With a fraction of a second to spare, the Reaper talked first....
With a fraction of a second to spare, the Reaper talked first....
With a fraction of a second to spare, the Reaper talked first....
The glare of the discharge seemed about fifty times brighter than normal.
"Hit the floor, Channy!" he heard Peer's shout.
He hit it without thought, dropping over the dead guard's legs....
Sound rammed at him enormously, roared on and began banging itself about and away among distant mountains. TheAsteroid'sfloor had surged up ponderously, settled back, quivered a bit and become stable again.
"An earthquake," Channok muttered, sitting up dazedly, "was exactly all we needed right now!"
"That wasn't any earthquake!" said Peer, standing pale-faced above him. "Get up and look!"
Long veils of stuff, presumably solid chunks of mountain, were drifting down the distant, towering face of the cliff at the foot of which they had buried theRa-Twelve. Rising to meet them, its source concealed beyond the horizon of the plain, was the slow, grey cloud of some super-explosion.
"I guess," he said slowly, "one of those two must have got curious about Koyle's wall-safe!"
"We were pretty smart about that," nodded Peer.
"We were, for once!" Channok agreed. He was looking around for something to sit down on quietly when he caught sight of the dead guard again. He started violently.
"Almost forgot about him! I guess now I'll have to bury him, and that Ezeff, the first thing. Maybe this one is carrying something that will show who they were."
He found something almost instantly—and he was glad then that Peer was still watching the oily writhings of the cloud across the plain. It was in a flat steel case he took out of one of the dead man's pockets: the identification disk of a member of the Imperial Secret Service—
TheService!
And they would have murdered us, he thought, shocked. They were going to do it!
He turned the guard over on his back. A big muscular young man with a look of sudden purpose and confidence still fixed on his face. It was the same face as the one on the disk.
Channok put the disk back in its case and shoved the case into the dead man's pocket. He stood up, feeling rather sick. Peer turned around from the lock and regarded him reflectively for a moment.
"You know, Channy," she stated carefully, "if you can't help it, it doesn't count."
He looked back at her. "I guess not," he said—and suddenly, for a moment, he could see four men marching one after the other down into the Mound. "Of course, it doesn't count!" he told her firmly.
VIII
They worked hard at shifting the cargo into the cache, but the Nameless Sun was beginning to slide down behind the mountains before they were finished. And by the time Channok had rammed the tunnel full of rocks with the tractor and cemented them into a glassy plug with the drill-blast, and scattered a camouflaging mess of boulders over everything, only a foggy red glow over the mountain crests, half obscured by the lingering upper drifts of the explosion of theRa-Twelve, remained of the day.
There was no moon, but the sky had come full of stars big and little over the opposite section of the plain; and so there was light enough to make out the dark hump of the Mound in the distance. Every time Channok looked in that direction, the low, sinister pile seemed to have edged a little closer; and he looked as often as his work gave him a chance to do it. Santis might have been right in stating that the Mound wasn't dangerous if you didn't get too close to it—but the instant he suspected there might be something going on over there, Channok was going to hop off the tractor, grab up Peer and get off Old Nameless at the best speed he and theAsteroidcould produce.
However, the Mound remained quiet. With everything done, he gave Peer a last ride back to theAsteroidon the tractor, ran it up the ramp into the storage section and closed the rear lock. Then they discovered they'd left their lunch containers lying among the rocks.
If he'd been alone, Channok would have left them there. But Peer looked so matter-of-fact about it that he detached the tractor's headlight and started back with her on foot. It was only a couple of hundred yards, and they found the containers without any difficulty. The Mound seemed to have moved a little closer again, but not too much. He gave it only a casual glance this time.
"Where are your friends, the ghouls?" he inquired, shining the light around the rocks as they started back. The grisly creatures had put in a few cautious appearances during the afternoon, but their nerves seemed to have suffered even more than his own from all that had happened.
"The ghouls always hit their burrows at sundown," Peer explained. "They're not like the story ones."
"What do they find to eat around here?" Channok inquired.
