Chapter VI: Part 6

Trehearne followed along, brooding on the subject of cruisers. The Vardda had no warships, being in the enviable position of having no use for them. But the Council maintained a small fleet of armed craft with maximum velocities considerably above those of the slower cargo ships, for the purpose of keeping down occasional outbursts of illegal trading among the Vardda themselves, and for protection of their factors on dangerously barbaric worlds.

The three-dimensional radar screens showed the normal number of tiny red sparks--the faster-than-light energy impulses of ships' generators. Joris scanned them with a practised eye.

"Nothing to bother us yet. Too early to tell--the sector immediately behind us is too crowded with shipping from the port." He turned to Quorn, the Communications officer. "Keep a damn sharp lookout astern. Call me the minute you see anything unusual. We can spell you a bit but you're going to get blasted little relief."

Relief was a problem on that voyage. No one got much of it. They had slightly over half the number of men required for a full crew under normal circumstances and some of them were not trained technicians. Trehearne found himself doing one eight-hour trick on the bridge, calling out dial readings, and another in Communications. Since, obviously, there was no sending to be done, he could handle the receiver well enough to get by.

Channel One, which was the official, top-priority voice of the Vardda Council, continued to request--and get--confirmation of their course.

It was not long before Quorn reported that radar showed a red spark astern that seemed to be following their course.

Calculating distance by intensity it was possible to judge the rate of approach. Joris demanded more thrust from the generators, ignoring the shuddering agony of the hull and the equally painful reactions of his men.

"Until we pick up Arrin," he said, "it's got to be cut and run. Thuvis is the first place they'll block off, and anything but a direct course on our part will give them time to do it."

They reached their acceleration peak--maximum stress for the fabric of the ship. Joris pushed it over. They prayed.

The observation port began to show a thinning star-field ahead. Wider and wider the areas of darkness spread and the colonies of suns were fewer and more scattered. The red sparks on the radar screens dwindled and faded until only two or three were left--lonely traders, outbound to these isolated systems. Those--and the single spark that brightened always astern.

The hours became a lagging monotony of constant watching, constant strain. Numb from lack of sleep, Trehearne went mechanically through his duties, forgot even to worry about what was going to happen. Yesterday was an eon ago, tomorrow was lost in nothingness. There was only today and he was tired.

It was the same with all of them. Joris seemed neither more nor less exhausted than the rest and Trehearne marvelled at the old man's strength.

Shairn remained locked in her cabin. She would not speak to anyone, except the youngster who brought her food, then only to voice a curt thanks.

Ahead the darkness deepened. The main axis of the Milky Way plane was "below" them. Beyond the isolated systems they could glimpse the lightless gulf of utter emptiness. Its black blankness afflicted Trehearne with a creeping horror. It was like seeing the primal Chaos before creation.

At last a dim red sun was centered in the field. It began to grow. The radar screens were empty, save for the one grim following spark that had become almost a flame, ominously bright.

Joris made his calculations and again they prayed.

They completed deceleration in a little less than half the normal time. That was the period during which no one ate and only those who had to remained erect.

Thuvis hung in the sky before them, an idiot sun, devouring the last of its strength and peering with a dull red eye at the cosmic face of death. It was circled by a single world.

"We'll have to make it fast," said Joris harshly. "You be ready, Edri."

The _Mirzim_ landed on an arid tableland swept by bitter winds. Quorn stayed to maintain his tense vigil at the radar screens but the rest of them went out, glad of solid ground if only for a few minutes.

The wind-driven dust tore at Trehearne, cutting into his flesh like tiny cold daggers. The sky was dusky at midday but there were few stars. Even at night there would be few stars here. The sullen glare of Thuvis washed the dusty desert world with red and where a deep ravine cleft the tableland the shadows clung like clotted blood. Trehearne could not think of a place that more resembled hell.

