The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (97 page)

Schuyler said, “When I found my technicians weren’t getting anywhere on those gadgets, I gave orders for my men out there to bring back a couple of K’harn scientists who could explain all that stuff to us. Two scientists of the K’harn were captured and brought here, but one unwisely attempted an escape and was killed. The other is still here, but he’s uncooperative and refuses even to speak to us. We don’t know his language, yet it’s essential that we get him to cooperate.”

Lindeman slowly began to rise to his feet, staring at Schuyler in absolute unbelief as the magnate went on.

“If you know the K’harn language, you can talk to him. Tell him my proposition—that as soon as he’s explained all the machines to my technicians, he’ll be returned to Andromeda. Emphasize to him that—”

It was as far as Schuyler got. Lindeman’s hoarse voice interrupted him, saying,

“So it wasn’t enough for your filthy greed to rob and kill out there, you had to bring two of them here prisoners. Why, you—”

He plunged toward Schuyler’s desk. Evers jumped up but before he could take a step, one of the tough-faced men had fired. The pallid beam from his gun dropped Lindeman like a heap of old clothes.

“You move and you get it too,” said the tough-faced man.

Schuyler said bitingly to the man, “Couldn’t you have grabbed him? There was no need to stun him, you fool.”

The man looked uncomfortable. “I thought—”

“Blockheads trying to think make most of my troubles,” said Schuyler. “Take him down to one of the lower rooms and let him sleep it off.”

The man hastily lifted Lindeman as though he were a mannikin and toted him out. The other tough-faced man remained, his gun in full evidence.

Schuyler turned his gaze back to Evers, who stood with fists tightly clenched. He said, “Your friend will be all right in an hour or so. Now what about my proposition—will you talk to this K’harn?”

“If I do—what?” asked Evers.

“You stay living,” said Schuyler promptly. “I keep my promises. You won’t leave Arkar, but neither of you will be killed or harmed.”

Evers thought about it, mastering his fury. He had no intention whatever of helping Schuyler but he thought himself justified in fighting the devil with fire. If he could stall till the GC ships reached Arkar…

He said slowly, “I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him what you say. But I won’t advise him to accept your proposition. That’s up to him.”

“You have nice scruples,” said Schuyler ironically. “You can also tell him that there are many ways of making people—even not-human people—talk, if we have to use them.” He looked at the man with the gun. “All right, put him in with the K’harn.”

The man who had taken Lindeman away returned. The two men shepherded Evers out of the bronze room, and along gleaming metal corridors to a stairway. They walked behind him, their guns out.

The stairway went down two levels before it ended in another corridor. There were two doors on each side of the short corridor, and each of the doors had a heavy combination-lock.

“Listen,” said Evers to the men, “you know that GC is on its way here right now, don’t you?”

One of the men said simply, “Shut up.”

Evers shut up. He knew when a thing was no use, and it was no use now.

He was halted in front of one of the doors. One of the men went to it and started turning the combination-lock. The other man stood behind Evers, his gun levelled.

The door was suddenly swung open by the man who had unlocked it. The man behind Evers shoved him powerfully at the same moment. Evers plunged forward, into a narrow metal cell. The door slammed shut behind him.

As Evers picked himself up he heard a movement in the corner of the cell. There, in the shadows, the K’harn stood watching him.

Weird child of another universe, this crouching, spidery shape—yet familiar to Evers’ eyes. The semi-human torso, the four powerful limbs that were neither arms nor legs yet were both, the fourfingered hands or feet, the white, hairless face and great dark eyes…

Evers started forward, and then as he opened his mouth to speak, the spidery figure rushed forward and he went down again, with alien hands upon his throat.

CHAPTER VII

Evers rolled on the floor of the cell, frantically trying to break the grip of his unhuman attacker. But two of the K’harn’s limbs pinioned his arms, and the other two hands were at his throat, strangling him. The big dark eyes blazed with a deadly rage, only inches from his own.

He could not breathe and he could not speak and the edges of things were beginning to darken. Evers knew he would be dead in a minute unless he broke that grip. His legs were free, and he brought his knees up in a battering smash at the weird torso.

The K’harn grunted, and the grip of his limbs on Evers relaxed for a brief second. Evers used his doubled-up legs as a lever, put all his strength into them, and thrust his spidery antagonist clear off him.

Instantly, with incredible quickness, the K’harn flashed in toward him again.

“Wait!” choked Evers in the K’harn language. “Friend—I—”

The terrible grip was on him again before he could say more, and he had done all he could and it wasn’t enough.

But the K’harn paused, holding him. His blazing eyes searched Evers’ face, and for the moment he did not tighten his grip.

That strange face so close to Evers, white and hairless, the eyes enormous, the nose rudimentary and the mouth small and lipless, was like a gargoyle-mask glaring down at him. Then the K’harn spoke for the first time, in his oddly-aspirated language.

“Where did you learn our speech?” he hissed. “Are there others of the K’harn prisoned here now?”

Evers could hardly speak at all with the hold still on his throat, but he forced out the syllables of that alien tongue in a husky whisper.

“I am a prisoner like yourself. There are no other K’harn here. I learned your speech from your own folk. I have stood on the worlds of Lah and Ameramm and Ky.”

The great, flaming eyes searched his face. “Ky?” whispered the K’harn. “You have been there?”

“I was there, and I saw the destruction and death that had been dealt there by the evil ones of my own race,” said Evers. “I and my two friends learned your language there, in the looted House of Knowledge.”

“What name has the Master of the House of Knowledge on Ky?” demanded the other.

Evers searched his memory frantically, and then said, “Janja is his name.”

