The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (16 page)

“Am I, Hyrst?”

“That’s for you to find out. I’m offering you the starship for Vernon, and that’s fair enough, because I want him as bad as you want it. And I can tell you, Bellaver, if you decide to play it smart and call in your guards to hunt me down, it will do you no good. I won’t be alive when they take me.”

Silence. In his mind’s eye Hyrst could see the beads of sweat running down Bellaver’s face behind his helmet. He could see Vernon’s face, too. It gave him pleasure.

“It should be an easy decision, Bellaver,” he said. “After all, suppose I am lying. What have you got to lose but Vernon? And with his record, that isn’t much.”

“Hold him,” said Bellaver. “All right, Hyrst. I’ll do it. But I’ll tell you now. If you lie to me, there won’t be any re-awakening in another fifty years. This will be for good.”

“Fair enough,” said Hyrst. “I’m putting my gun away. I’m coming in.”

He walked quickly through the snow toward the tower.

CHAPTER X

On the bridge of his yacht, Bellaver turned to Hyrst and said,

“I’ve done what you wanted. Now find me that starship.”

Hyrst nodded. “Take off.”

The rockets roared and thundered, and the swift yacht leaped quivering into the sky.

Hyrst sat quietly in his recoil chair. He felt a different man, changed entirely in the last few days. Much had happened in those days.

Bellaver had got busy on the radio even before his yacht left Titan, and the story of the Lazarites had burst like a nova upon the Solar System. Already there were instances of suspected Lazarites being mobbed by their neighbors, and Government was frantically concerning itself with all the new, far-reaching implications of the Humane Penalty.

Close on the heels of this bomb-shell had come Vernon’s angry accusations against Bellaver, delivered as soon as he was given to the authorities on Mars. During the twenty Martian hours necessary for formal charge and the taking of depositions, and while Bellaver’s yacht was being refueled, Vernon’s story of the starship went out on all the interworld circuits. And it had been as Christina had said. The whole Solar System was frantic to have the Lazarites caught and stopped, and every man in space became a self-appointed searcher for the hidden starship. Bellaver, letting his lawyers worry about Vernon’s accusations, had already laid formal claim to that ship, based on the value of the stolen Titanite.

“Where?” demanded Bellaver now, in a fury of impatience. “Where?”

“Wait,” said Hyrst. “There are too many watching, ready to follow you. They know what you’re after. Wait till we’re clear of Mars.”

He sat in his chair, looking into space. His drive was all gone, and the anger that had fed it. Somewhere his son and his two daughters were drawing their first free breaths relieved of a burden they should never have had to carry. They knew now that he was innocent, and they could think of him now without bitterness, speak his name without hate. He had done what he had set out to do, and he was finished. He knew what was ahead of him, but he was too tired to care.

The yacht went fast, away from the old red weary planet. Hyrst thought of Shearing and Christina and the others, laboring over their ship on the dark plain. He felt safe in doing this, because Vernon was gone and the gray evil man who had helped to torture Shearing aboard the
Happy Dream
was still in an Earth hospital recovering from the blow Hyrst had given him. They were out of reach, and Hyrst was the only Lazarite Bellaver had.

He did not try to get through to Shearing because he knew that was impossible, and there was no reason for it anyway. He let his mind stretch out and rove through the nighted spaces beyond Saturn, beyond Uranus and Neptune, beyond the black and frigid bulk of Pluto. He did not see the ship nor touch a Lazarite mind, and so he knew that they were still holding the cloak, still hiding from possible betrayal. He withdrew his mind, and wished them luck.

“We’re clear of Mars,” said Bellaver. “Which way?”

“That way,” said Hyrst, and pointed. “Toward the Sun.”

The yacht swerved and steadied on a new course, toward the distant glare of Sol. And Bellaver said,

“What’s the exact location?”

“Can you trust every man in this crew?” asked Hyrst. “Can you be sure not one of them would give it away, when we stop to refuel? You’re not the only one that knows about the starship now, remember.”

