The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (93 page)

The beam cut off, and he heard an exclamation. He went forward, and in the square of darkness that was the airlock door of the ship he saw the darker blob that was Lindeman.

Lindeman held a gun and also, in his other hand, a torch. He let it shine briefly, and beyond its dazzle Evers saw his scrawny little form leaning tensely forward, peering.

“I wasn’t expecting two to come back,” Lindeman said hastily. “I—who’s the girl? Did you contact Garrow?”

“No, I didn’t,” Evers said bitterly. “Schuyler’s agents nearly had me, and they and GC are hunting me, and we’d better get off Valloa quick before they find us.”

He pushed the stammering, protesting Lindeman ahead of him into the ship, slamming shut the airlock door. Inside Straw was waiting—a towering, dark young giant with an absurdly round, boyish face that gave no hint of the first-class brain behind it. His upper left arm was bandaged and his face was still a little pale, but that did not prevent him from uttering a low whistle of appreciation when he saw Sharr.

“I can see you’re feeling better,” said Evers.

“Oh, sure, I’m all right,” said Straw. “Who is she?”

“She’s the reason I failed,” Evers said. “GC has every world alerted for us, and this Valloan girl spotted me and tried to sell me to Schuyler.”

Lindeman peered at her in myopic anger, his ruff of thin brown hair making him look more than ever like an enraged marmoset.

“If so, why the devil did you bring her here?”

“Had to, to get here myself,” Evers told him. “Schuyler’s men are after her too, now. Will you stop babbling? We’ve got to clear out of here fast.”

He pushed forward into the control-room of the little ship, a crowded iron coop, and took the pilot-chair.

“But where can we
go
?” asked Lindeman, on a note of desperation.

“Anywhere that isn’t Valloa will do, for a starter,” Evers said. “Look, will you strap Sharr into a chair? Have you ever been in a starship before?”

He addressed the latter question to the Valloan girl, as Lindeman strapped her into a recoil-chair. Her green eyes were very wide as she looked at him.

“No,” she said.

“Good,” he grunted. “You’ll catch hell when you feel overdrive for the first time. It’ll pay you back for that chop on the neck.”

She called him what sounded like the Valloan equivalent of a nasty name, but he was too busy with the controls to pay any heed. He had no time to waste. He set up an elementary takeoff pattern, fed it into the computers, punched the generator switch, and blasted the
Phoenix
up out of the jungle in a roaring rush.

He wondered how much more the old ship could take, how much more any of them could take. It wasn’t fair to ask a ship or a man to cross the ocean that lies between the galaxies, and come back again, and still have to go on and on.

Valloa fell away and Evers shifted fast into overdrive. The lights turned blue and the
Phoenix
shivered and fell a billion miles into nothingness, falling right out of the continuum into hyper-space. The starry blackness outside the windows became an evilly blurred and streaked grayness.

He set a tentative course along the rim of the galaxy, and then sagged in the chair. Lindeman came and looked at him, and said,

“Now where? The GC will have ships out after us fast, and we’re bound to be spotted soon.”

“I know,” said Evers.

“Then where?”

There was a little silence, except for the eery hum of the drive, and in the silence the girl Sharr sat looking from one to another of them, her face white and strained and wondering.

“We’ve tried to sneak back into the galaxy and get our story to the Council secretly,” said Evers. “It didn’t work, and it won’t work, now. GC won’t believe our story, and while we’re trying to prove it to them. Schuyler’s men will get to us and shut us up for good.” Straw said, “We could call GC on the communic and tell them our story, before we surrender to them.”

Evers said wearily, “We’ve been over that before. The minute we use the communic we tell Schuyler’s outfit where we are, and they’ll be right onto us.”

Lindeman pounded on the control-board in a kind of anguish. “Then what are we going to do?”

Evers had been thinking. Through his fog of exhaustion, a slow, sullen anger had been growing in him. He was tired of being hunted.

