Trehearne heard someone ask, "Who was Lankar?"
"One of Orthis' last pursuers, who left a secret log of the pursuit to ease his guilty conscience. Enough of it survived—"
Joris said, "The hell with Lankar. Get on with it."
"We had to push the star-maps back in time—galactic motion, star streaming, a million complicated problems of relative motion and proper motion, back five hundred years and then another five hundred, and then correlate them. Handling an almost unlimited number of variables like that, it could only be done on the biggest math-machines and electronic computers at Llyrdis. And that meant it all had to be done secretly, bit by bit. That work's been going on for a long, long time."
Edri drew a long breath that was coupled with a racking yawn.
"The resultant charts indicate an unnamed dark star following an orbit here, outside the main stream of the Galaxy." He traced a line with his finger. "These charts for the fringing stars are incomplete, as you know. There's nothing to draw anyone out to these godforsaken regions and they've never been properly explored. But according to our calculations, that dark star was in the right place a thousand years ago and Orthis' life-skiff was launched from there. Now the wheel of the Galaxy has turned so, taking the dark star with it...."
He laid his hand on the crossing of two marked lines on the chart, and looked at them.
"That's our destination, Joris. If we're right, the ship of Orthis is there. If we're wrong—well, somebody else will have to try again in another thousand years."
He remained standing, silent, his hands braced on the table, too tired to move. Joris rubbed his bleary eyes and began to read the coordinates aloud from the chart. Mechanically the Second Officer set up the combination on the finder.
Joris moved heavily back to the pilot chair. When the finder clicked off the new course, he set the Mirzim on it. Then he spoke over the intercom to Radar. "What's the position of that cruiser?"
A croaking voice answered him. He listened, and then turned to the others. "Closer," he said. "Always closer."
Trehearne's mind turned back to its constant half-waking nightmare. The cruiser, following, hanging on, dogged, persistent, relentless. He lived over painfully every maneuver, every trick by which Joris had managed to delay their pursuer, to grasp a little more time, a little more distance.
He remembered the last-minute plunge into a dark nebula when the cruiser was almost close enough to range them. He remembered the turning and twisting and doubling inside the blackness of the cloud, where the absorptive cosmic dust fogged the radar. They had lost the cruiser there. They had got clear away and for a time they had hoped. They had made it to this fringe sector—and then the red spark showed again on the screen, coming closer, always closer.
There were times when Trehearne forgot the physical fact of the cruiser, a ship of ordinary metal officered and manned by ordinary Vardda spacemen. At such times it seemed to him that theMirzimwas pursued by a demoniac nemesis striding naked across the plunging gulfs—a nemesis wearing Kerrel's face with Kerrel's hands outstretched to grasp them.
Sometimes Shairn's face was there beside Kerrel's, white, unreadable, a misty cloud that blotted out the stars.
The hoarse voice of the radar man croaked at intervals. The ship fled on toward the dark star.
Joris finally turned around. The table had been taken out, the charts and the toilsome calculations rolled up and shoved away. Arrin lay on the deck against the after bulkhead, sleeping. He would not leave the bridge until he knew whether or not his life and work had gone for nothing. Edri sat beside him. He was not asleep.
Joris said flatly, "It isn't going to work."
Edri said nothing. He waited.
Joris went on, as though he hated what he was saying, but had to say it. "Look at it. As soon as I start deceleration the cruiser will begin to cut our lead to nothing. And they're stressed for less deceleration time than I can make without tearing theMirzimto pieces. What'll happen? They'll be down on us before we can even begin our search."
Edri nodded. He leaned back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. He said, "They know now what we're after. What do you suppose Kerrel would do if he found the ship of Orthis?"
Nobody answered that. There was no need to answer. A heavy silence followed, during which Trehearne thought of the messages that had gone out across the Galaxy from the cruiser's ultra-wave—guarded messages that betrayed by their very spareness the desperate nature of this mission, urgent requests for other Council cruisers to close up with all speed. But those others were still too far away to matter. Whatever happened would have happened before they could come up. Kerrel was going to finish this alone.
Edri said, "What are we going to do?"
Joris rubbed his big hand over his stubbled face and blinked and said, "Our only chance, if Orthis' ship and secret are really there, is to get the ultra-wave equipment to it in time for what we planned." He went on slowly, "I think our life-skiff could carry that equipment. If we drop the skiff it could travel on constant velocity for a while before it would have to decelerate. Meanwhile I could swing theMirzimon another course, running back along the rim of the Galaxy, away from the dark star. The cruiser would follow me. Chances are, with their radar concentrated on me to catch my lateral-impulse pattern, they wouldn't notice the skiff at all when she started deceleration."
He sighed. "They'd catch us, of course. But theMirzimisn't going to keep on forever after the beating she's taken. The generators are in bad shape. But we could keep going long enough to give you time."
Edri thought it over. "I don't like it," he said. "But it looks as though it's that or nothing."
Joris was muttering under his breath about maximum loads and capacity. "The main ultra-wave equipment," he said, "and three men. The skiff would keep that. We'd keep the auxiliary ultra-wave set here, of course."
"Who can you spare? You'll need all your flight-technicians."
"He can spare me," said Trehearne. "I'm the most non-essential. And I can still stand up if I have to."
Joris nodded. "Yes. Quorn has to go to handle the ultra-wave, of course—and he can handle the skiff all right."
"Who else?"
"You," said Joris.
Edri looked at the sleeping Arrin. "He ought to go instead of me. He's worked for it longer than I have." It was obvious that Arrin was unable to go anywhere, and Edri sighed. He pulled himself erect. "All right, then. Come on, Trehearne. We'll start loading."
The skiff was contained in a cell of its own, sunk in the side of theMirzim—a miniature starship with a flight range long enough to give the crew of a disabled ship a chance to reach safety. But there was no use trying to think of safety any longer.
Trehearne routed out every man that was off-station and could stand erect. Following Edri's orders he stripped the skiff of everything they wouldn't need. Quorn oversaw the removal of the heavy ultra-wave radio equipment from theMirzimand its loading into the skiff. He seemed unnecessarily particular about it. Trehearne swore and sweated but got it done. Then he went back to the bridge with Edri and Quorn. Joris studied his instruments.
