Free Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One by Jack Vance Page A

would come to this.”
    He climbed into the pilot’s seat, looked out across the desert. Barbara huddled somewhere behind him, sobbing softly.
    An hour passed, during which they said no word. Then, without warning, a fiery orange ball rose from the hill across the pond, drifted toward the station. Root blinked, jerked upright in his seat. He scrambled for the ship’s machine gun, yanked at the trigger—without result.
    When at last he found and threw off the safety the orange ball hung over the station and Root held his fire. The ball brushed against the antenna—a tremendous explosion spattered to every corner of vision. It seared Root’s eyes, threw him to the deck, rocked the ship, left him dazed and half-conscious.
    Barbara lay moaning. Root hauled himself to his feet. A seared pit, a tangle of metal, showed where the station had stood. Root dazedly slumped into the seat, started the fuel pump, plunged home the catalyzers. The boat quivered, bumped a few feet along the ground. The tubes sputtered, wheezed.
    Root looked at the fuel gauge, looked again. The needle pointed to zero, a fact which Root had known but forgotten. He cursed his own stupidity. Their presence in the ship might have gone ignored if he had not called attention to it.
    Up from the hill floated another orange ball. Root jumped for the machine gun, sent out a burst of explosive pellets. Again the roar and the blast and the whole top of the hill was blown off, revealing what appeared to be a smooth strata of black rock.
    Root looked over his shoulder to Barbara. “This is it.”
    “Wha—what do you mean?”
    “We can’t get away. Sooner or later—” His voice trailed off. He reached up, twisted a dial labeled EMERGENCY. The ship’s ULR unit hummed. Root said into the mesh, “Dicantropus station—we’re being attacked by natives. Send help at once.”
    Root sank back into the seat. A tape would repeat his message endlessly until cut off.
    Barbara staggered to the seat beside Root. “What were those orange balls?”
    “That’s what I’ve been wondering—some sort of bomb.”
    But there were no more of them. And presently the horizon began to glare, the hill became a silhouette on the electric sky. And over their heads the transmitter pulsed an endless message into space.
    “How long before we get help?” whispered Barbara.
    “Too long,” said Root, staring off toward the hill. “They must be afraid of the machine gun—I can’t understand what else they’re waiting for. Maybe good light.”
    “They can—” Her voice stopped. She stared. Root stared, held by unbelief—amazement. The hill across the pond was breaking open, crumbling…
     

     
    Root sat drinking brandy with the captain of the supply ship Method, which had come to their assistance, and the captain was shaking his head.
    “I’ve seen lots of strange things around this cluster but this masquerade beats everything.”
    Root said, “It’s strange in one way, in another it’s as cold and straightforward as ABC. They played it as well as they could and it was pretty darned good. If it hadn’t been for that scoundrel Landry they’d have fooled us forever.”
    The captain banged his glass on the desk, stared at Root. “But why? ”
    Root said slowly, “They liked Dicantropus. It’s a hell-hole, a desert to us, but it was heaven to them. They liked the heat, the dryness. But they didn’t want a lot of off-world creatures prying into their business—as we surely would have if we’d seen through the masquerade. It must have been an awful shock when the first Earth ship set down here.”
    “And that pyramid…”
    “Now that’s a strange thing. They were good psychologists, these Dicantrops, as good as you could expect an off-world race to be. If you’ll read a report of the first landing, you’ll find no mention of the pyramid. Why? Because it wasn’t here. Landry thought it looked new. He was right. It was new. It was a fraud, a decoy—just strange