Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

22 The lower portion of old Babu’s face seemed to harden, as though some sudden and mysterious alchemy were working to change his jaw muscles from stone to iron. “A boy could have spied on them,” he snarled. “Why did you leave us?” “To see with my own eyes, and to bring back with me proof of my seeing,” he heard himself replying. As he spoke he raised the moist red scalp of the Prowler he had slain, and dangled it before old Babu’s nose. “We needed no proof,” old Babu scoffed. “You made light of the danger. You said the Prowlers would never attack. You said — there were too few of them, too many of us.” “I said that?” growled Babu, running his finger along the livid scar that bisected his right cheek. “Babu, if you deny you said it, you lie in your teeth.” The old warrior’s cracked lips split in a grin. Slowly his right eye lidded itself and then rolled back on a moist optic. “Well, well,” he growled. “Though we appeared to scoff we did not doubt your wisdom. It is just that—well, we love you, Agar. Without you to lead us we would fight with sinking hearts.” “You would fight well enough,” Monitor 236 heard himself reply. “You... you’re just on the threshold of the warrior-king- priest stage. You think I possess magical powers. You haven’t actually defied me yet, but when I’m dead you'll put me on so high a pedestal. I won’t be able to climb down and help you. You'll pick out some- one to intercede for you—an unscrupulous old buzzard of a witch doctor who'll lead you deeper and deeper into the mire.’ Babu pressed his lips together and looked away. “Sometimes your speech carries you away from us on wings of darkness,” he said. A look of bewilderment passed over Agar’s face. “What ... what did I just say, Babu?” “Don’t make me repeat it,” Babu replied. “He has spoken strangely to me, too, Babu,” the girl in the crook of Agar’s arm said. “Sometimes it is better to wonder than to know why a great warrior must speak so. You must trust him as I do, Babu.” “I have not removed my trust from him,” Babu growled. “But— The old warrior’s eyes became a wet shine suddenly, and his hand darted to the hatchet at his waist. ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION “Here it comes,” he grunted. A sensation of fierce readiness stirred in Agar, tensing the muscles of his back. He saw Babu leap to rejoin his warriors, and felt the girl slipping from his clasp. There was a wetness on his chest over his heart, where she had pressed her cool lips as though to steel him for combat. A wetness on his chest, a feeling of fierce readiness and then he was leaping forward with his hatchet upraised. The Prowlers were sweeping in on his people from every part of the square. With bloodcurdling screams they streamed over the converging moto-pavements, their shaven heads gleaming in the blueness and their lips snagged by their teeth. There was no order or method in their attack and neither was there discipline in the ranks of Agar’s warriors. From the first it was hand-to-hand and grip-to-grip, with hatchets rising and falling until the Central Square ran crimson. Back and forth the battle surged, with barbarians pitted against savages now directly under the great, towering Half Body, and now beneath the long gray line of power conduits on the far side of the square and now in the middle of the square in a sickening crescendo of slaughter. The Prowlers fought without giving or asking quarter. They seemed intent only on massacring Agar’s people as fiendishly as possible. It was ghastly, and there was no stopping it. Wildly Agar found himself wrenching a hatchet from a hairy hand and chopping down on a nose that went shooting off in a gory sliver. With two hatchets he then assailed the yelling savage just beyond, only to have both hatchets torn from his clasp _ by a seven-foot giant with hairy shoulders. Dodging a lunge that just missed his jugular, he dropped to one knee and butted upward with his skull. With a rattling cough the massive one went staggering backward, his skull split from behind by still another hatchet. Old Babu had come panting up just in time. Babu had hurled the hatchet, but another Prowler wanted it. As Babu wrenched it from the big Prowler’s splintered skull he had to kill again, with swift and gory precision. Babu now had two hatchets and he handed one to Agar. Somewhere an un- earthly scream rose and subsided. Some- Ccomiclbooks.c©