Andre Norton - Daybreak - 2250 A. D.

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DAYBREAK—2250 A.D.
(Star Man's Son)
Copyright, 1952, by Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc.
An Ace Book, by arrangement with
Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Printed in U.S.A.
1. A THIEF BY NIGHT
A night mist which was almost fog-thick still wrapped most of the Eyrie in a cottony curtain.
Beads of moisture gathered on the watcher's bare arms and hide jerkin. He licked the wetness from
his lips. But he made no move toward shelter, just as he had not during any of the long black
hours behind him.
Hot anger had brought him up on this broken rock point above the village of his tribe. And
something which was very close to real heartbreak kept him there. He propped a pointed
chin—strong, cleft and stubborn—on the palm of a grimy hand and tried to pick out the buildings
which made straight angles in the mist below.
Right before him, of course, was the Star Hall. And as he studied its rough stone walls, his lips
drew tight in what was almost a noiseless snarl. To be one of the Star Men, honored by all the
tribe, consecrated to the gathering and treasuring of knowledge, to the breaking of new trails and
the exploration of lost lands—he, Fors of the Puma Clan, had never dreamed of any other life. Up
until the hour of the Council Fire last night he had kept on hoping that he would be given the
right to enter the Hall. But he had been a child and a fool to so hope when all the signs had read
just the opposite. For five years he had been passed over at the choosing of youths as if he did
not exist. Why then should his merits suddenly become diamond-bright on the sixth occasion?
Only—his head dropped and his teeth clenched. Only —this was the last year—the very last year for
him. Next year he would be over the age limit allowed a novice. When he was passed over last
night—
Maybe—if his father had come back from that last ex-
ploring venture—If he himself didn't bear the stigma so plainly—His fingers clutched the thick
hair on his head, tugging painfully as if he would have it all out by the roots. His hair was the
worst! They might have forgotten about his night sight and too-keen hearing. He could have
concealed those as soon as he learned how wrong it was to be different. But he could not hide the
color of his close-cropped hair. And that had damned him from the day his father had brought him
here. Other men had brown or black, or, at the worst, sunbleached yellow, covering their heads. He
had silver white, which showed to all men that he was a mutant, different from the rest of his
clan. Mutant! Mutant!
For more than two hundred years—ever since the black days of chaos following the Great Blow-up,
the atomic war—that cry had been enough to condemn without trial. Fear caused it, the strong,
instinctive fear of the whole race for anyone cursed with a different physique or unusual powers.
Ugly tales were told of what had happened to the mutants, those unfortunates born in the first
year after the Blow-up. Some tribes had taken drastic steps in those days to see that the strain
of human—or almost human-lineage be kept pure.
Here in the Eyrie, far apart from the infection of the bombed sectors, mutation had been almost
unknown. But he, Fors, had Plains' blood—tained, unclean—and, since he could remember at all, he
had never been allowed to put that fact from him.
While his father had lived it had not been so bad. The other children had yelled at him and there
had been fights. But somehow, his father's confidence in him had made even that seem natural. And
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in the evenings, when they had shut out the rest of the Eyrie, there had been long hours of
learning to read and write, to map and observe, the lore of the high trails and the low. Even
among the Star Men his father had been a master instructor. And never had it appeared doubtful to
Langdon that his only son Fors would follow him into the Star Hall. So even after his father had
failed to return from a trip
to the lowlands, Fors had been confident of the future. He had made his weapons, the long bow now
lying beside him, the short stabbing sword, the hunting knife—all with his own hands according to
the Law. He had learned the trails and had found Lura, his great hunting cat—thus fulfilling all
the conditions for the Choosing. For five years he had come to the Fire each season, with
diminishing hope to be sure, and each time to be ignored as if he did not exist. And now he was
too old to try again.
Tomorrow—no, today—he would have to lay aside his weapons and obey the dictates of the Council.
Their verdict would be that he live on sufferance—which was probably all a mutant could expect—as
a worker in one of the cave-sheltered Hydro farms.
No more schooling, no fifteen or twenty years of roving the lowlands, with further honored years
to look forward to as an instructor and guardian of knowledge—a Star Man, explorer of the
wilderness existing in the land where the Great Blow-up had made a world hostile to man. He would
have no part in tracing the old cities where forgotten knowledge might be discovered and brought
back to the Eyrie, in mapping roads and trails, helping to bring light out of darkness. He
couldn't surrender that dream to the will of the Council!
