The Godmen

CHAPTER IV

It was very noisy inside the Thetis. Part of the noise was being made by Kwolek and his crew down in the bowels of the drive-room, but only a small part. Most of it came from outside.

Harlow felt as though he were standing in the interior of a great iron-sided drum. Yrra, beside him, had her hands over her ears. He could feel her flinch at the loudest and he knew she was frightened — not of the noises, but what they could mean to her.

The screen in front of them showed the ground around the ship. It swarmed with Ktashans. The sun was high now, and between its heat and their own activities most of the men had thrown off their short robes, leaving only loose drawers that did not hamper their movements. Their golden bodies gleamed, glowing with energy and sweat. They had hammered tirelessly on the Thetis' hull for more than three hours now and they showed no signs of flagging. So far the durametal hull had resisted everything they had from stones to crude drills and wrecking bars. But the stubborn methodical battering was getting on Harlow's nerves.

He leaned over to the intercom. “How's it going?"

Kwolek's voice answered him in a rasping snarl. “It won't go at all if you don't quit pestering me. Some fool question every five minutes!

"Okay,” said Harlow. “Okay."

He didn't blame Kwolek. The boys were doing the best they could. They could have replaced the damaged tube in half the time from outside, but the Ktashans out there made that impractical. So it was being done under emergency-in-space procedure, from inside, only one difference, which would help some. They didn't have to wear vac-suits.

"It won't be long now,” he said to Yrra, having to shout to make himself heard but trying to make it a comforting shout. He knew what she was thinking. He was thinking the same thing himself. If the Ktashans ever managed to break their way inside, their chances for living long were poor. They didn't have Brai now, but they had committed their sin against custom and tabu when they got Brai out of his prison. And what had happened afterward would probably only make N'Kann more determined than ever to punish them for having set loose no one knew what menaces connected with the Vorn.

He took Yrra by the shoulders and turned her away from the screen. He said, “I want to know about the Vorn — everything that your brother told Dundonald."

She was scared, but after a moment she answered him.

"He told Dundonald all that he knew, all that my people know. It is all legend, for it was two generations ago.” She thought a moment, then went on. “The Vorn came to this world—"

Harlow interrupted. “How did they come? What did they look like?"

Yrra stared. “It was not known how they came. They had no ship like this one — no ship at all. They suddenly were just here."

And that, Harlow thought, was the same story that the Survey had heard on several worlds about the Vorn. They did not use ships, they just appeared. Some method of instantaneous transmission of matter seemed the only answer to that riddle. It was small wonder that the Cartel back on Earth was grabbing for such a secret.

"As to how they looked,” Yrra was continuing, “the stories are strange. It is said that they were human, but not human like us — that they were of force and flame, not of flesh. Is such a thing possible?"

That, too, was the cryptic description that other worlds had given the Survey. It could mean anything, or nothing.

"I don't know,” said Harlow. “Go on."

"It is said,” Yrra told him, “that the Vorn spoke to our people in some way. Our people were very afraid. But the Vorn said they had not come to harm them, that they were star-rovers who visited many worlds and were merely visiting this one. They said they would go back to their own world, but might come here again some day."

"Where did the Vorn say their home-world was?” asked Harlow.

It was the crucial question and he waited tensely for the answer.

"In the Great Blackness,” said Yrra, using the name given by the Ktashans to the Horsehead that was such a big feature of their night sky. “The Vorn said that beyond two blue stars that burn at the edge of the Blackness there is a bay that runs deep into it, and that a green star far in that bay was their native star."

Harlow's hopes leaped up. He had noted the twin blue stars on the fringe of the Horsehead — and this sounded like a clear clue.

"Is that what Brai told Dundonald?” he asked, and Yrra nodded.

"Yes. And that is why my people condemned Brai. For when Dundonald left here he said he would search for the world of the Vorn, and so great is my people's reverence for the Vorn that they thought that sacrilege."

The banging upon the hull of the Thetis suddenly stopped. In the abrupt silence, Harlow thought hard. He said, “Whether or not the Vorn are really there, that's where Dundonald went so we have to go there. And that's where Taggart will have headed, as soon as he got this information out of Brai."

