The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (98 page)

He could see that Rrulu was doubtful and uneasy about the whole plan. The K’harn, lacking the human capacity for intrigue, was poorly fitted for such a bluff. Evers anxiously drilled him over and over, warning him that he must appear beaten, not defiant.

Of a sudden, there was a sound at the door that brought Evers sharply around. It was the sound of the lock outside the door being turned.

“Here they are,” said Evers. “They didn’t give me as much time to persuade you as I’d expected. But remember, if we bluff them now, it’ll work.”

He could hear the lock turning this way and that, for what seemed to his tautly strung nerves an interminable time. Finally the door swung open.

In its opening stood Sharr.

The Valloan girl was silhouetted against the brightly lighted corridor outside. She had a gun in one hand, and her lithe body was tense as she peered into the comparatively dark cell.

Evers bounded forward. “Sharr! For God’s sake, how—what—”

Her hand grasped his sleeve and her green eyes were brilliant as she babbled up to him.

“I’ve found you! I was afraid they’d killed you! I found the other—Lindeman—but he’s stunned, sleeping. I—”

“But why did you leave the warehouse?” Evers demanded. “Did they find your hiding-place?”

“No!” said Sharr. “But I saw them taking you away. I had to try to reach you, before they tortured or killed you. I had the gun you’d given me, and I got through the darkness to this house, and slipped in a servant-door, and hid and watched. When I saw one of the men who had taken you come up from below, I came down here. There was another guard—”

Evers felt the death-knell of his hopes. Everything had depended on Sharr, whose presence on Arkar nobody suspected, remaining in hiding until the GC came and she could emerge and tell them the truth. Instead, she had come out and used the consummate skill of the hereditary thieves of Valloa to seek and find him.

His whole plan was in ruins, for it was still hours till the GC cruisers would arrive and he did not now think they were likely to live that long. Yet how could he reproach Sharr, when she had risked her own safety to find them?

“You shouldn’t have—”, he began, and then he stopped. Sharr’s face had gone white, and her eyes, looking over his shoulder into the shadowy cell behind him, were distended. Her mouth opened on a scream.

He knew instantly that she had seen Rrulu in the shadows back there, and that the totally unexpected sight of the big, spidery K’harn was the cause of her horror.

Evers’ hand clapped over her mouth, stifling the scream. He gripped her and spoke in her ear.

“He is a friend. A
friend
. One of the K’harn I told you about. A prisoner like myself.”

He did not trust her until her efforts to squirm loose and screech quieted down. Then he removed his hand from her mouth.

Sharr shivered, but kept quiet. Only her eyes never left the unhuman figure of the K’harn.

Evers felt the desperation of defeat. They might get out and hide for a little while but their escape would soon be discovered and they would be caught long before GC came, and Schuyler would win after all.

“Damn it,
no
!” he told himself. “There must be some way to beat him, even if we go under.”

Rrulu moved restlessly forward, and Sharr shivered. And of a sudden, Evers seized on a possibility. It might be a poor one, but it was the only one left.

He said swiftly to Rrulu, “You said you could adapt the instruments of Knowledge of the K’harn for destruction.”

“Yes!” said Rrulu, a somber flash lighting his eyes. “In all this time alone I have calculated the way to do that—something no K’harn ever thought of before.”

“There are many instruments looted from your Houses of Knowledge, in that warehouse,” Evers said. “Could you use them? How long would it take?”

“Not long, if the right instruments are there,” said the K’harn. “If there is a synthesizer there I could reverse the polarity of its forces and—”

Evers interrupted. “All right. We’ll try it. What I want you to do, if you can, is to cause as much destruction as possible here. Then, even if they get us, GC will surely investigate what’s going on here on Arkar.”

He told Sharr rapidly then, and added, “I think we’re gone geese anyway, but if Rrulu can do some spectacular damage, it’ll surely blow the lid off things here. Where’s Lindeman?”

“In the next room,” she whispered. “I did not know which you were in, I had to open them all. A six-year-old child of Valloa would laugh at such locks.” She added, “They didn’t hurt you?”

There was something in her face as she asked the last, and Evers bent forward and kissed her. He took the gun from her hand and went out into the bright corridor.

Rrulu had said there was always a guard on duty but there was no one in the corridor now. Evers hastened to the next door, with Sharr trailing close behind him and looking back fearfully at the K’harn following them.

The door was closed but not locked. He stepped inside and stopped, startled.

Lindeman lay on a cot, stirring and moaning a little as the effect of the stunner began to wear off.

On the floor with his face upward lay one of the tough-faced men.

“He was in the corridor when I came down,” Sharr said. “I shot him. I dragged him in here in case anyone came down.”

Evers thought to himself that Sharr was a true daughter of barbaric Valloa. She had given the man a full-strength beam. Remembering Straw, he could not be sorry.

He sprang forward and began to chafe Lindeman’s wrists and smack his cheeks, trying to bring him back to consciousness.

Lindeman moaned, “Damn you, Schuyler.” But he did not open his eyes.

“We can’t bring him around,” Evers said. “We’ll have to carry him, for we’ve got little time.”

Sharr suddenly turned her head sharply; and then ran to the door.

“There is no time at all,” she whispered. “Listen!”

CHAPTER VIII

Evers sprang to the door, snatching out his weapon. He pushed Sharr back into the room, and stood in the doorway listening.

Boots were clumping down the stair at the end of the hallway. It was only one man, and as his feet came into view on the stair, the man was saying loudly,

“Roy, I—”

At that moment the man’s face came into view as he descended the stair. It was the other tough-faced man. Alarm flashed into his battered face as he saw no one in the corridor.

Before he could move, Evers stepped out into the corridor with his energy-gun levelled.

