Restoree (24 page)

Jokan and the Councilmen exclaimed excitedly and leaned forward eagerly as Harlan continued.

“I don’t say we now have the route to their homeworld. It is impossible to tell whether they were on an outward or inward orbit. The holds were barely half full,” he added, dropping his voice and swallowing. I guess I wasn’t the only one who looked ill. There was no longer any question in my mind what those holds carried.

“However, I believe it is important for us to retrace their route, starting from the notation that is the Tane group and working backward.”

The sound of a planecar right on top of us made me glance up startled. Talleth was at the controls. He secured the craft to the landing balcony and stood waiting.

“I have a quick trip to make, gentlemen, after which I will explain myself in greater detail. If you will excuse me,” and Harlan rose.

“You have to go right away?” I murmured, deeply disappointed. I was positive now there was something separating us.

“Will you come with me, Sara?” Harlan asked. There was a quality, a pleading in his voice, that I had never heard before.

“Certainly.”

The fact that he wanted my company, coupled with his unsettling look, was not altogether reassuring. But, perhaps during the flight I would have time to get to the bottom of the problem.

This aim was soon thwarted completely when I realized that this plane, fast as it was, was also small. Talleth, stolidly piloting, was no farther away from me than my outstretched arm. This was scarcely the time or place for an important private discussion.

The trouble with public life, I thought bitterly, is that it
is
so damned public. If I had to put up with six years of this while Maxil grew to his majority, I would be a frustrated woman.

Harlan’s unaccountable nervousness was obvious in many ways as the trip progressed. He kept up a superficially agreeable conversation, inquiring about the events after the attack, the reactions of the most skeptical Councilmen once the resonators were proved effective.

“Where are we going?” I asked as casually as I could when our forced conversational gambits were exhausted.

“To Nawland,” Harlan said crisply.

“What’s that?” I persisted.

I obviously should have known because Talleth jerked his head as if to look at me, but changed his mind and kept facing the instrument panel.

“The Space Research Station,” Harlan answered in a tone that brooked no further questions.

But my own terrible worries were more than I could contain, even faced with his unresponsiveness.

“Is Monsorlit there?”

Harlan looked at me, startled. “Of course not. He has absolutely nothing to do with this.”

I was too relieved that Monsorlit had not made good the threat he had made in the Vaults. The fleeting impression that Harlan considered Monsorlit a lesser evil than the installation at Nawland did not occur to me until later.

A taut silence settled in the little cabin. The set of Harlan’s jaw and the feeling that he had again withdrawn from me were inhibiting to the point that all I felt free to do was stare out the window at the sea.

We were flying swiftly over a long tail of islands in shallow water. In the distance, a smudge across the horizon, loomed the purple shadow of a land mass. Above it, a lance against the darkening evening sky, I saw a rocket blast off. Several miles away was another airborne plane, heading toward our mutual goal.

The sight of a fishing boat, similar to the one Harlan and I had escaped in, sent a stab of pain through me. I blinked back the tears that came to my eyes at the memories that sail evoked. Sitting in silent sorrow, I waited passively for this journey to end.

Space Research Station conjures a picture of purposeful activity, launching pads, half-erected gantries, waiting spaceships. But Talleth circled round the island, away from just such a scene, coming in across a quiet cove to an almost deserted strip of slab rock and sand. Two enormous hulls, all their airlocks open like terrible wounds to the setting sun, rested untended on the strip. A smaller rocket was parked to one side of the giant ship Talleth hovered near. Both he and Harlan peered out their side of the plane, searching for something. I noticed that Talleth’s face had a greenish tinge and he was sweating profusely.

Then I noticed there were huge tubes, several feet in diameter, plugging the entrances to three of the locks. A variety of equipment, tubing and wires, was carefully stacked against the curve of the huge ship’s hull, half obscured by shadow.

“Number Three,” Harlan muttered savagely.

Wordlessly Talleth guided the plane down the length of the ship to an open lock, tubeless, in which stood three tall Ertoi figures, one beckoning to us.

