Corridor of the Suns

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 star-ships, 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?”

“Be sure of that,” said Rrulu. “But it will take a little time, to alter the circuits—”

Evers thought heavily that time was the last thing they would be allowed, and with the thought came a call from Sharr at the door.

“I think your escape is discovered,” said the girl.

Evers bounded to the door. The whole sky was turning crimson as the red sun of Arkar showed its rim above the horizon. The blood-like rays illuminated the compounds, the docks and star-ships, the tall flower-trees and their giant blooms, the arrogant dome of Schuyler’s metal mansion towering in the distance above everything.

From the direction of the mansion, two cars were racing toward the dock area. Men ran from the cars into shops and barracks. Then a warning siren began to scream.

“Yes, they’re going to start searching for us,” Evers muttered. He swung around to the K’harn, whose weird hands were now flying over the wires of crystals of the machine. “How much longer, Rrulu?”

“Several minutes, at least. I can’t do it any faster—”

Evers, coming to an icy decision, drew his gun. He thought they were all of them near the end of their rope, but till he stopped breathing he meant to hit back at Schuyler. A few minutes might do it—

He said to Sharr, “Only one way to give Rrulu time enough — and that’s to decoy them away from here. I’m going to hit for the forest. They’ll hear the alarm and follow me, and won’t bother the warehouse for a while.”

“But they’ll catch you and kill you!” she cried. “Schuyler will take no more chances—”

He paid no attention to her objections. He opened the warehouse door a little and slid out, and plunged for the neighboring forest.

He crossed the invisible detector beam, and the bells started their clangoring alarm. Evers glanced back and saw men back by the docks pointing and running forward.

He also saw Sharr, running silently right behind him on her bare feet.

“Why didn’t you stay?” he cried.

“I go with you!” she said. “I—”

“Duck!” he yelled, and grabbed her and hit the dirt just inside the forest, as lethal beams ripped the foliage over their heads.

He took her hand and scrambled up and ran on, through the underbrush beneath the lovely, looming flower-trees, with the red sunlight strong now in their faces.

“Keep in the brush,” Evers panted. “Their tracs can’t follow us in it, and the longer we keep going the more time it gives Rrulu.”

Ironically, almost as he said that, they heard a sound of crashing progress through the brush at several places behind them.

“What is it?” asked Sharr, seeing his face.

“They’re following us with Workers,” Evers said.

He needed to say no more. The Workers could go through anything, and faster than any human.

They plunged on, the thorny shrubs ripping their garments, scratching their arms and legs, and the ominous crashing strides behind them came closer each moment.

It seemed incredible to Evers that this should be the end of everything, and yet he knew it was — the cruelly anti-climactic conclusion of Lindeman’s great dream.

They burst suddenly out of the brush into the rubbly dark stones of the ancient ruins of Arkar. Sharr’s foot twisted on a loose bit of rock, and she cried out in pain and fell. Evers stooped to help her up.

She screamed, and he heard the thump-crash-thump close behind him, and whirled around.

A Worker, its giant blue metal body towering enormous in the bloody light, was striding out of the brush after them. Its human controller was keeping back out of sight, using the robot’s radar “vision” to find the fugitives.

Evers fired at the mindless giant, and knew as he triggered that his beam could not harm the thing.

Yellow destruction-beams flashed out of the eye-like apertures in the Worker’s metal body, almost instantly.

The beams missed.

Incredulously, Evers saw that the Worker was staggering and floundering as though out of control, its beams flashing aimlessly and blasting the dark stones nearby. He heard cries of astonishment and terror from back in the brush toward the spaceport.

Next moment, a band of pulsing, cold, white light seemed to expand from back there toward them. The light engulfed the staggering Worker.

The Worker’s metal body wavered hazily, changed, melted into blue vapor — and was gone.

The expanding white light reached Evers and Sharr. He looked down stupefiedly at his hand. The gun in it was changing to smoke, drifting away, and his fingers closed on emptiness.

Then he understood.

“By God, Rrulu did it! A wave of force, that’s tuned to de-cohere metals and nothing else into energy—”

He got Sharr to her feet and started back with her, running toward the compound on the wide open trail that the Worker had made.

