bolt of blue flame hissed toward the striding Scot.
MacIan’s right hand shot out in the instant the gun spoke. One of Lehn’s rubber boots cased his arm almost to the shoulder, and around the ankle of it a length of metal was made fast; two mesh belts linked together. The spitting blue fire was gathered to the metal circle, shot down the coupled lengths, and died in the ground.
The pistol sputtered out as a coil fused. Thekla cursed and flung it at MacIan’s head. The Scot dodged it, and broke into a run, dropping Lehn’s boot that his hands might be free to grapple.
Thekla fought like a low-canal rat, but MacIan was bigger and beyond himself with the first madness of fever. He beat the little Martian down and bound him with his own belt, and then went looking for his clothes and gun.
He found them, with Lehn’s, in the hut next door. His belt pouch yielded quinine; he gulped a large dose and felt better. After he had dressed, he went and wrestled Lehn into his coverall and helmet and dragged him out beside Thekla, who was groaning back to consciousness in the mud.
Looking up, MacIan saw three Nahali men watching him warily out of scarlet eyes as they slunk toward him.
Thekla’s escort. And it was a near thing. Twice clammy paws seared his face before he sent them writhing down into the mud, jerking as the overload beat through their nervous systems. Triangular mouths gaped in noseless faces, hand-like paws tore convulsively at scaly breast-plates, and MacIan, as he watched them die, said calmly:
“There will be hundreds of them storming the fort. My gun won’t be enough. But somehow I’ve got to stop them.”
No answer now. He shrugged and kicked Thekla erect. “Back to the fort, scut,” he ordered, and laughed. The linked belts were fastened now around Thekla’s neck, the other end hooked to the muzzle of MacIan’s gun, so that the slightest rough pull would discharge it. “What if I stumble?” Thekla snarled, and MacIan answered, “You’d better not!”
Lehn was big and heavy, but somehow MacIan got him across his shoulders. And they started off.
*
The fringe of the swamp was in sight when MacIan’s brain became momentarily lucid. Another dose of quinine drove the mists back, so that the fort, some fifty yards away, assumed its proper focus. MacIan dropped Lehn on his back in the mud and stood looking, his hand ready on his gun.
The village swarmed with swamp-rats in the slow, watery dawn. They were ranged in a solid mass along the edges of the moat, and the fort’s guns were silent MacIan wondered why, until he saw that the dam that furnished power for the turbine had been broken down.
Thekla laughed silently. “My idea, MacIan. The Nahali would never have thought of it themselves. They can’t drown, you know. I showed them how to sneak into the reservoir, right under the fort’s guns, and stay under water, loosening the stones around the spillway. The pressure did the rest. Now there’s no power for the big guns, nor the conductor rods in the moat.”
He turned feral black eyes on MacIan. “You’ve made a fool of yourself. You can’t stop those swamp-rats from tearing the fort apart. You can’t stop me from getting away, after they’re through. You can’t stop Lehn from thinking what he does. You haven’t changed anything by these damned heroics!”
“Heroics!” said MacIan hoarsely, and laughed. “Maybe.” With sudden viciousness he threw the end of the linked belts over a low liha -branch, so that Thekla had to stand on tiptoe to keep from strangling. Then, staring blindly at the beleagured fort, he tried to beat sense out of his throbbing head.
“There was something,” he whispered. “Something I was saying back in the swamp. Something my mind was trying to tell me, only I was delirious. What was it, Thekla?”
The Martian was silent, the bloody grin set on his dark face. MacIan took him by the shoulders and shook him. “What was it?”
Thekla choked and struggled as the metal halter tightened. “Nothing, you fool! Nothing but Nahali and liha -trees.”
“ Liha -trees!” MacIan’s fever-bright eyes went to the great green pollen-pods hung among the broad leaves. He shivered, partly with chill, partly with exultation. And he began like a madman to strip Lehn and Thekla of their rubber coveralls.
Lehn’s, because it was larger, he tented over two low branches. Thekla’s he spread on the ground beneath. Then he tore down pod after pod from the liha -tree, breaking open the shells under the shelter of the improvised tent, pouring out the green powder on the groundcloth.
When he had a two-foot pile, he stood back and fired a bolt of electricity into the heart of it.
Thick, oily black smoke poured up, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the fire took hold. A sluggish breeze was blowing out of the swamp, drawn by the cooler uplands beyond the fort; it took the smoke and sent it rolling toward the packed and struggling mass on the earthworks.
Out on the battlefield, Nahali stiffened suddenly, fell tearing convulsively at their bodies. The beating rain washed the soot down onto them harder and harder, streaked it away, left a dull film over the reptilian skins, the scaly breast-plates. More and more of them fell as the smoke rolled thicker, fed by the blackened madman under the liha -tree, until only Legionnaires were left standing in its path, staring dumbly at the stricken swamp-rats.
The squirming bodies stilled in death. Hundreds more, out on the edges of the smoke, seeing their comrades die, fled back into the swamp. The earthworks were cleared. Ian MacIan gave one wild shout that carried clear to the fort. Then he collapsed, crouched shivering beside the unconscious Lehn, babbling incoherently.
Thekla,