A low questioning sound came out of the dark and ab-~ sently he answered with an assenting
thought. A shadow detached itself from a jumble of rocks and crept on velvet feet, soft belly fur
dragging on the moss, to him. Then a furred shoulder almost as wide as his own nudged against him
and he dropped a hand to scratch behind pricked ears. Lura was impatient. All the wild scents of
the woods were rich in her widened nostrils and she wanted to be on the trail. His hand on her
head was a restraint she half resented.
Lura loved freedom. What service she gave was of her own choosing, after the manner of her kind.
He had been so proud two years ago when the most beautifully marked kitten of Kanda's last litter
had shown such a preference for his company. One day Jarl himself—the Star Captain —had commented
on it. How that had raised Fors' hopes—but nothing had come of the incident, only Lura herself. He
rubbed his hot cheek against the furry head raised to his. She made again the little questioning
sound deep in her throat. She knew his unhappiness.
There was no sign of sunrise. Instead black clouds were gathering above the bald top of the Big
Knob. It would be a stormy day and those below would keep within shelter. The moisture of the mist
had become a drizzle and Lura was manifestly angry at his stubborness in not going indoors. But if
he went into any building of the Eyrie now it would be in surrender—a surrender to the loss of the
life he had been born to lead, a surrender to all the whispers, the badge of shameful failure, to
the stigma of being mutant—not as other men. And he could not do that—he couldn't!
If Langdon had stood before the Council last night— Langdonl He could remember his father so
vividly, the tall strong body, the high-held head with its bright, restless, seeking eyes above a
tight mouth and sharp jaw. Only—Langdon's hair had been safely dark. It was from his unknown
Plainswoman mother that Fors had that too fair hair which branded him as one apart.
Langdon's shoulder bag with its star badge hung now in the treasure room of the Star Hall. It had
been found with his battered body on the site of his last battle. A fight with the Beast Things
seldom ended in victory for the mountaineers.
He had been on the track of a lost city when he had been killed. Not a "blue city," still
forbidden to men if they wished to live, but a safe place without radiation which could be looted
for the advantage of the Eyrie. For the hundredth time Fors wondered if his father's theory
concerning the tattered bit of map was true—if a safe city did lie somewhere to the north on the
edge of a great lake, ready and waiting for the man lucky and reckless enough to search it out.
"Ready and waiting—" Fors repeated the words aloud. Then his hand closed almost viciously on
Lura's fur. She growled warningly at his roughness, but he did not hear her.
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Why—the answer had been before him all alongl Perhaps five years ago he could not have tried
it—perhaps this eternal waiting and disappointment had been for the best after all. Because now he
was ready—he knew it! His strength and the ability to use it, his knowledge and his wits were all
ready.
No light yet showed below. The clouds were prolonging the night. But his time of grace was short,
he would have to move fast! The bow, the filled quiver, the sword, were hidden between two rocks.
Lura crawled in beside them to wait, his unspoken suggestion agreeing with her own desires.
Fors crept down the twisted trail to the Eyrie and made for the back of the Star Hall. The bunks
of the Star Men on duty were all in the forepart of the house, the storage room was almost
directly before him. And luck was favoring him as it never had before for the heavy shutter was
not bolted or even completely closed as his exploring fingers discovered. After all—no one had
ever dreamed of invading the Star Hall unasked.
Moving as noiselessly as Lura he swung over the high sill and stood breathing in a sort of light
flutter. To the ordinary man of the Eyrie the room would have been almost pitch dark. But, for
once, Fors' mutant night sight was an aid. He could see the long table, the benches, without
difficulty, make out the line of pouches hanging on the far wall. These were his goal. His hand
closed unerringly on one he had helped to pack many times. But when he lifted it from its hook he
detached the gleaming bit of metal pinned to its strap.
To his father's papers and belongings he might prove some shadowy claim. But to that Star he had
no right. His lips twisted in a bitter grimace as he laid the badge down on the edge of the long
table before clambering back into the grayness of the outer world.
Now that the pouch swung from his shoulder he went openly to the storage house and selected a
light blanket, a hunter's canteen and a bag of traveler's corn kept in readiness there. Then,
reclaiming his weapons and the impatient Lura, he started off—not toward the narrow mountain
valleys where all of his hunting had been done, but down toward the forbidden plains. A chill bom
of excitement rather than the bite of the rising wind roughened his skin, but his step was sure
and confident as he hunted out the path blazed by Langdon more than ten years before, a path which
was not overlooked by any station of the outpost guards.
Many times around the evening fires had the men of the Eyrie discussed the plains below and the
strange world which had felt the force of the Great Blow-up and been turned into an alien,
poisonous trap for any human not knowing its ways. Why, in the past twenty years even the Star Men
had mapped only four cities, and one of those was "blue" and so must be avoided.
