She groaned, as though in despair at trying to deal with an idiot. "Your prison was strong and carefully guarded. Did we have trouble breaking into it? Would we have trouble breaking in anywhere? Guards consist of men and electronic devices. We can blank them both, in many different ways. So can the Irrians. Your defenses wouldn't hold."
And Birrel realized with a sinking heart that that was true.
"But we've got to fight. We've got to do what we can."
"Yes. Of course you do. And there is only one way." Her voice was eager now, forceful, hammering home her points with relentless logic.
"Come back with us to Ruun. Tell the authorities what you know, what you have actually seen. That will be enough to make them believe and mobilize. Vannevan and his men are only the forerunners here. A small fleet must come from Ir for the actual raid. Ruun can stop them, you cannot. You understand? Your defense is out there!"
And she pointed at the glittering sky above the trees.
Birrel followed her gesture and thought,Oh Lord, I can't! I'm scared. How far is Wolf 359? I never even heard of it.
And then he thought,But she's right. Connor, all our armed forces—we'd be like babies against a fleet from Ir. We have atomic weapons but we'd never have the chance to use them. It would be just as it was at the prison—
He listened to the owl and the crickets and the gurgle of running water, and smelled the cool sweetness of the summer night and dug his fingers into the grass because he wanted to hold on to Earth and all that was familiar.
But overhead the stars glittered and shone, and there was a decision to be made.
"If you want to fight for your world and your people," said Kara softly, "you must have courage to do what you know is right, even if it is against orders."
Yes, thought Birrel. Yes, indeed. Have courage.
Well, the whole thing had gone wrong from the start. He couldn't see that he would make it any better by delivering Kara to Connor. The chances were she couldn't be made to tell anyway where the ship from Ruun was hidden, and it would undoubtedly take off at the first hint of danger. And in any case, it seemed that the Irrians were the threat to Earth, and she didn't know where their ship was. If Kara was telling the truth, the resultant delay might be fatal to both their causes. He thought she was telling the truth.
Very quickly, before he could change his mind, he said, "It seems I have to go with you to Ruun."
"Good," she said fiercely. "Good! Then we have a chance." She jumped to her feet and tugged at him impatiently. "We've wasted too much time already. Let's go."
"Now hold on," he said. "We'll make better time if we plan ahead. Where is your ship?"
"North. In a wild place beyond a big body of water—I think it's called the Hudson's Bay."
Well, if you wanted to hide a spaceship, Birrel thought, that would be as good a place as any. But it was the devil of a long way off.
"How did you get down here?"
"By hopper."
"Bywhat?"
"Hopper. A small flier for planetary hops. It's hidden right here in the woods. We made a shelter for it as soon as we got the farmhouse and flew it in by night. Before that it was in some mountains where we first landed. Come on."
And there was no problem. No problem at all. You found the camouflaged shelter in the summer woods and you got into the neat impossible craft that was in it and watched a girl in a tan suit manipulate a couple of controls with the casual ease of a teen-ager using a record-player. Some quiet force—compressed air, Birrel thought, remembering experimental aerodyne models he had seen—lifted the hopper high and took it away, and the last red coals of a smouldering farmhouse winked in the black countryside and were gone.
By dawn they were far north and rifling with incredible speed through the sky, at a fantastic altitude. Any radarman who chanced to catch them on his screen would lose them so fast he would never believe he had seen anything. And Birrel now knew a lot more about Kara and her people than he had.
Kara's father had been a high officer in Ruun's intelligence service in the days when, according to her, the existence of four peaceful planets hung on its efficiency. She herself, as a kind of proud inheritance, also belonged to the intelligence service, which in these later times had dwindled to a small and neglected group of people dedicated to not trusting the Irrians.
It was these intelligence people who had discovered the departure of the Irrian ship for Earth and deduced the reason for its going. But official Ruun had refused to be hustled into a panic. They were not going to put four planets on a full war footing, with all that implied, merely because a ship had made the voyage to another solar system. Rather, they thought, this star voyage might well be the beginning of a new era in peaceful expansion, with the Irrians finally taking a place in a civilized community of worlds. They had allowed a shipload of agents from Ruun to follow and check on the Irrians, but no more. And any future action would be determined by what documented information they brought back.
Kara's people had been forced to lose a little time while they learned the language and customs of the part of Earth they had business in, well enough to get by. They had done this—as presumably the Irrians had too—by adapting their televisors to receive terrestrial broadcasts which they could pull in from amazing distances, and then staring at them for hours at a time with the help of a philologist and a social scientist. Then, when they came south after the Irrians, they had been able to slip quite easily into the polyglot life of New York, which is accustomed to accents and odd ways.
"There's the ship," said Kara suddenly.
She had brought the hopper down in an express-elevator plunge and was pointing at a wedge-shaped piece of barren land between two rocky arms at the base of a mountain. The light of the rising sun made a sort of dazzle in the air, but apart from that there was nothing.
"I don't see any ship," he said. "Where?"
"I forgot, you don't have the refraction-type camouflage. When you're used to it you can spot it without a scope, if you know where to look. Here." She made rapid adjustments in a small gadget like a camera view-finder. "This is tuned to our chosen vibration rate. Makes it harder for an enemy to find us."
Birrel looked into the 'scope and saw a slim silver spire standing on the flat land, its nose pointed toward the sky.
He looked out the port again and saw nothing.
"Light rays bent in a magnetic field around the ship," she said. "They'll drop it now. Watch."
She depressed a switch, activating some automatic signal system. The dazzle of sunlight vanished and the silver ship was there. She landed beside it.
She stepped out and waited for Birrel to follow. He hesitated, looking at the ship. A hatch opened and a magnetic grapple dropped down toward the hopper. Below, a much smaller hatch appeared and extruded a ladder. Once he climbed that ladder, Birrel knew, he was trapped. The ship would take off and—
"There's nothing to be afraid of," Kara said, smiling.
He set his jaw and went with her to the ladder and climbed it and passed into the ship.
It smelled like a submarine, of oil and metal and canned air. There was a man in an odd-looking coverall who stared at him and spoke to Kara. He heard Kara explaining, and in the meanwhile the lock door behind him was grinding shut and locking itself with relentless precision.
Kara said, "This is Thile. He commands the ship."
