And then the cat pounced!
And then the cat pounced!
And then the cat pounced!
The cat had seized her homunculus by the thigh; she knew the tiny bone had been crushed. She caught fleet, dizzy impressions of the animal striding off proudly with the little creature between its jaws. The letter lay where it had fallen, under the dispatch machine, almost invisible.
The doll ceased her blind writing and drew a tiny black cylinder from her belt. The cat's right eye loomed huge above her.
Mentally, Perat studied the chessboard position with growing interest.
"Idiotic Terran game," he growled. "Only a Terran would conceive of the idea of calling a crushing defeat a drawn battle. I'm sorry I taught you the game. It's really quite—what was that?"
"Sounded like the cat, didn't it?" responded Evelyn.
Her tiny alter ego had dropped from those destructive jaws and was dragging itself slowly back to the dispatch. It found the message and picked it up.
"Do you think something could have hurt it?" asked Evelyn.
The doll struggled toward Gorph's desk, leaving behind a thin red trail.
Then several things happened. Hot swords sizzled in Evelyn's back, and she knew the enraged feline had broken the spinal column of the doll. With throbbing intuition she collapsed her telepathic tentacle.
Too late.
Perat's probe was already in her mind, and she knew that he had caught the full impact of her swift telepathic return. She lay there limply. Her rib, now almost healed, began to ache dully.
The man continued to lie motionless, staring heavy-lidded at the ceiling. Gradually, his mind withdrew itself from hers.
"So you're high-born," he mused aloud. "I should have known, but then, you concealed it very adroitly, didn't you?"
She sat up against the wall. Her heart was pounding almost audibly.
He was relentless. "No Scythian would play chess the way you did. Only a Terran would play for a draw after total defeat."
"I play chess well, so I am a Terran?" she whispered through a dry throat.
Perat turned his handsome grey eyes from the ceiling and smiled at her. His mouth lifted venomously as he watched her begin to tremble.
"Pour me aterif," he ordered.
She arose, feeling that she must certainly collapse the next instant. She forced her legs to move, step by step, to the table by his couch. There she picked up theterifdecanter and tipped it to fill his glass. The dry clatter of bottle on glass betrayed her shaking hands.
"One for you, too, my dear Lyn."
She held the decanter several inches above her glass to avoid that horrible clatter, and managed to spill quite a bit on the table.
Perat held his glass up to touch hers. "A toast," he smiled, "to a mysterious and beautiful lady!"
He drank prone, she standing. She knew she would spill her drink if she tried to recross to her couch.
"So you're a Terran? Then why did you kill the Terran officer on the balcony?"
She was so relieved that she sank limply to the floor beside him.
"Why should I tell you? You wouldn't believe anything I told you now, or that you found in my mind." She smiled up at him.
"True, true. Quite a dilemma. Should I shoot you now and possibly bring the rage of a noble Scythian house down about my ears, or should I submit you to mechanical telepathic analysis?"
"I am yours, viscount," she laughed. "Shoot me. Analyze me. Whatever you wish."
She knew her gaiety was forced, and that it had struck a false note. The iron gate of doubt had clanged shut between them. From now on he would contain her mind in the mental prison of his own. The dispatch beside Gorph's desk could have no further aid from her. Anyway, the cat had undoubtedly carried off the doll.
"What a strange woman you are," he murmured. A brief shadow crossed his face. "With you, for a little while, I have been happy. But in a few metrons, of course, you will depart under close arrest for the psych center, and I'll be on my way back to the Tharn suns."
Within half a metron the office force would begin straggling into the Administration offices and her letter would be found and given to a puzzled Gorph, who would then query Perat as to whether it should not be in the incoming box for urgent matters. But what would Gorph do if his superior refused to communicate with him or anyone else for a full metron? The first messenger jet left very soon, and there was no other for four metrons. Would Gorph send it on the first jet, or would he wait? It was a chance she'd have to take.
She got up from the floor and sat down on the couch beside the Viscount of Tharn. "Perat," she began hesitantly, "I know you must send me away. I'm sorry, because I don't want to leave you so soon, and you do not want me to leave you until the last moment, either. Anything else that I would tell you, you might doubt, so I say nothing more. I would like to dance for you. When I dance, I tell the truth."