They knew the traditions of the old times. But, Langdon had always insisted even while he was
repeating the stories to Fors, they could not judge how much of this information had been warped
and distorted by time. How could they be sure that they were of the same race as those who had
lived before the Blow-up? The radiation sickness, which had cut the number of survivors in the
Eyrie to less than half two years after the war, might well have altered the future generations.
Certainly the misshapen Beast Things must once have had a human origin though that was difficult
for any who saw them now to believe. But they clung to the old cities and there the worst of the
change took place.
The men of the Eyrie had records to prove that their forefathers had been a small band of
technicians and scientists engaged in some secret research, cut off from a world which disappeared
so quickly. But there were the Plainsmen of the wide grasslands, also free from the taint of the
beast, who had survived and now roamed with their herds.
And there might be others.
Who had started the atomic war was unknown. Fors had once seen an old book containing jotted
fragments of messages which had come out of the air through machines during a single horrible day.
And these broken messages only babbled of the death of a world.
But that was all the men of the mountains knew of the last war. And while they fought ceaselessly
to keep alive the old skills and learning there was so much, so very much, they no longer
understood. They had old maps with pink and green, blue and yellow patches all carefully marked.
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But the pink and green, blue and yellow areas had had no defense against fire and death from the
air and so had ceased to be. Only now could men, venturing out from their pockets of safety into
the unknown, bring back bits of knowledge which they might piece together into history.
Somewhere, within a mile or so of the trail he had chosen, Fors knew that there was a section of
pre-Blow-up road. And that might be followed by the cautious for about a day's journey north. He
had seen and handled the various trophies brought back by his father and his father's comrades,
but he had never actually traveled the old roads or sniffed the air of the lowlands for himself.
His pace quickened to a lope and he did not even feel the steady pour of the rain which streamed
across his body plastering even his blanket to him. Lura protested with every leap she made to
keep pace with him, but she did not go back. The excitement which drew him on at such an unwary
sped had spread to the always sensitive mind of the great cat and she made her way through the
underbrush with sinuous ease.
The old road was almost a disappointment when he stumbled out upon it. Once it must have had a
smooth surface, but time, disuse, and the spreading greedy force of wild vegetation had seamed and
broken it. Nevertheless it was a marvel to be examined closely by one who had never seen such
footing before. Men had ridden on it once encased in machines. Fors knew that, he had seen
pictures of such machines, but their fashioning was now a mystery. The men of the Eyrie knew facts
about them, painfully dug out of the old books brought back from city lootings, but the materials
and fuels for their production were now beyond hope of obtaining.
Lura did not like the roadway. She tried it with a cautious paw, sniffed at the upturned edge of a
block, and went back to firm ground. But Fors stepped out on it boldly, walking the path of the
Old Ones even when it would have been easier to take to the bush. It gave him an odd feeling of
power to tread so. This stuff beneath his hide boots had been fashioned by those of his race who
had been wiser and stronger and more learned. It was up to those of his breed to regain that lost
wisdom.
"Ho, Lura!"
The cat paused at his exultant call and swung the dark brown mask of her face toward him. Then she
meowed plaintively, conveying the thought that she was being greatly misused by this excursion
into the dampness of an exceedingly unpleasant day.
She was beautiful indeed. Fors' feeling of good will and happiness grew within him as he watched
her. Since he had left the last step of the mountain trail he had felt a curious sense of freedom
and for the first time in his life he did not care about the color of his hair or feel that he
must be inferior to die others of the clan. He had all his father had taught him well in mind, and
in the pouch swinging at his side his father's greatest secret. He had a long bow no other youth
of his age could string, a bow of his own making. His sword was sharp and balanced to suit his
hand alone. There was all the lower world before him and the best of companions to match his
steps.
Lura licked at her wet fur and Fors caught a flash of— was it her thoughts or just emotion? None
of the Eyrie dwellers had ever ben able to decide how the great cats wer able to communicate with
the men they chose to honor with their company. Once there had been dogs to run with man—Fors had
read of them. But the strange radiation sickness had been fatal to the dogs of the Eyrie and their
breed had died out forever.
Because of.that same plague the cats had changed. Small domestic animals of untamable independence
had produced larger offspring with even quicker minds and greater strength. Mating with wild
felines from the tainted plains had established the new mutation. The creature which now rubbed
against Fors was the size of a mountain lion of pre-Blow-up days, but her thick fur
was of a deep shade of cream, darkening on head, legs, and tail to a chocolate brown—after the
coloring set by a Siamese ancestor first brought into the mountains by the wife of a research
engineer. Her eyes were the deep sapphire blue of a true gem, but her claws were cruelly sharp and
she was a. master hunter.