He reached the edge of the compound. They stopped, staring.

The warehouse in which he had left Rrulu and Lindeman was gone. So was everything that had been in it, except Lindeman’s senseless form, and Rrulu, and the machine of crystal over which the K’harn bent.

The crystal spheres of that alien mechanism were silently spinning around the central sphere, faster than the eye could follow. Light, blazing force, pulsed out from them as though pumped outward. Here was the source of that expanding ring of metal-destroying force.

The ring of force had expanded across half the compound. The other warehouses were gone. The star-ships in the docks were all gone but one, and even as Evers stared that one ship melted into vapor, and so did the Workers stalking beyond it, and the cranes and machinery beyond them.

The men of Schuyler were standing paralyzed by the incredible, stupefied by the vanishing of the weapons in their hands, the cars and tracs they had been driving, the ships upon which they had been working.

Evers and Sharr ran to Rrulu. The K’ham’s great eyes flared with triumph.

“You did it — but you destroyed all the things that were stolen from your own worlds!” cried Evers.

“And that is well,” said Rrulu. “Those things will never be used by murderers. Nor this one — when its work is done, I will destroy it too.”

A hoarse voice yelling in the distance swung Evers around. It came from a tall figure in a silken blue coverall who was shouting frenziedly to the stupefied, staring men. It was Schuyler.

“Get them with your bare hands!” Schuyler was yelling. “Stop them before—”

One of the men pointed, crying out, and Schuyler turned and looked. And there in the distance the expanding ring of force had reached the looming metal mansion. The proud dome wavered, shifted into smoke, and then was gone from among the tall flower-trees.

Schuyler turned back and came straight on toward Evers and Rrulu, and his face was now the face of a madman.

“Don’t kill him!” cried Evers.

Rrulu had bounded forward, a terrible figure in his scuttling spidery rush, and had seized the magnate.

Evers ran toward them. “Don’t kill him! He’s our hostage against his men — when they recover from their daze, we’ll need him to hold them back till GC gets here!”

He pried the K’harn’s hands away from Schuyler’s throat. Schuyler’s face was already distorted and blue, but he was still breathing.

Across the compound, the men were still standing like men in a dream, some of them babbling, some of them just staring wildly.

Rrulu reached out and touched the base of the machine, and the spinning crystal spheres slowed their revolutions. The ring of force disappeared. They looked at each other, and then across the compound from which everything metal, every man-made structure, had disappeared.

There was no triumph in Rrulu’s face now. It was sick and strained and strange as he looked at Evers. He said.

“I am the first K’harn ever to use our wisdom for destruction. It was necessary. But I am ashamed.”

In the GC cruiser speeding away from Arkar, Lindeman lay sleeping. Evers gave up all idea of awakening him yet, and he and Sharr went out of the little cabin.

The commander of the cruiser met them in the corridor. He said,

“I’ve been down to see our prisoners. Schuyler’s all right, and talking about his lawyers.”

“He won’t squeeze out of this, will he?” said Evers.

The commander laughed. “A dozen of his men are ready right now to give evidence. He hasn’t got a chance. If nothing else, your queer friend’s testimony would be enough.”

He looked along the corridor to where Rrulu stood beside a window, looking somberly at the blurred grayness outside.

The GC officer shivered. “He surely did a job. Never saw anything like it. I’ll be glad when he and his knowledge are back in their own galaxy.” He added, his face hardening, “That’ll be as soon as we can build the Lindeman drive into a dozen cruisers. We’re going to Andromeda in force — and any of Schuyler’s looters still there will get a nasty surprise.”

When the GC man had gone, Sharr said, “I will soon be back in my own home, too. It will be good. I don’t like Earthmen.”

She did not look at him as she said it. Evers looked down at her. He said,

“You know very well that you’re not going back to Valloa, that I love you and you’re going with me. You just want to make me say it.”

She still did not look up at him, but she came and put her head against him and began to cry.

Evers, holding her, patted her red head. He said, “Only two things. On Earth, people don’t understand the respectability of being an hereditary thief. So no more of that.”

“No more,” said Sharr muffledly.

He felt the back of his neck. “And no matter what arguments we have, no more Valloan judo. Absolutely no more.”