"Yes, dance, but take care of your rib," assented the man moodily.
She filled his glass again with a sure hand and replaced it on the table. Then she unloosed the combs in her hair and let it fall in a profusion of curls about her shoulders, where it scintillated in a myriad sparkling semicircles in the soft light of the table luminar.
She shook her shoulders to scatter her hair, and unhurriedly released the clasp of her outer lounging gown. The heavy robe fell about her feet, leaving her clad only in a thin, flowing under-garment, which she smoothed languidly while she kicked off her slippers. Her mouth was now half-parted, her eyelids drooping and slumbrous. Perat was still staring at the ceiling, but she knew his mind was flowing unceasingly over her body.
"I must have music," she whispered. The man made no protest when she pressed the controls on his communications box to receive the slow and haunting dance music from the officers' club in the next zone.
The main avenue of access to Perat was now cut. And Gorph was a bolder man than she thought if he dared knock on the door of his chief while she was inside.
She began to sway and to chant. "The Song of Karos, the Great God of Scythe, Father of Tharn folk, Dweller in Darkness...."
Perat's glass halted, then proceeded slowly to his lips. Of course, no educated nobleman admitted a belief in the ancient religion of the Scythes, but how good it was to hear it sung and danced again? Not since his boyhood, when his mother had dragged him to the temple by main force.... He placed one palm behind his head and continued to sip and to think, as this strange, lovely woman unraveled with undulant body and husky voice the long, satisfying story of his god.
As she postured sinuously, Evelyn breathed a silent prayer of thanks to the dead mentors who had crammed her to bursting with Scythe folklore.
The luminous metron dial revolved with infinite slowness.
V
One metron had passed when Perat laid his empty glass on the table, without releasing it.
"Enough of dancing," he murmured with cold languor, cutting his communications box back to its authorized channel. "Come here, my dear. I wish you to kiss me."
Evelyn glided instantly to the silken couch, tossing her hair back over her shoulders and ignoring the fact that her rib was alive with pain. She knelt over the reclining man and kissed him on the mouth, running her fingers lightly down his right arm. He relinquished his glass at her touch, and she refilled it absently.
Only then did she notice that something was wrong.
His left hand was no longer beneath his head, but was concealed in the mass of cushions that overflowed his couch in a mute, glittering cascade.
Perat swirled his glass silently, apparently watching only the tiny flashes of iridescence flowing from his jeweled right hand.
Evelyn thought: What made him suspicious? There's something in his left hand. If I only dared probe.... But he'd know I was afraid, and I'm not supposed to be afraid. Anyway, in a little while it won't matter. If the field crew has started pulling the columns, they should be through in half a metron. If they haven't started, they never will, and nothing will matter then, anyway.
The man's face was inscrutable when he finally spoke. "You couldn't have gone on much longer, anyway, on account of your rib."
"It was becoming a little painful."
"Twice you nearly fainted."
So he had noticed that.
He continued mercilessly. "Why were you so anxious to keep me shut up for a whole metron?"
"I wanted to amuse you. We have so little time left, now."
"So I thought, until your rib began to trouble you. The reaction of an ordinary woman would have been to stop."
"Am I an ordinary woman?"
"Decidedly not. That's why the situation has become so interesting."
"I don't understand, Perat." She sat down beside him, forcing him to move his legs so that his left hand was jammed under the cushion.
"A little while ago, I decided to contact Gorph's mind." He took a sip. "It seems he had been trying to reach me through the communications box."
"He had?" She pictured Gorph's old-womanish anxiety. He had found the sealed message, then, but hadn't been able to verify it because his chief had been listening to a tale of gods. Had he or had he not sent the message by the early jet? It had to be! Possibly all five of the columns had been drawn by now, but she couldn't assume it. The strain-pile would not erupt for a full Terran hour after the fifth column has been drawn. From now until death, of one sort or another, she must delay, delay, delay.
Her blue eyes were widely innocent, and puzzled, but the nerves of her arms were going dead with over-tension. Perhaps if she threw theterifin his eyes with her left hand and crushed the numbing supraclavicular nerve with her thumb....