"Some sorts of rocks. They've got no real teeth but their mouth is like a grinder inside. Most of the rest of their insides, too, Santis said. I had a tame one I used to pitch stones at and he'd snap 'em up. But all that weren't blue he'd spit out. The blue ones went right down—you could hear them crunching for about a foot."
"What a diet!" Channok commented. Then he stopped short. "Say, Peer! If they bite like that, they could chew right into our cache!"
"They won't," said Peer. "Come on."
"How do you know?" Channok asked, following her.
"They can't bite through a good grade of steel-alloy. And they don't like its taste anyhow. Santis said so."
Well, it had been Santis this and Santis that for quite a while now! Peer's father seemed to be on record with a definite opinion on just about everything. And what made him think he knew what a ghoul liked to chew on?
Perhaps Channok couldn't be blamed too much. He was dog-tired and dirty and hungry. He'd killed his first two men that day, and not in fair fight either but with an assassin's sneak thrusts, from behind and by trickery; and he'd buried them, too. He'd seen the shining ISS disclose itself in action as something very tarnished and ugly, and a salvaged ship worth a fortune go up in a cloud of writhing grey smoke....
There had been a number of other things—close shaves that had felt too close, mostly.
At any rate, Channok stated, in flat unequivocal terms, that he didn't wish to hear anything else that Santis had said. Not ever!
"You're taking the wrong attitude," Peer informed him, frowning. "Santis is a very smart man. He could teach you a lot!"
"What makes you think I want to learn anything from a space-rat?" Channok inquired, exasperated.
Peer stopped short. "That was a dirty thing to say!" she said in a low, furious voice. "I'm not talking to you any more."
She drew away till there was a space of about six feet between them and marched on briskly towards theAsteroid, looking straight ahead.
Channok had to hurry to keep abreast of her. He watched her in the starlight for a few moments from the corners of his eyes. He probably shouldn't have used that term—the half-pint did look good and mad!
"Tsk! Tsk!" he said, disturbed.
Peer said nothing. She walked a bit faster. Channok lengthened his stride again.
"Who's my nice little girl friend?" he inquired wheedlingly.
"Shuddup!" growled Peer.
She climbed into theAsteroidahead of him and disappeared while he sealed the locks. The control room was dark, but he felt she was around somewhere. He switched on the power and the instruments. Familiar dim pools of green and pink gleamings sprang up in quick sequence like witchfire quivering over the control desk. Perhaps it wasn't an exceptionally beautiful sight, but it looked home-like to Channok. Like fires lighting up on a hearth.
"Well, let's see you handle this take-off!" he invited the shadows around him briskly. This time there weren't any mountains nearby to worry about.
"You handle it," Peer said from behind his shoulder. "It's my turn to laugh."
She did, too, a few minutes later—loud and long! After he'd got over the first shock of narrowly missing the Mound, Channok gave a convincing imitation of a chagrined pilot and indignantly blamed theAsteroid....
He'd guided them halfway out of the Nameless System when she came behind the control chair in the dark, wrapped her arms in a stranglehold around his neck, and fondly bit his ear.
"Cut it out," Channok choked.
"Just the same," stated Peer, loosening her grip a trifle, "you'renotso smart, like Santis is!"
"I'm not, eh?"
"No," said Peer. "But Santis said you would be some time. 'That Channok's going to make a real spacer!' he said. 'Just give him a chance to catch on.'"
"Well," Channok muttered, secretly flattered, "we'll hope he was right."
"And, anyway," said Peer, "ILOVEyou just as much!"
"Well, that's something, too!" Channok admitted. He was beginning to feel very much better.
"And guess what I've got here," Peer said tenderly.
"What?"
"A nice, soapy cloth. For what you said when you saw the first ghoul. So just open that big trap right up now, Channy!"
He couldn't tell in the dark; but it tasted like she'd taken the trouble to mix something extra foul into the soap lather, too.
"And after you've stopped spitting bubbles," said crew-member Peer, who was switching on all lights to observe that part of the business, "I'll tell you what I saw on the Mound."
Channok shuddered.
"If you don't mind, Peer," he suggested soapily, "let's wait with that till we're a lightyear or two farther out!"