“You could tell
me
.”

“You’re too impatient, Bellaver. You’d want to head straight there, and it won’t be that easy. They have defenses. We have to be careful, or they’ll destroy the ship before we reach it.”

“Or finish their relays and go.” Bellaver gave Hyrst a long look. “I’ll trust you because I have to. But I wasn’t making an empty threat. And I’ll do it so there won’t be any thought of murder. You’d better find me that ship, Hyrst.”

From then on, Bellaver hardly slept. He paced the corridors and haunted the control room and watched Hyrst with a gnawing, agonizing doubt. Hyrst began to feel for him a distant sort of pity, as he might have felt for a man afflicted by some disease brought on by his own excesses.

The yacht passed the orbit of Earth, refueled at an obscure space station, and sped on. Hyrst continued to stall Bellaver, ordering a change of course from time to time to keep him happy. At intervals he let his mind rove through those dark spaces they were leaving farther behind with every passing second. Each time it was a greater effort, but still there was no sign of the starship or its base, and so he knew that the labor still went on.

By the time the yacht reached the orbit of Venus a fan-shaped cordon of other ships had collected around and behind her drawn by the word that Bellaver was on his way to find the starship. Government patrols were in constant touch.

“They can’t interfere,” said Bellaver. “I’ve got a lien on that ship, a formal claim.”

“Sure,” said Hyrst. “But you’d better be the first to find it. Possession, you know. Bear off a bit. Mislead them. They’re sure now they know where you’re going.”

“Don’t they?” said Bellaver, looking ahead at the glittering spark that was Mercury. “There isn’t anyplace else to go.”

“Isn’t there?”

Bellaver stared at him, narrow-eyed. “The legend of the Vulcan was exploded by the first explorers. There is no intra-Mercurial world.”

Hyrst shot a swift stabbing mental glance toward Pluto. Still nothing. He sighed and said easily,

“There wasn’t then. There is now.”

He brazened out the look of incredulity on Bellaver’s face.

“These are Lazarites, remember, not men. They built a place for themselves where nobody would ever think to look. Not a planet, of course, just a floating workshop. A satellite. And now you know. So you can let them beat you to Mercury.”

“All right,” said Bellaver softly. “All right.”

They passed Mercury, lost in the blaze of the Sun, and only a few ships followed them, far behind. The rest stopped to search the craggy valleys of the Twilight Belt, and the bleak icefields of the Dark Side.

And now Hyrst had run his string out, and he knew it. When no intra-Mercurial satellite showed up, physically or on detector-screens, there was no further lie to tell. He drove his mind out and away, to the cold planets wheeling on the fringes of Sol’s light, and he sweated, and prayed, and hoped that nothing had gone wrong. And suddenly the cloak was dropped, and he saw a lonesome chip of rock beyond Pluto, all hollowed out for shops and living quarters, and the great ship standing in the mile-long plain, with the stars all drifted overhead. And the ship lifted from the plain, circled upward, and suddenly was not.

Hyrst was bitterly sorry that he was not aboard. But he told Bellaver, “You can stop looking now. They’ve got away.”

He watched Bellaver die, standing erect on his feet, still breathing, but dying inside with the last outgoing of hope.

“I thought you were lying,” he said, “but it was the only chance I had.” He nodded, looking toward the shuttered port with the insufferable blaze outside. He said, in a flat, dead voice, “If you were put out here, bound, in a lifeboat, headed toward the Sun—Yes. I could make up a story to fit that.”

In the same toneless voice, he called his men. And suddenly the yacht lurched over shuddering in the backwash of some tremendous energy. Hyrst and the others were flung scattering against the bulkheads, and the lights went out, and the instruments went dead.

Beyond the port, on the unshuttered side away from the Sun, a vast dark shape had materialized out of nothing, to hang close in space beside the yacht.