Perat turned his head for the first time and looked her full in the face.
"Gorph says he sent the message," he said tonelessly.
She looked at him blankly, then casually removed her hand from his knee and dropped it in her lap. He must absolutely not be alarmed until she knew more. "Apparently I'm supposed to know what you're talking about."
He turned back to the ceiling. "Gorph says someone prepared a priority dispatch with my signature, and he sent it out. I don't suppose you have any idea who did it?"
Time! Time!
"When I was Gorph's assistant, there was a young officer—I can't remember his name—who sometimes forged your signature to urgent actions when Gorph was out. This is true, Perat. My mind is open to you."
He fastened his luminous grey eyes on her. "I presume you're lying, but...." His mental probe skimmed rapidly over her cortical association centers. Her skill was strained to the utmost, setting up false memories of each of thousands of synaptic groups just ahead of Perat's probe. On some of the groups she knew she had made blunders, but apparently she preserved the general impression by strengthened verification in subsequent nets. She wove a brief tale of a young officer in charge of metals salvage who had sent an order to a field group to recover some sort of metal, and since Gorph had been out, and H.Q. needed the metal urgently, the officer did not wait for official authorization. His probe then searched her visual lobe thoroughly, but with growing skepticism. She offered him only indistinct memories of the dead officer's identity.
"Who was the man?" asked Perat as a matter of form, sipping histerifabsently.
"Sub-leader Galen, I think." That would give him pause. He knew she had offered no visual memory of Galen. He would wonder why she was lying.
"Are you sure?"
She wanted to look at the time-dial on the wall, but dared not. From the corner of her eye she saw Perat's left arm tense, then relax warily. His mental probe had fastened grimly to her mind again, though he must know it would be effort wasted. She conjured up an image of Sub-leader Galen in the act of telling her he was handling a very urgent matter and that he'd tell the Viscount later what he'd done. Then the face of the young officer changed to another of the staff, then another, then still another. Then back to Galen.
"No, I'm not sure."
Perat smiled thinly. "You wished to gain time, and I wished to idle it away. I suppose we have both been fairly successful."
The communications box beside the bed jangled.
"Yes?" cried Perat, all alert.
As his mouth was forming the word, his probe was collapsing within her mind, and her own flashed briefly into his mind. The hand under the pillow held a Faeg, aimed at her chest. But the safety catch was still on.
"Excellency?" came Gorph's tinny voice.
"Yes, Gorph? Have you replaced the columns?"
"Replaced"...? That seemed to indicate that the field crew had followed her forged order, then returned the columns by Perat's countercommand, relayed telepathically through Gorph. But once all the great rods were drawn, replacing them did not halt the strain-pile. The negative potential would keep on increasing geometrically with time, as planned, to the final goal of joint catastrophe and stalemate.
Some sort of knowledge was drumming silently at her threshold of consciousness. Something she couldn't quite grasp. About the woman in the stereop? Possibly. It would come to her soon.
Ignoring Perat's gloating smile, she looked casually at the metron dial, and her heart leaped with elation, for the dial had ceased revolving. Electrons must be flowing from the center of the ship through the walls, outward toward the surface two thousand miles away, and the massive currents were probably jamming all the wall circuits.
Within minutes,finis.
Could she really rest, now? She was beginning to feel very tired, almost sleepy. Her duty had been done, and nothing could ever be important again.
Gorph was answering his master over the speaker: "Yes, your excellency, we got them back, that is to say, excepting that one of the five is only half-way out of its cradle."
Life was good, life was beautiful. She almost yawned. Most certainly all of the columns had been pulled out, and then four had been replaced and something had broken down with the fifth. But they had all been out, and that was the only thing that mattered.
"What happened, Gorph?" asked Perat, sipping at histerifagain. His eyes were fastened on his mistress.
She knew that he had pulled the safety catch on the Faeg.
"When the crew took the rods out, the prime mover broke down on the fifth one, when it was only half-way out. They brought in another mover and got the other four rods back in, and now they're trying to repair the first mover and push the fifth rod back."
(The fifth rod had not been completely drawn. Oh Almighty Heaven!)
