Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 Read Online Free Page B

heart as he sat motionless as a stone image, thank you for flocking around. Thank you for being big and long and
shaped like my boat.
                 For the sharks helped him fool that observer craft up there. He would seem like one of the great school of sharks. At last the silvery
torpedo hoisted its nose and dived upward and away out of sight somewhere.
Darragh hoisted his sails and headed north again.
                 To
supplement his dwindling food supply, he trailed a line overside with a hook
that carried a bait of pork rind. Not a day passed that he did not catch
several good fish. Splitting them, he grilled them over a handful of glowing
charcoal fragments on his slate hearth, and on another bit of slate baked
flapjacks of cassava meal and water.
                 Sliding
past Dominica , he observed that Roseau , too, had been utterly obliterated by the
enemy, nor had the jungle returned; apparently the entire island had been so
thoroughly blasted that all life had been swept away and nothing left but the
great bald mountain in the center. If no seeds had been blown or washed up
there, to grow a new mat of
vegetation, perhaps the explosive ray had been at work here recently. Why? Did
the Cold People conduct target practice? If so, did they prepare for another
clash with humanity? And, once more, what was that ray weapon of theirs? It
must be hot beyond imagination to do such scathe, even to concrete buildings
and pavements. But how did the Cold People, so gingerly in even mild warmth,
endure the management of a hot
weapon?
                He could not answer those questions,
but he did not put them out of his mind. The mystery added to the menace;
however, Darragh decided that he did not feel too timid about it. After all—and
he grinned rather tigerishly to himself as he developed the thesis he had
begun—man had ruled too long on Earth to learn defeat in mere half century of
time.
                 In
his fancy he saw ranks of warriors that seemed to pass his mind's eye in
review, ranging one behind the other as they came out of the dead centuries.
There were the battered but triumphant Marines of Midway and Okinawa, the
scarred infantry that had swept like a tidal wave up the beaches of Normandy;
the victors of Cantigny and the Argonne, in weathered khaki; Lee's gray
Virginians, Grant's stubborn men in blue; the Light Brigade that did not pause
to reason why at Balaklava; Cortez and his rusty-armored handful that gulped
down the Aztec Empire; the Crusaders, led by Richard and Saint Louis, the
Saracen chivalry of Salah-ad-Din; Caesar's Tenth Legion; Assyrian phalanxes,
bearded and scale-armored. And, behind these, barely visible in prehistoric
antiquity, the hairy men of the Flint People, Darragh's first human ancestors
who in Europe had met the Neanderthal race, another
monster people who had to be taught who was ruler of Earth.
                 Those
were the conquerors, and not one of them but had known defeat once and again,
and not one of them but had risen to victory. Just now, all mankind was down;
but not out, by no means out. Resting, rather, on one knee,
shaking the groggy head clear, flexing the muscles, growing strong by the
respite, getting ready to resume the struggle. The plight of the human
race was desperate, but not too desperate.
                 Then
Darragh saw in his mind those villages and little towns in the South American
jungle where his people lived— houses of hewn timber and adobe-like stucco and
tight-thatched roofs, with their governments and market places, with their
fields here and there for the growing of crops and the grazing of herds. He saw
the civilization mankind had rebuilt; the forge, where the blacksmith had found
his frade one of dignity and prestige as in brave old days; the looms and the
potteries; the village schools, such as the one in which his father had taught
from old books that told the story of humanity's