Talleth set the plane down, the sweat pouring off his face. It hadn’t seemed that the plane required that much effort to fly and the temperature was mild.

“I must ask you to come, Sara,” Harlan said in a terse, hard voice. Glancing at him, I was startled to see he, too, was sweating and constantly swallowing. He opened the plane door. An awful smell overwhelmed us and I coughed wildly to clear my lungs of the stench.

I heard Talleth groan, but Harlan had a hand under my elbow and was urging me out onto the sand.

“What’s that stink?” I asked, covering my nose and mouth with a fold of my tunic.

Harlan didn’t answer. His face showed great distress. Relentlessly he guided me quickly up the rampway to the open lock. The three Ertois moved quietly aside to let us enter.

“This way,” one of them thrummed in an incredibly deep voice.

Harlan didn’t answer and now I felt his hand trembling even as his fingers took a firmer grip on my elbow. Now, I was scared, too.

“We have put samples in the nearest chamber,” our guide boomed hollowly, his voice echoing and echoing down the long dim corridor. “The others have been disintegrated.”

The Ertoi stopped by an oddly shaped orifice and nodded his head gravely to Harlan.

Harlan looked ghastly, the sweat pouring down his face, his jaw muscles working furiously as he swallowed. He gave every indication of someone about to be violently ill and mastering the compulsion by sheer willpower.

The moment I stepped through that orifice a scream tore from me. Only because the Ertoi and Harlan were holding me fast did I stay on my feet. I knew why Harlan looked ill. I knew what that smell was. I knew where I was. I was on a Mil ship and I had been in such a room before. I had been in such a room and what I had seen there had sent my mind reeling into the deepest shock.

“They do not look like
you,
the Ertoi say,” Harlan managed to say between his teeth. “I have to make you look.”

He and the Ertoi half carried me to the long high frame where several sheeted mounds lay still. One of the other Ertoi very carefully pulled back the top of the sheets and the first face was visible to me.

I didn’t want to look down. But I had to. With that dread fascination horrible accidents have for you. No matter how ghastly, you have to look and assure yourself it is just as bad or worse than you have already imagined. He was Chinese or at least some Oriental . . . his race didn’t matter beyond the fact that he had once lived on my planet. I was propelled to the next victim and this was infinitely worse. Because it was a blond girl with the fresh misty complexion of an Englishwoman. Her hair had been shorn off close to her scalp and her face was contorted in the horrible rictus of death. There was no skin on her neck, only raw red flesh, the muscles and neck tendons exposed. I gave the covering a twitch and saw, as I instinctively knew I should but nevertheless had to confirm, that all skin had been flayed from her body. Skin, golden skin, my new golden skin. I, too, had once been flayed and . . . restored with golden skin. How much skin can a human lose and live? I stood swaying, my eyes unable to leave her face until I spun away to retch in deep terrible spasms.

I knew it was Harlan who picked me up and carried me out of that charnel place, I felt skin not scales under my hands as I struck out wildly, intent only on inflicting pain on him who had led me, all unwitting, back into horror. I must have acted like a madwoman, shrieking, flailing with arms and legs. Then the pressure around me and in me was relieved as I felt the tart freshness of uncontaminated air around me and the smell was gone from my nose and throat and lungs. I was conscious of the sound of surf, the unlimited sky above me and then a sharp prick in my arm.

A scaly hand thrust an aromatic under my nose, but it only caused my stomach to heave again.

A hand, gentle for all it was scaly and hard, held my head as I vomited, stroking my streaming wet hair back from my face.

As the convulsive dry retching subsided, I became aware that I was propped against the scaly leg of one of the Ertoi. Another Ertoi was shielding my face from the brilliant sunset, his saurian face kind and compassionate as he bathed my face and hands.

Beyond my line of vision, I could hear someone else being violently ill and the thrumming voice of the third Ertoi talking quietly.

I don’t know how long it took before we recovered from the experience but it was already full dark when Harlan came over to where I lay, still propped against the patient Ertoi, too weak and spent to move.

“Are they people from your planet, Sara?” Harlan asked with sad weariness.

“Yes.”