"Pretty soon," he said. He gave Quorn his flight instructions. "Trehearne is still a lubber," he remarked, "but he knows enough by now to give you a hand when you need it."
Edri said, "Surrender as soon as you're challenged, Joris."
Joris laughed, a pallid ghost of his old loud roar. "I will. Right now, I'm too tired to die." He glanced again at the instruments. "Time to go."
They looked at each other, these fatigue-drunken red-eyed men whom a dream had dragged to the edge of the universe, and could find nothing to say in this moment of their parting.
"Good luck," muttered Edri then and turned away.
"You're the ones who're going to need it," Joris called after them.
Trehearne went through after Quorn and Edri into the skiff. They sealed off and then Quorn took the controls and waited, watching his chronometer. His hand grasped loosely about a red switch marked RELEASE.
He closed the switch.
There was a squeal and grind of machinery, a sense of super-swift forces at work as the complicated releasing-gear did its work, an instant of extreme pressure, and the skiff had left theMirzim. They could see nothing but they knew that skiff and ship had already diverged far apart at their unthinkable speeds.
Quorn watched his instruments while Trehearne and Edri sat looking at nothing, afraid to sleep lest they should not be able to wake again. They sat, and swayed, and waited, until presently Quorn started his forward generator and began deceleration.
Trehearne lost track of things. Part of the following time he was unconscious, or nearly so. The rest of it he observed as in a confused dream. He thought of how he had once been wildly eager for starflight. But he managed to do the things that Quorn required of him.
The port cleared. It had no adapter and functioned as a port only at visual speeds. Now, ahead of them, Trehearne could see a huge bulk of darkness against the outer dark, illumined only faintly by the galactic light.
"There it is," said Edri. "The dark star." His voice shook a little.
They swept closer, still slowing down. "It has a planet," said Quorn. "There, catching the starshine—"
"Two," said Trehearne. "I see two."
Two dimly gleaming bodies, dead worlds clinging to a long dead sun out here at Galaxy edge. The glow of the Milky Way touched them, the ghostly glow of candles at a wake, and only emphasized their drear darksomeness and lonesomeness.
Edri whispered, "Well try the outer planet first. Give me a hand, Trehearne."
They crawled aft between the crowded banks of equipment to a detector that had come from theMirzim'shold. Edri fumbled at it.
"In Orthis' day they used radioactive fuel, of course," Edri mumbled. "We calculated its half-life. Even supposing his bunkers were nearly empty there should be enough left to register on this counter. A teacupful would do it."
Trehearne helped Edri adjust the shielding apparatus on the mechanism until the needle was still.
"What about natural radioactive deposits on the planets themselves?" he asked.
"We get a break there. Too old. The last radioactive element will have practically died out millions of years ago." He raised his voice. "Keep the skiff as low as you dare, Quorn. The counter has a wide sweep. Take it slow."
He crouched over the telltale needle. Trehearne moved forward again.
The planet was small, less than two thousand miles in diameter. Between the intense gloom and the motion of the skiff he could see nothing but a black featureless desolation, rifted here and there with white that he took to be the frozen remains of an atmosphere. He thought what it would be like to land there and shivered.
They quartered and swept the planet carefully. The telltale needle of the counter remained motionless. Edri said, heavily, "We'll go on. Pray we find it on the other planet. Pray Orthis didn't come down on the dark star. It would take forever to find him there."
Quorn fed in power and cleared away. The port dimmed again, and Edri moaned.
"He's about out," Quorn said. "Looks like whatever is done, we'll have to do the most of it."
The second world was larger than the first by three times or more. It was not content to be featureless. It thrust up gnawed and shattered ranges, stripped bones of mountains sheathed in frozen gases. It showed forth dreary plains coated white with congealed air, glistening faintly in the light of the great galactic wheel. It turned toward the watchers the naked beds of its vanished oceans, sucked dry to the deepest gulf. It displayed the scars of its long dying, the brutal wounds of internal explosion, the riven gashes of a shrinking crust. A hideous world that seemed to remember beauty still and to resent the cruelty of death.
Edri whispered, "Pray—pray that the damned thing moves." Instead of doing so, he cursed the needle that it did not stir.
"Keep going," said Trehearne.
They kept going.
The needle quivered.
Edri let out a hoarse cry. "Easy!Easy!" Tears began to run down his cheeks. He sobbed. The needle was still again.
"Circle!" Trehearne shouted to Quorn. "Circle till we get it centered."
He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted salt, and wondered how it got there.
Quorn swung the skiff around in a tightening spiral until Edri said, "Now! Let her down."
He scrambled forward, thrusting his face against the port, trying to see. Quorn switched on a landing-light. The blue-white blaze lit up a circular area below, the light intensely bright, the shadows intensely black. Its beam went sharply down.
They followed it. It was as though the skiff were poised on that pillar of light, sinking downward. They were above a planetary surface racked and tortured by final diastrophism. Towering miles high, loomed a mighty cliff of riven rock. In front of it a chasm yawned, and beyond the chasm a drear and tumbled landscape stretched dim under the great sword of the Galaxy.
They started down along the face of the titanic cliff. Looking at the chasm at its base Trehearne began to get uneasy.
"There's no ship here," he said. "The counter must have picked up some last radiation from deep down in that chasm."
Quorn agreed with him. But Edri said, "No, keep going." Trehearne could feel him tremble.
They went on down the face of the giant, looming wall. Trehearne pointed suddenly. "Isn't that a ledge?"
The hard bright edge of the beam cut across a shelf of rock that jutted out halfway down the cliff. Quorn swung the skiff in closer. Something on the ledge glistened dully under the light. Quorn let the skiff drop with a sickening rush. Detail sprang clear—shattered rock, ancient magma, puddles of frozen air in the hollows. And among them an ovoid shape, symmetrical, smooth, giving back a metallic glint.
Edri said the name of Orthis, as though it were a prayer.
TWENTY
Quorn had set the skiff down on the ledge. They had scrambled into pressure suits. They had forgotten that they were already three-quarters dead. Awkward in the clumsy armor, stumbling on the jagged rock, slipping on the patches of frozen air, they clawed their way toward the goal they had crossed a Galaxy and gambled their lives to find. Above them the ghastly cliff leaned outward against nothingness, below them the abyss plunged down into the dead heart of a world. Beyond them was a spreading desolation, and in the black sky the awful rim of the Galaxy lay like a blazing sword of light.