Birrel shook hands with him. He was a small lean man with very keen eyes and a hard competent jaw.
"So Holmer and Rett are both dead," he said, with grim regret. "Well, we'll make Vannevan pay for them. Help him strap in, Kara. We're taking off at once." He looked at Birrel. "If we can get back to Ruun without delay, you may be able to convince our sheeplike leaders in time. I hope so."
He hurried away somewhere forward—or up. Kara took Birrel into a small cabin where there were several padded couches, and helped him secure himself with broad webbing straps.
"Scared?"
"Not a bit."
"Liar. Don't worry about it. The first take-off is always the worst." She leaned over impulsively and kissed him, ludicrously like a mother tucking a fretful child into bed. The ship suddenly gave a great roar and a quiver, and a raucous horn began to sound. She scrambled into the couch next to his.
Birrel's heart pounded wildly and the blood in his veins turned cold and thin as water.
There was noise. A stunning, deafening crescendo of it. Then there was a feeling of motion. He lay on the top of a rising piston that pressed him slowly and relentlessly against air compressed into a smaller and smaller space. He opened his mouth and yelled in panic fear, seeing himself crushed into a flattened pulp. The cry was lost in the bursting roar that enveloped the ship. Ages passed. And then miraculously the pressure eased and finally was gone.
Thile's voice came suddenly from a speaker in the wall. "Trouble, Kara. Radar says another ship has taken off from Earth, right behind us."
Birrel heard her quick, fierce exclamation. "So Vannevan was watching his radar for our take-off. I knew he'd never let us get back to Ruun if he could help it!"
CHAPTER VII
They were all in the ship's bridge now. Thile and Kara and a young man named Vray were conferring tensely with the radarman and checking a bristling array of instruments.
Birrel was looking at space.
The ports on one side were shielded against the sun, so he couldn't see it. Earth was behind, or below them, so he couldn't see that either. All he could see was nothing, an infinity of it, without top or bottom, front or back, beginning or end. The stars floated in it, by the millions and billions, like shoals of fiery fish gleaming red and gold and blue and green, white and violet, orange and dull crimson. They were not crowded. There was plenty of room between them. The eye was drawn farther and farther into those distances and the body unconsciously tried to follow, until the mind recoiled from the edge of some psychic calamity and screamed for solidity. Birrel spun away from the port and grabbed hold of a stanchion and stood with his eyes shut, sweating and shaking as though he had just run a race.
Kara said, "It gets you, doesn't it?"
He indicated that it did, beyond words. She nodded.
"It's no different with us. We look up at our summer skies just as you have, and dream about what it's like. We read books and we see pictures. But you can't know until you actually get out into space and see it for yourself. And I don't think you ever get over being awed. I never have."
Birrel opened his eyes again, but kept them firmly fixed on the inside of the bridge. Thile and Vray were still hanging over their instruments, looking grim.
"That ship," said Birrel. "It'll try and catch us, I suppose. Stop us from getting word to Ruun."
"I can't imagine Vannevan letting us go without a fight." Her voice was not exactly frightened, but it had a sort of clipped tightness about it that was far from carefree.
"Can he? Catch us, I mean?"
"The Irrians are good spacemen, and their ships are about as fast as ours. But Thile is a wizard. He can outfly anything in space."
Thile heard her and looked up. He said sourly, "Thanks. But you might as well tell him the truth. Vannevan is not going to rely on speed and skill alone, but on weapons. And we're not carrying any atomic armaments. The government brains didn't think it was wise, considering that we were trespassing on a strange world and might conceivably have an accident, such as falling into a city. They're thoughtful that way."
"As an Earthman, I appreciate it," said Birrel. "You have conventional weapons, don't you? That's at least an equal footing."
"We're not used to them," Thile said. "They are. But we'll do our best. Believe me."
He glanced at Vray and nodded.
"Stand by for translation."
Birrel looked at Kara.
"That only means," she said, "that we're going faster."
"How much faster?"
"Well, just at first," she said, "about double the speed of light."
Birrel stopped trying to go along intelligently with any of it. He just let it happen.
The lights inside the ship dimmed and burned blue. There was a screeching whine that rose up and out of hearing, clawing at the nerves as it went, and then there was a moment of awful vertigo when the ship and everything in it seemed to slip and fall sideways in an insane fashion.
The open ports slid shut automatically. Just before they closed Birrel caught a glimpse through them of the stars he had been looking at only a few moments before. They shifted, streamed like burning rain, and vanished, to be replaced by squiggling lines of lights.
Then the ports were shut and there was nothing except the personal sense of disorientation to show that anything had happened.
Complacently, like one who knows he is dreaming and that therefore these strange things are not really happening and so need not be taken seriously, Birrel listened to the voices of the men, speaking technical words of no meaning to him as they went through what was apparently a routine check. Then the radarman said,
"They're right with us."
Thile grunted. "Full acceleration," he said. "Build up as fast as you can. Maybe their generators aren't as good as ours."
The whining began again but on a different note. Birrel pictured himself inside an iron egg flying through space—what kind of space?—at double, triple, quadruple the speed of light. He erased the thought from his mind as quickly as he could. He said to Kara,
"Why haven't people done more star-travelling? You obviously have a workable drive."
"We haven't had the time until recently," Kara said. "The Irrians kept us too busy. Then the few exploratory trips we did make to neighboring systems were discouraging. In most cases the planets were uninhabitable, and the ones that did have life forms were pretty awful. Our government hasn't encouraged star flight. I think they're afraid of what might come flying back our way."
The ship quivered and trembled. Birrel thought he could almost feel the atoms crawling in the metal under his hand.
"Do you ever hit things?" he asked. "Like stars, I mean."
"Not very often. But I believe the results are quite spectacular. You become a nova almost at once."
He laughed. He did not ask any more questions.
The whining levelled off at last, refusing to go any higher. A collection of needles steadied on the main control-board.
Vray said, "That's it."
The radarman shook his head and said, "They're still with us."
The lines deepened in Thile's face, turning it grim and hard.
"Action stations. We'll try and get them before they get us."
Birrel said, "What do you want me to do?"
"Back in your bunk and strap in. This is liable to be rough."
He shook his head. "There must be something I can do."
