John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

"We were wrong. We were about sixty miles west of New Caltroff when a patrol floater spotted us, and hit us with a rocket."

He shook his head ruefully. "At that. We were lucky: The rocket was a solid round, not explosive. It holed us, which of course made us totally unspaceworthy, wrecked the life-support system, and caused other damage, some of it to me. I had about a dozen wounds, fairly superficial, from pieces of metal.

"But we could still fly. And a good deal faster than a police floater. Your mother lost them and hid in the anvil top of a thunderhead."

"A thunderhead?" I said. "The turbulence must have bounced you around something terrible, at the very least!"

"I suppose that's why they didn't look for us there. But in the anvil top, we were above major turbulence, and at the same time, effectively invisible to radar. We parked there and drifted southeast with it, to within twenty miles of a place we knew."

They'd been lucky, all right. Then mom had flown them by night to the place, a backwoods hill farm forty miles north of Jarfoss. Dad had lost quite a lot of blood. The people who hid them put the cutter in a hay barn, surrounded it with walls of hay bales, then roofed it over with bales on top of planks. It took months to get repair parts. Commercial sources had been shut down by the Empire, and when they finally got parts, it was from the naval supply depot at Jarfoss-parts never intended for a small civilian cutter. But they made do.

They never knew the pipeline the parts came through.

Dad had thought seriously then about staying on Evdash, and working with the underground, but the Glondis Party had old grudges against him, and there was a price on his head. He'd be a danger to anyone he might work with, a magnet to the political police.

A turncoat police unit, it turned out, had already arrested Dr. Boshner. He was hanged without trial during the first public executions. He'd been tried in absentia, back on Morn Gebleu, nearly thirty years ago.

The Glondis spy network really kept things hairy for a while. The resistance movement lost probably a third of its people the first week, and there was a continual trickle of losses after that. Mom and the people they were with doctored dad themselves, rather than risk getting a doctor. Mom sutured his wounds; his only anaesthetic was homemade whiskey.

Meanwhile a new underground was forming, and bit by bit, contacts were occurring with the old. It was hard to evaluate its size or much about it, because for safety, no one knew the names of more than a few others. But as far as he and mom could see, the nucleus seemed to be the military. And apparently the loyal police, when they'd adjusted to the new situation, started closing their eyes to underground activities as much as they dared.

By that time in dad's story, our behinds were tired of sitting on rocks, but we ignored the discomfort. We wanted to hear the rest. "How did you get together with Jenoor?" I asked.

"Jenoor," dad said, "why don't you tell him?"

"Well," she began, "it was quite a chain of coincidence. The sergeant transferred me to a delivery service van, where the driver gave me a shot to kill the pain. Then he delivered me…" She paused and looked around. "…at Jom and Dansee Jomber's! Dansee was home when I arrived, and it hit her pretty hard to learn what had happened. Piet had been a close friend of theirs. And I'm sure she assumed that the rest of you had been destroyed by patrol ships, though of course she didn't say that to me.

"They kept me in their basement for three days. The first thing Densee did was clean and bandage my foot. I was sort of on a cloud from the painkiller then, and watched her. It was pretty gross."

Looking at me, she smiled. I was cringing. "The first night, a man came there who was apparently a doctor. He gave me another shot-the first one was wearing off-and repaired my foot. That I didn't watch."

She turned to dad then. "Klentis," she said-not Uncle Klent anymore-"why don't you and Aven tell them the rest? It's more your story than mine."

Dad stood up before he spoke, and rubbed his backside. "You'll just have to wait a minute. My bones aren't as young as yours."

I became aware then of just how sore my own backside was from silting on rocks. "Let's go sit in the Rebel Javelin," I suggested. Everyone seemed to think that was a good idea, so we went in and sat on soft, contoured seats. And at mom's suggestion, Moise went into one of the cabins and napped. So much of what he'd been hearing meant nothing at all to him that he'd gotten groggy, and was having a terrible time staying awake

Dad. it turned out, had gotten a pipeline to a warrant officer in naval operations at Jarfoss. The cutter had be paired by then, and the idea was for the WO to get information to dad, to help him decide when to try to get off Evdash. At the same time, Jom Jomber was looking for somewhere to send Jenoor. And the warrant officer, one of the few people who knew Jenoor was there, made a deal with dad. He'd provide him with information, if dad would take this young girl away.

So mom, in a borrowed utility floater, had gone the next night to pick up this young girl in a parking lot in Jarfoss. Each had almost come apart when they saw who the other was.

On the farm, dad asked Jenoor where we'd been headed. Naturally she told him Grinder. He knew it wouldn't be in the astrogation cube by that name, and when he questioned her about it, she didn't know the planet's official name. When he told her-Tagrith Four- she said she'd never heard it before.

And if she hadn't, it seemed probable that the rest of us hadn't either.

They'd talked it over then, trying to figure what we might have done, in the unlikely event that we had gotten out-system alive. And decided the likeliest place to look for us was on Fanglith. If they didn't find us here, they'd head for Tagrith Four and hope we were alive somewhere.

Dad told us frankly that he hadn't had much hope. But any at all was enough to follow up on.

Their own escape, a couple of weeks later, was a lot less hairy than ours. It involved a major solar flare and undoubtedly some deliberate "failures to notice" by patrol scouts. Failures that could be blamed on instrument and radio problems caused by the flare. The Imperial cruiser had left the system by then.

And Bubba told us then why he'd been so quiet and moody after we left Evdash. It was more than the food, and being separated from Lady and the pups. Most espwolves, by their emotional disposition, can handle that land of thing pretty well. His bigger problem was that he had a secret from us-a very heavy secret, from me especially.

"I knew Jenoor alive out there on ground," he said, "Alive, wounded. I also knew it suicide to try get her. So I said nothing." He looked at me, holding my eyes with his. "After that, I not tell. I know you. You go mad if you know we left her there like that. You tear your hair out. After you shoot me."

"No, Bubba," I said. "No way would I ever shoot you. No way! Tear my hair out, yes. And I might have said some terrible things to you, until I got my senses back."

His eyes never faltered. "Anyway," he went on, "I not tell. But it hard to have such a secret. I never felt like that before. Like guilt. Worse than grief."

Jenoor went to him and, kneeling, hugged him. "Bubba," she said, "you seem wiser and wiser to me all the time. You did the right thing, the only right thing." Her eyes were brimming when she stood up. "And look how it turned out."

Bubba grinned at her. "Espwolf live around people, get more and more like them. Even sentimental."

Which made me wonder, not for the first time, what it would be like to be an espwolf.

After Bubba's confession, we talked about what we'd do next. Mom and dad both considered that Fanglith was no place to try developing an anti-Imperial base. We'd keep it in mind as a last refuge, but that was all.