Trehearne was aware of the silence. He had never been on an airless world before. He felt the impact as his metal boot struck against a shard of rock, but it made no sound. All he could hear was the harsh breathing of Quorn and Edri, transmitted to him by the helmet audio.
The ship of Orthis loomed before them, lightless, lifeless, cradled in the ashes of destruction. It had a look of patience. It had lain here for a thousand years, untouched by time or rust, entombed in silence and the endless night, eternal as the dead suns that rove forever in uncorrupting space. It seemed that it could wait until the end of the universe, cherishing its trust. Awe came upon Trehearne, and with it a kind of fear.
They found the lock port. It stood wide open, the valves still clean and shining. There could be no corrosion here, with every atom of air and moisture frozen in the purifying cold. The light of Trehearne's belt-lamp showed him, on the floor of the lock chamber, the scored marks of a man's boot. They might have been made only yesterday.
The three men paused outside that open port. They looked at each other through the glassite plates of their helmets, and their faces were strange. Then Trehearne stepped aside, and Quorn also. Edri bent his head. He moved forward to the port. Slowly, without sound, he clambered into the ship of Orthis.
The others were close behind him. Their belt lamps cut hard slashes of light across the airless dark. They passed through the lock chamber and came into a corridor running fore and aft. It was utterly still. The heavy drag of their boots on the metal deck made not the slightest sound. It was like walking in a fever-dream, and the deadness of the ship, the black, inert, unstirring deadness, was more oppressive than the desolation in which it lay. The rocks and cliffs had never moved, they had never been built by the hands of men, no thought or hope had ever entered into them. Trehearne's skin crept in little waves of cold. He could hear the beating of his own blood in his ears, the dull throbbing of his own heart. He moved with the others, lonely figures in a tomb, and he started like a child at every shape the light picked out.
The whole after section of the ship was a laboratory. Much of the delicate equipment was shattered, either by speed-vibration or a hard landing. Trehearne could make nothing of the tortured mass of metal and splintered crystal, but Quorn said, very softly, "He was studying interstellar radiation. Most of that stuff is beyond me, but I can see that much."
One section of the laboratory contained a complicated mass of coils and prisms and intricate banks of reflectors arranged around what must have been a great central tube. There was a small platform at the focal point of the mechanism, fitted with straps. Along one bulkhead was a stack of metal cages for experimental animals. Several of the little creatures were still there. They had died, the quick death of airlessness and cold, but their bodies were still perfect. They had, then, survived the voyage. The ultra-speeds of interstellar flight had not harmed them.
The men searched for a time among the wreckage, and then Edri said, "There's nothing for us here. No good trying to figure out the apparatus. They couldn't do that in all the years they had the ship impounded, when it was all in shape. Most of it Orthis designed and built himself."
Trehearne looked again at the small furry bodies in the cages, lying as though in sleep. Somehow they made the betrayal of Orthis doubly cruel—that even beasts could be given the freedom of the stars, that so many generations of the races of so many worlds had been denied.
They went into the corridor, retracing their steps, and passed on forward. They found the living quarters, small and spare and monastically neat. The coverings of the bunk were rumpled and the pillow still retained the hollow where a man's head had lain. Trehearne shivered. Presently they went on, to the bridge.
Trehearne realized then what an act of heroism it had been to push this antique ship to the limits of the Galaxy and beyond. The instruments were so few and rudimentary, the system of controls so crude. There was a locking device, a primitive Iron Mike that could keep the ship on its course without human attention, and he thought that only that had made Orthis' lonely flight possible. But the science of star-craft had come a long way since then.
Quorn's voice, held to a whisper as one speaks in a church, reached him on the helmet phone. "It's incredible. This ship wasn't even built for voyaging, it was a spatial laboratory. It's a wonder it survived at all."
Edri drew a long breath, with a quiver in it like a sob. "We still haven't found what we're looking for. Do you suppose it isn't here? Do you suppose that after all...." He didn't finish.
They began to search again. It was Trehearne who found the door in the after bulkhead of the bridge. He pushed it open and looked through into the cabin beyond. The beam of his belt-lamp speared brightly into the immemorial dark.
Involuntarily, he screamed.
Quorn and Edri ran to him. He was clinging to the bulkhead. Cold sweat poured down his face, and his eyes were wide and wild. They looked past him, over his shoulder.
The cabin was small. It was fitted as a library, crammed with metal cases of books, some of them micro-tape volumes of an ancient type, some of them thick ragged notebooks. The knife-sharp light-beams picked them out, in brilliant highlight and black shadow. There was a great table, bolted down, and on the table was a metal box. A man's hand rested there, the fingers open, curled slightly over the edge of the box, protectively, possessively, as though it were something loved and precious.
"Oh God," whispered Quorn, "look at him...."
He sat in a metal chair behind the table. His head was lifted, looking toward the port in the outer wall that showed the black sky slashed across with the mighty fires of the Galaxy. The hard light showed him clearly. He was an old man. The years of his life had been many and unkind. They had shaped his face as though from iron, gouging the lines deep, hammering the ridges hard, driving out all traces of youth and hope and whatever laughter there might have been to forge a mask of bitter anger, and reproach, and in the end, despair. It seemed to Trehearne that he could read a whole life history in that face, caught forever in the moment of death, when surely the man was crying out upon whatever gods he worshipped, demandingWhy?
Edri began suddenly to laugh. "Orthis. It's Orthis. He's been here waiting for us to come in...."
Quorn raised a hand in its heavy gauntlet and struck Edri's helmet so that Trehearne could hear the ringing in his own audio. "Shut up. Damn you, Edri. Shut up." Edri stopped laughing. After a moment he said, "For a moment I thought...."
Trehearne muttered, "So did I." Here in the airless utter cold, death held no decay, no change. But there was more to it than the lack of physical corruption. The fire in this man had burned so deep that even death could not erase its scars. Where the lamp-beams caught them, his open eyes seemed still to glow with the unforgotten embers.