And I knew why he had subjected me to that horror. I knew, too, what incredible courage it must have taken him to accompany me, knowing what he would see, knowing what he must put me through, and unwilling, despite the cost to himself, to let me go to that little death alone.

“You may proceed with orders, Sala,” Harlan murmured.

One Ertoi saluted Harlan and then me and went back to the ship. In a minute or I heard the chirropp, chirropp of the planecar.

Harlan managed to get into the plane himself, but the two Ertoi had to lift me in. Harlan held me in his lap, my head against his chest, both of us too exhausted to move.

Talleth took off at top speed. He, too, had had more of that stretch of Nawland than he could endure.

Whatever injection had been given me, the lassitude it produced spread through my body. Although I feared for a sleep that might be punctuated with the nightmare of revived terrors, I felt myself slipping without volition into the black velvet well of unconsciousness.

The first thought that crossed my mind on wakening was that it wasn’t hunger that roused me. It was a soft light, diffused on the wall above the bed. I turned my head to see Harlan, propped up, writing quietly but quickly on a thin metal slate. It was the slip of the stylus across the metal that had penetrated my sleep.

At my movement, Harlan turned, his expression anxious and hopeful, changing quickly to a hesitant smile as our eyes met.

“You were so still. So deeply asleep . . .” he said in a low voice.

“No, I’m all right,” I assured him, giving his hand a reassuring pat. He caught my hand, squeezing so tightly I gave a little cry.

He put down his writing and turned on his side toward me, his eyes still concerned.

“They have a saying on Earth,” I began, trying to lighten his mood, “the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. Then the law catches him. In this case, it was the victim who returned.”

Harlan groaned and dropped his head down to the bed, hiding his face from me.

“Frankly,” I continued, around the tightness in my throat, “I think it did the victim good. By all rights, I should have had horrible nightmares and I didn’t.”

Harlan grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me, his face twisted with emotion.

“How can you forgive me? How can you ever forget what I have done to you? Forcing you to face that unspeakable horror?”

“Harlan,” I said,
“You
went with me. It must have been ten times worse for
you.”

He stared at me blankly, as if I had lost my mind.

“You’re incredible. It must have been ten times worse for me?” he repeated, shaking his head in disbelief at my words. “For me? For ME!” He gave an explosive snort of laughter and then hugged me so fiercely I cried out. “I’ll never understand you. Never. Never.” And he began to laugh, rocking me back and forth in his arms, laughing I realized, in sheer relief.

“Well, it wasn’t very funny,” I reminded him, nonplussed at his reaction.

“No, not funny at all,” and Harlan continued to laugh, softer now, with silly tears coming to his eyes.

The strained look of worry had lifted from his face when he held me off a little to look at me. His eyes and mouth held traces of his laughter, but his look was intensely proud and possessive.

He brushed my hair back from my forehead tenderly and settled me against him, my head on his chest.

“I have several things to tell you, Sara,” he began in a more normal voice. “One, I was honestly afraid you would wake mad or hating me. No, don’t interrupt,” and he placed a finger on my lips. “I never expected you to understand why I had to subject you to that ordeal. I said be quiet,” and his voice was stern, more like himself. “I had only a short time to get you there for the identification. If you remember, I told Jokan and the two Councilmen that we had discovered undamaged star maps from which we could retrace the routes of the Mil. From certain procedures we know they follow,” and he swallowed suddenly, “Sala is of the opinion that their last touchdown was at the planet from which those people came.” He held me tightly as I inadvertently began to tremble again.

I took several deep breaths and nodded at him to continue, to ignore my reactions.

“The Star-class I ordered Jessl to refit will carry Jokan and Talleth to your own world with such help as we can give.” He paused and then added in a low voice, “I was going to suggest that you return with them.”

“You were going to,” I pushed away from his chest so I could see his face.

“I don’t want you to leave, but I felt, in view of what happened yesterday, I owed you the choice. There may be someone on your world you would prefer to be with.”

I turned in his arms, looking him squarely in the face. His expression was grave but gave me no indication of his thoughts.