That taste possessed her now as she drew Fors' attention to a patch of moist ground where the slot
of a deer was deep marked. The trail was fresh—even as he studied it a bit of sand tumbled from
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the top into die hollow of the mark. Deer meat was good and he had few supplies. It might be worth
turning aside. He need not speak to Lura—she knew his decision and was off on the trail at once.
He padded after her with the noiseless woods walk he had learned so long before that he could not
remember the lessons.
The trail led off at a right angle from the remains of the old road, across the tumbled line of a
wall where old bricks protruded at crazy points from heaped earth and brush. Water from leaves and
branches doused both hunters, gluing Fors' homespun leggings to his legs and squeezing into his
boots.
He was puzzled. By the signs, the deer had been fleeing for its life and yet whatever menaced it
had left no trace. But Fors was not afraid. He had never met any living thing, man or animal,
which could stand against the force of his steeltipped arrows or which he would have hesitated to
face, short sword in hand.
Between the men of the mountains and the roving Plainsmen there was a truce. The Star Men often
lived for periods of time in the skin-walled tents of the herders, exchanging knowledge of far
places with those eternal wanderers. And his father had taken a wife among tine outlanders. Of
course, there was war to the death between the humankind and the Beast Things which skulked in the
city ruins. But the latter had never been known to venture far from their dank, evil-smelling
burrows in the shattered buildings, and certainly one need not fear meeting with them in this sort
of open country! So he followed the trail with a certain reckless disregard.
The trail ended suddenly on the tip of a small gully. Some ten feet or so below, a stream—swollen
by the rain —frothed around green-grown rocks. Lura was on her belly, pulling her body forward
along the rim of the ravine. Fors dropped down and inched behind a bush. He knew better than to
interfere with her skilled approach.
When the tip of her brown tail quivered he watched for a trembling of Lura's flanks which would
signalize her spring. But instead the tail suddenly bristled and the shoulders hunched as if to
put a brake upon muscles already tensed. He caught her message of bewilderment, of disgust and,
yes, of fear.
He knew that he had better eyesight than almost all of the Eyrie men, that had been proved many
times. But what had stopped Lura in her tracks was gone. True, upstream a bush still swayed as if
something had just pushed past it. But the sound of the water covered any noise and although he
strained—there was nothing to see.
Lura's ears lay flat against her skull and her eyes were slits of blazing rage. But beneath the
rage Fors grasped another emotion—almost fear. The big cat had come across something strange and
therefore to be considered with suspicion. Aroused by her message Fors lowered himself over the
edge of the gully. Lura made no attempt to stop him. Whatever had troubled her was gone, but he
was determined to see what traces it might have left in its passing.
The greenish stones of the river bank were sleek and slippery with spray, and twice he had to
catch hurriedly at bushes to keep from falling into the stream. He got to his hands and knees to
move across one rock and then he was at the edge of the bush which had fluttered.
A red pool, sticky but already being diluted by the rain and the spray, filled a clay hollow. He
tasted it with the aid of a finger. Blood. Probably that of the deer they had been following.
Then, just beyond, he saw the spoor of the hunter that had brought it down. It was stamped boldly
into the clay, deeply as if the creature that made it had balanced for a moment under a weight,
perhaps the body of the deer. And it was too clear to mistake the outline—the print of a naked
foot.
No man of the Eyrie, no Plainsman had left that trackl It was narrow and the same width from heel
to toe—as if the thing which had left it was completely flat-footed. The toes were much too long
and skeleton-thin. Beyond their tips were indentations of—not nails—but what must be real claws!
Fors' skin crawled. Its was unhealthy—that was the word which came into his mind as he stared at
the track. He was glad—and then ashamed of that same gladness— that he had not seen the hunter in
person.
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Lura pushed past him. She tasted the blood with a dainty tongue and then lapped it once or twice
before she came on to inspect his find. Again flattened ears and wrinkled, snarling lips gave
voice to her opinion of the vanished hunter. Fors strung his bow for action. For the first time
the chill of the day struck him. He shivered as a flood of water spouted at him over the rocks.
With more caution they went back up the slope. Lura showed no inclination to follow any trail the
unknown hunter might have left and Fors did not suggest it to her. This wild world was Lura's real
home and more than once the life of a Star Man had "depended upon the instincts of his hunting
cat. If Lura saw no reason to risk her skin downriver, he would abide by her choice.