For a long time the three men stood, not moving, grouped in the doorway. Trehearne said once, "I think he wanted whoever found him to look inside that box, there under his hand." Orthis' life-work, the future of the Galaxy, held in a little box. They knew it. But still they were not quite ready to go in and take away from Orthis the thing that he had kept so long. And it was strange, Trehearne thought, that in this moment when their emotions ought to be at the highest pitch, when they should be feeling most poignantly the weight of all the centuries of sacrifice and struggle that had led them here, and what it was all going to mean, they were too tired to feel anything very much, only the edges of awe and an instinctive reluctance to approach the dead. He wanted to get away from this funeral ship. Finally he wanted it so much that he went in and tried to move Orthis' hand from off the box. The arm was frozen rigid as a steel bar, and he gave it up, working the box carefully out from under the icy fingers, in horror lest they break.
The others had come slowly in beside him. The box was not locked. He lifted up the lid, and the lamplight showed a notebook bound in cloth. On top of it lay a loose sheet of paper with a few angular lines of writing. Edri picked it up, very clumsily in his armored hands, and held it to the light, reading aloud in a queer flat voice. "I have clung to life this much longer...."
Edri stopped, and coughed, and started over, and Trehearne thought that Orthis listened.
"I have clung to life this much longer to write down for the first time all my formulae, complete and simplified so that they can be understood and used. In them lies the freedom of the stars. I, the first of the star-born, was rejected by the greed and fear of the planet-born. But it will not always be so.
"I shall not see what comes. My ship has already flown too far, I have little fuel, and I am old. Therefore I have set the airlock control and in a few minutes it will open. A swift death, and better than a slow one as the air-pumps fail. After that, I shall wait. What I dreamed will never be forgotten. Some day there will come others who believe as I have always believed, that the stars are for all men."
Edri fell silent. And Quorn said, "He watched the Galaxy for a thousand years, and waited."
Trehearne forced himself to move, to break the spell. "Unless we hurry, it will not have done him any good." He reached out and took the box and shut it, and thrust it into Edri's hands. "Come on. Edri, do you hear me? Come on! We haven't got much time."
Edri looked at the box, and then at Orthis, who had had a thousand years of time. Then he turned and went out, and Quorn went after him, and Trehearne, down the dark corridor and out of the silent ship. Trehearne looked up at the flaming river of stars in the sky and thought what a mighty dream the first of the star-born men had carried with him into the long night.
A sudden panic of haste came over him. Orthis had given them this trust literally with his own hand. If they failed now because they were too slow, too worn out now, at the last, to do what needed to be done.... He began to run toward the skiff, shouting at the others, urging them on, harrying them until they ran too, staggering over the blasted rock. He pushed them inside, a little crazy now himself, talking incessantly about the need for haste. Quorn took off from the ledge. They did not want to be near the ship of Orthis when they did what they were going to do. He sent the light craft racing across the dead world, searching for a place to land.
"Hurry," said Trehearne. "Got to hurry!"
Quorn cursed him savagely. "I'm doing all I can. Shut up and listen. Both of you. Keep your pressure suits on and your helmets ready."
Trehearne stopped talking. He sat, holding his hands tight between his knees, shaking all over. Edri was bent over the notebook from the metal box, reading.
"It's all here," he said. His voice was hoarse with weariness, with emotion he was too numb to feel. "The equations, the formulae, the instructions for constructing the equipment, the instructions for using it. I don't understand them, but others will." He looked at Trehearne with red-rimmed eyes. "Orthis has a foreword here. He was the first of the star-born. The mutation began spontaneously on that first long voyage. The constant vibration of speed, not speed as we know it now but more than the human body was used to, speed approaching the velocity of light, and the impact of interstellar radiation on the living cell. That's what did it. Orthis was the end-product of four generations of breeding under those conditions. He was nature's first attempt to create Galactic Man, to readjust the human body to meet new needs. And the thing he labored on so long was the reduction of that long natural process to a workable formula that could accomplish the change in one generation instead of four. God, I'm so tired I'm repeating this stuff like a parrot from Orthis' own words. What you do, of course, is alter the germ plasm of both parents before conception takes place, and ... anyway, it's all here."
Quorn said suddenly, "This place looks as good as any. At least it'll give us a little more cover."
He took the skiff down carefully toward the flat bed of an ancient watercourse. The channel was filled now with frozen air, but in bygone ages it had gouged a deep canyon in the rock, leaving eroded holes and overhangs. Quorn worked the skiff into one of these washed-out places, under the canyon wall.
Edri was going over his book again, making sure, dazed with the hypnosis of exhaustion and the need to be right. He did not dare to fumble or read a single figure wrong. There wouldn't be any time for corrections or recheckings. The weight of the responsibility was so heavy on him that he seemed to be physically shrinking under it. His lips moved constantly. Trehearne did not envy him his job.
Quorn grunted at him and they went aft together to struggle with the ultra-wave equipment. Trehearne was possessed by a demon of urgency, and he had not the slightest idea what he was doing. Quorn gave orders and he obeyed them blindly, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Nerve and temper were worn to the last frayed edge and beyond, and before they were through they were snarling at each other like dogs. Hooking the power leads to the skiff's generators was the hardest task of all, but somehow they finished. They lifted Edri to his feet and sat him down again, still clutching his book, in front of the transmitter. Quorn bent over the control switches. The generators hummed, feeding in the power. Edri was still staring at the book. Trehearne shook him. "Go on," he said. "Talk."
Edri blinked and frowned, looking up at them as though he had forgotten entirely what he had to do. Quorn took Edri's face between his hands and spoke to him, slapping his cheeks gently one after the other as he talked. "Listen, I've got it on the emergency band, covering all channels. Every ultra-wave receiver within its range will pick it up, including non-Vardda communication centers. Edri, do you understand me? The minute Kerrel picks it up he'll be able to center us and come in on our beam. So you've got to make it fast. Fast!"
Edri blinked again, and shivered. "All right. I'll try." He glanced nervously at Trehearne. Quorn made the last dial setting, and then he spoke into the transmitter.
"G-One! G-One! Emergency. Request clearance all channels. Use your recorders! Use your recorders! G-One, clear all channels...."