“It’s on lethal,” Evers said. “Keep your hands away from your sides. Walk this way.”

The tough-faced man looked at him. He was estimating his chances. Whatever was in Evers’ face seemed to be enough to convince him that his chances were not good. He spread his arms out and walked down the corridor.

Sharr, keeping well out of Evers’ line of fire, reached out and took the weapon from the man’s belt. Evers gestured to the open doorway of the cell.

“In there.”

The tough-faced man walked in. He glanced swiftly at Rrulu, crouched burning-eyed and grotesque and terrible, and at Lindeman, lying on the cot. Then he looked at the man on the floor, at his blank face and sightless eyes.

“There’s Roy,” said Evers. “He’s dead. You’ll likely be right with him in another minute.”

The man looked from the figure on the floor to Evers, and his face became gray and sick.

“You can live,” said Evers. “We’re going out of here, and we don’t want to be seen. You lead us out and if no one sees us, you live.”

The touch-faced man was sweating. He said hoarsely, “There’s no way I can do that.”

“That’s too bad for you,” said Evers.

“Kill him,” said Rrulu in his hissing speech.

The man could not understand the words but he understood the menace in the tone and in the unhuman, flaring eyes. He seemed to wilt.

“There’s a stair up to the back car-park, for unloading stuff,” he said.

“That’ll do fine,” said Evers. He spoke to the K’harn in his own language. “Bring my friend, we are going out.” And then to the tough-faced man he said, “All right. Keep right ahead of me.”

They started down the corridor in a strange little procession, the man in front, Evers behind him with the gun in his back, the red-haired Valloan girl and then the big, spidery K’harn, carrying the half-conscious Lindeman by one limb as easily as a doll, and walking with a scuttling glide on the other three.

Their unhappy guide went past the bottom of the stair, and opened a door beyond it. There was a ramp there, leading upward. It ended in another closed door. The tough-faced man swung the door outward and started through.

He suddenly moved very fast. He sprang out and at the same time swung the door violently back to hit Evers in the face.

Evers was taken off guard, yet the trick did not succeed. The door hit his extended foot and that checked its swing. Instantly Evers lunged through it.

Out here in the open, he dared not risk firing a crackling blast from the gun. Instead, as he swung, he raised the weapon and brought its barrel down on the tough man’s head.

He was just in time. A loud yell that had been in the man’s throat came out as a grunt, and he collapsed.

EVERS DRAGGED him into the concealment of nearby dandelion shrubs, and then looked around. They were in the shadow of the metal castle’s great wall, near the rear. Through the darkness he descried two parked vehicles under towering lily-trees farther back—a car and two tracs.

“We’ll take that car,” he said instantly to Sharr. “If you and Rrulu and Eric keep down, I can pass as a driver on an errand, in the darkness.”

“It will soon be daylight!” she warned. “The sky shows a little light, that way.”

Two minutes later, Evers drove the car with deliberate lack of haste away from the looming mansion and down the road of giant flowers. There was indeed a thin band of ruddy light low in the dark sky ahead, and he resisted the temptation to go fast. In the back seat, Sharr crouched down beside the unconscious Lindeman, keeping herself well away from the crouching figure of the K’harn.

Evers drove out onto the compound of the dock area. But he kept his course so as to circle around behind the docks, toward the warehouses. The men working under krypton lights around the starships, though they must have heard him, did not look up as he went unhurriedly by. Breathing more easily, he drew the car up in the shadow behind that warehouse in which Straw had died.

Rrulu, with a fierce impatience, bounded out of the car. Evers gave Sharr a torch he found under the dash, and then he picked up Lindeman and followed the K’harn and the Valloan girl.

The warehouse door was still unlocked as Sharr had left it. They went inside and he closed the door and set Lindeman down on the floor. Sharr’s torch came on, playing over that tangle of incomprehensible mechanisms and instruments, and Rrulu uttered a low, passionate exclamation.

“The treasures of a dozen Houses of Knowledge, riven away from my people!”

Evers asked rapidly, “What can you do with them?”

The K’harn took the torch from Sharr and ran forward, examining the great pile of loot.

Sharr was bending over Lindeman. She looked pale and crumpled, and not at all like the cocksure Valloan girl who had impudently taken him away from a GC man not too long before.

Evers was tired too, and feeling a sick foretaste of ultimate defeat. It had been a foolish thing, he felt now, to pin their last gamble on the half-mad K’harn’s obsession. As far as he could see, Rrulu was doing nothing, just poking and prying amid the mass of mechanisms.

He told Sharr, “Stay by the door and watch through the crack. Call if anyone comes.”

She said, “And if they do?”

“I’m afraid it’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’,” he said. “Cheer up, Sharr. It may be finish for us but if Rrulu can do anything it’ll wind up Schuyler too.”

He left her at the door and went to where the K’harn had brought a glittering mechanism out of the mass, and was crouching beside it.

It was the big object which had formerly reminded Evers of an enormous toy. There was a two-foot crystal sphere at its center, and around that on metal tracks were mounted a dozen smaller crystal spheres of varying size. There was a complex of wiring underneath, linked to one of the black cubes that Rrulu had called power-cubes.

The K’harn, crouching beside the enigmatic mechanism like a great spider by its prey, was intently engaged in moving the small crystals from one “orbit” to another exchanging their places, revising the wiring.

“What can the thing do?” Evers asked him, but it was a minute before the busy K’harn answered.

“It is a synthesizer. As I told you, it can generate a force that converts free energy into any chosen elements. When I get through with it, it will reverse that process.”

Evers was increasingly dubious. He was a scientist himself and he could imagine no way by which the glittering thing could accomplish such a feat.

“Then you can destroy with it—enough to call the attention of the GC men when they come?”