Corridor of the Suns

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.

Straw looked up at him with a mirthless smile on his round face. “Your little plan is working just fine, Vance. See back there?”

Evers looked at the right-hand edge of the tank. Three blips, widely separated from each other, were crawling through the wilderness of suns. Their courses converged toward the Phoenix.

“GC’s big radar station on Tinno must have picked us up, right away.” said Straw. “We can’t use the inter-galactic drive in here. They’ll soon catch up to us.”

Evers calculated mentally. “It’s cutting things’close, but we should reach Arkar at least twelve hours before them. I’ll take over.”

Straw got up, stretching his towering young figure and tenderly feeling his bandaged arm, as Evers took the pilot-chair.

Lindeman woke up, and looked at them with eyes still red-rimmed from fatigue and sleep. He studied the tank.

Then he shook his head. “We’ll have to move fast on Arkar. And how can we, without Schuyler’s toughs grabbing us the first move we make?”

“Only one thing to do,” Evers said. “Arkar’s a forested world now — remember those stories of the giant vegetation Schuyler grew there? Land the Phoenix in the forest, sneak in to his spaceport there, find his galactic-drive ships and his loot from Andromeda, and then show them to the GC men when they arrive there looking for us.”

Lindeman said gloomily, “But Schuyler’s radar-station will spot us when we come in.”

“Sure they will. And they’ll track where we land, and will come looking for our ship. But while they’re finding it, we will be on foot making for their spaceport.”

“Harebrained, but the only thing we can try,” muttered Lindeman. He glanced at Sharr, standing beside the pilot-chair. “What about that Valloan wench? She’ll give the show away first chance she gets.”

“I will not!” said Sharr. “I did not know the thing that Schuyler is doing, before!”

“Oh, sure, now you’re noble-minded and everything,” said Lindeman. “My eye!”

Evers interrupted, before Sharr could retort to that. “She’ll be all right. If nothing else, she knows by now that she’s in as much danger from Schuyler as we are.”

Straw, grinning, took the furious girl by the arm. “Forget them, honey. Come on back and help me break out some ration-capsules.”

They went aft, but within a few minutes Straw returned, ruefully rubbing his cheek. “Some right arm that baby’s got!”

Evers told him, “You’re lucky you haven’t a broken neck. The Valloans have a kind of judo that’s murder, and she knows it. Better let her alone.”

They took the ration capsules and the Phoenix droned on through the formless grayness of hyper-space. And in the great chart in the tank, the three blips that were GC cruisers crept on their trail.

Evers watched the chart, and thought. He thought their chances were no better than Lindeman’s estimate. He thought that he might just have been too clever entirely in thrusting themselves right into the stronghold of their enemy. But what else could they do? A black and evil work was going on there away on the fringes of Andromeda galaxy. It would go on for years if it wasn’t exposed. It was up to them to expose it, in any way. at any risk.

Evers’ face hardened and he told himself, “If we can’t do it any other way, I’ll kill Schuyler.”

He looked again and again at the tank as the hours went by. Arkar was drawing closer, and the three GC cruisers were still far back.

Lindeman and Straw hung over his chair now, studying the chart anxiously. Sharr watched the light-streaked evil grayness outside the windows with a horrified fascination. Time went by.

“We’re close enough to switch out of overdrive,” said Lindeman, finally.

Evers shook his head. “Not yet. I want to get in as close as we can, first.”

“It’s dangerous to come out of overdrive too near a planet!”

Evers did not turn but he heard Straw answer Lindeman. “Dangerous? Do you think we’re good insurance risks, no matter how we do this?”

Now very fast, in the chart, the dot that was the sun of Arkar and the smaller dot that was the planet closed toward the blip of the Phoenix.

“Strap in,” said Evers, still without turning.

He waited, his hands sweating on the switches. He hoped their instruments had not gone erratic after all they had been through. If they were only a shade off, three men and a girl would go to glory in a spectacular way.

He switched out of overdrive.

The brilliant glare of sunlight hammered through the windows, replacing the evil grayness, and the throb of the generators rose to a shriek beyond hearing, and the atoms of Evers’ body shivered again from nauseating shock as they fell back through dimensions.

And the Phoenix was in normal space, black space with the dull-red sun blazing big ahead of them, and the greenish globe of Arkar rolling toward them on its orbit, looking up big…

“That tears it!” yelled Straw suddenly. “Look down there!”

Two small hornets of metal, catching the ruddy light on their sides, had swung up out of the shadow of the planet and were curving up toward them.

“I knew Schuyler’s radar here would spot us!” Lindeman cried.

Evers ignored that, and hit the blast-switches hard. The Phoenix jumped at full power, heading toward the northern hemisphere of the half-shadowed planet as the two little spacers came up from under it.

“We’ve got a chance yet,” he said rapidly. “Give me the coordinates of the spaceport here, quick!”

Lindeman punched buttons, and as the microfile of standard interstellar navigational data flashed the information, he read it off. As he heard it, Evers fed the information into the computer.

The landing-pattern he wanted sprang out before him as a graph of light on a small screen. He read it and then hit the blasts again, altering course, aiming to swing low around the northern pole of Arkar.

The planet spun under them, half in bright light, half in shadow. Their goal was on the shadowed half, and that was good if they could make it. He thought they could beat those two metal hornets in by a few seconds.

He thought wrong. Blinding flares exploded silently in space right around them. The instrument-panel went Click! and Sharr cried out and put her hand to her dazzled eyes.

Lindeman said, in a tone of wonder, “They’re firing energy-shells. No private ship in the galaxy is allowed to carry weapons that size.”

Evers said harshly, “A lot that would worry a man who’s robbing whole worlds. Their men on Valloa must have sent them word about us. Better hold on.”

He didn’t look to see if they obeyed. There would be another burst of energy-shells in a moment, and he had plenty to do.

He hit the blast-buttons like a man gone insane, sending the Phoenix down in a corkscrew, crazy course toward the shadowed forests on the night side of Arkar. Evers was an astronautical engineer and a good pilot. But the men in those metal hornets were not just good, they were expert. They hung right after him and they fired again.

Evers, leveling out and suddenly changing course, saw blinding light and heard the crash of severed metal and smelled super-hot air.

“Grazed our tail!” Straw yelled. “Set her down!”

It was that or nothing, for the Phoenix was falling out of control. Evers set her down, fast and hard. They crashed down through boughs and leaves and smacked solid ground, and then the wounded ship rolled over and over through the forest.