He motioned violently, and Edri leaned forward. "I may not have time to repeat. We have found the ship of Orthis. Here follow the formulae for the Vardda mutation."
TWENTY-ONE
Edri had begun to read from the notebook. He was going fast, but taking desperate pains to make each syllable clear. Quorn hung tensely over his dials. Trehearne sat motionless, except that his muscles quivered. Sweat ran in his eyes. He was tired. He was so tired that Quorn, three feet away, looked as blurred and indistinct as though he were lost in the haze of distance. Edri's voice went on, and on, and on.
Quorn said hoarsely, "The cruiser has picked us up. They're already trying to jam us. Hurry up."
Edri's face became that of a hunted thing. His voice rose shrill, racing desperately. He turned the last page. He finished it, and then he went back to the beginning and started to repeat. Quorn stood up.
"It isn't any use, we're blanked out. That means the cruiser's close, close enough to...."
He didn't have time to get the rest of the words out. The skiff was shaken suddenly as by a giant hand. Quorn was flung against a bulkhead, and Trehearne lay on the floor. Only Edri, hanging on to the transmitter, still talked.
"Shell burst," Quorn said, getting up again. "They're ranging us down the canyon." He reached for his helmet. The skiff shuddered a second time, harder. Trehearne scrambled painfully to his feet. He tried to jam Edri's helmet down over his head, but Edri fought him, clinging to the transmitter. Quorn laid hold of him and yelled, "You're not getting through any more! Come on!" He closed the master switch. Between them they got Edri's hands loose and the helmet on him. The skiff was racked again, and something broke with a crackle of exploding glass. Trehearne locked his own helmet. Through the audio he could hear Quorn shouting something about the airlock and getting clear before the skiff was blasted flat with them inside it. Half dragging Edri between them, they began to run. Some of the deck plates were already buckled, and there was an ominous shrill whistle of escaping air. They reached the lock and got it open.
Out on the canyon floor a great light blossomed and died. Chunks of rock struck silently against the skiff. The deck leaped under their feet, and the airlock spewed them out as the hull rocked over. They hit the ground hard, too hard. For the space of several seconds they lay where they were, and there were no more shell bursts. Trehearne groaned and sat up. "I guess that was the last one. Quorn? Edri? Somebody answer me."
Edri was silent, but Quorn said thickly, "They know we quit sending. Damn it, I've cut my mouth on the helmet rim and it's bleeding all over me." Trehearne could hear him spitting. He crawled over and shook Edri. Presently Edri said, "Where's the notebook?"
"Still in the skiff."
"We've got to get it...."
"What for?"
"I guess you're right. Did we do it, Quorn? Did we put it through?"
"I don't know, I don't know! They came in on us so fast...."
He got up off the ground, looking at something, and then he pointed, up into the black sky. "Are we going to run," he asked, "or wait?"
Trehearne looked up and down the river bed that was clogged with air, frozen, and then along the cruel, cold line of the cliffs above. "We could breathe for a few hours, all right, till our oxygen gave out. But it hardly seems worth it."
Quorn sat down again. "I guess we wait."
They waited, and the cruiser dropped down silently out of the sky. It was dark in the canyon, where the cliffs cut off the galactic light, but the cruiser's ports shone brightly. Trehearne was almost glad to see them. They were human. They were comforting, after all the night and desolation of a dead world. The airlock opened and a vivid shaft of brilliance shot out of it, going straight on with no air to diffuse it, until it hit the opposite wall of the canyon, near the skiff. Men in pressure suits began to come out of the lock. Trehearne rose. He stepped into the bright beam and walked slowly toward the men. Edri came after him, and Quorn.
A voice he did not know spoke over the helmet phone. "Identify yourselves."
They gave their names, and Trehearne added, "We're unarmed. We're through." There was a certain relief in being through. Whatever happened from here on was out of their hands. They could sit passively and rest, and let it happen. He looked at the ship and thought of warmth and light and food and comfort, and most of all he thought of sleep. Shairn and Kerrel could come later.
The men from the cruiser carried weapons, a type of shock-rifle more deadly than the little tubes that only stunned. They came out a short distance, toward the three bulky shapes that shuffled down the beam of light. The first voice that had spoken gave an order, and the two men went off toward the skiff to search it, their belt lamps bobbing. Then it spoke again to Trehearne and the others. "Keep your hands as high as you can. All right, that's far enough."
Trehearne said, "I told you, we're unarmed."
"Precaution. Stand where you are."
They stood, and were searched.
"Very well," said the officer's voice. "Come aboard."
"No."
One short word, spoken quietly in a voice that Trehearne knew. A voice he had not heard for a long, long time, but that he remembered. Kerrel's voice. Some of the exhaustion in him stirred and drew back, and anger took his place. The men stood in the beam of light, but with their backs toward it, facing their prisoners. The undiffused glare passed around them, leaving their faces in darkness, invisible behind the helmet plates. Trehearne tried to identify Kerrel, but he could not.
The officer said, rather irritably, "But there's no point in standing out here any longer." The case had been long and hard for him, too. "We take off as soon as the search detail comes back."
"Yes," said Kerrel. "But not them. They stay here."
The suited shapes, the faceless and unhuman shapes that had stood together drew apart a little and turned toward each other, as though they tried to pierce the darkness with their peering helmet plates. There was a silence of astonishment, and then Edri said, "That's murder."
The voice of the officer, rising on a note of anger, demanded, "Kerrel, what the hell—Have you gone clean crazy?"
"Is justice a crazy thing?" There was something strange about Kerrel's voice. It was flat and toneless and devoid of passion, the voice of a man with too much inside himself to bear, too much to find escape through any normal channels. "They may have succeeded. Do you understand that? They may, just possibly, have done what they set out to do. Do you know what that would mean?"
"As well as you do. And don't worry about justice, they'll get it. But they'll get it from the Council on Llyrdis, according to law."
"Law," said Kerrel softly. "Once Trehearne received the benefit of our law. I told them then that they were wrong to give it to him. The law is good, I've served it all my life. But there are times when one has to go beyond the law if one is to go on serving it. Leave them here."
