Time Traders II: The Defiant Agents Key Out of Time by Andre Norton Read Free Book Online

position by force of character alone, though they might come successively from one family clan over several generations.
    He did not want the chieftainship here. No, but neither did he want growing whispers working about him to cut him off from his people. To every Apache severance from the clan was a little death. He must have those who would back him if Deklay, or those who thought like Deklay, turned grumbling into open hostility.
    "Tsoay is one quick to learn," Travis agreed. "We go at dawn—"
    "Along the mountain range?" Buck inquired.
    "If we seek a protected place for the rancheria, yes. The mountains have always provided good strongholds for the People."
    "And you think there is need for a fort?"
    Travis shrugged. "I have been one day's journey out into this world. I saw nothing but animals. But that is no promise that elsewhere there are no enemies. The planet was on the tapes we brought back from that other world, and so it was known to the others who once rode between star and star as we rode between ranch and town. If they had this world set on a journey tape, it was for a reason; that reason may still be in force."
    "Yet it was long ago that these star people rode so . . ." Buck mused. "Would the reason last so long?"
    Travis remembered two other worlds, one of weird desert inhabited by beast things—or had they once been human, human to the point of possessing intelligence?—that had come out of sand burrows at night to attack a spaceship. And the second world where the ruins of a giant city had stood choked with jungle vegetation, where he had made a blowgun from tubes of rustless metal as a weapon gift for small winged men—but were they men? Both had been remnants of that ancient galactic empire.
    "Some things could so remain," he answered soberly. "If we find them, we must be careful. But first a good site for the rancheria."
    "There is no return to home for us," Buck stated flatly.
    "Why do you say that? There could be a rescue ship later—"
    The other raised his eyes again to Travis. "When you slept under the Redax how did you ride?"
    "As a warrior—raiding . . . living . . ."
    "And I—I was one with go'ndi ," Buck returned simply.
    "But—"
    "But the white man has assured us that such power—the power of the chief—does not exist? Yes, the Pinda-lick-o-yi has told us so many things. He is busy, busy with his tools, his machines, always busy. And those who think in another fashion cannot be measured by his rules, so they are foolish dreamers. Not all white men think so. There was Dr. Ashe—he was beginning to understand a little.
    "Perhaps I, too, am standing still, halfway up the stairway of the past. But of this I am very sure: For us, there will be no return to our own place. And the time will come when something new shall grow from the seed of the past. Also it is necessary that you be one of the tenders of that growth. So I urge you, take Tsoay, and the next time, Lupe. For the young who may be swayed this way and that by words—as the wind shakes a small tree—must be given firm roots."
    In Travis education warred with instinct, just as the picture Redax had planted in his mind had warred with his awaking to this alien landscape. Yet now he believed he must be guided by what he felt. And he knew that no man of his race would claim go'ndi , the power of spirit known only to a great chief, unless he had actually felt it swell within him. It might have been fostered by hallucination in the past, but the aura of it carried into the here and now. And Travis had no doubts that Buck believed implicitly in what he said, and that belief carried credulity to others.
    "This is wisdom, Nantan— "
    Buck shook his head. "I am no nantan , no chief. But of some things I am sure. You also be sure of what lies within you, younger brother!"
    On the third day, ranging eastward along the base of the mountain range, Travis found what he believed would be an acceptable camp site. There was a canyon with a good