"You'd only be in the way," Kara said. She was already removing a protective panel from a control-board ominously marked in red. She smiled, to take the sting out of the words. "You'll need a vac-suit. Here, Rett's will fit you."
She took a baggy-looking suit and a plastic helmet out of a locker and handed it to him. The others were putting on similar suits, leaving the helmets open. Birrel said, "Why?"
"In case we're hulled. If you hear the warning-horn, clap your helmet shut.Fast."
She showed him how and then practically pushed him out of the bridge. He shuffled back to the cabin and lay down on the bunk, feeling worse than he had at any time since the beginning of this hare-brained venture. He was scared, and he didn't mind admitting it. If he had been able to do something, anything at all, it wouldn't have been so bad. But just to lie here alone in this completely incredible ship, thinking of the completely incredible but perfectly real destruction that faced him—that was something no man ought to be asked to do.
He did it.
He was able to sense the "feel" of the ship, and from that to gauge the variations—the slight recoil and shudder as missiles presumably were launched, the greater perturbations of what could only be the near-miss blasts of the enemy weapons. It occurred to him that what these star-folk meant by "conventional weapons" were probably not at all the simple explosive types referred to by that name on Earth. The technical problems involved in launching any kind of missile at all at light-plus speeds were so far beyond him that he didn't even try to figure them. But there was no doubt that it was being done. Every leap and jar of the ship told him that unmistakably.
Even so, Birrel was not prepared for the suddenness and violence of what happened.
There was a crash. He felt it physically and heard it, too, this time, transmitted by the ship's air. He fell upward against the straps as the gravitational axis of the ship was brutally reversed. The lights dimmed to an eerie blue and there was a horrible tortured howling of overtaxed generators. The ship rammed through into normal space with much the same effort as of a speeding car hitting a stone wall, only greatly magnified. Birrel heard the warning-horn start. He clapped his helmet shut, and then inertia flung him into the recoil couch as into a slab of granite and the joints of the ship began to spring around him. Then everything was dead, generators, horn, everything. The ship was silent except for one sound, the hiss of escaping air.
Stunned but still, incredibly, alive, Birrel unfastened the straps and floated out of the couch.
The ship was still moving, but there was no longer any gravity field to speak of. Birrel was in free fall. He floated like a great clumsy balloon out of the cabin and toward the bridge, clawing his way while the ship bent and wavered and wobbled around him, its rigid frame gone limp. As limp as his own body felt. Currents of escaping air whirled papers, garments, pieces of equipment, bits of wreckage wildly around in the interior. He was in a panic lest his helmet be cracked or his suit torn.
The bridge was a shambles of buckled steel and shattered glass. The radarman was crumpled among the remains of his equipment, which had toppled and crushed him. Thile, strapped into the pilot's chair, was stirring feebly. Birrel looked frantically around for Kara.
She was strapped into a recoil chair in front of the fire-control panel. He thought at first she was dead, but when he looked closer he could see that she was breathing. There was nothing he could do for her at the moment and she was safer where she was, so he left her and went to help Thile. There was no sign of Vray at all, except for a few small red icicles formed on the edge of a jagged rift in the hull through which everything movable in the bridge had already been sucked.
Thile's voice came faintly through the helmet audio. "I told you they were better shots."
"Are you hurt?"
"Are you?"
"I don't know yet. Haven't had time."
"Nor me," said Thile. "I can stand up, so I guess I'll live." Blood was trickling from his helmet. He snuffled at it and made futile pawing motions at his helmet. "Well, that does it. Vannevan's won hands down." He swore, a dejected and bitter man. "Four good men dead, and all for nothing. It wasn't even a good try."
He pointed through the riven wall, to the black peaceful gulf beyond with the far stars shining in it.
"See there?"
There was a ship, matching its pace to the slow drift of the derelict. From its slim belly a much smaller craft dropped and jetted fire.
"They'll be aboard us in a few minutes."
Remembering how Vannevan had conducted his questioning at the farmhouse, Birrel could see little hope. If he and Thile and Kara were going to be at Vannevan's mercy, they might better have gone the way of Vray and the radarman.
Unless—
"Listen," said Birrel suddenly, "Listen, there's one thing we might do." He went over to Kara and shook her until she opened her eyes. "There isn't much time, you've both got to play along with me or it won't work. It might give us an edge, to use against Vannevan. Listen—"
He spoke rapidly, forcefully, and they listened, while the life-boat of the Irrian ship came closer, riding its fiery jet across the black gulf outside.
Thile said, "It might work—"
"It'll be dangerous," whispered Kara. "If he finds out—"
"I don't figure I have much to lose anyway," said Birrel dryly. "Hurry up!"
When Vannevan and his men came into the broken ship they found Thile and Kara clinging quietly together, apart from the Earthman Birrel, who was strapped into a recoil chair with his hands bound tightly behind him.
CHAPTER VIII
There were six of the Irrians, counting Vannevan. They wore vac-suits and they were all armed. Two of them went immediately to Thile and Kara and searched them for weapons, but they had none. The time for resistance was past.
Another man, on Vannevan's instructions, began to tear open the lockers that were still intact, looking for papers. The others stood guard. They handled themselves easily, experts at null gravity.
Birrel looked at Vannevan and said sourly, "Out of the frying pan into the fire. I don't know which of you is worse."
Vannevan's eyes were bright, cruel, competent and happy. Very happy. He had wiped out, and with interest, the defeat he had suffered at the farmhouse. He had crushed the Ruunites completely. For him, it was a good day.
He smiled at Birrel. "You see what happens to meddlers."
"I wouldn't call it meddling," Birrel said. "We caught a spy. It was natural to want to know who he was working for, and why."
"When you found out," Vannevan said, "why didn't you report back to your superiors? You were free. I remember distinctly that you were free."
Birrel indicated Kara with a savage movement of his chin. "She talked me out of it, damn her. With a gun."
"So," said Vannevan, and smiled, and shook his head. "But she had no weapon. I myself had seen to that."
"She had one," Birrel said bitterly. "In the hopper. She told me there was another car hidden there for emergencies, and like a fool, I believed her. Instead there was that flying-thing, and she pulled a weapon from inside it. The next thing I knew I was aboard this ship, a prisoner. They were going to take me back to Ruun whether I wanted to go or not."
