Corridor of the Suns

CHAPTER III

Sharr stared at him, suddenly no longer a self-assured adventuress, but a worried girl.

“You were right,” she said. “They would have made me go with them. They wouldn’t have paid me.”

“The money means nothing to Schuyler,” Evers said. “But there’s a secret that means a great deal to him, and you might have learned it. I think if he catches you you’ll be as dead as I’ll be if he catches me.”

He added, “You know you can’t sell me out now.”

Sharr made no move. She asked, “Where will you go if I release you?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m not safe here now. There’ll be others come to see what happened to these two. They’ll search everywhere. I’ve got to have some place to go.”

Evers gave her a sour smile. “You think fast, don’t you? Chase with the hounds or run with the hare. All right, I see your point. You free me and I’ll promise to take you with me.”

“Where?”

“To the Phoenix, our ship. It’s out in the jungle and my friends are waiting there. We’ll have to get away from Valloa fast and try some other world.”

Sharr went to the cupboard and came back with a crystal knife and slashed the hide thongs around his wrists. Evers rubbed his wrists painfully.

His heart sank at the thought of going back to Lindeman and Straw and reporting his failure.

But there was nothing else for it. They’d be lucky if they got away from Valloa, now. And the news that they’d returned from outer space would set a hue and cry for them wherever they went.

He took the gun out of the senseless Flat-face’s pocket, stuck it in his own pocket, and went out with the girl hurrying silently after him.

The street was darker now, the River of Stars low in the black sky. And it seemed very silent, for now the nightly calling of the bells had ceased.

As he stood in the narrow, empty street between the glimmering crystal houses, trying to figure the direction, Evers heard the silence suddenly broken. A far-off keening and wailing came sweeping through the town toward him.

“That tears it!” he said. “The GC men — they found out it was a false lead, and are back to comb the town some more!”

He felt desperate. Long before they could get to the edge of town, to the jungle, the fast cars would have overtaken them. In these empty streets, he and Sharr would be spotted instantly.

But what if the streets were crowded? Evers had an idea which he would have rejected in a less desperate situation. He snatched the gun back out of his pocket.

“You people think a lot of those bells, I’ve heard?” he said.

Sharr flashed him a worried, wondering look. “Yes — the bells go from father to son, for generations. But why—”

He didn’t answer. On a roof a little back along the street shimmered a great row of the conical crystal bells, deserted now that the night-music time was over. Evers notched his gun to the highest power and fired up at the row of bells.

Sharr uttered a gasp of horror and clutched at his arm. “No, do not—”

Her voice was instantly drowned in the terrific, ringing crash as his beam shattered the bells. Agonizing to the ears, like the falling of millions of crystal goblets on a stone floor, the big chimes seemed to utter a ringing, throbbing death-cry across the dark town.

Almost at once, even before the ringing dissonances had ebbed away, voices cried out and people began to run into the streets. Yells of rage came from the next block, Valloan voices rising in a tumult, all the crystal houses disgorging their occupants to mill in the streets and point up at the shattered bells.

Evers already had Sharr by the wrist and was pulling her along with him, down the dark street away from the gathering uproar.

“That’ll keep the GC men busy for a little while,” he said. “Hurry!”

“It was sacrilege!” she cried. “The bells are older than your Earth—”

“I’ll pay for them sometime if I live long enough — which is doubtful,” he grunted. “Come on.”

They ran on through the dark streets with the River of Stars in their faces, a magnificent cataract of light belting the sky just above the dark jungle.

When Evers hit the fields at the edge of town he skirted along them, trying to find the road of the crystal-miners by which he had entered the Valloan town. The uproar was still going on behind them, though dimmed by distance. He guessed that GC was having its hands full with the outraged Valloans.

He found the road — hardly more than a wide trail. The dark jungle took them in.

He was near exhaustion. He had had too much, for too long a time, and the last few hours had about used him up. He slowed to a walk, and the Valloan girl slowed down too.

Evers, his breath pumping harshly, uttered a little laugh that had no mirth in it.

“And we thought when we started, that when we came back we’d get a heroes’ welcome. Even though we broke regulations, we thought we’d be heroes — the men who went to Andromeda!”

It seemed now to him such a long and weary time ago, that takeoff into the outer gulf. They had felt like Columbus, not dreaming of the appalling knowledge that was waiting for them out there across the abyss, the knowledge that had doomed them to a fateful homecoming…

The dark jungle got darker as the blazing River of Stars sank lower toward the horizon. The smells and sounds of this Valloan forest were alien to Evers, but he was too numb with fatigue to be sensitive to them now. He stumbled a little as he went along the trail, and he would have passed the broken limb he’d left to mark his turn-off, if Sharr had not caught his arm.

“Is this it?”

“Yes, this is it. The Phoenix is this way.”

He forced his way through the brush, reeds smashing under his feet, with Sharr behind him. No need to worry about leaving a trail now!

He came into the little clearing, and there loomed the dark bulk of the Phoenix. It seemed a small ship, to have gone so far. It seemed a tired ship, its flanks crusted with the dust of undreamably far worlds.

A lethal beam flashed from the ship, ripping and scorching the brush beside them.

“Eric, for God’s sake, it’s me!” yelled Evers.

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 star-ship 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 take-off 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.