at the prospect of a square meal. Presently they’d start climbing and when they did it was all over. Kirk didn’t even have a weapon with which to fight.
He looked down at them. Five squat thick shapes with six legs; four powerful legs with claws and two slender ones held in against the chest, armed with sucker discs for climbing. Five pairs of black eyes watching, hungry and infinitely patient. Five tucked bellies burning under pale, shaggy hair.
He was looking at death. A strange cold terror took him. He turned his head toward the yellow girl and saw the same thing in her eyes. They looked at each other, not moving nor breathing, thinking that they were young and going to die.
He shivered. The girl’s yellow body burned in the grey light. He moved. He didn’t know why, only that he had to. He took her in his arms and found her lips and kissed them, roughly, with an urgent, painful hunger. She fought him a little and then lay still against him.
One of the shags started to climb. Kirk saw it across the girl’s shoulder. He let her go and walked to the boulder’s edge and waited until the shaggy head was level with his feet. Then he crouched and struck, in a way he had never struck before. Blood spurted across his fist. The shag roared and fell backward clumsily, shaking its head. Kirk stood up and sucked in his belly and yelled. He felt savage now, but not afraid. The echoes howled eerily.
The shag started up again, and two more came with him.
There was something queer about the echoes. They got louder and wilder. Men’s voices, shouting. Kirk couldn’t look, but he heard the yellow girl cry:
"Piruts!"
*
He heard them coming closer, bare feet scrambling on rock. The shags came higher. He struck down, left and right. One beast lost hold with one sucker and fell into another, knocking it loose. They fell, clawing each other. The third came on. Kirk hit it. It slid its head aside and caught his wrist.
The pain blinded him. He roared and beat at it, but the grip on his wrist pulled him to his knees and almost over the edge. The brute started back down the boulder, taking Kirk with him.
The yellow girl slid suddenly in under Kirk and reached over and took hold of the shag’s snout and peeled it back. The beast snuffled and squealed and chewed on Kirk’s arm. The girl twisted harder. Blood began to spill down over the shag’s teeth.
It let go. Kirk began to hear slingstones whistle. The shag bellowed and took itself back down the rock, fast. The others were scattering away across the plain, driven by stones from expert slingers. Kirk and the girl crouched quietly, trembling and breathing hard.
Somebody called cheerfully, "You might as well come down now."
Kirk supposed they might as well. He climbed down, streaming blood from his torn wrist, with the girl scrambling beside him. The hackles were raised across her yellow shoulders.
Piruts. Kirk thought about Pa and Russ and Frank being driven up that tongue of naked rock. Their own people had killed them, but the Piruts put them there in the first place. And there was Jakk. Besides....
They were Piruts. That was enough. Kirk felt numb inside. It might have been easier if the shags had got them, after all.
The man who had called them was waiting, lounging back against a rock. He was no taller than Kirk, but he was a lot thicker and his hair was red. The bones of his face were heavy and brutal under his beard. His horny overlids were dropped so that only bright black slits showed of his eyes. He was smiling. It was a lazy, white-toothed, cheerful smile, but Kirk didn’t like. It made his belly knot up.
"What," said the Pirut, "the hell are you two kids doing out here?"
"Hunting," said Kirk shortly. There were a lot of Piruts among the tumbled rocks. Four, five hands of them.
The red Pirut had stopped looking at Kirk. He was looking at the Captain’s yellow daughter. "Well," he said. "Well, well!" He took himself away from the rock and came toward them. He moved slowly, as though he might be sleepy. Kirk didn’t like that, either.
He said, "Let us go. We haven’t anything to steal."
The Pirut chuckled. "I’m not so sure about that." He was still looking at the yellow girl. "No," he said. "I’m not sure about that at all."
He raised his hand and called the others in. Kirk knew he couldn’t fight; he followed the leader.
*
It was a lot colder in the Pirut cave than it was back in the huts of the colony. Everybody kept close together for warmth, crowded around the scanty heat-stones. There was a moaning draft from somewhere that kept Kirk’s hair stirring, and there were babies crying. Babies that didn’t sound any different from the one at home.
Kirk chewed up the last of his handful of pemmican, made of shag meat and sour berries, and was thankful for a full belly. The yellow girl crouched on the cold stone, not saying anything, her arms around her knees. The Pirut women watched her out of hostile eyes.
Samel, the red Pirut who had turned out to be some sort of an Officer, watched her too, but his eyes were not hostile.
"Close-mouthed piece, aren’t you?" he said. He threw a scrap of bone at a wiry black girl huddled over the heat, and laughed. "Sada," he yelled, "get her to give you lessons, will you?"
Everybody enjoyed that. Sada called him a name and turned her back. Samel’s black eyes came back to the yellow girl.
"You won’t tell who you are. That means you’re somebody. An Officer’s daughter, likely. Maybe even the Captain’s."
Some flicker in the girl’s eyes must have told him he’d hit home. He jumped up and shouted, "Hey! All of you, look here! We’ve got somebody—we’ve got the Captain’s daughter!"
The mob stirred and moved in. People began to shout, to curse and make animal noises of sheer hate. For a minute Kirk thought he and the girl were going to be torn apart. He shivered violently, and the hate was so strong in the air he could smell it.
Samel pulled out his sling lazily and loaded it. The sweep of his arm stopped part of the crowd, and the rest quieted down enough to hear him say:
"Hold it! Sit down, you fools! The girl’s gold. We can buy things with her."
Kirk didn’t get that word ‘gold’, but he understood the rest of it. It was what he had told her, himself.
He wished the babies would stop crying. It was hard to hate these people so much when you knew they had kids just like the one at home, wailing in the cold.
The mob relaxed sullenly. The Captain’s daughter spoke suddenly, very clear across the muttering quiet of the crowd.
"You can’t buy your way into the colony with me. They’ll kill me, like they did the three Hans, only this time they won’t wait as long."
She was telling the truth. Samel didn’t like it, and Kirk liked it even less, but she was. The muscle twitched under Kirk’s eye. It was a hell of a world. You couldn’t keep straight in it at all.
"All right," said Samel. "But we can buy heat with you. And maybe before we do we can get some things out of you, free." He moved in close to her, staring down with sultry eyes. He said huskily, "And don’t think we can’t, baby. And don’t think we wouldn’t enjoy it!"
She shivered, but her eyes didn’t flinch. She told him steadily, "If it’s about the Ship, you can do what you want and go to hell with it."
"I watched you up there on that rock," said Samel slowly. "Both of you. You have guts, all right. But I wonder...." He let his gaze slide down over her long, arrogant body. "It would be a pity to spoil that."
*
The girl Sada pushed her way out from the crowd.
"You big red son of a she-shag! Look at us! Look at this lousy cave, and those boxes of heat-stones that wouldn’t keep a rat-pup warm, and then think of these swine sitting up there on their plateau,