Kara spoke sullenly. "His people killed Rett. It was the least we could do."
"Listen," said Birrel, struggling angrily against the straps that held him. "I don't give a curse what quarrel you have between you. I don't care if you blow each other's worlds out of the sky. I'm an Earthman. I don't belong here. I—"
He looked around at the broken ship, at space gaping monstrously beyond the riven hull. It was not difficult for Birrel to let an expression of fear come into his face.
"I want to go back," he said.
Vannevan looked at him. "How badly?"
Birrel would not meet his eyes. He muttered, "Bad enough."
"Well," said Vannevan. "We'll see." He motioned to one of his men. "Cut him loose. Did you find anything?"
The Irrian who had been searching shook his head, and Thile said, "I could have told you. We don't keep written records."
Vannevan shrugged and said, "Let's go."
They floated gracefully through the ship, with Birrel lumbering and floundering in their midst. They passed through the airless lock and into the life-craft. In a short time they were being taken up into the belly-pod of the Irrian ship, and a little while after that Birrel found himself a prisoner with Thile and Kara in a locked cabin.
The ship paused only long enough to finish the destruction of the derelict. Then it went into overdrive, on its way to Ir.
During the rest of the voyage, knowing full well that they were being watched, the three kept up their pretense of hostility. But Birrel came more and more to admire Thile and Kara. They were personally defeated and in a desperate situation. Their mission was a failure. Their world and way of life, which had hung on that mission, were threatened with destruction. But they clung quietly to their hope and courage and never whined—in striking contrast to Birrel himself, whose part called for constant complaint.
Birrel thought he was establishing himself sufficiently well as a frightened man who might be talked into doing almost anything for the right reward. He hoped so. Because not only his own life but the lives of Thile and Kara depended upon that, not to speak of the safety of several worlds, including his own. He was a little upset to discover that Kara's safety loomed larger in importance than anything else. He decided then that he was in love with her.
There came finally a time when the warning rang, and the lights burned blue and the ship shuddered, and then the port unmasked.
"We're out of overdrive," said Thile. "We're there."
An awe fell on Birrel as he looked out the port with them. The ship, in normal space again, was sweeping in a curved pattern toward a sun whose diamond incandescence eclipsed the stars.
Almost lost in that overpowering glare, three points of light swung far on the other side of this system. It was toward the biggest of the three that Thile and Kara were gazing.
"Ruun," whispered Kara. "If they only knew, if we could only get a message to them—"
Thile said bitterly, "What good would it do even if wecouldsend a warning? Our cautious government would merely say, as they did before, 'You have no proof that the Irrians mean war, and without proof we cannot act'."
The ship swung on in its landing-pattern and now, below, Birrel saw a planet coming up toward them.
It was a scarred world of black-and-green. He thought at first that these were land-and-water divisions, but as they went lower he saw that they were not—that the green were fertile plains but that the ominous black areas were utterly lifeless lands, black and blasted and barren.
"That's what the oligarchs of Ir have made of their world," said Kara. "Those burned-out regions are the scars of their wars between themselves. And now, with no fissionable matter left, they must go to space for the means of destruction!"
The ship went down toward one of the wide green areas. There was a city here—a far-stretching grimness of gray, massive buildings, with a movement of hoppers and ground-cars over and through it. A spaceport lay outside the city, with the silver towers of many ships there flashing back the diamond sun.
They felt the landing. Then there was silence. They waited for Vannevan to come, but he did not. Instead, armed Irrian guards came and marched them out of the ship onto a blackened concrete apron. They stood there for a few minutes, in a chill wind.
Birrel thought, shivering, "Not Earth, this world I stand on. Not my own world—"
The diamond blaze of sunlight was wrong, the color of the sky was wrong, the too-light feeling of his body was strange. The silver ship behind them, the great gray city ahead, all wrong, queer—
"Remember your plan," whispered Kara.
Birrel steadied. He had a part to play, and upon how he carried it through might depend their last slender chance. He played that part now.
He gave a vivid imitation of a man who was in a panic. He looked up at the sun and cried out and shut his eyes, and then opened them again and looked wildly around him. Then, crying out in a voice edged with hysteria, he broke back toward the spaceship.
The guards grabbed him and hauled him back. He told them shrilly, "I can't stay here, I won't stay—I want to go back—"
The Irrian guards laughed at him. When a covered vehicle not unlike a light truck came speeding up, they shoved him and Kara and Thile into it and got in after them, still laughing.
As the truck sped into the city, Birrel shivered, and looked at everything in a numb, scared way.
The city was as grim as it had looked from afar. The gray, utilitarian cement building-material used universally did not make for beauty. The men and women in the streets were mostly in a drab sort of coverall garment that was not beautiful either. Birrel saw them looking at the truck and guards as they passed, and he thought there was a sullenness in some of the watching faces. He remembered what Kara had said, that many of the Irrian people were discontented with their oligarchs' rule but were held down tightly. He thought they looked it.
The truck turned finally into a courtyard and stopped. Heavy gates were locked behind it. Birrel and the others were ordered out. He managed to get close to Kara and give her hand a reassuring touch. Then they were taken inside a building made of greenish stone, instead of cement, with ominous-looking horizontal slits in the walls in place of windows.
Inside, without a word of explanation, they were separated. Thile and Kara were marched away up a stairway while Birrel's guards took him on down a main hallway. The hall was painted a utilitarian gray and it had guards stationed at regular intervals. About halfway down there was a door with a double guard in front of it. Birrel's armed escort stopped him here, spoke to the guard, who spoke to someone inside by means of an intercom with a small video screen. Presently the door opened and Birrel was ushered inside.
Vannevan sat at one side of a big square table. A second man, older than Vannevan and that much more experienced in the ways of those who wage war out of choice and not necessity, sat behind it. His face was a mask, his curiously opaque eyes watching Birrel narrowly as the guards were sent away.
Vannevan said, "This is our Earthman." And to Birrel he said, "This is Wolt, our Minister of Defense."
Birrel refrained from making the obvious comment. From here on he was on his own and had to be careful. Any hope of advantage he might gain by making the Irrians think he was their not unwilling tool could be lost by a single incautious word.
"I understand," said Wolt, "that the Ruunites kidnapped you and brought you into space by force."
"They did."
