"Yes," said Hackett. "I know about it."
"He began to hope we might kill some Greks, so he told us everything he could. We fixed up a hearing aid so he could hear his own voice and he made a recording. The transmitter in the back can send it so that Aldarians with cut hearing nerves will hear the language they used when they could talk like anybody else."
"You'll broadcast it, and it'll urge the Aldarians to turn against the Greks?"
"Not—not too soon," said Lucy unhappily. "The Aldarian you captured said if we used it too soon some of them would think it was a Grek trick and not dare believe it. And they'd tell the Greks for safety's sake."
"I repeat," said Hackett evenly, "that I don't like the Greks."
She was silent for a little while. The tractor groaned and rumbled upon and through the snow. Then she said, "He said that from now on the Greks won't wait to make Aldarians deaf. They'll cut their hearing nerves while they're babies, so they'll never have any idea of sound or spoken words."
The tractor went on and on. There were many others before it and others behind. The art of traveling over a continent of snow and ice was well developed. The sun moved around the horizon, never dipping below it. There came a time when rest was necessary. They halted. They slept. With insufficient sleep they went on again.
Back in the United States there was a further communication from the Greks to the volunteer Aldarians patiently teaching nonsense to aspiring students.
It announced that the Grek ship would descend at the same earth cradle that had been prepared for their ship before. They'd known of the atomic bombs planted there before their first landing. It was a form of arrogance to use it again, ignoring the possibility that humans could devise any weapon they could not counter.
"They're plenty confident," said Hackett when he heard of it. "If they should be right, by the time they administer punishment to those of us who've been working to defy them—"
"We'll be dead," said Lucy firmly. "We'll make sure of it."
"If they have the least suspicion," said Hackett grimly, "well be wiped out tomorrow. You, by the way, will stay at least three miles back from where any fighting happens."
Lucy did not answer.
The day's journey continued. The sun did not ever set, but its rays were low and slanting. During this day, a plane flew low overhead and dropped an object by parachute. It was a packet of high altitude photographs of the terrain all around the place to which the thing from the moon had descended and from which it had risen again. The pictures were incredibly detailed. From thirty-five thousand feet they showed square miles of cracked and fissured surface, and a range of mountains with every valley revealed to the last jagged boulder which penetrated the snow. There was a mark calling attention to one place on one enlarged photographic print.
It was a depression in the snow, where something heavy had packed the soft stuff down. The low-slanting sunshine cast shadows in the depressed space.
There was discussion. Painstaking examination told more. There was a hundred-foot line of trampled snow from the single large depression. As on Morrow Island, the thing from the moon had landed here, as near as possible to this hidden power-generating station. It had only been necessary to walk thirty yards through the snow. The Greks, evidently, did not imagine a race of such variegated talents that it could find footprints in snow, hundreds of miles from any human settlement, made by aliens marching to arid from an object that humans should be unable to detect.
The expedition sent a tight microwave beam skyward to where the plane that had dropped the pictures now circled out of sight. The plane went away. The expedition went on. There was a schedule to be kept to. It was necessary if efforts now preparing elsewhere were to take effect on the exact instant for the exact effect for the tractors to take advantage of.
The ground party went on in its unending, jolting, crawling progress. At nine hundred hours it moved toward a mountain range from whose farther side it could not be seen. At nine hundred forty hours planes came flying low above the snow surface. They were medium bomber jets, capable of a speed of mach two at sea level, and carrying bombs of very respectable size. They had come down from the United States, refueled and now they plunged over the tractor expedition too fast for the eye to follow. They were a muttering to the rear. They were a bellowing overhead. Then they were a diminishing uproar ahead. The sound of their going trailed them by miles.
They lifted sharply to clear mountain bridges and dipped down; there were ripping, bursting bombs, and a cloud of white phosphorus smoke began to form to windward of the mountains' farther slopes. There was another tumult overhead. Hackett was almost deafened by this, because he'd plunged out of the tractor carrying Lucy and was insisting upon climbing into another.
A second squadron of bombers went racing across the snow sheet and steeply upward. More bombs thudded as they landed. The mountains echoed to sounds they had never heard before in all their millions of years.
And the snow tractors, abruptly dumping all excess loads, flung into the highest speed of which they were capable and raced toward a spot where some unknown object had marked the snow exactly as the snow had been marked on Morrow Island half a world away.
It was not spectacular. From a distance it seemed only that there were small white-painted dots moving over snowfields and the lower slopes of mountains. They left tracks in the snow behind them. Now some of them plunged into dense clouds of white vapor moving slowly toward them from where five-hundred-pound and larger smoke bombs had landed. More of them dived into the white-out the smoke bombs made. Presently there was only one such dot remaining away from the blank whiteness from which detonations and the rasping of automatic weapons came.
The moment arrived when the tractor in which Hackett rode could go no farther. With others, he plunged out and made his way ahead. There were other vehicles still moving. There was dense fog. There were explosions . . .
Shrilling whistles and shouts called to all men. Hackett, panting, ran for the source of the outcry. There was a blown-away door and a cavern from which warm air floated out. Hackett dived into it, with many others. They swarmed down passages. This was no such stable-like cave as the arctic one had been. He saw an Aldarian. The Aldarian had his back against a stony wall and his arms spread wide. This was what the broadcast by Lucy's tractor—inaudible to Greks and men alike—had warned was to be a signal by Aldarians that they wanted to strike a blow at the Greks. This furry man held the pose, but he jerked his head fiercely, mouthing unintelligible sounds, urging the humans into a certain passage on beyond.
Hackett tore into it. There was an Aldarian who fought desperately against the invading humans. He had to be killed. There were others who hesitated. Hackett saw one weeping as he tried to decide instantly between terror for those who were hostages for him, and the ravening, raging, horrible longing to strike at the race of Greks.
There was a flash of flame past Hackett's face. It splashed against stone and glowing powder and pebbles dropped down. Hackett fired. There were other men with him. They were in a room of such spaciousness and lavish luxury as no human despot ever had made for himself. And there was a bulky, gray-skinned Grek moving swiftly toward apparatus at its end. He fired once more and the flash of his hand weapon was like lightning. He had almost reached the device which was plainly a communicator of some sort—
Hackett killed him, from ten yards, with a .45 caliber, primitive, automatic smokeless-powder pistol.