They came back to the road. But now Fors used hunting craft and the trail-covering tricks which
normally one kept only for the environs of a ruined city—those haunted places where death still
lay in wait to strike down the unwary. It had stopped raining but the clouds did not lift.
Toward noon he brought down a fat bird Lura flushed out of a tangle of brush and they shared the
raw flesh of the fowl equally.
It was close to dusk, a shadow time coming early because of the storm, when they came out upon a
hill above the dead village the old road served.
2. INTO THE MIDST OF YESTERDAY
Even in the pre-Blow-up days when it had been lived in, the town must have been neither large nor
impressive. But to Fors, who had never before seen any buildings but those of the Eyrie, it was
utterly strange and even a bit frightening. The wild vegetation had made its claim and moldering
houses were now only lumps tinder the greenery. One water-worn pier at the edge of the river which
divided the town marked a bridge long since fallen away.
Fors hesitated on the heights above for several long minutes. There was a forbidding quality in
that tangled wilderness below, a sort of moldy rankness rising on the evening wind from the hollow
which cupped the ruins. Wind, storm and wild animals had had their way there too long.
On the road to one side was a heap of rusted metal which he thought must be the remains of a car
such as the men of the old days had used for transportation. Even then it must have been an old
one. Because just before the Blow-up they had perfected another type, powered by atom engines.
Sometimes Star Men had found those almost intact. He skirted the wreckage and, keeping to the
thread of battered road, went down into the town.
Lura trotted beside him, her head high as she tested each passing breeze for scent. Quail took
flight into the tall grass and somewhere a cock pheasant called. Twice the scut of a rabbit showed
white and clear against the green.
There were flowers in that tangle, defending themselves with hooked thorns, the running vines
which bore them looped and relooped into barriers he could not crash through. And all at once the
setting sun broke between cloud lines to bring their scarlet petals into angry life. Insects
chirped in the grass. The storm was over.
The travelers pushed through into an open space bordered on all sides by crumbling mounds of
buildings. From somewhere came the sound of water and Fors beat a bath through the rank shrubbery
to where a trickle of a stream fed a manmade basin.
In the lowlands water must always be suspect—he knew that. But the clear stream before him was
much more appetizing than the musty stuff which had sloshed all day in the canteen at his belt.
Lura lapped it unafraid, shaking her head to free her whiskers from stray drops. So he dared to
cup up a palmful and sip it gingerly.
The pool lay directly before a freak formation of rocks which might have once been heaped up to
suggest a cave. And the mat of leaves which had collected inside there was dry. He crept in.
Surely there would be no danger in camping here. One never slept in any of the old houses, of
course. There was no way of telling whether the ghosts of ancient disease still lingered in their
rottenness. Men had died from that carelessness. But here—In among the leaves he saw white bones.
Some other hunter—a four-footed one—had already dined.
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Fors kicked out the refuse and went prospecting for wood not too sodden to burn. There were places
in and among the clustered rocks where winds had piled branches and he returned to the cave with
one, then two, and finally three armloads, which he piled within reaching distance.
Out in the plains fire could be an enemy as well as a friend. A carelessly tended blaze in the
wide grasslands might start one of the oceans of flame which would run for miles driving all
living things before it. And in an enemy's country it was instant betrayal. So even when he had
his small circle of sticks in place Fors hesitated, flint and steel in hand. There was the
mysterious hunter —what if he were lurking now in the maze of the ruined town?
Yet both he and Lura were chilled and soaked by the rain. To sleep cold might mean illness to
come. And, while he could stomach raw meat when he had to, he relished it broiled much more. In
the end it was the thought of the meat which won over his caution, but even when a thread of flame
arose from the center of his wheel of sticks, his hand still hovered ready to put
it out. Then Lura came up to watch the flames and he knew that she would not be so at her ease if
any danger threatened. Lura's eyes and nose were both infinitely better than his own.
Later, simply by freezing into a hunter's immobility by the pool, he was able to knock over three
rabbits. Giving Lur.a two, he skinned and broiled the third. The setting sun was red and by the
old signs he could hope for a clear day tomorrow. He licked his fingers, dabbled them in the
water, and wiped them on a tuft of grass. Then for the first time that day he opened the pouch he
had stolen before the dawn.
He knew what was inside, but this was the first time in years that he held in his hand again the
sheaf of brittle old papers and read the words which had been carefully traced across them in his
father's small, even script. Yes —he was humming a broken little tune—it was here, the scrap of
map his father had treasured so—the one which showed the city to the north, a city which his
father had hoped was safe and yet large enough to yield rich loot for the Eyrie.