"Very well, Gorph. I need not repeat that none of the rods are to be moved out again, unless I appear to you personally. I'll talk to you later."
The box went dead.
Perat, now taking no notice of Evelyn, finished histerifleisurely. She sat at his side, breathing woodenly. She had done all that she could do. All five rods had not been withdrawn, and they never would be, now.
"If all Terran women are like you," he began slowly, "I cannot understand how you Terrans lost this battle." He did not expect an answer, and did not wait for one. His hard eyes seemed softened somewhat by a curious admiration. "Only your own gods know what you have endured in your attempt to start the pile."
She looked up wretchedly.
He went on: "Yes, we learned in the nick of time, didn't we? Our physicists told Gorph that the great rods were the core of a pile that could have converted both ships into pure energy, with not a shred of matter left over—something that all the fission piles in the two galaxies couldn't do. It seems that the pile, if activated, would have introduced sufficient energy into the low-packing-fraction atoms, from iron on down to helium, to transform them completely from matter into radiation.
"Unpleasant thought! Now the Scythian plan will be modified slightly. We shall wait until we tear our globe away from yours,faraway, and then prime movers left behind in your ship here can pull the columns again, all five, this time. Our globe then proceeds into the Terran Confederacy, and the war will be over. But of course, you'll know nothing about that."
He regarded her wearily. "I'm sorry Lyn—or is it 'Evelyn Kane'? If you had been of Tharn-blood, or even of the Scythian federacy, I would have married you."
She listened to him with only half a mind. Some strange, inaudible thing was trying to reach her. Something she couldn't grasp, but ought to grasp. What had the mentors told her to be ready for? Exhaustion lay like a paralyzing blanket over her inert mind.
"You killed your countryman that day," he intoned, "just to ingratiate yourself with me. He was very generous to you. When he saw that you wouldn't shoot him with his eyes open, he closed them. Who was he?"
"Gordon, Lord Kane. My father."
Theterifglass shook, and the man's face became perceptibly paler. He breathed stridently for a while before speaking again.
This time he seemed to be calling with earnest finality to the forbidding deity of his own warlike homeland, announcing a newcomer at the dark portals of the god: "This woman...!"
Evelyn Kane did not shriek when the Faeg-bolt tore through her rib and lungs. Even when she sank to the floor, the pain-lines in her own face were much better controlled than those in Perat's.
She did not shriek when the bolt tore through her.
She did not shriek when the bolt tore through her.
She did not shriek when the bolt tore through her.
Then as she lay quietly on the thick, gilded carpet, with consciousness rapidly fading and returning with the regularity of her heart beats, she realized what had been calling to her. The piezo crystal in her waist-purse, still hidden in the shadows of her table, had been activated, and had brought into focus within the room the dim, transparent outlines of a small space ship.
Perat saw it too, and his eyes widened as they traced it quickly from wall to wall.
"It's real ..." whispered Evelyn between clenched lips. "Mentors wanted me ... return in it ... to Terra ... secret of pile...."
A strange light was growing over Perat's face. "Of course! So that's why your father tried so hard at the last to break through our blockade and get a ship through! If the secret of the strain-pile had ever reached Terra, all the Tharn suns—indeed, the whole Scythe federation—would be novae by now! By Karos, it was a narrow thing!"
There was a soft gurgling in Evelyn's throat.
He flung his pistol away and sat down beside her, lifting her head to his chest. "I'll call the physician," he rasped through contorted lips.
She slid a cold palm over his hot cheek, caressing it lightly. "No ... we die...."
He stiffened. "We?"
She continued to stroke his cheek dreamily. "Die with you...."
He shook her. "What are you talking about!" he cried. "The pile isn't going to erupt!"
"Crystal focusses ... ship ... only when pile...."
His face blanched.
She whispered again, so softly that he had to bend his ear to her lips. "You escape ... get in ship...."
He stared at her incredulously. "You'd let me get away with the pile secret!"
She relaxed in his arms, smiling sleepily, while the tiny red trickle from the corner of her mouth grew wider. "Stupid of me."
She shivered. "... cold...."