"Brai would never tell a treacherous enemy like that anything — not even under torture,” Yrra declared proudly.

Harlow looked at her a little a little pityingly. “You don't know Earthmen. They're too clever to use torture any more. They use a process led narco-synthesis, and other things. Brai will tell all he knows."

Yrra did not answer. She had turned to look at the screen and now her eyes were wide and bright with a new terror.

Harlow followed her gaze, and his own nerves tightened with a shock. He saw now why the Ktashans had stopped hammering on the Thetis' hull.

The golden men were all running out onto the plain to meet something that was coming slowly from the city. It trundled ponderously on wooden wheels, pushed by a gang of sweating men. It was a massive ram made of a colossal tree-trunk tipped with stone.

Harlow jumped to the intercom. “Kwolek, we've got maybe ten minutes! They're coming with a nutcracker that'll spring our plates for sure."

"Ten minutes? We need an hour more!” answered Kwolek's voice. “We've unshipped the damaged tube but it'll take that long to install a new one."

Harlow thought a moment, then made his decision. There was only one thing to be done.

"Suspend work,” he said. “Seal the tube-mounting and come up here. We'll take off as is."

"Are you crazy?” Kwolek howled, but Harlow snapped off the intercom.

Kwolek and Garcia came into the bridge a minute later. Kwolek's red face was smeared with dirt and he was badly upset.

"You ought to know that a takeoff on unbalanced tubes will sunfish the Thetis all over,” he said. Then he saw the screen and the sweating, triumphant Ktashan men on the plain, all pushing their massive ram faster and faster toward the ship. He said, “Oh.” He bent over the intercom and spoke into it loud urgent words, ending up with a profane order to get it done fast. Harlow took Yrra by the arm and pulled her away from the screen, where she was still watching with fascinated horror the ponderous approach of the ram.

"This is going to be rough,” he told her. “You'll probably be scared to death, but it won't last long."

Either way, he thought, it won't last long. If we make it, or if we don't.

He strapped her into his own bunk, making her as secure and comfortable as possible, and when he got through she looked so small and patient and scared and too proud to show it that he kissed her. Then he ran back to the control room.

Kwolek and Garcia were already strapped in, Kwolek with his ear glued to the intercom and both of them watching the screen. The ram was much closer now. Its massive head of red stone looked and was heavy enough to batter down the stone walls of a city.

Kwolek said, “Another couple of minutes. We don't want to take any chances of the seal blowing out when we hit vacuum."

He was sweating visibly. So was Garcia, but more neatly, refraining somehow from staining his tunic collar. Harlow said, “Give me the outside speaker. Fast."

He strapped himself into his own recoil chair while Garcia flipped switches and made connections on the communic board. He too watched the screen. He could see the scars of combat on the barrel of the ram, the histories of old battles written in the chips and cracks in the stone warhead. He could see the faces of the Ktashans, quite clearly. They were the faces of fanatics, uniform across the galaxy no matter where you found them. The men who knew they were right, the men without mercy.

Garcia handed him the mike. “Here.” He looked at the great red head of the ram and folded himself as small as he could in the confines of his chair, as though he wanted to compact his atomic structure as solid as possible against the coming shock.

Harlow roared into the mike. Amplifiers picked up his voice and magnified it a thousand-fold and hurled it forth from the ship's exterior speaker system.

"N'Kann!” he cried. “Get your men out of there. We're taking off.” In the screen he could see the startled faces upturned toward the gigantic sound of his voice, the bodies arrested in motion. “We're taking off! Run, or you die. N'Kann, you hear me? Leave the ram and run!"

Kwolek turned from the intercom and said, “All ready."

Harlow stared at the screen. Some of the Ktashans had turned to run. Others still stood undecided. Still others, the hard core of violence, shouted and waved their arms toward the ship, urging on the ram.

Harlow groaned. “The fools,” he said. “I don't want to kill them. I can't—"

The ram inched ponderously forward.