Hyrst heard in his mind, strong and clear, the voice of Shearing saying, “Didn’t I tell you the brotherhood stands by its own? Besides, we couldn’t make a liar out of you, now could we?”

Hyrst began to laugh, just a little bit hysterically. He told Bellaver, “There’s your starship. And Shearing says if I’m not alive when he comes aboard to get me, that they won’t be as careful about warping space when they go away as they were when they came.”

Bellaver did not say anything. He sat on the deck where the shock had thrown him, not speaking. He was still sitting there when Hyrst passed through the airlock into the starship’s boat, and he did not move even when the great ship vanished silently into whatever mysterious ultra-space the minds of the Lazarites had unlocked, outbound for the limitless freedom of the universe, where the wheeling galaxies thunder on forever across infinity and the stars burn bright, and there is nothing to stop the march of the Legion of Lazarus. And who knew, who could tell, where that march would end?

Aboard the starship, already a million miles away, Hyrst said to Christina. “When they brought me back from beyond the door, that was re-awakening. But this—this is being born again.”

She did not answer that. But she took his hand and smiled.

DREAMER’S WORLDS

Reining in his pony on the ridge, Khal Kan pointed down across the other sands of the drylands that stretched in the glare of the crimson, sinking sun.

“There we are, my lads!” he announced heartily. “See yonder black blobs on the desert? They’re the tents of the drylanders.”

His tall young figure was straining in the saddle, and there was a keen anticipation on his hard, merry young face.

But Brusul, the squat warrior in blue leather beside him, and little Zoor, the wizened third member of the trio, looked uneasily.

“We’ve no business meddling with the drylanders!” accused brawny Brusul loudly. “Your father the king said we were to scout only as far west as the Dragal Mountains. We’ve done that f and haven’t found any sign of the cursed Bunts in them. Our business is to ride back to Jotan now and report.”

“Why, what are you afraid of?” demanded Khal Kan scoffingly. “We’re wearing nondescript leather and weapons—we can pass ourselves off to the drylanders as mercenaries from Kaubos.”

“Why should we go bothering the damned desert-folk at all?” Brusul demanded violently. “They’ve got nothing we want.”

Little Zoor broke into sniggering laughter. His wizened, frog-like face was creased by wrinkles of mirth.

“Our prince has heard of that dryland princess—old Bladomir’s daughter that they call Golden Wings,” he chuckled.

“I’ll be damned!” exploded Brusul. “I might have known it was a woman! Well, if you think I’m going to let you endanger our lives and the success of our reconnaissance for a look at some desert wench, you—”

“My sentiments exactly, Brusul!” cried Khal Kan merrily, and spurred forward. His pony galloped crazily down the crimson ridge, and his voice came back to them singing.

“The Bunts came up to Jotan,

Long ago!

The Bunts fled back on the homeward track

When blood did flow!”

“Oh, damn all wenches, here’s an end of us because of your fool’s madness,” groaned Brusul as he caught up. “If those drylanders find us out, we’ll make fine sport for them.”

Khal Kan grinned at the brawny warrior and the wizened little spy. “We’ll not stay long. Just long enough to see what she looks like—this Golden Wings the desert tribes all rave about.”

They rode forward over the ocher desert. The huge red orb of the sun was full in their faces as it sank toward the west. Already, the two moons Qui and Quilus were rising like dull pink shields in the east.

Shadows lengthened colossal across the yellow sands. The wind was keen, blowing from the far polar lands of this world of Thar. Behind them rose the vast, dull red shoulders of the Dragal Mountains, that separated the drylands from their own coastal country of Jotanland.

A nomad town rose ahead, scores of flat-topped pavilions of woven black
hyrk
-hair. Great herds of horses of the black desert strain were under the care of whooping herdsboys. Smoke of fires rose along the streets.

Fierce, swarthy drylanders whose skins were darker than the bronze faces of Khal Kan and his companions, looked at the trio with narrowed eyes as they rode in. Dryland warriors fell in behind them, riding casually after them toward die big pavilion at the camp’s center.