"A serious act. And I understand that you are quite anxious to return to your world."
Birrel said eagerly, "Can I, is there any way? I can't take this, space and stars and a world I never saw, I've got to get back—"
He saw Wolt and Vannevan watching him keenly as he babbled in pretended hysteria, and he thought they looked satisfied by what they saw.
Wolt said, "Some of our ships will be going back to Earth on a mission. You could go back with them, if—"
"If?" prompted Birrel eagerly.
Vannevan answered. "You're a secret agent of a great Earth power. You could assist our mission."
Now Birrel's face became apprehensive, cautious. "Just how do you mean that, Vannevan? Listen, I want to go back, sure. But I'm not going to betray any secrets or help you steal plutonium or—"
Wolfs hard voice cut in. "Let's consider the situation realistically. The loss of some fissionable material will make very little difference to Earth, with its enormous resources. Isn't that so?"
Cautiously, grudgingly, Birrel said that he couldn't see that it would make much difference, no.
"Now you must accept one fact. No matter what you as an individual may or may not do, we are going to take those materials. The very life of our planet depends on it. You understand that?"
"Yes."
"Very well. Now the decision that faces you is this. Will you be doing your world a greater service by denying us the information we want and thereby forcing us to take possible violent measures in carrying out our mission—or by helping us do it quietly and thus saving a great number of lives?"
"Think of the weapons we have," Vannevan said. "Think how your Earthmen are armed. You know how much chance they have of fighting us off."
Birrel thought they would have a very good chance, but he didn't say so. He frowned, and looked uneasily at the floor.
"What would you want me to do?"
"Vannevan tells me that your people are in possession of a certain probe-ray record that was taken from our man. We'd want that back."
"That's impossible," Birrel said. "The President himself couldn't get at it."
Wolt shrugged. "In that case, you would have to supply us with similar information."
There was a long silence. Then Birrel said, with just the right lack of conviction,
"No, I can't do it."
Vannevan stood up. "I think we'd better show him the cavern, Wolt. I don't believe he understands yet just how much the safety of Earth depends on him."
Wolt nodded. He rose, too, and walked to the wall. It appeared perfectly blank and solid, but under the pressure of his hand a segment of it swung in, revealing a tiny lift. The three men got in, the door closed, and the lift plunged down.
Birrel tried to keep his excitement well hidden. His act was already paying off—apparently they were about to show him something that even the Ruunites didn't know about.
Just how he might use that knowledge to help himself and his two friends he could not figure yet. But his stretch in the OSS had taught him well. Keep your mind alert and flexible, play it by ear, and wait for the break which may come in a hundred ways and from the most unexpected sources.
The lift let them out onto a narrow platform beside a car that ran from a track through a tunnel hollowed roughly out of bedrock underneath the city. They got into it and the car shot through stale darkness relieved by a few dim lights. It went fast.
Birrel stole a glance at the other two men, and decided against any precipitate action. Vannevan had something hidden in his hand, and it would be something small and nastily potent as a weapon, he was sure. He'd wait, play it along—
There was light again, sudden and bright. The car burst into it, into vast and unexpected space. For a second Birrel thought they had come back to the surface again. Then he saw the rocky vault high overhead and the walls going away on either side and he knew it was a mammoth cavern.
The car stopped. They stepped out onto a platform.
"This way," said Wolt. "I want you to see it all."
They moved off the platform and onto a railed shelf cut out of the rocky wall. And Birrel stared in amazement.
The end of the tunnel and the shelf on which they stood were about halfway up the cavern wall. Below, and stretching away as far as he could see, rank upon rank of great metal shapes stood, some painted in dour red or gray, others naked, gleaming steel or copper. There was no one in the cavern, no sound, no movement—nothing but the brooding silence and the loom of the endless rows of enigmatic mechanisms.
Wolt and Vannevan looked down on them, with the faces of men who see a beautiful and splendid vision. And Wolt said,
"Do you know what those are?"
Birrel said, "No."
"And how should you? Your world is still in the nursery. Those are weapons—or they will be, when they are mounted in ships. Mighty weapons, that lack just one thing—the fissionable matter that must power them. The matter that our world doesn't have. Perhaps you understand now why we must raid your atomic stockpiles?"
"But," said Birrel, staring wide-eyed at the terrifying array of giants below him, "where are your ships? You'd need hundreds—"
"We have them," Vannevan said. "All we need to put at end to the domination of Ruun forever."
He turned to Birrel with an expression of serious and friendly candor that might have fooled him if he not known Vannevan so well.
"We have no interest whatsoever in Earth as a conquest. But don't overlook the fact that now the Ruunites know how rich your planet is. They might decide to take it over, just as they've taken over every world in this system but Ir. So in helping us break Ruun's power, you're actually protecting your own world. Now what do you say?"
Birrel looked out over the silent cavern with the endless ranks of deadly machines. He pretended to be miserable, torn between doubt and longing. Finally he said,
"I've got to think it over. Give me time—"
Wolt started to speak, but Vannevan shot him a look and said easily, "Of course, take all the time you want. There will be several days before the ships are ready."
"Ships?"
"Going to Earth. I'll be going with them, of course, to lead the raid. Or I should say, ahead of them. They'll wait in space until they get my signal. You could come back with me, if you decide to help."
Again, on a note of desperation, Birrel said, "I've got to think."
They took him back to the car and through the tunnel and into the building again. There guards took him upstairs and placed him in a small square room without even slits in the wall, furnished with a bed, a table, and a chair. They locked the door and left him alone there, with nothing to do and nothing to see, and nothing even to hear but the soft blowing of air through an iron-barred duct in the ceiling.
Maximum security, and no distractions. In this place a man couldn't do anything but think.
Food was brought. The guard who brought it admitted it was now night outside, but he refused to say anything about Kara and Thile, where they were or if they were still alive.
Birrel ate. A little after that the lights went off. He groped his way to the bed and lay down, trying to see a way out, a way to help Thile and Kara and stop the evil that was about to be done, and seeing only darkness.
Eventually, without meaning to, he fell asleep.
He was wakened by a sound. It was a very slight sound, and it took him a minute to identify it as the clink and creak of an iron grating being moved. By that time it was too late.
Somebody was already in the dark room, and before Birrel could call out a man's body was on top of him and strong hands were fastening on his throat.
