John Rackham by The Double Invaders

he
nodded. "I do not know just what. But I will learn. All men who are
healthy are asked to move into the cities to leam new skills. If that is
war-effort, yes."
    Bragan
frowned to himself as he tried to analyze this. Ihe Scartan language didn't
have a word for war, not exactly. The nearest they could come was
"struggle hard against extreme difficulty" with overtones of being
hindered by other people. Nor did they even have a word for bomb. It was a
puzzle, but he decided to let it go and hope that something would turn up to
trigger off a solution.
    "We have half a day," Ryth
declared. "We can deal with the mereens in that time, three of us. This
way, Zorgan." She conducted him into another room, indicated a massive
cylinder and alongside it a thing that looked like a hand-power-tool. "Bring
those. Hork will show you." She caught up a low stool and a handful of
cords and marched out. Hork grinned, hefted the cylinder onto a shoulder while
Bragan took the tool, and they followed her out and across a sun-bright meadow
at a pace that made Bragan stretch hard to keep up. In a while the meadow took
on a slope, and they climbed, to halt by a rough fence of dark green bushes.
Ryth dropped the stool, made two quick double-tweaks of her fingers to undo
buttons, and stepped right out of her blue tabard, to drop it aside on the
grass. Then she strode ahead, slid in between the shoulder-high bushes and was
gone from sight. Hork tossed his tunic to one side, too, and pointed to the
stool.
    "You'd
better take that. Here, I'll show you how the cutter works." He took a
length of pressure tubing and connected it at one end to the heavy cylinder,
the other end to the butt of the tool, turned valves, pressed a stud, and the
tool whined. Bragan held it, studied it curiously. It had a semicircle muzzle
like a comb, and when the motor ran, a circular toothed blade skimmed over the
teeth of the comb. Shears!
    "Doesn't it pull away to the
right?" he wondered, and Hork nodded.
    "That's
the trick of it, Zorgan. You bear the effort against that. You have seen this
kind of thing before?"
    "Similar
idea, but we do it with a straight comb and straight blades that oscillate to
and fro. There's a spinning drive just the same, but it operates a rocker-arm;
do you know what I mean? I don't see that it's any better than this, though.
Just different." What he didn't remark on, although it impressed him, was
the fact that in this stubby handle he held was a hydrogen-burning fuel-cell
producing electricity enough to drive that motor, which was a way of producing
and using electricity that he had never seen so cunningly done before.
    He
looked up as the bushes tossed and Ryth came through lugging a protesting
animal something bigger than a sheep, but looking more like a cross between a
goat and a mule, with useful and angry teeth and a thick mat of gray fleece.
Hork went forward, grabbed competently, and made quick and expert passes with a
cord, then delivered the victim to Bragan's feet.
    "Start
here," he advised, slapping the root of the tail, "and run right up
the spine to the neck, then down one side first, then the other."
    Bragan
took a moment to steady his hand, and his breathing, and made a start. Those
two glimpses of Ryth in nothing but a skimpy white cashmere patch about her
loins had shaken him badly. It was obvious that the woman didn't know the power
she had. Hork didn't seem to see anything amiss either as he watched Dragan's
inexpert efforts.
    "Don't
be afraid of hurting the mereen," he urged. "The blades cannot cut
unless you force them into the flesh on purpose. A moment, when I have stringed
the next one, and I will show you." Ryth wa$ back with another snarling
beast. He grabbed and threw and fastened swiftly, then took the shears.
    "Like this; see?" He plied the
whirring blades and the thick mat of wool peeled away down to the belly line. "Now
for the other side. Never mind the shoulders, neck and legs. Leave those, or
the merreen will be able