The Viscount of the Tharn Suns, the greatest star-cluster in the Scythe federation, knotted his jaw muscles feverishly and gnawed at his lower lip. Somehow or other the strain-pile had been energized. Probably the terrific proton storm that had hidden both ships for years had compensated for the unrealized potential of the undrawn fifth rod. It was his duty to the federation to throw this woman to the floor and take refuge between the shadowy, shimmering walls of the escape ship. He must carry the secret of the pile to safety with him. He had only seconds.
He looked down distractedly at the small creature who was destroying the proud ships that two great civilizations had spent a generation in building. She seemed to be in a deep, peaceful sleep. The only sign of life was a faint pulse in her throat.
She was the only woman that he had ever found whose companionship he could have ... enjoyed hour after hour. He almost thought, "could have loved."
The room was growing quite warm. The tremendous currents coursing through the walls were swiftly growing stronger.
Another thought occurred to him: How had those Terran mentors planned for their escape ship to avoid the holocaust? Any matter within millions of miles would be destroyed. It was evident, then, that wherever the ship was, it wasnotwithin the danger zone.
Suddenly he understood everything.
With a queer smile, in which ribald surmise and tenderness fought for supremacy, he picked the woman up, carried her into the phantom vessel, placed her on the pilot's lounge, and strapped her in. From his waist-purse he took a hypodermic syringe, removed the sheath from the needle, and thrust it into her arm. Her face twinged briefly, but she did not waken. He threw a blanket over her and then strode quickly to the controls. They were fairly simple, and he had no difficulty in switching the automatic drive to the general direction of the Tharn sun cluster. He wrote a hasty note on the pilot's navigation pad, and then turned again to the woman. He removed one of his duplicate jeweled rings and slipped it on her finger. His father would recognize it and would believe her.
Then he bent over her and kissed her lightly on the lips.
"Perhaps I love you too, my dearest enemy," he whispered gently. "Educate our son-to-be in the ways of peace."
Again outside the ship, he spun the space lock that sealed her in. The ship's walls were now growing opaque and he could no longer see inside.
His communications box was jangling furiously in a dozen different keys, and anxious, querulous voices were pouring through it into the room. He snapped it off, loosened his collar, filled his glass to overflowing with the last of theterif, and cut off the table luminar. His stereop projector next had his attention.
He lay on his couch in the darkness of his death cell, studying with the keenest satisfaction his wife, son, and father, while they waved at him happily from the radiant stereop sphere.
Those Terran mentors had planned well. The escape ship would not be affected by the nearing cataclysm, because it was really in a different time plane—at least five years in the past. The catastrophe would simply release it to its original continuum, whence it would proceed with its precious cargo to the Tharn suns.
Odd effect, that time shift. He wished now he'd read more of the theories of that ancient Terran, Einstein, who claimed that simultaneity was an illusion—that "now" here could be altogether different from "now" in other steric areas. His son, unborn as yet "here," was more than four years old "there"—on the planet. Tharn-R-VII, where the lad played in his grandfather's gardens.
And then there was the mystery of the rings. The old count had not had another ring made of course. The ring the count had sent with the stereop coils must have been the same one that Perat had just placed on the finger of his bride. The ring sent with the stereops was merely his original ring brought back in the relooping of a time-line. In his "now" there was only one ring—the one he was wearing. In Evelyn's "now" there was the same ring, but that was logical, because her "now" would soon be five years earlier than his. Owing to this five-year relooping of time, it had been possible for the ring to exist in duplicate for six weeks. But very soon, in his "now," it would be destroyed for good.
He pressed the repeat button on the stereop and started the coil again. The boy had an engaging grin, rather like his own (he would indulge a final vanity), but without the scar. He hoped there would never be another war to disfigure or kill his son. It was up to the next generation.
As he swirled histerif, he smiled and thought of the note he had left on the pilot's pad:Name him after your father—Gordon.
"...failed to find any survivors, or for that matter, any trace whatever of either globe, if one excepts the supernova that appeared for a quarter metron some thirty years ago at the far margin of the proton storm. We of the Armistice Commission therefore unanimously urge that further hostilities by either side would necessarily be indecisive...."
—Scythe-Terran Armistice, History and Tentative Provisions (excerpts): Gordon of Tharn, Editor-in-Chief and Primary Scythian Delegate.