Edgar Burroughs - Beyond The Farthest Star

"That's the end of them," shouted Balzo Han.

Quite suddenly and unexpectedly my motor took hold again, and we immediately drew away from the other two ships, which Balzo Jan was spraying with gunfire.

We must have been hit fifty times, but the plastic of our fuselage and wings could withstand machine-gun fire, which could injure us only by a lucky hit of propeller or instrument-board. It is the heavier guns of combat planes and bombers that these fast, lightly armed pursuit planes have to fear.

"I hate to run from Kapars," I shouted back to Balzo Jan. "Shall we stay and have it out with them?"

"We have no right to throw away a ship and two men," he said, "in a hopeless fight."

Well, that was that. Balzo Jan knew the rules of the game better than I; so I opened the throttle wide and soon left the remaining Kapars far behind, and shortly after, they turned and resumed their flight toward Kapara.

There are two pilot seats and controls in the front cockpit, as well as the additional controls in the after cockpit. However, two men are seldom seated in the front cockpit, except for training purposes, as there is only one gun there and the Unisan military chiefs don't believe in wasting man power. However, the seat was there, and I asked Balzo Jan to come up and sit with me.

"If you see any more Kapars," I said, "you can go back to your gun."

"Do you know," he said, after he had crawled up into the forward cockpit and seated himself beside me, "that we have been so busy since you first discovered me climbing into your ship that I haven't had a chance to ask you who you are. I know a lot of men in the fighting service, but I don't recall ever having seen you before."

"My name is Tangor," I said.

"Oh," he said, "you're the man that my sister discovered without any clothes on after a raid several months ago."

"The same," I said, "and she is mourning you for dead. I saw her at the Harkases the night before we took off for this last raid."

"My sister would not mourn," he said proudly.

"Well, she was mourning inwardly," I replied, "and sometimes that's worse for a woman than letting herself go. I should think a good cry now and then would be a relief to the women of Poloda."

"I guess they used to cry," he said, "but they don't any more. If they cried every time they felt like crying, they'd be crying all the time; and they can't do that, you know, for there is work to do. It is war."

IT IS WAR! That was the answer to everything. It governed their every activity, their every thought. From birth to death they knew nothing but war. Their every activity was directed at the one purpose of making their country more fit for war.

"I should think you would hate war," I said to Balzo Jan.

He looked at me in surprise. "Why?" he demanded. "What would we do with ourselves if there were no war?"

"But the women," I said. "What of them?"

"Yes," he replied, "it is hard on them. The men only have to die once, but the women have to suffer always. Yes; it is too bad, but I can't imagine what we would do without war."

"You could come out in the sunshine, for one thing," I said, "and you could rebuild your cities, and devote some of your time to cultural pursuits and to pleasure. You could trade with other countries, and you could travel to them; and wherever you went you would find friends."

Balzo Jan looked at me sceptically. "Is that true in your world?" he asked.

"Well, not when I was last there," I had to admit, "but then, several of the countries were at war."

"You see," he said, "war is the natural state of man, no matter what world he lives in."

We were over the southern tip of Unis now. The majestic peaks of the Mountains of Loras were at our left, and at our right the great river which rises in the mountains south of Orvis emptied into the sea, fifteen hundred miles from its source. It is a mighty river, comparable, I should say, to the Amazon. The country below us was beautiful in the extreme, showing few effects of the war, for they have many buried cities here whose Labour Corps immediately erase all signs of the devastating effects of Kapar raids as soon as the enemy has departed.

Green fields stretched below us in every direction, attesting the fact that agriculture on the surface still held its own against the Kapars on this part of the continent; but I knew at what a price they raised their crops with low flying Kapar planes strafing them with persistent regularity, and bombers blasting great craters in their fields.

But from high above this looked like heaven to me, and I wondered if it were indeed for me the locale of that after-life which so many millions of the people of my world hope and pray for. It seemed to me entirely possible that my transition to another world was not unique, for in all the vast universe there must be billions of planets, so far removed from the ken of Earth men that their existence can never be known to them.

I mentioned to Balzo Jan what was passing in my mind and he said, "Our people who lived before the war had a religion, which taught that those who died moved to Uvala, one of the planets of our solar system which lies upon the other side of Omos. But now we have no time for religion; we have time only for war."

"You don't believe in a life hereafter, then?" I asked. "Well, I didn't either, once, but I do now."

"Is it really true that you come from another world?" he asked. "Is it true that you died there and came to life again on Poloda?"

"I only know that I was shot down by an enemy plane behind the enemy lines," I replied. "A machine-gun bullet struck me in the heart, and during the fifteen seconds that consciousness remained I remember losing control of my ship and going into a spin. A man with a bullet in his heart, spinning toward the ground from an altitude of ten thousand feet, must have died."

"I should think so," said Balzo Jan, "but how did you get here?"

I shrugged. "I don't know any more about it than you do," I replied. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream from which I must awake."

He shook his head. "Maybe you are dreaming," he said, "but I am not. I am here, and I know that you are here with me. You may be a dead man, but you seem very much alive to me. How did it seem to die?"

"Not bad at all," I replied. "I only had fifteen seconds to think about it, but I know that I died happy because I had shot down two of the three enemy planes that had attacked me."

"Life is peculiar," he said. "Because you were shot down in a war on a world countless millions of miles away from Poloda, I am now alive and safe. I can't help but be glad, my friend, that you were shot down."

It was a quiet day over Unis; we reached the mountains south of Orvis without sighting a single enemy plane, and after crossing the mountains I dropped to within about a hundred feet of the ground. I like to fly low when I can; it breaks the monotony of long flights, and we ordinarily fly at such tremendous altitudes here that we see very little of the terrain.

As we dropped down I saw something golden glinting in the sunshine below us. "What do you suppose that is down there. I said to Balzo Jan, banking so that he could see it.

"I don't know," he said, "but it looks amazingly like a woman lying there; but what a woman would be lying out in the open for, so far from the city, I can't imagine."

"I am going down to see," I said.

I spiralled down and as we circled over the figure I saw that it was indeed a woman, lying upon her face-an unmarried woman, I knew, for her suit was of golden sequins. She lay very still, as though she were asleep.

I put the plane down and taxied up close to her. "You stay at the controls, Balzo Jan," I said, for one must always think of Kapars and be ready to run, or fight, or hide.