For the first time, the grip relaxed. The K’harn drew back a little. He stood facing Evers, and there was still a menace in the tenseness of his four limbs, the poise of his head, the glare in his eyes.

“Yes,” he whispered. “That is his name. You could not have learned that had you been of the looters. For they only stayed long enough to kill, to seize the instruments of Knowledge, and to take them away and with them, two of us lesser Masters.”

Evers began to realize that this K’harn was half-mad, and he did not wonder at it. To see their peaceful city shattered by the sudden eruption of Schuyler’s ships from the sky, to have death strike from unfamiliar weapons, to be captured and brought on the nightmare traverse between galaxies, to be prisoned and questioned and threatened for weeks, maybe months—he thought he would have gone crazy himself.

“The men who hold us here are my enemies as they are yours,” Evers told him. He began to talk more rapidly, hesitating often as he tried to remember the unfamiliar phrases, telling how he and Lindeman and Straw had gone to Andromeda and of the terrible surprise that had awaited them on the fringe worlds there. He concluded, “We came back to stop what they are doing to your worlds. My people, our government, would stop it if they knew. But we had to prove it, and in trying we were discovered, and one of my friends is dead and one is senseless and I am in this cell with you.”

The K’harn had listened with feverish attention, and some of the tenseness and menace went out of his attitude. He began to walk back and forth in the narrow cell—the swift, gliding spidery walk of his race.

“And the evil goes on and the worlds of my people are ravaged, and I can do nothing!” he said. “If I had been slain like Oll, it would have been better. I thought you one of my enemies, and attacked you so that I
would
be slain.”

Evers said, “Oll? Schuyler said that he’d captured two of you K’harn scientists—and that one was killed trying to escape—”

The K’harn said, “That was Oll. I am Rrulu of Ky. We two were taken when they looted the House of Knowledge. They have kept me here—how long? They have tried to make me speak, and I would not.”

Evers nodded. “They want you to explain the workings of the instruments of Knowledge.”

“I guessed that,” said Rrulu. “I will die before I speak or tell them anything. They are murderers.”

Evers had learned enough of the K’harn temperament to understand the peculiar loathing that Rrulu put into that last word. The culture of the K’harn was a purely pacific one. Developing on the fringe worlds of Andromeda with no enemies and no lack of resources to cause fight between themselves, they had become a people to whom violence was a grotesque and horrible thing.

“We have never killed,” said Rrulu. “We thought that only beasts killed. And that was our weakness, when the robbers came. But we shall learn to kill!”

He came closer to Evers. The only light in the little cell was from one tiny bulb in the high ceiling, but it was light enough to show the terrible resolve on that unhuman face.

“I have thought much in the time I have been here,” said Rrulu. “In the past, we have only created. But the instruments that create can be altered so that they will destroy. If I ever get back to my people—”

He stopped, and Evers saw the hopelessness that came into his strange eyes.

“You
can
get back, Rrulu!” he exclaimed. “At least there is a chance, if you will do as I say.”

The K’harn looked at him. “How? The door is locked. There is always a guard in the corridor outside. I have tried more than once and could not break out. Oll was killed, trying.”

“Not that way,” said Evers. “We’ve got to use our wits. There will be ships of law arriving here ten hours or so from now. What we have to do is use our wits to stay alive till GC gets here.”

He went on to explain to Rrulu that Sharr was in hiding in the warehouse of loot, unsuspected by anyone, and that when the GC cruisers arrived, the Valloan girl could come out of hiding and tell the GC men everything.

Evers added, “We’ve got to stall until then. Schuyler put me in here because I speak your language. I am to offer you safe return to your own galaxy if you will explain the workings of the machines and instruments they brought from Andromeda.”

Rrulu stiffened. “Those things are the looted instruments of Knowledge from our worlds. I saw them taken, I saw K’harn shot down defending them. I will not help these killers. Not now, not ever.”

Evers said hastily, “I know. I don’t want you to. What I do want you to do is to bluff Schuyler along, make a pretense of being willing to explain all those gadgets.”

But it seemed that deception was as new and difficult a concept to the K’harn’s thinking, as violence had formerly been.

“I will tell them nothing,” he said.

Evers began to sweat. He feared now that the obsession of hatred which dominated Rrulu was going to cross out their only chance. He tried another approach.

“You say you’ve thought up a way by which your people could adapt their scientific instruments into weapons, to use against Schuyler’s ships?”

Rrulu’s eyes blazed. “Yes—by reversing our synthesizers. You do not understand our science. But we create metal, plastics, any element, by mechanisms that generate a force which causes free sub-atomic particles, free energy, to cohere into matter. The same mechanisms could be quickly reversed to
de-cohere
any chosen elements into energy again. We could utterly destroy invading ships!”

“Then if you could return to Ky, you could teach your people how to defend themselves,” Evers said. He added quickly, “But my way is the only way you can live to return—by pretending to yield to Schuyler.”

Slowly, the K’harn’s expression changed. He was silent for moments, and then said, “I will do as you say.”

“Good!” breathed Evers. “Now listen. They’ll be back soon to ask me what your answer is. I’ll say that you’re tired of imprisonment, and will explain the instruments and their powers, with me as interpreter.”

“But then they will demand that I do so at once,” objected Rrulu. “And they will at once find out that it is all deception, that I mean to tell them nothing.”

“I’m betting that they
won’t
ask you to start explaining things right away, but wait till later,” Evers said. “Don’t you see—the GC ships will be here before long. Schuyler has to keep you and I and Lindeman strictly under cover until the GC has come and gone. He’ll wait till after they’ve left, before starting to question you.” He concluded grimly, “But he won’t get a chance. When GC gets here and Sharr comes out and blows the gaff on the whole thing, Schuyler is through right then.”