“Dead drunk,” he commented. “Seen chickens-pigs, too-get that way on cider leavin’s. Lookit here-this bird can’t fly straight neither!”
He was right. A lavender creature, whose wings were banded with pale green and gray, flapped an erratic course to a nearby bush and clung there as if it did not trust its powers for a farther flight.
Cully laid down the limp hopper and picked one of the golden apples. It snapped away easily, and he held it out for their closer examination. The skin was firm over the pulp, and radiating out from the stem were tiny rosy freckles. And the enticing scent was a temptation hard to withstand. Dard wanted to snatch the fruit from the engineer, to sink his teeth in that smooth skin and prove to himself that it tasted as good as it smelled.
“Pity we ain’t got a hamster with us to try it on. But we can take some back. Iffen they’re good,” Harmon swallowed visibly, “we can have us some real eatin’! Needn’t let the critters take ’em all. The fella what lived here, I bet he set a store by them there things. Golden apples, yeah, that’s jus’ what they be. But they ain’t gonna run away, and me, I’d kinda like to see the house and barns.”
The house and barns, if those were the correct designations for the domes, were half buried in twisting vines and rank growth. When they broke their way through to what must have been the front door of the largest dome, Cully let out his breath in a low whistle.
“Fight here. This door was smashed in from the outside.”
Dard, accustomed to the violence of the raiding parties of Pax, noted the broken scraps of metal on the portal and agreed. They edged into a scene of desolation. The place had been looted long ago, tough grass grew through a crack in the wall, and the litter underfoot went to powder when their boots touched it. Dard picked up a shred of golden glass which held a fairy tracery of white pattern. Rut there was nothing whole left.
“Raiding party, all right,” Harmon agreed, conditioned by his Terran past. “Could be that they had them some Peacemen here too. But it was a long time ago. We’d better let Kordov and the brains prospect around in here. Maybe they can learn what really happened. Wonder if the barn took a beatin’.”
But what they did discover in the larger of the two remaining domes brought a steady stream of curses from Harmon and made Dard’s skin crawl with its suggestion of wanton and horrible rapine. A line of white skeletons lay along the wall, each in what seemed a stall. Harmon tried to pick up an oddly shaped skull which went to dust in his fingers.
“Left ’em to die of thirst and starvation!” gritted the farmer. “Knocked off the people and jus’ left the rest. They-they were worse’n Peacemen-them what did this!”