"Get away!” he yelled at them with a note of desperation, and touched a stud on the central control board.

The Thetis quivered and began to hum to herself, a deep bass note of anticipation.

The ram stopped. The men stood by it, staring up. Behind them the larger crowd was melting away, slowly at first and then with increasing speed.

Harlow touched the stud again, advancing it a notch. The hum became a growling, a wordless song. The Thetis gathered herself for the upward leap, “Get away!” screamed Harlow into the mike, but his voice was almost drowned in the iron voice of the ship, and then suddenly the men turned from the ram and fled away across the plain.

Harlow set his teeth and slammed the firing key all the way down.

The Thetis went up in a great wobbling surge, like a bird with an injured wing. But she was an awfully big bird, and terribly strong, and the violence of her thrashings about nearly snapped the eye-teeth out of Harlow's head. He fought through a deepening haze to keep her from flopping over out of the control of her gyros and crashing back to the ground, feeling the contents of his skull wash back and forth like water in a swinging kettle, feeling the straps cut into him when he went forward and the bolts of the chair prod him through all the padding when he was flung back, hearing strange rasping grunting whistling noises that he knew was himself trying to breathe. The control panel dimmed and at last disappeared beyond the red mist that filled the cabin, or his own head. His pawings at the keys became blind and unsure. Panic swept over him. I'm blacking out, he thought, I can't hold her, she's going down. He tried to scream, in anger and protest against this sudden end, in fear and regret. The contraction of his diaphragm forced blood into his head and held it there for a moment, and the mists cleared a little and the wild gyrations of his insides steadied down just enough for him to get hold of reality, if only by its thinnest edge.

He hung on, forcing himself to breathe deeply, slowly. One. Two. Three. The indicator lights winked peacefully on the board. The furious thrashings of the unbalanced drive had settled to a sort of regular lurch-and-spin no worse than that of a ship in a beam sea. The Thetis was in space. She was not going to crash.

He looked around at Kwolek and Garcia. Both of them were bleeding at the nose — he found that he was too — and their eyes were reddened and bulging, but they managed to grin back at him.

"That's a devil of a way to treat a good ship,” croaked Kwolek. “If I ever get hold of that Taggart—"

"You and me both,” said Harlow. “Let's get that tube fixed."

Kwolek was already unstrapping. He went staggering out of the control room. Harlow gave the controls to Garcia and staggered after him, heading toward his own quarters.

He found Yrra almost unconscious in the bunk, her flesh already showing some cruel bruises from the straps. He unbuckled them and wetted a towel in cold water, and wiped her face, smoothing the thick tumbled hair back from her forehead. Presently she opened her eyes and looked up at him, and he smiled.

"It's all right now,” he said. “Everything's all right."

She whispered, “Brai?"

"We're going after him. We'll get him back."

"From the world of the Vorn.” She was silent a moment, her gaze moving about the unfamiliar cabin. The tiny viewport was open. She looked through it at her first view of deep space, the stars burning all naked and glorious in their immensities of gloom, and Harlow saw the thrill of awe and terror go through her. Her fingers tightened on his wrist, and they were cold.

"On my own world I was not afraid of the Vorn,” she whispered. “I laughed at N'Kann and the old men. But now—” She stared out the viewport. “Now I am in the country of the Vorn, and I am afraid.” She turned suddenly and buried her face against him like a child. “I am afraid!"

Harlow looked over the top of her head to the viewport. The country of the Vorn. The black and tideless sea through which they voyaged at will between the island stars. Harlow had never been afraid of the Vorn, either. He had hardly believed in their existence. But now, when he looked at space and thought of the brooding Horsehead and the two blue suns that burned in its shadow, he felt a cold prickling chill run down his spine.

Dundonald had gone that way and he had not come back.

