And then, with a roar of power and the whine of antigravity engines reverberating in his ears, Ben Trefon lifted the little ship swiftly into the dark sky and watched the House of Trefon dwindle to a speck on the Martian desert below him. Maybe when he came back, he thought, his father would explain what it was that he still had left unsaid. But somehow Ben knew, even now, that he was leaving behind in this house something he would never regain. He shifted the controls gently, and watched as the ship moved out from behind the disc of Mars and headed like a tiny arrow in toward the orbit of Earth.
2. The Raid
SOMEWHERE FAR below the dark side of the planet Earth glowed dimly up in the ashen light from the moon. Hardly breathing, Ben Trefon watched the great gray disc loom steadily larger in the view screen of his scout ship. For the hundredth time he checked the approach pattern of lights on the control panel before him; each tiny fleck of light represented one of his companion ships. He adjusted the controls, felt the little ship veer slightly as he brought it back into proper alignment with the others. There was no sign of the other ships in his view screen. The flat-black paint on their hulls reflected no light, and the ships were darkened, moving toward their target like shadows out of the blackness of space.
From the perimeter of the dark planet below a tiny fleck of light appeared, turning in a slow curve, then blinking out again as it moved into Earth’s shadow. It was an early warning satellite, moving in a low, watchful orbit around Earth. Ben smiled grimly to himself. That would mean that Earth now knew the raiders were coming. Long since, the great radar screens on the planet’s surface must have picked out the pattern of the raiding ships: over three hundred reflecting fragments of metal, moving in close formation straight down toward the planet’s surface from their rendezvous with the orbit ship hiding behind the moon. The Earthmen knew the raid was coming, all right, and Ben could imagine the furious preparations going on below to greet the raiders at the expected target site.
But now the time for patience and planning was over. From this point on speed, striking power, certainty of purpose and skill were the raiders’ weapons as they converged like a swarm of bees on a target too late discovered to be properly protected. Each of the raiding ships, each of the men now piloting a ship through Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational field had his own individual assignment. The raid had been rehearsed; the advance planning had been perfected, reviewed, revised and re-perfected.
It was this planning that had always, invariably, made the raids on Earth so successful. The Spacers had no equals when it came to navigational skill. They had learned through the centuries to strike hard and fast, to get their work done and to get out, always leaving behind them a wave of confusion and terror.
Such raids were dangerous, of course, but Ben Trefon had had no time to consider the possible dangers. He never gave thought to the fact that he might not leave the surface of this planet alive. As always, the goal of the raid was simple and explicit: five million tons of wheat stored in the granaries south of the metropolis called Chicago in the center of the northern hemisphere continent; fifteen thousand tons of dressed beef stored in the vast cold storage lockers of the packing plants a little farther north in the great city; and last but not least, thirty women, not younger than fifteen years, not older than twenty-five, to fulfill the quota required by the Spacer Council at the time of its last census.
Already the groundwork for the raid was finished. Spies on the planet’s surface, their hair dyed to conceal the tell-tale whiteness, had worked for many nights excavating the grain storage units at target site and placing the antigravity rods beneath them, so that the raiders had only to connect the rods to their ships’ generators to raise the bins up through Earth’s atmosphere to a place where each orbit ship could scoop them into its hold. A quick landing of a few dozen ships in the right places was all it would take; fifteen minutes of swift work by the ships’ crews, while a covering crew fought rear-guard action with any defending troops that arrived in time, a few swift moves, and the Spacers would have replenished their dwindling supplies of staple foods once again.
The maukis were a different matter. There it was a matter of swift movement, resourcefulness and imagination on the part of the raiders assigned to kidnap them. Each of the thirty ships assigned was responsible for one woman, and each pilot was responsible for his own escape with his booty. Even though it was seldom discussed, every man in the raiding party knew instinctively that these women were really the most critical prize of all, as far as ultimate survival of the Spacer culture was concerned.
Like all the others, this raid was to follow a rigid pattern. Preparations had been made months in advance: first the drawings to select the crew of the raiding ships; then the assignment of jobs and the selection of squad leaders; then the weeks of drilling and planning, with each anticipated move carefully coordinated with all the rest; the checking and double checking with the Spacer contact men stationed on Earth to prepare the ground. There were the mock raids on any one of a dozen specially prepared asteroids in the vicinity of Asteroid Central, and the intensive training of all the men who would pilot ships, to be sure they were fresh in their knowledge of Earth meteorology, atmospheric conditions, geography and the latest figures on defense entrenchments.
It was not unusual for a raid to be six or eight months in preparation. This particular raid had taken five months of intensive hard work before the Raid Commander was satisfied. At last the orbit ship, one of the great spherical inter-planetary cargo ships of the Spacer fleet, was commissioned for the raid and thrown into orbit toward the sun. And once again, as in so many raids before, the orbit ship and all the rest of the raiding fleet, from the tiny S-80’s to the twenty-man cruisers that handled the big null-gravity generators, began to take their places in a wide orbit around Earth, using the hidden side of Earth’s moon for a rendezvous point before the raid began.
In the final gathering at rendezvous the ships maintained strict radio and radar silence, converging on the orbit ship for their last briefing. Up to that point the raid could be cancelled at any moment, either on order from the Spacer Council or on advice of the contact men on Earth. But once zero hour had arrived and the ships had begun their final drive down to the surface of the planet, there was no stopping. The raiders knew that from that point on they were on their own, that the success or failure of the raid was in their hands.
Ben Trefon had seen many pictures of the verdant planet that lay in his view screen now. He had seen picture tapes of the rolling farm lands, carefully operated to provide the biggest possible food yields for the teeming millions of people living there. He had seen films of the huge steel caves, the great tiered cities that spread over the largest part of the planet’s surface, the hive-like homes of the Earthmen. He had seen pictures of the rolling roads that criss-crossed the planet to carry food and supplies from continent to continent, and of the undersea farms that grew algae and sea food, the staples of the Earthmen’s diet. From time to time he knew that Spacer raids had struck at the huge floating harvest rafts, many square miles across, which floated on the major oceans of the planet and tended the undersea crops.