Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 by The Dark Destroyers (v1.1)

them and,
beginning to press around this inner group, twice as many more. The blonde girl
who had knelt beside him gazed with relief as he moved and half rose, and he
smiled at her. She looked capable and intelligent and pretty. She wore dark
slacks, a white blouse with short sleeves, and slippers that seemed to be made
of coarse cloth, like canvas. Her bare arms and face were tanned, the darker
because of that bright hair.
                 "You
mean, who are we?" prompted the nearest man, a fellow perhaps thirty, with
canny eyes set rather close together. "Why—we've been here ever since
this settlement has been here."
                 Darragh
only half-heard those words. He was getting up and looking beyond the gathering
of people.
                 A
town was there. At least it looked like the towns that Darragh had seen in old
salvaged pictures of the civilization from which his own forebears had fled.
There were ten houses or so—cottages, he remembered such houses were called—or
white-painted planks with roofs of snug red tile. They had green lawns and beds
of bright flowers, and they were ranged around a wide central court. Behind and
around those cottages rose a great lead-colored wall, that extended in a
sweeping curve to enclose the houses and the central common, holding them as ,at the bottom of a tube. Looking up, Darragh was aware that
this wall rose to a tremendous height. It was as though he and these men and
women and their houses were at the bottom of an immense chimney.' Far above
them, the shaft was filled with radiance, dazzling and warm, that came down and
touched everything with brightness.
                 The
blonde girl, too, had risen. She stood straight beside him, as tall almost for
a girl as Darragh was for a man. All the excitement and mystery could not keep
him from seeing that her body was both strong and graceful, that she was
somebody he would like to know better.
                 "Where
did you come from?" she asked.
                "Why, from
outside there." Darragh gestured to the wall at one side.
                 "From the Owners?"
                "Owners?" repeated
Darragh. "Who are the Owners?"
                "They just threw you in here
with that ray," said the man with the close-set eyes.
                 "Oh,"
said Darragh. "You mean the Cold People. No, I didn't come from them. Do I
look like one of them?"
                 Everybody
was staring. "I say that I came from outside, "he repeated." Far away from here. Down on the Orinoco , if you know where that is."
                 "South
America," said the blonde girl. "You mean you come from South
America?"
                 "I
was scouting the Cold People," Darragh elaborated. "I got hold of one
of their aircraft and came here to look at this dome where they live. They got
my ship down, but I got away and ran off through about eighty-eight miles of
tunnels, and for some reason or other they pushed me in here among you."
He laughed. "I don't blame you for staring at me, I know it sounds
fantastic. Or should I say it sounds foolish?"
                 Nobody
answered that. Everyone kept staring for a moment. Then the man who had first
spoken crinkled the brow above his close-set eyes. "You'll have to forgive
us. It's hard to grasp the notion that there are still free human beings."
                 "Why,
aren't you free?" demanded Darragh.
                Another man spoke. He was broadly
built, with short grizzled hair. "How can we be free? Don't you see this
pen we five in?"
                 Darragh
gazed around the lead-colored walls again. "Is this a prison, you mean?
The Cold People keep you prisoners?"
                 "Cold
People," repeated the younger man. "That's a good name for
them."
                 "And
you call them ..." began Darragh.
                "We call