CHAPTER IX
Birrel had been close to death before, but never closer. Those hands clamped down, shutting off voice and breath, and the weight of a powerful body bore on him, holding him. He heard quick harsh breathing, and then the booming of his own blood in his ears drowned it out. He clawed at the wrists that would not be moved, and felt the first cold edge of darkness sliding over him.
Then memory circuits clicked over—circuits long unused, but needing only the right stimulus to activate them.
Birrel put his two clenched fists together and rammed them upward with the desperate strength of an animal that knows it has to shake itself loose or die. The fists hit something and there was a noise in the dark above him. The hands on his throat loosened a little and he thrashed his arms up and back at the same time he got what purchase he could with his feet and heaved.
The hands let go. The body floundered on him, not wanting to be thrown off. He pounded at it, wildly, viciously, gasping air into his lungs. He felt hair under his fingers. He grabbed a fistful of it and hauled it sideways. Someone whimpered and cursed, not making much noise about it. He hauled and heaved and the body rolled off him and thumped onto the floor. Instantly, Birrel threw himself on top of it.
And now it was his turn.
He dug his knee into a yielding belly and heard the breath go out. Fists flailed at his face but he kept his head pulled in between his hunched-up shoulders. He pawed in the dark and found an ear, and then another one, and he held onto them like handles and beat the skull between them up and down on the floor.
"Who is it?" he snarled. "Vannevan? No, he doesn't like his odds this even. But he sent you, didn't he?"
A hoarse, half-articulate "No!" came from the man pinned beneath him.
Birrel paused. "The devil he didn't."
"The devil he did. I'd kill that murdering bastard too, if I could get my hands on him." The man squirmed and sobbed for breath. "Anyway, why would Vannevan want to kill you? You're going to help him."
"How do you know?" asked Birrel, his eyes narrowing in the dark.
"The whole underground knows it. You're helping him get fissionables from your world. Why do you think I'm here? To keep you from doing it!"
He erupted into sudden action, catching Birrel off guard as he grappled with this new concept of an Irrian underground opposed to Vannevan. It wasn't too surprising, remembering those sullen faces in the streets. But then they were rolling over, clawing and pounding at each other. Now, though, Birrel's movements were chiefly defensive.
"Hold it," he panted. "Hold it! I've got an idea that we're on the same side."
The man laughed hoarsely and went on hunting for his throat.
"All right," said Birrel. "We'll play it your way."
He gave the man a slashing blow with the edge of his hand, guessing at the distance. It hit a little low on the shoulder, but it jarred him enough to slow him down. Birrel moved quickly. In a second he had his forearm under the man's chin, in a strangle-hold. He applied pressure, and the man became quiet.
He let up. "Now will you listen?"
The man whispered, "Yes."
"There's an underground movement here, against Vannevan and Wolt and the other oligarchs?"
"Against war. We're sick of it. You must have seen what it's done to our world. So we organized ourselves when this plan to steal fissionables from another solar system came up." He struggled against Birrel's grip. "Today we heard Vannevan had brought back an Earthman who was going to help—"
"Relax," said Birrel. "I'm not going to help Vannevan do anything." He explained rapidly. "I was stalling for time, waiting for a chance to make a break. Get me out of here, and I'll prove it."
The man remained unconvinced.
Impatiently, Birrel hauled him to his feet. "Two friends of mine, Ruunites, are somewhere in this building. If you could get to me, you can get to them. I want them freed. And I want to talk to the leaders of your underground. Between us I think we might have a chance to stop Vannevan and his party for good. Anyway, what have you got to lose? If your people have me, I can't help Vannevan."
The man said, grudgingly, "Well, all right. I can get to your friends if you really want them freed. I helped build this place." He stepped away from Birrel, rubbing his throat. "Take off your shoes and any metal you have on you."
Birrel did as he was told.
"Now reach up toward the grating. You'll find a knotted rope. Be as quiet as you can."
Birrel climbed the rope, to a place where the duct became level enough to crawl in. He heard the man replace the grating behind them. Then he joined him, and they began a slow mole-like journey through the maze of air-ducts that supplied these inner cells of the Ministry's private prison.
The man found his way quite easily. At every intersection of the ducts luminous code-numbers glowed—"To help us when we make repairs," the man whispered, and laughed. "We use the ducts all the time for spying. I suppose tonight will finish their usefulness, but we'll find some other way."
The underground had known where Thile and Kara were prisoned almost as soon as they had been put there. Twice the knotted rope was let down and twice gratings were removed and then replaced. Birrel went down after Kara himself and took a second or two to hold her in his arms before he lifted her into the duct.
Some time later, he had no idea how long, they had worked their way down below the level of the building and into a dry conduit that their guide said was left over from an earlier day, before the city was rebuilt. The conduit took them for some distance, and then they climbed a flight of wooden stairs into a cellar, and from there went up into the main room of a modest house, where half a dozen active and hard-faced men sat waiting.
They sprang up when Birrel and the others came in, two or three of them pulling weapons. There was a period of heated conversation, and then one of the men shouted for order and got it.
"Now then," he said, "let's hear about it. You first."
He listened, and the others listened, and all the time they watched Birrel with hatred and distrust.
Impatiently, before the man was through telling why he had not killed the Earthman, Birrel broke in on him to speak to Thile and Kara.
"They showed me something today," he said. "Vannevan and Wolt. A cavern full of armaments—enough to blow Ruun out of the sky as soon as they get the fissionable material they need."
Thile said, "We had an idea there was such a place, but we could never pin it down."
"Neither could we," said the man who seemed to be the leader of the group. He looked hard at Birrel. "It's a mighty well-kept secret."
"There's a direct way into it from Wolt's office," Birrel said, and described it. "Now listen. If we can get away, get word to Ruun—"
"If you're thinking of ships, it's impossible. They're too well guarded on the ground, and the batteries would blow you apart before you could clear the atmosphere."
"Well, then," said Birrel, "is there any way to send a message? Can you communicate from world to world?"
"Quite easily," said Thile. "But there it comes down to the same old thing. Proof."
"For God's sake," said Birrel, "how much proof do they need?"
"Quite a bit, to get them to act in time. I assume that's what you have in mind, isn't it? Blast the cavern and destroy the armaments?"