Trehearne spoke, for the first time. "It wouldn't do for me to go back to Llyrdis, would it, Kerrel? Not to stand up in open Council and tell exactly how and why Yann died."
Kerrel's voice answered him, and he could not tell which of the helmeted shapes was speaking, the shapes with the shadowed faces. It was maddening not to know.
"And was I wrong, Trehearne? Could you stand up in open Council and say that I was wrong to try it?"
"Listen," said the officer. "I'm not judge and I'm not jury. I was sent out by the Council to bring these men in, and I'm going to do it. For God's sake, Kerrel, stop trying to carry the weight of the universe on your shoulders. No man is that big. Come on, you three—into the ship."
"No."
One figure detached itself. One figure drew away from the rest of the group and stood between them and the ship, with a shock-rifle in its hands.
"You're not thinking far enough ahead. Suppose they've failed. Should they be put on trial—under a law and a system that they've risked their lives to tear down—should they be allowed to talk to the whole Galaxy about what they've done, to become heroes and martyrs, a focal point of trouble for all time to come?"
"There have been Orthist trials before." The officer was moving toward Kerrel. "I think you'd better give me that rifle, before you get carried away."
The muzzle of the shock-gun lifted, and Kerrel said, "Wait, I'm not finished yet." The officer took another step and then he hesitated, and an uneasiness seemed to come over him and the rest of the cruiser's men. Trehearne's belly contracted with a sick impotent fury and his hands moved forward in a grasping motion, futile, hungry. Quorn was cursing in a monotone, so low that it only formed a background for the voices speaking over it.
Kerrel said, "These men are different. They found the ship, the shrine. They've been inside it, handled the notebooks, for all I know they've seen the body of Orthis himself. They proved it could be done. Will that ever be forgotten?"
"I don't give a damn," the officer said. "No one is going to kill prisoners. Give me the gun."
Kerrel stepped back, just a little, a step or two. The group of men began to widen out, slowly, leaving one by one the beam of light until only three were left, a small screen between Kerrel and the prisoners. Trehearne's legs bent and flexed. He watched the gun.
Kerrel said, "Suppose they didn't fail. Suppose it's all over, the thousand years of Vardda life. Should they be allowed to enjoy the thing they've done?"
"Fine talk," Trehearne said. The darkness was deep and close, outside the beam. "Noble talk. Maybe I even believe it. But you've got another reason, too."
"I admit it. But in this, it doesn't matter. No woman ever born was important enough to matter in this." He asked quietly of the officer, "Will you leave them here?"
"Will you put that gun down!"
Back another step. "You three men there, in front of the prisoners. Move aside."
"All right," said the officer. "Jump him!"
Trehearne sprang for the darkness. He saw the three men in front of him melt away. The rifle cracked and flared, not aimed at anyone just yet, a warning. And then the night was full of motion.
Lying on the black rock, on the iron ridges of frozen air that flowed between, Trehearne watched the clumsy dance of men in shapeless pressure suits and round blank helmets, in and out of the sharp bright beam that was empty now except for themselves. They had moved around Kerrel in the blackness and the silence and come upon him from the back, but their hands were hampered by the gauntlets and the bulging fabric of Kerrel's suit was hard to hold. They lost him, and then he was part of the group again and they did not know which one, and their voices rose in an angry babble. Only Kerrel did not speak. Trehearne crept on his belly, farther away from the beam, and the shadows that were Quorn and Edri followed him. Suddenly Edri tapped his helmet, and then pointed, and Trehearne saw the solitary figure of a man walking in the darkness outside the beam, but from this angle showing black against it, toward the place where the prisoners had been.
Trehearne said aloud, "This is Trehearne speaking. He's coming our way, to your right and just outside the beam."
The men began to run, spreading out. And then the shock-rifle flared and flared again, steady, systematic, raking all the ground where the prisoners should be, the blue bolts cracking in the helmet phones like heavy static. Trehearne and the others fled farther away, floundering over the bitter ground, and the blue bolts haunted them, and then two men flung themselves at Kerrel from behind. He fell, dropping the rifle.
The two men got up after a moment, rather slowly. Someone came with a belt lamp, and then others, and then all of them, with Trehearne and Quorn and Edri. They all stood looking down at the figure that still lay where it had fallen and did not move. There was a ridge of rock with sharp teeth edging it, sticking up from the frozen air.
"He hit hard," said one of the men, "right on his face-plate, and it broke."
The officer swore, viciously. "What a stinking mess! Why did he have to do it? He must have been crazy."
"I don't know," Trehearne said slowly. "Where do you draw the line between lunacy and belief? If there'd been more like him, we couldn't have done what we did."
They picked Kerrel up and carried him to the cruiser, and Trehearne plodded on where he was told. Inside the ship he and the others were stripped of their pressure suits and searched again for weapons. Then guards took them down a corridor, tired bitter men who had been too long on a grinding job. One of them said, "We overhauled theMirzim. All your friends are here." And then he added, "It's a pity that we have to save the lives of men like you."
They came to a heavy door and stopped, and Shairn was standing there. She looked thin, and her eyes were shadowed, and there were lines around her mouth that had not been there before. She was not the old Shairn. She was someone new. There was no joy in that meeting. She looked at Trehearne and said, "Michael, what have you done?"
He shook his head and answered, "That's the hell of it. We may not have done anything at all."
TWENTY-TWO
The voyage was ending. They had known from the long period of deceleration that it was ending, and now the last pressures, and the small, grinding shocks as the cruiser settled into its dock, told them that they were again on Llyrdis. The bells rang, and the throb of the generators gave way to an unfamiliar silence.
They waited, then. And nothing happened. The hours went by and nothing happened.
Trehearne said finally, "They're not even going to remove us from the cruiser. They'll take us off to wherever we're bound for without even hearing us."
Edri shook his head. "No. Vardda law sentences no man without formal trial."
They could see nothing, hear nothing. Until, at last, the door was unlocked. There were officers and guards—many guards, all of them armed. Their faces told nothing.
"You will come with us," said the young captain of guards soberly.
"Where?" demanded Joris. "To Llyrdis prison or—"
"All communication with the prisoners forbidden," clipped the young captain. "You will come with us."