But it was not easy to read his father's cryptic notes. Langdon had made them for his own use and
Fors could only guess at the meaning of such directions as "snake river to the west of barrens,"
"Northeast of the wide forest" and all the rest. Landmarks on the old maps were now gone, or else
so altered by time that a man might pass a turning point and never know it. As Fors frowned over
the scrap which had led his father to his death he began to realize a little of the enormity of
the task before him. Why, he didn't even know all the safe trails which had been blazed by the
Star Men through the years, except by hearsay. And if he became lost— His fingers tightened around
the roll of precious papers. Lost in the lowlands! To wander off the trails—!
Silky fur pressed against him and a round head butted his ribs. Lura had caught that sudden nip of
fear and was answering it in her own way. Fors' lungs filled slowly. The humid air of the lowlands
lacked the keen bite of the mountain winds. But he was free and he was a man.
To return to the Eyrie was to acknowledge defeat. What if he did lose himself down here? There was
a whole wide land to make his own! Why, he could go on and on across it until he reached the salt
sea which tradition said lay at the rim of the world. This whole land was his for the exploring!
He delved deeper into the bag on his knee. Besides the notes and the torn map he found the compass
he had hoped would be there, a small wooden case containing pencils, a package of bandages and
wound salve, two small surgical knives, and a roughly fashioned notebook —the daily record of a
Star Man. But to his vast disappointment the entries there were merely a record of distances. On
impulse he set down on one of the blank pages an account of his own day's travel, trying to make a
drawing of the strange footprint. Then he repacked the pouch.
Lura' stretched out on the leaf bed and he flopped down beside her, pulling the blanket over them
both. It was twilight now. He pushed the sticks in toward the center of the fire so that unburnt
ends would be consumed. The soft rumble of the cat's purr as she washed her paws, biting at the
spaces between her claws, made his eyes heavy. He flung an arm over her back and she favored him
with a lick of her-tongue. The rasp of it across his skin was the last thing he clearly
remembered. There were birds in the morning, a whole flock of them, and they did not approve of
Lura. Their scolding cries brought Fors awake. He rubbed his eyes and looked out groggily at a
gray world. Lura sat in the mouth of the cave, paying no attention to the chorus over her head.
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She yawned and looked back at Fors with some impatience.
He dragged himself out to join her and pulled off his roughly dried clothes before bathing in the
pool. It was cold enough to set him sputtering and Lura withdrew to a safe distance. The birds
flew away in a black flock. Fors dressed, lacing up his sleeveless jerkin and fastening his boots
and belt with extra care.
A more experienced explorer would not have wasted
time on the forgotten town. Long ago any useful loot it might have once contained had either been
taken or had moldered into rubbish. But it was the first dead place Fors had seen and he could not
leave it without some examination. He followed the road around the square. Only one building still
stood unharmed enough to allow entrance. Its stone walls were rank with ivy and moss and its empty
windows blind. He shuffled through the dried leaves and grass which masked the broad flight of
steps leading to its wide door.
There was the whir of disturbed grasshoppers in the leaves, a wasp sang past. Lura pawed at
something which lay just within the doorway. It rolled away into the dusk of the interior and they
followed. Fors stopped to trace with an inquiring finger the letters on a bronze plate. "First
National Bank of Glentown." He read the words aloud and they echoed hollowly down the long room,
through the empty cage-like booths along the wall.
"First National Bank," he repeated. What was a bank? He had only a vague idea—some sort of a
storage place. And this dead town must be Glentown—or once it had been Glentown.
Lura had found again her round toy and was batting it along the cracked flooring. It skidded to
strike the base of one of the cages just in front of Fors. Round eyeholes stared up at him
accusingly from a half-crushed skull. He stooped and picked it up to set it on the stone shelf.
Dust arose in a thick puff. A pile of coins spun and jingled in all directions, their metallic
tinkle clear.
There were lots of the coins here, all along the shelves behind the cage fronts. He scooped up
handfuls and sent them rolling to amuse Lura. But they had no value. A piece of good, rust-proof
steel would be worth the taking—not these. The darkness of the place began to oppress him and no
matter which way he turned he thought he could feel the gaze of that empty skull. He left, calling
Lura to follow.
There was a dankness in the heart of this town, the air here had the faint corruption of ancient
decay, mixed with the fresher scent of rotting wood and moldering vegetation. He wrinkled his nose
against it and pushed on down a choked street, climbing over piles of rubble, heading toward the
river. That stream had to be crossed some way if he were to travel straight to the goal his father
had mapped. It would be easy for him to swim the thick brownish water, still roily from the storm,
but he knew that Lura would not willingly venture in and he was certainly not going to leave her
behind.