He said, “We’ve got to
prove
what Schuyler’s doing, before we surrender to GC. Then they’ll have to believe us.”

He looked at the three-dimensional representation of this sector of the galaxy in the “tank.” He said, “The planet Arkar, where Schuyler has his home, isn’t too far from here along the Rim.”

Lindeman’s eyes became round and horrified. “Go to Arkar? It’d be walking right into Schuyler’s hands. He
owns
that planet.”

Evers nodded. “And it’s the one place where he won’t be expecting us to go.”

“And when we get there?”

Evers said, “Schuyler must be running his secret operation from Arkar. The secret would be bound to get out if he used any of his company’s ordinary bases. Only on that private world of his could he maintain secrecy. If we go there, we can maybe blast his operation wide open for the whole galaxy to see.”

“How can we? Three men, against Schuyler’s whole bunch there—”

Evers shrugged. “You said yourself that GC cruisers will soon spot us, and be after us. All right. We’ll lead them right to Arkar, and show them what’s going on there.”

Lindeman said, “
If
we’re still living when they get there. Schuyler would put us away fast before GC ever arrives, if we’re caught.”

“I know,” said Evers. “That’s the chance we have to take.”

“I say, take it,” said Straw. “To the devil with weaselling around like this.”

Lindeman looked sick with worry. “It’s crazy. But we’ve got to prove to the galaxy somehow what we found at Andromeda.”

Evers got up out of the pilot chair and stood, swaying a little on his feet.

“Keep her headed for Arkar, then. GC will spot us soon enough. I’ve got to get some sleep or I’m through.”

He started back through the control-room, as Lindeman took the pilot-chair. Sharr had got out of her chair too, and he looked at her and shook his head.

“You’d have been safer back on Valloa,” he told her. “But you would come.”

“I’m not afraid,” she flashed. And then she asked, “What
did
you find out there at Andromeda galaxy?”

“We found the one thing we didn’t expect,” said Evers. “We found that we weren’t the first Earthmen to reach Andromeda, after all.”

She stared. “Not the first? But who was there before you?”

He said, “Schuyler and his men were there before us!”

He stumbled on back toward the cabin.

CHAPTER IV

Evers dreamed as the ship fled on, and in his sleep a nightmare memory and vision rose before him.

For again he seemed to be in Andromeda galaxy, their little ship forging through mighty halls and corridors of suns, on and on through that solemn vastness of space and fire and strangeness. And then they were landing upon a world, in a city. Under the orange sun it flashed and glittered, an unearthly metropolis of plastic and silvery metal, laced with slender shining cables upon which swiftly came and went forms that were not human.

Destruction had been in that city. Great scorched slashes had been torn in the alien buildings, and many of the shining cables hung broken and useless, and there was a whispering susurration in the air, a sound of grief.

A face rose before Evers, white and hairless and strange, with two enormous dark and shining eyes that were bent upon him in an accusing gaze. From the little mouth came speech, and Evers heard the accusation and he cried out a denial.

“No, no!
We
did not slay the K’harn!”

He woke on his own yell, and he was sweating in his bunk in the little cabin of the
Phoenix
, and Sharr was bending over him, her green eyes wide and startled.

She said, “I came—you were yelling—”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said. He unfastened his straps and sat on the edge of his bunk, still shaking.

He looked forward toward the control-room. He could see Lindeman asleep in one chair, his monkey-like head lolling, and Straw was in the pilot-chair. They were still in overdrive.

The red-haired Valloan girl was looking down at him puzzledly, unconsciously rubbing her left ankle with her bare right foot. It was a ridiculously childish gesture for one who, in that costume, was obviously not at all a child.

“Who are the K’harn?” she asked.

Evers looked at her. “I must really have been yelling.” He said, broodingly, “They’re far away. They live on the outer worlds of Andromeda galaxy.”