"I want to stop that fleet from taking off for Earth. If he hasn't any way to use fissionable matter, Vannevan may not be in such a rush to get it."
The other men were listening now with intense interest. They seemed to have forgotten a lot of their distrust in the excitement of learning about the cavern. The leader, who said his name was Shannock, said fiercely,
"Those armaments have taken years of work and a fortune in money, taxed out of our pockets. They've kept us poor, when we might have been building up trade and business on a peaceful world. If they were wiped out, the war party would go with them."
Thile said wistfully, "It's a beautiful thought. But by the time our cautious leaders on Ruun have assured themselves that they're not making a mistake, it'll be far too late."
"There must be some way," Birrel said, striding around in an agony of frustration. "Someway. Some—listen, can you transmit visually, from world to world? Could you send a picture to Ruun?"
"Of course," said Shannock, rather shocked at his ignorance. "The interplanetary automatic relay system has been working ever since we learned how to build spaceships."
Then a queer look came over his face.
"You mean to transmit right from the cavern?"
"That would be proof enough, wouldn't it?" Birrel demanded. "If we showed them the actual cavern, down to the actual armaments?"
Looking a little stunned, Thile said it ought to be proof enough for anyone. "There's just one question. How are you going to do it?"
"Technically, can it really be done?"
"With a special type of transmitter, yes."
Birrel looked at the men of the underground. "If you'll help, we ought to be able to make a pretty good try. How many men can you muster in a hurry—armed?"
"About twenty," Shannock said. "Besides us."
"And can you get portable equipments?"
"Easy. We can get into the Ministry building, too, by a way we know. But from then on we'll have to fight. Likely some of us won't make it."
"Likely," Birrel admitted, thinking privately that probably none of them would make it all the way. "But since we're all due for the gallows one way or another, this looks like our only chance to make Wolt and Vannevan sweat. Want to try it?"
"Give me half an hour," said Shannock. His eyes blazed with a feral light.
Birrel waited. It was a little less than a half hour and it seemed like no time at all because he spent it talking to Kara, and the things he wanted to say to her would have taken hours. Perhaps years. When finally, armed now and accompanied by twenty-seven determined men of the underground, he and Thile started back through the conduit, Kara went with them. There was no safe place to leave her, and in any case Kara was a soldier, share and share alike. She carried a weapon and walked beside Birrel, and after a while it didn't seem strange to him that she should do so, but rather as it should be.
This time they did not enter the duct system. They came through a drainage pit into an unused cellar, and from there directly into the main hall of the Ministry.
It was past midnight and the building was quiet. The guards stood at their posts, but the eruption of armed men into the hall came so suddenly that they had only time for a few scattered shots before they were dropped. Shouts and sounds of alarm and running feet came from other parts of the building. Leaving one man on the floor of the hall, the attacking party rushed into Wolt's office and barred the door.
"Hold it," Birrel panted, "while I find the right stone."
He pawed frantically at the wall, trying to remember exactly where Wolt had placed his hand. Outside there was a tramping of feet and a growing clamor of voices. "Can't you find it?" Thile said.
Shannock ordered his men back from the door. They grouped themselves behind Birrel with the men who carried the portable transmitter in their center. "You better find it," Shannock said, "or—"
His words were drowned in a roaring crash as the door was blown in. Weapons began to hiss and whine. "Hold them, hold them," Birrel begged. "Here it is—"
The stone shifted under his fingers. The concealed door swung open. Birrel pushed Kara through it and then the men with the transmitter. They packed into the small lift and shot down, still firing as the automatic door slammed shut. They had lost four more in the office.
"There's no guard in the cavern itself, they didn't want too many knowing about it," Birrel said. "But they'll soon be after us from this end."
They wrecked the lift door as well as they could, hoping to cripple it, and then loaded themselves into the car and raced away down the dark tunnel.
"They'll come after us, yes, but it'll take them a little time to walk," said Shannock.
The car rushed out of the dark and into the cavern, stopping by the lighted platform. And in this great space of looming, silent, ugly metal shapes, their voices and the noises they made seemed loud.
Shannock rattled out orders. "Set up your transmitter on the shelf here. Wreck that car. Then we'd better split our forces. Half here to hold the tunnel, half down below in case they come in by some other way."
Thile and Kara stayed with the technicians. They were going to have to do the talking. Birrel stayed at the tunnel mouth, with Shannock's lieutenant and half the men. Shannock and the rest of the men climbed down a spiral steel stair that dropped dizzily from the shelf to the cavern floor.
They had collected extra weapons from their own fallen and from guards they had killed in the building, and with these they crouched down behind the barrier of the wrecked car.
Birrel watched the technicians out on the shelf. He had gathered that they had ways of surmounting what would have been insurmountable difficulties on Earth, using types of impulses and rectifiers and carrier-beams unknown there. The equipment did not particularly resemble television equipment as he knew it. Anyway, the technicians seemed to know what they were doing. He hoped they did. It would be a pity to go to all this trouble for nothing.
He saw Thile, and then Kara, making animated gestures as they talked into the transmitter. They were, apparently, going to have time at least to get the message on its way. Then, with terrifying unexpectedness, the voice of God seemed to speak from the air, deafening them.
"Lay down your arms!" it said. "Surrender—you are surrounded on all sides—"
"Amplifiers," said Birrel. "They must have needed them to order things done, in a place this size. Look out, now. They'll rush us any minute—"
And they did, coming out of the dark tunnel in a fury of flashing beams from their weapons.
From behind the wrecked car someone threw an energy-grenade and then another. The results were a little too good. The whole roof of the tunnel fell in, effectively blocking it to the enemy, but also sealing off any possibility of fighting their way back out through it.
Birrel looked around. Thile and Kara and the technicians were still sticking to their task. Down below, on the cavern floor, Shannock had driven back an attack, but from up here Birrel could see the men hiding among the looming machines and knew how badly Shannock was outnumbered.
He flung himself down the spiral stair, and the others followed. The loudspeakers roared monotonously overhead, ordering them to surrender. Birrel took up a position behind a huge looming metal bulk and then looked up at the shelf. Thile, Kara and the technicians had disappeared. A second later he saw them coming at breakneck speed down the stair, and in almost the same second something exploded with a blinding flash on the shelf and the transmitter vanished.