Fors struck out east along the bank above the flood. A raft of some sort would be the answer, but
he would have to get away from the ruins before he could find trees. And he chafed at the loss of
time.
Th'ere was a sun today, climbing up, striking specks of light from the water. By turning his head
he could still see the foothills and, behind them, the blueish heights down which he had come
twenty-four hours before. But he glanced back only once, his attention was all for the river now.
Half an hour later he came across a find which saved him hours of back-breaking labor. A sharp
break in the bank outlined a narrow cove where the rive rose during the spring freshets. Now it
was half choked with drift, from big logs to delicate, sunbleached twigs he could snap between his
fingers. He had only to pick and choose.
By the end of the morning he had a raft, crude and certainly not intended for a long voyage, but
it should serve to float them across. Lura had her objections to the foolishness of trusting to
such a crazy woven platform. But, when Fors refused to stay safely ashore, she pulled herself
aboard it, one cautions paw testing each step before she put her full weight upon it. And in the
exact middle she squatted down with a sigh as Fors leaned hard on his pole and pushed off.
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The weird craft showed a tendency to spin around which he had to work against. And once his pole
caught in a mud bank below and he was almost jerked off into the flood. But as the salty sweat
stung across his lips and burned in his blistered palms he could see that the current, though
taking them downstream, was slowly nudging them toward the opposite bank.
Sun rays reflected by the water made them both warm and thirsty, and Lura gave small meowing
whines of self-pity all the rest of the hour. Still, she grew accustomed enough to the new mode of
travel to sit up and watch keen-eyed when a fish rose to snap at a fly. Once they slipped past a
mass of decayed wreckage which must have been the remains of a boat, and twice swept between
abutments of long-vanished bridges. This had been a thickly settled territory before the Blow-up.
Fors tried to imagine what it had looked like when the towns had been lived in, the roads had been
busy with traffic, when there had been boats on the river—
Since the current was taking them in the general direction of the route eastward he did not
struggle too quickly to reach the other side. But when a portion of their shaky raft suddenly
broke off and started a separate voyage of its own, he realized that such carelessness might mean
trouble and he worked with the pole to break the grip of the current and reach the shore. There
were bluffs along the river, cutting off easy access to the level lands behind them and he watched
anxiously for a cove or sandbank which give them a fair landing.
He had to be satisfied with a very shallow notch where a landslide had brought down a section of
the bank containing two trees which now formed a partial barrier out from the shore. The raft,
after much back-breaking labor on his part, caught against these, shivered against the pull of the
water, and held. Lura did not wait, but was gone in a single leap to the solid footing of the tree
trunks. Fors grabbed up his belongings and followed, none too soon, as the raft split and whirled
around, shaking into pieces which were carried on.
A hard scramble up the greasy clay of the bank brought them into open country once more. Grass
grew tall, bushes spread in dusty blotches across the land and there were thickets of saplings
reclaiming the old fields. But here the wild had not altogether conquered land tamed by centuries
of the plow and the reaper.
Lura let him know that it had been too long since their last meal and she intended to do something
about supplies. She set off across the faint boundaries of the old fields with grim purpose in
every line of her graceful feline body. Grouse scuttled from underfoot and there were rabbits
everywhere, but she disdained to notice such small game, pushing on, with Fors half a field behind
her, toward a slope which was crowned with a growth of trees, almost a full wood.
Halfway up she paused, the tip of her tail quivered, the red rosette of her tongue showed briefly
between her teeth. Then she was gone again, fading away into the tall grass as silently and
effortlessly as the breeze might pass. Fors stepped back into the shade of the nearest tree. This
was Lura's hunt and he must leave it to her.
He looked out over the waving grass. It seemed to be some form of stunted grain, not yet quite
ripe, for it had a seed head forming. The sky was blue with small white clouds drifting across it
as if the storm winds had never torn them, although at his feet lay a branch splintered and broken
by yesterday's wind.
A hoarse bellowing brought him out of his half dream, bow in hand. It was followed by the spitting
squall which was Lura's war cry. Fors began to run up the slope toward the sound. But hunter's
caution kept him to such shelter as the field afforded so he did not burst rashly out onto the
scene of the combat.
Lura had tackled big game! He caught the sun flash on her tawny fur as she leaped away from an
inert red-brown body just in time to escape the charge of a larger beast. A wild cow! And Lura had
killed her calf!