It seemed strange to Trehearne to walk again on unmoving floors, corridors, decks—on a planet. The tawny glare of Aldebaran was dazzling when they filed out of the cruiser. The air seemed unnaturally damp, heavy with the tang of the sea.
He and Joris and Edri, the first to emerge, looked around with a throb of eagerness, of half-hope. They could not see much. The cruiser had landed in a closed-off sector and there were other guards waiting out here beside a number of the sleek cars.
But Trehearne could hear. He could hear all the usual hum and din and clangor of the vast spaceport, the grind of cranes and rumble of trams, the scream of a fast planet-flyer coming in. And then thewhooshof a great bulk hurtling upward, a starship outbound for distant suns. And in the distance the shining towers of Llyrdis city still magnificently challenged the heavens.
Trehearne felt a sick sense of futility. All this vast ordered turmoil of routine and activity, all the Galaxy-wide trade that centered here, the thousand-year solidity of Vardda commercial monopoly—how could he have dreamed that a pitifully faint and aborted radio call could ever shake it? The faces of his friends showed him how their last hope had begun to wane.
"The cars," said the young captain. "You four will go in the first one."
Edri found his voice. "What about Arrin?"
"I am permitted to tell you that your comrade has been removed to hospital and is in good condition."
Joris said nothing. Trehearne saw his sunken eyes looking across the spaceport and thought how it must be for him to come back thus to this place where for years he had sat with his hands guiding the Vardda ships that came and went. Then the car took them out of the spaceport, fast. Trehearne saw that other cars, with guards alone in them, ran unobtrusively along ahead of and behind them.
And nothing was changed in Llyrdis. The peacock city preened itself beneath the sun, iridescent, splendid, its streets thronged with the smiling Vardda and the other stranger races—echoing with music, brilliant with color. They passed a Vardda man and girl who stood, laughing as they talked. And it was then that Trehearne ceased altogether to hope.
"We're going to the Council Hall," Edri said presently.
Joris nodded somberly. "I could have told you that. As a Council member, I have to be formally impeached and removed before charges against me can be pressed." He added grimly, "Old Ristin, the chairman, won't weep over that. We tangled pretty often, in the past."
The Council Hall sat amid a crowded nexus of governmental buildings. It dominated Llyrdis, not by size, but by age. It was a grey old pile, without beauty but with the massiveness and solidity of eternal things. Its courts and corridors and staring officials Trehearne saw only vaguely. They slid over his vision, and nothing seemed entirely tangible until, in an anteroom, Shairn's face leaped real to his eyes.
She had been waiting to see him pass, he knew. Her face was white and strained, and she said nothing, but her eyes said, "Michael! Michael!" He looked back at her as they went on and he wondered what she read in his own eyes. And then they had entered the deliberative chamber itself.
It was not large and not crowded, a half-moon-shaped hall with something more than a hundred Vardda in its chairs. Of the blur of faces turned toward him, most were grave, some curious, some open in their hatred.
Ristin, the chairman, was a magnificent white-haired old Lucifer who disdained the petty vanity of pretending that this was a routine matter.
"This Council is not a judicial body," he informed the four. "The criminal charges against you—piracy, resisting of authority—will be handled by the regular courts. We are here investigating a matter urgent to the state."
Joris got up, thrusting his gray head forward like an old mastiff's. He growled, "Since this is an investigation, you can't legally carry it out without hearing us."
Ristin said grimly, "The Coordinator of the Port was always good at making himself heard here. But you will have to wait this time, Joris." He looked up at the watching Vardda faces as he added, "The problem of your personal offense is not foremost. What concerns us most urgently is the general policy to be adopted by the Council."
Trehearne hardly heard. That glimpse of Shairn had done things to him and his mind was far away. He wondered vaguely why Edri, who had sat sagging heavily beside him, suddenly stiffened, why Edri convulsively grasped his wrist.
Ristin was continuing, "Therefore I emphasize again that we of the Council must not let any emotion of resentment sway our judgment. We are elected to serve the best interests of the Vardda as a whole and we must let no lesser considerations in any way affect our decision."
Then Joris laughed. His head came up, and his bellowing laughter echoed and re-echoed from the vaulted roof. He swung around to Trehearne and Edri and Quorn, and his eyes were blazing now. "By God, you did it after all!"
Trehearne, still only half understanding, felt a white-hot thrill. Edri had begun to tremble violently.
Ristin's cool voice cut in. "Believe me, your exultation is premature. Nevertheless there is no purpose in concealing the fact that your actions have presented us with an unprecedentedly grave problem."
Quorn said hoarsely to Trehearne, "Don't you get it? Our message got through!"
Trehearne understood then. The gravity of the watching faces, the bitter hatred in some of them, the strong leadership the old chairman was wielding to conquer the crisis—all these belied the everyday appearance of Llyrdis that had been the death-knell of his hopes. He knew, now. He knew that through them, after a thousand years, the voice of Orthis had spoken to the Galaxy. And it had been heard—somewhere it had been heard.
Ristin was saying, "So far only vague rumor and hearsay is abroad. Every operator who might have heard the broadcast has been warned not to repeat it but there are bound to be Orthists among them. The fact that non-Vardda worlds possess ultra-wave receivers for use in their commerce with us is an even more serious matter. It stands thus—that in spite of the news-services' co-operation with us on the matter, it is slowly becoming public knowledge that Orthis' secret was found and broadcast. At least three recordings of it have been found, and two written records. We can assume that there are more."
Joris said grimly, "In other words—the secret is out and everyone will soon know that—and what are you going to do about it?"
"The Coordinator of the Port has summed it up," Ristin agreed, coolly. "What shall we do about it?"
A tall Vardda leaped up and cried, "I suggest that the first thing we do is to execute these traitors!"
There was a fierce chorus of agreement from a few dozen voices. Ristin called sharply for order.
"I have reminded you that our paramount consideration at this moment must be the ultimate best interests of our people! Let us have no more such outbreaks."
An older Vardda man rose in the tiers and said quietly, "Before I advance my suggestion I should admit that I have always had secret Orthist sympathies. I don't think that I am the only one here who can say that. You must allow for that." He went on. "I would have liked long ago to see this unnatural monopoly ended. Now our hand has been forced. I suggest that our best and wisest course is to act at once—to declare publicly that we Vardda are going togivethe secret to the whole Galaxy."
