Oomphel in the Sky Read online

nothing else, and they didn'tmake any trouble before they left. Then, Sanders said they'd beenbuilding fires out in the fallow ground and moaning and chanting aroundthem for a couple of days, and idling on the job. Saving their strengthfor the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He's probablythe lad who started it. Had a dream from the Gone Ones, I suppose."

  "You mean, like this fellow here?" the lieutenant asked. "What are they,Mr. Gilbert; priests?"

  He looked quickly at the lieutenant's collar-badges. Yellow trefoil forThird Fleet-Army Force, Roman IV for Fourth Army, 907 for his regiment,with C under it for cavalry. That outfit had only been on Kwannon forthe last two thousand hours, but somebody should have briefed him betterthan that.

  He shook his head. "No, they're magicians. Everything these Kwanns doinvolves magic, and the shoonoon are the professionals. When a nativeruns into something serious, that his own do-it-yourself magic can'tcope with, he goes to the shoonoo. And, of course, the shoonoo works allthe magic for the community as a whole--rain-magic, protective magic forthe village and the fields, that sort of thing."

  The lieutenant mopped his face on a bedraggled handkerchief. "They'llhave to struggle along somehow for a while; we have orders to round upall the shoonoon and send them in to Bluelake."

  "Yes." That hadn't been General Maith's idea; the governor had insistedon that. "I hope it doesn't make more trouble than it prevents."

  The lieutenant was still mopping his face and looking across thegathering-place toward Alpha, glaring above the huts.

  "How much worse do you think this is going to get?" he asked.

  "The heat, or the native troubles?"

  "I was thinking about the heat, but both."

  "Well, it'll get hotter. Not much hotter, but some. We can expectstorms, too, within twelve to fifteen hundred hours. Nobody has any ideahow bad they'll be. The last periastron was ninety years ago, and we'veonly been here for sixty-odd; all we have is verbal accounts from memoryfrom the natives, probably garbled and exaggerated. We had pretty badstorms right after transit a year ago; they'll be much worse this time.Thermal convections; air starts to cool when it gets dark, and thenheats up again in double-sun daylight."

  It was beginning, even now; starting to blow a little after Alpha-rise.

  "How about the natives?" the lieutenant asked. "If they can get anycrazier than they are now--"

  "They can, and they probably will. They think this is the end of theworld. The Last Hot Time." He used the native expression, and thentranslated it into Lingua Terra. "The Sky Fire--that's Alpha--will burnup the whole world."

  "But this happens every ninety years. Mean they always acted this way atperiastron?"

  He shook his head. "Race would have exterminated itself long ago if theyhad. No, this is something special. The coming of the Terrans was asign. The Terrans came and brought oomphel to the world; this a signthat the Last Hot Time is at hand."

  "What the devil _is_ oomphel?" The lieutenant was mopping the back ofhis neck with one hand, now, and trying to pull his sticky tunic loosefrom his body with the other. "I hear that word all the time."

  "Well, most Terrans, including the old Kwannon hands, use it to meantrade-goods. To the natives, it means any product of Terran technology,from paper-clips to spaceships. They think it's ... well, not exactlysupernatural; extranatural would be closer to expressing their idea.Terrans are natural; they're just a different kind of people. Butoomphel isn't; it isn't subject to any of the laws of nature at all.They're all positive that we don't make it. Some of them even think itmakes us."

  When he got back in the car, the native pilot, Heshto, was lolling inhis seat and staring at the crowd of natives along the side of thegathering-place with undisguised disdain. Heshto had been educated atone of the Native Welfare Commission schools, and post-graded withKwannon Planetwide News. He could speak, read and write Lingua Terra. Hewas a mathematician as far as long division and decimal fractions. Heknew that Kwannon was the second planet of the Gettler Beta system,23,000 miles in circumference, rotating on its axis once in 22.8Galactic Standard hours and making an orbital circuit around GettlerBeta once in 372.06 axial days, and that Alpha was an M-class pulsatingvariable with an average period of four hundred days, and that Betaorbited around it in a long elipse every ninety years. He didn't believethere was going to be a Last Hot Time. He was an intellectual, he was.