Sharr stared at him with a touch of awe in her eyes. “Then there are
people
there?”

Evers looked up at her. “I’m not sure you’d call them people. They’re not human, hardly even humanoid—yet they’re what the human seed might have developed into in another universe. Four-limbed, strange, but—yes, they’re people. Peaceful, intelligent people, who never deserved what Schuyler brought them.”

She shook her red head wonderingly. “I still can’t believe—how could Schuyler and his men get to that other galaxy before you, and no one ever suspect? How long has he been going there?”

Evers thought. “As near as we can figure it out, Schuyler’s task-forces have been secretly visiting Andromeda galaxy for two years. He has a lot of scientific brains in his pay. Some of them must have figured out how to speed up the overdrive, just as Lindeman did—it was always theoretically possible. With his money and facilities, it’d be quite easy for Schuyler to fit ships with the new drive and send them to Andromeda in total secrecy. To maintain that secrecy, they’ve been waiting to kill us when we got back.”

“But why? What are they
doing
there?”

“They’re stealing, that’s what they’re doing,” Evers said grimly. “The K’harn, the inhabitants of the Andromeda fringe worlds, are a pretty advanced folk scientifically. Their cities are rich in metals that are rare or unknown here, scientific devices developed along lines unthought of by us, whole treasures of alien knowledge. But, as I said, the K’harn are a peaceful, cooperative folk. War and weapons they don’t know about. It’s been easy for Schuyler’s ships, equipped with heavy weapons, to systematically loot the K’harn cities.”

Sharr’s eyes flashed. “Earthmen—they’re all the same. Why don’t they stay on their own world!”

“I’m an Earthman,” Evers reminded her. “So are my friends. We’re not helping Schuyler, we’re trying to stop what he’s doing.”

He added somberly, “But I don’t blame you. The K’harn thought the same thing when we landed first on one of their worlds. Schuyler’s task-force had been there months before. They thought we were more of the same. They tried to kill us—they did wound Straw—before we made them understand we knew nothing about it.

“We stayed there. The K’harn taught us their language. They were desperately anxious to find out where we came from and where Schuyler’s ships came from, anxious to know if there would be any more marauders from the sky.”

Evers laughed, a jarring sound.

“And when in turn
we
learned from them what had happened, we couldn’t believe it at first. We’d been so sure we were the first Earthmen to reach Andromeda.

And we found that others had been there for a long time, looting. We went to other K’harn worlds, saw what Schuyler’s men had done. It was one of their wrecked, discarded ships that told us it
was
Schuyler’s men. We saw enough destruction, enough dead K’harn, to do us. We headed back home, to tell the whole galaxy what they were doing out there. But we knew we’d never get a chance to tell much unless we landed on a world like Valloa and got word secretly to the Council.”

“And I trapped and betrayed you!” cried Sharr. She said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’d help you stop the evil they’re doing, if I could.”

Evers rose to his feet. “The only way to stop it is to drag it out for everyone to see. That’s why we’re going to Arkar.”

HE WENT FORWARD to the control-room, Sharr trailing after him. They were still in overdrive and the windows still showed only a formless grayness streaked with crazy squiggles of light. In the tank-chart, the blip that was the
Phoenix
was crawling through a swarm of light-flecks that were suns. Beyond this small Rim cluster was an isolated minor sun with one planet—Arkar.

Few men in the history of the galaxy had ever owned a planet. Schuyler did, legally. He had applied for a perpetual lease on Arkar. It was then an arid, lifeless globe, a desert of dust, with only crumbling stone ruins of infinite age to show that men had once lived there before their world dried and died. There was no one else who wanted the deathly place, and the lease was granted. Promptly some of the Schuyler millions had been poured into it, setting up great electronic water-synthesizers, bringing in vegetation, levelling a spaceport and building the castle that was Schuyler’s home. Arkar, thus Earth-conditioned, had become a flowering, livable world—and it was Schuyler’s world.