He paused, to emphasize his point. "The secret is out anyway. But by acting quickly we can take credit for that. We can aver that the broadcast was made with our consent. Remember, whether we like it or not, in a few generations other worlds will be flying the stars—and we do not want them cherishing a legacy of hatred for us then."
Trehearne, listening, smiled grimly. "Politics don't change much across the Galaxy."
"But it's all we hoped for," Edri whispered. "It would work, too!"
Discussion, angry debate, had sprung up. It went on and on, passionate voices accusing and denying, Ristin sternly maintaining order, bringing back the argument to the main issue time after time. Finally, in a lull of the disputing voices, Joris swung around and faced the Council.
"Now listen to me," the old man roared. "You'd think the way some of you talk that this meant the end of the Vardda, the end of Llyrdis, the end of everything. That's utter asininity. In the first place, mutations don't take place overnight. It will be a generation or two before the other races start going out between the stars in any numbers."
Trehearne saw that sink home. The Vardda Council, being human, could not worry too deeply for long about a future they wouldn't see.
"And furthermore," Joris bellowed, "when every half-baked folk in the Galaxy does take to starflight, does that mean the great Vardda trade is ruined forever? Listen! We Vardda were the first to go out to the stars.The first!Do you think all the lubberly races of the Galaxy can compete with us out there? Do you think so?"
He caught them with that, with the Vardda pride, the Vardda glory. Trehearne saw the strained faces changing. Not all of them, but many.
Joris paused before he said his final word. "Do you think there will ever be a time when we Vardda can't hold our own?"
There was not much talk after that. There were questions, protests, doubts, but little more argument. All the arguments had been spoken.
"We have to decide this now or never," Ristin told them. "If we delay longer, there will not be a choice."
Trehearne heard the resolution read, and the voting and the result. Not easily could the Vardda yield! Forty-three voted against the resolution. But seventy-nine for it.
Ristin said, "It will be announced by general broadcast tonight that, in view of the advance of civilization on many star-worlds, the Vardda deem the time ripe to share the secret of mutation with other selected races."
Quorn said, "It's done. Trehearne, it's done."
Trehearne still could not quite grasp that that simple statement marked a change forever in the Galaxy, that with it all human races began the great change toward Galactic Man.
"And these criminals who forced us to do the thing?" demanded a Vardda recalcitrant, glaring at Trehearne and his fellows.
"We have no choice there," Ristin said dryly. "To punish them for what they did would belie our own announcement. The ordinary charges against them can be dismissed."
"So that for their crime they go unpunished?"
Ristin sighed regretfully. "The interests of the state demand it. Yes."
Trehearne's comrades were breaking down, half stunned, half incredulous of the victory they had thought beyond them. But strangely Trehearne was not thinking of what they had won for the Galaxy races. He was feeling a pride that Joris' phrase, "We Vardda," had kindled in him.
"We Vardda—"
And he was one of them. He was one of the starlords, the first, the oldest, the greatest of the starmen.
Edri was thinking of something else. He had stepped forward amid the general clamor to speak to Ristin. "There is one more thing. Orthis—"
"A cruiser has been sent to guard his ship," said Ristin.
Edri nodded painfully. "But Orthis was not ever child of a planet. He was star-born, dwelling always between the stars. He has sat long on that far world. If his ship could take space again...."
Ristin said musingly, "A good thought. By putting that ship into an orbit around our system we'll create a monument that will remind all the Galaxy that it was a Vardda who gave them starflight."
Edri turned to Trehearne and Joris. He had tears in his eyes. He said, "Orthis is going home."
The message left for Trehearne had told him simply that Shairn would be at the Silver Tower. It was handed him when they finally emerged from the Council Hall. Joris got him a car and driver. Trehearne hesitated, suddenly hating to part from the old man. Edri, and Quorn and the others had their eager plans. But Joris took no joy in their victory.
"Had it been done a generation ago my son would be a star-captain now," he muttered, in answer to Trehearne's awkward words. "Well—"
The car took him out of the city, smooth and fast, and the great flare of Aldebaran sank toward the sea and dusk came on. The stars burgeoned and Trehearne looked up at them. He looked at the far faint spark of little Sol, and thought of Earth and of a changeling born there who had by a miracle won his way home.
That green and distant Earth knew nothing yet of the battle fought and won beyond the edges of the Galaxy. But it had been Earth's battle too and she would know of it in time. Even to Earth, when a generation had passed, the starships would begin to go openly. And with their internecine conflicts past, Earth's young men too would go out among the stars to join the great march of Galactic Man. Who could say where that march might not lead them? To other galaxies, other island continents of suns....
Trehearne's thoughts came back from the immensities of the future when he saw the Silver Tower glimmering in the starlight. He left the car and walked toward it, and then he saw the pale figure on the shadowy beach beside the slow wash of the sea, and he went down to it.
He put out his arms to her, but she held him off. She spoke to him, her voice clear, her face a white blur in the darkness. "I won't have hidden things between us, Michael. I want you to know. I hate you for what you've done to the Vardda. I'll always hate you for it."
He stepped back and let his arms fall. "In that case," he said, "I'd better go."
"No, wait." She came to him and put her hands on either side of his face, very gently, and she said, "I love you, in spite of everything. I don't know why. My mind keeps telling me all the reasons why I shouldn't, but—it's a queer thing, Michael. I've never been in love before. Will you have me on those grounds?"
He held her this time, tight against him, and his lips brushed over hers as he answered, "Life with you won't be any haven of peace, I'm sure. But I knew that when I found you."
Standing with her in the gloom, the sea-wind rumpling her white robe and tumbling her hair, memory tricked him back to that night on the Breton beach, centuries ago. So far and far he had come since then, and yet of it all that was almost his clearest memory.
He knew now, with a wisdom that he had not had before, that it would always be so with a man—that it was not the conflicts and the pain and the triumph, not the empires and the stars and the struggles that the memory clung to the longest. It was the little things, the sound of a girl's laughter, the cry of birds on the sea-wind, the flare of a long-ago sunset, that a man held, that he would always hold, when everything else was gone.