Fors' arrow was already in the air. The cow bellowed again and tossed her wickedly horned head.
She made a shambling run to the body of her calf, snorting in red rage. Then crimson froth puffed
from her wide nostrils and she stumbled to her knees and fell on her side. Lura's round head shot
up above a stand of thick grass and she moved out to the side of her prey. Fors came from the
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trees where he had taken cover. He would have echoed Lura's rasping purr had it been in his power.
That arrow had gone straight and true to the mark he had set it.
It was a pity to have to waste all that meat. Enough to keep three Eyrie families for a week lay
there. He prodded the cow with a regretful toe before starting to butcher the calf.
He could, of course, try to jerk the meat. But he was unsure of the right method and he could not
carry it with him anyway. So he contended himself with preparing what he could for the next few
days while Lura, after feasting, slept under a bush, rousing now and then to snap at the gathering
flies.
They made camp that night a field or two beyond the kill, in the corner of an old wall. Piles of
fallen stone turned it into a position which could be defended if the need arose. But neither
slept well. The fresh meat they had left behind drew night rovers. There was a scream or two which
must have come from Lura's wild relatives and she growled in answer. Then in the early dawn there
was a baying cry which Fors was unable to identify, woods learned as he was. But Lura went wild
when she heard it, spitting in sheer hate, her fur rising stiff along her backbone.
It was early when Fors started on, striking across the open fields in the line set by his compass.
Today he made no effort to keep cover or practice caution. He could see no menace in these waste
fields. Why had there been all the talk back in the Eyrie about the danger in the lowlands? Of
course, one did keep away from the "blue" patches where radiation still meant death even after all
these years. And the Beast Things were always to be dreaded—had not Langdon died in their attack?
But as far as the Star Men had been able to discover those nightmare creatures kept to the old
cities and were not to be feared in the open. Surely these fields must be as safe for man as the
mountain forests which encircled the Eyrie.
He took an easy curve and came out suddenly on a sight which brought him up—blinking. Here was a
road —but such a road! The broken concrete was four times as wide as any he had seen—it had really
been two roads running side by side with a stretch of earth between them, two wide roads running
smoothly from one horizon to another.
But not two hundred yards from where he stood gaping, the road was choked with a tangle of rusting
metal. A barrier of broken machines filled it from ditch to ditch. Fors approached it slowly.
There was something about that monstrous wall which for forbidding—even though he knew that it had
stood so for perhaps two hundred years. Black crickets jumped out of the weeds before him and a
mouse flashed across a stretch of clear stone.
He rounded the jumble of wrecked machines. They must have been traveling along the road in a line
when death had struck mysteriously, struck so that some of the machines had rammed others or
wavered off to pile up in wild wreckage. Others stood solitary as if the dying driver had been
able to bring them to a safe halt before he succumbed. Fors tried to pick out the outlines and
associate what he saw with the ancient pictures. That— that was certainly a "tank," one of the
moving fortresses of the Old Ones. Its gun still pointed defiantly to the sky. Two, four, five
more he counted, and then gave up.
The column of machines stretched out in its forgotten disaster for almost a mile. Fors brushed
along beside it in the waist-high weeds which bordered the road. He had a queer distaste for
approaching the dead machines more closely, no desire to touch any of the bits of rusted metal.
Here and there he saw one of the atom-powered vehicles, seeming almost intact. But they were dead
too. All of it was dead, in a horrible way. He experienced a vague feeling of contamination from
just walking beside the wreckage.
There were guns on the moving forts, guns which still swung ready, and there had been men,
hundreds of men. He could see their white bones mixed with the rust and the debris driven in by
years of wind "and storm. Guns and men—where had they been going when the end came? And what was
the end? There were none of the craters he had been told were to be found where bombs had
fallen—just smashed machines and men, as if death had come as a mist or a wind.
Guns and men on the march—maybe to repel invaders. The book of air-borne messages treasured in the
Eyrie had spoken once or twice of invaders coming from the sky—enemies who had struck with
paralyzing swiftness. But something must have happened in turn to that enemy • —or else why had
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file:///F|/rah/Andre%20Norton/Norton,%20Andre%20-%20Daybreak%202250%20AD\.txtDAYBREAK—2250A.D.(StarMan'sSon)Copyright,1952,byHarcourt,Brace&Co.,Inc.AnAceBook,byarrangementwithHarcourt,Brace&Co.,Inc.AllRightsReserved.PrintedinU.S.A.1.ATHIEFBYNIGHTAnightmistwhichwasalmostfog-thickstillwrappedmostofthe...

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