"Surrender," said the amplifiers. "We will grant you a fair trial if you do, but if you do not you will be killed to the last one. Surrender—"
Thile and Kara joined Birrel behind his metal bulwark, panting.
"Did you get through?" he cried.
"We don't know. There wasn't time to receive acknowledgement."
"Here they come!" yelled Shannock.
And they came, slipping among the looming shapes of potential destruction, firing, killing, being killed, being for the second time driven back.
And now for a moment the amplifiers fell silent and another voice spoke close at hand. Vannevan's voice.
"Count your dead. You can't replace them, but we can. How long can you hold out?"
"As long as there's one of us left!" Shannock shouted back.
"That won't be long, will it? Don't be a fool, man. Surrender."
Birrel answered him. "You'll be the one to surrender, when the ships come from Ruun."
Vannevan laughed. "The Earthman. You still think the Ruunites will fight, eh? They won't."
They attacked again, and were again fought off—or rather, Birrel thought, they withdrew, content to hack away at their opponents' numbers without exposing themselves any more than they had to.
The amplifiers spoke again. But suddenly the voice had a different tone, and it did not talk about surrender.
"A message has just been received from Ruun. Ruunite ships will position over this target in one hour and destroy it. All persons are warned to get clear of the area at once. I repeat that message. Ruunite ships will position—"
Pandemonium broke out in the rebel ranks.
"You hear that, Vannevan?" Birrel shouted. "You're through."
Vannevan did not answer.
The amplifiers fell silent. Birrel looked at Thile, and then at Shannock, who said,
"They're not going away."
"Vannevan," said the amplifiers, "this is Wolt. I am leaving as of now and I advise you to do so. There's no virtue like knowing when it's time to run."
Still there was no sound or sign from Vannevan.
The amplifiers were silent. In the distance were noises made by people going away.
One of the men, impatient, sprang up and into the open aisle between the machines. "Hell," he said, "they must have gone. We'd better—"
He died between words, and suddenly from where they had crept close seven or eight men sprang out and rushed, firing. Vannevan led them. There would be no peace, no surrender, no flight for Vannevan.
He saw Birrel with Thile and Kara and he smiled and flung his weapon up, and Birrel shot him just before his finger touched the firing-stud.
Those of the seven or eight who were still alive threw their weapons down.
Shannock said, "I guess we can go now."
They followed the captive soldiers to the far entrance of the cavern, leaving Vannevan where he had fallen among the machines.
An hour later, Birrel stood with the others in the forefront of a close-packed crowd outside the city, and watched the great Ruunite ships position over a particular spot. Mighty lightnings crashed downward from their bellies. Smoke and dust and shattered rock rose in a vast cloud, and settled again, and there was a huge gaping hole in the ground, and still the lightnings pounded at it until there was nothing left of the cavern or anything it had contained.
Shannock and his men cheered mightily. The bulk of the Irrian crowd watched silently, not used yet to the idea of peace.
Birrel, oddly enough, was not thinking of Ruun or Ir, but of Earth.
CHAPTER X
The ship swept in toward the night side of Earth in a great curve, and first of all Earthmen that had ever lived, Birrel felt the sharp, nostalgic emotion of coming back to the world that would always be "the" world.
He was in the bridge with Thile and Kara. Kara was very silent, looking at the shadowed planet-face ahead, not looking at Birrel at all. But Thile was busy, and vocal about it.
"It's hard enough to make a landing on a strange planet," he said. "But to have to do it secretly, without being seen—well, I'm glad this will be the last time."
The last time, Birrel thought. The last ship that would come from the stars to Earth—at least, for a long, long time. He didn't like that thought. He had argued against it, back there at the other system, at Ruun.
The men who governed Ruun were wise and well-meaning men—but obstinate. They had welcomed Birrel. They had been grateful to him. They had agreed to return him to his own world. But on one thing, they were adamant. There would be no sudden opening up of the starways, no open contact between Ruun and Earth.
Birrel, his head full of visions of a sudden leap into the stars by the men of Earth, had pleaded. But in vain.
"Your world Earth is not ready," had said the leader of the Council of Ruun. "It is not even one world, yet. When it has become one—when it has forgotten the folly of wars and weapons—then we will not need to come to you. You will come to us."
He had softened that final refusal by an offer. "But you, who have done much for us, can stay here at Ruun if you wish."
"I can't," Birrel had said heavily. "I'm an agent, with a mission. If I didn't go back, those who sent me would never know what happened—they'd live in perpetual apprehension of attack from outside. I have to return with my report."
"Then you will be taken. And after that, no more of our ships will go there."
And now this last ship from outside was quietly coming down toward the nighted face of Earth, and Kara still was silent, and there was a sickness in Birrel's heart.
Thile, by the control-panel, told the helmsman, "Now softly, softly, are you trying to wake the whole damned continent?—softly—ah!"
They had landed.
Thile and Kara went down the ladder in the darkness, with Birrel. They stood with him by the loom of the ship.
The tall trees around them were black and vague, but the smell of pine was on the keen air, and the smells, the sounds, the feel of everything was subtly right again.
"We landed a lot farther south than last time, so you can soon find a road and people," said Thile. "Well, lad—"
He shook hands with Birrel, and then he turned and shook hands with Kara, and kissed her, and said, "You're a bloody fool but I'd do the same thing," and turned and started back up the ladder.
Birrel said, finally, "Kara—"
"Yes," she said. "I'm staying."
He took her in his arms and could only speak her name again, and then she said, "We have to stand clear, before the ship takes off."
"I can't let you do this!" he cried. "It's why I wouldn't ask you to do it. No ship will come again, and you'll weary of it here, and—"
"Yes, yes," she said, as one might quiet a troubled child, "I know all that. But right now, we must get clear of the ship."
Minutes later, from a ridge a thousand yards away, they heard a boom of thunder and saw a quickly-muffled blast of flame, and then glimpsed the great silver bulk riding skyward, vanishing almost at once.
Birrel, holding Kara, looked up with her into the starry sky and saw the flying shadow against the stars, that was there for an instant and then was not there at all.
He wondered if, in the years ahead, she would look more and more with memory and longing at that starry sky. He hoped, he prayed, that she would not.