  He started the contragravity-field generator as soon as Miles was in hisseat. "Where now, boss?" he asked.

  "Qualpha's Village. We won't let down; just circle low over it. I wantsome views of the ruins. Then to Sanders' plantation."

  "O.K., boss; hold tight."

  He had the car up to ten thousand feet. Aiming it in the map directionof Qualpha's Village, he let go with everything he had--hot jets,rocket-booster and all. The forest landscape came hurtling out of thehorizon toward them.

  Qualpha's was where the trouble had first broken out, after the bug-outfrom Sanders; the troops hadn't been able to get there in time, and ithad been burned. Another village, about the same distance south of theplantation, had also gone up in flames, and at a dozen more they hadfound the natives working themselves into frenzies and had had tosleep-gas them or stun them with concussion-bombs. Those had been thevillages to which the deserters from Sanders' had themselves gone; fromevery one, runners had gone out to neighboring villages--"The Gone Onesare returning; all the People go to greet them at the Deesha-Phoo. Burnyour villages; send on the word. Hasten; the Gone Ones return!"

  Saving some of those villages had been touch-and-go, too; the runners,with hours lead-time, had gotten there ahead of the troops, and therehad been shooting at a couple of them. Then the Army contragravity beganlanding at villages that couldn't have been reached in hours by footmessengers. It had been stopped--at least for the time, and in thisarea. When and where another would break out was anybody's guess.

  The car was slowing and losing altitude, and ahead he could see thinsmoke rising above the trees. He moved forward beside the pilot andpulled down his glasses; with them he could distinguish the ruins of thevillage. He called Bluelake, and then put his face to the view-finderand began transmitting in the view.

  It had been a village like the one he had just visited, mud-and-wattlehuts around an oval gathering-place, stockade, and fields beyond. Heshtobrought the car down to a few hundred feet and came coasting in onmomentum helped by an occasional spurt of the cold-jets. A few sectionsof the stockade still stood, and one side of the khamdoo hadn't fallen,but the rest of the structures were flat. There wasn't a soul, human orparahuman, in sight; the only living thing was a small black-and-grayquadruped investigating some bundles that had been dropped in thefields, in hope of finding something tasty. He got a view ofthat--everybody liked animal pictures on a newscast--and then he wasswinging the pickup over the still-burning ruins. In the ashes of everyhut he could see the remains of something like a viewscreen or anuclear-electric stove or a refrigerator or a sewing machine. He knewhow dearly the Kwanns cherished such possessions. That they haddestroyed them grieved him. But the Last Hot Time was at hand; the wholeworld would be destroyed by fire, and then the Gone Ones would return.

  So there were uprisings on the plantations. Paul Sanders had beenlucky; his Kwanns had just picked up and left. But he had always gottenalong well with the natives, and his plantation house was literally acastle and he had plenty of armament. There had been other planters whohad made the double mistake of incurring the enmity of their nativelabor and of living in unfortified houses. A lot of them weren't around,any more, and their plantations were gutted ruins.

  And there were plantations on which the natives had destroyed the kloobaplants and smashed the crystal which lived symbiotically upon them. Theythought the Terrans were using the living crystals to make magic. Nottoo far off, at that; the properties of Kwannon biocrystals had opened amajor breakthrough in subnucleonic physics and initiated half a dozentechnologies. New kinds of oomphel. And down in the south, where thespongy and res
inous trees were drying in the heat, they were startingforest fires and perishing in them in hecatombs. And to the north, theywere swarming into the mountains; building great fires there, too, andattacking the Terran radar and radio beacons.

  Fire was a factor common to all these frenzies. Nothing could happenwithout magical assistance; the way to bring on the Last Hot Time wasPeople.

  Maybe the ones who died in the frenzies and the swarmings were the luckyones at that. They wouldn't live to be crushed by disappointment whenthe Sky Fire receded as Beta went into the long swing toward apastron.The surviving shoonoon wouldn't be the lucky ones, that was for sure.The magician-in-public-practice needs only to make one