That prickling of fear did not leave Harlow in the long days that followed — arbitrary “days” marked out of the timeless night through which the Thetis fled. With the damaged tube replaced, she built up velocities rapidly on a course that took her straight toward the Horsehead. There was no sign of Taggart's Sunfire on the radar. He was too far ahead for that. In fact, he was so far ahead that there was no hope of overtaking him or forestalling any action he might take on the world of the Vorn, which he would reach long before Harlow. Any sensible man would have said the pursuit was hopeless, but the men of the Thetis were not sensible. If they had been they would never have signed up with Survey. Also, they were angry. They had been made fools of, and they had almost died of their foolishness, and now they were determined to catch up with Taggart if it took them the rest of their lives.

Which might not be very long, Harlow thought. He looked gloomily at the screen that showed the panorama of space ahead of the Thetis. It was one of the most magnificent sights in the galaxy. You sat stunned and wordless before it, and no matter how often or how long you stared at it the wonder and the glory did not depart. There was the whole vast canvas of the universe for a backdrop, and all across it, arrogant, coal-black, and light-years vast, the Horsehead reared against a bursting blaze of suns. Magnificent, yes. Splendid and beautiful, yes. But there was another word that came to Harlow's mind, an old word not much used any more. The, word was sinister.

Yrra spent as much time as she could with him in the control room, watching the screen, straining her eyes for some glimpse of the ship that carried her brother. Harlow noticed that the Horsehead had the same effect on her. There was a sign she made toward it, furtive and quick as though she were ashamed of it, and he knew that it was a Ktashan sign to ward off evil.

For a long time the relative positions of the tiny ship and the great black nebula seemed not to change. Then gradually the blazing fringe of stars passed off the screen and the blackness grew and swallowed the whole viewfield, lost its shape, and then finally produced a defined edge outlined against the light of distant suns, and eventually that black coast-like showed the marker-lights of two blue sullen stars.

The Thetis decelerated and felt her way between the beacon suns.

Beyond them was a bay, a bight in that incredible coastline. And now fear really caught the men of the Thetis—a fear much greater than any they might have felt for the deeds of men or the legendary Vorn. This was something absolutely elemental, and it had to do with the terror of darkness and alienage and unhuman might that go back to the beginnings of the race.

None of them had ever been near a black nebula before. They were deathtraps, blind areas where radar was useless, where a ship was helpless to protect herself against drifting stellar debris, where you might ram yourself full on into a drowned dark star before you ever knew it was there. Now they were creeping antlike into the very flanks of the Horsehead. The bay was relatively narrow, and it wound and twisted around great shoulders of blackness, past upflung cliffs of dust that lifted a million miles to crests that blazed with the fires of hidden stars, over crevasses that plunged a million miles to break in a ragged cleft through which stars showed as faint and distant as those of Earth on a cloudy night. Everywhere you looked, up, down, ahead or on both sides, those incredibly vast clouds enclosed you in their eternal blackness, like the shrouding draperies of a funeral couch made ready for some god.

Kwolek shook his head. “For God's sake,” he said. “If the Vorn lived in here, no wonder they found a way to conquer space. They had to!"

The Thetis crept on and on in that nighted cleft, and presently there was light ahead, the blaze of a green sun that touched the looming clouds around it with a lurid glow.

They crept closer and saw a planet.

"That must be it,” said Garcia. “The world of the Vorn."

"If there's anything in the Ktashan legends,” said Harlow. “Anyway, it's the world where Dundonald went, and where Taggart is. We're going to have to be damned careful going in—"

Yrra, who was sitting at the back of the control room, suddenly made a small sound of exhaled breath.

It was a very curious sound, suggesting a fear too great for mere screaming. Harlow's skin turned cold as though from a sluice of ice water. He turned his head. He saw Kwolek and Garcia, both frozen, staring at something still behind him. He saw Yrra. A sickness grew in him, a fatal feeling that something totally beyond human experience as he knew it was already confronting him. He continued to turn, slowly, until he could see.

He was not wrong. From out of the blackness of the Horsehead and the fire of an alien star, silently, with no need for clumsy armor or the sealing of locks, something had come to join them in the ship.

Yrra whispered a word. She whispered it so faintly that under ordinary conditions he might not have heard it, but now it rang in his ears with a sound like the last trump. She said:

"The Vorn!"