Edri had hastened to the lip of the ravine. Trehearne followed and looked down. Below the steep sides, below the ugly screes, was a tangle of pallid vegetation, stunted trees and leprous shrubbery, clustered around warm springs that smoked like little fumaroles in the chill air. There was a settlement here, three or four small plastic structures surrounded by a wall, and outside the wall a pathetic expanse of tilled land.

"They're coming!" cried Edri. "They saw the ship...."

A narrow path led steeply up from the ravine. Men were already toiling along it. Trehearne counted them. Eight, ten, eleven--eleven men, the total population of this world of ultimate exile.

Edri was shouting. His voice echoed back and forth in the ravine with a hollow booming sound. Other shouts answered him. The men on the path began to run. They slipped and staggered in their haste, clawing their way upward. Trehearne could see their white faces strained toward him.

He watched them come--gaunt wind-bitten hopeless men with the greyness of living death upon them, striving up from that deep red-lit prison, answering the call of Edri's voice. He saw their eyes, the eyes of men called back suddenly from that terrible numbing of the mind that is worse than clean destruction.

Edri threw his arms around the man who came first over the rim. He had not been there as long as the others and the stamp was not so deep on him. He turned and shouted at his mates to hurry. His beard and his unkempt hair blew in the wind and his voice was wild.

Edri cried to him, "No time for talk now, Arrin! Is that all of you?"

It was. The line of bearded scarecrows hastened toward the _Mirzim_. Ready hands helped them in.

The voice of Quorn yelled over the intercom, "They're right on top of us! Hurry it up!"

Joris had thrust his way forward to the bridge. He was at his station and waiting before the port was closed.

"Ready for take-off! Watch yourselves!"

His hand reached out for the signal relays. And then Trehearne saw it hesitate and fall back.

From the opening door of the Communications room another voice spoke, perfectly audible at that short distance--the metallic voice of the receiver.

"_We have your range. Do not attempt to take off. We have your range. Do not attempt._..."

Over Joris' suddenly shrunken shoulders, through the bridge port, Trehearne saw the long slim shape of a cruiser sweep in toward a landing close beside them.

EIGHTEEN

Kerrel's face appeared on the small screen. There was no need now for the ultra-wave and the ordinary visiphone unit had been cut in. Edri and Joris confronted him. Trehearne stood in the doorway, listening. Behind him were the rescued exiles, and black despair was on them all.

Kerrel regarded Edri and Joris with a weary hatred. He seemed to have learned that being an agent of the Council had its rough side. But there was no slightest hint of leniency in his tone.

"The gun crew has orders to open fire in exactly fifteen minutes," he said. "You have that long to clear your ship, bringing with you neither weapons nor personal gear of any sort." He repeated, "Fifteen minutes precisely."

Joris looked at him with red and sunken eyes. Twenty years of age had come upon him in the last few minutes. He could not seem to bring himself to speak. Edri's hands were clenched so tightly that the fingers were bone white. They moved back and forth, seeking something to strike and not finding it. He too had become old.

"Fourteen minutes," said Kerrel, without emotion. "You're wasting time."

Edri turned abruptly and thrust his way blindly past Trehearne, who caught and held him in the doorway.

"Let go," said Edri viciously and cursed him. "That ravine is deep. I can step off into it now as well as later. I won't be taken back."

"Hold on," said Trehearne. A sudden wild hope had come to him. He lifted his voice. "Kerrel! Kerrel, can you hear me?" He was out of visual range of the screen.

"Yes, Trehearne, I hear you."

"Then listen! Tell your men to hold their fire. We have Shairn aboard!"

Joris' head came up sharply. Edri stopped fighting. And in the screen Kerrel's mirrored face went through the shadings of surprise, shock, then understanding and a wry mirth.

"You have a quick mind, Trehearne," he said. "But it won't do. Thirteen minutes."

"Go and get her, Edri," said Trehearne. His mouth was dry, his body drenched with cold sweat.

Edri plunged away into the corridor. Trehearne went and stood where Kerrel could see him. He smiled and wondered if Kerrel could hear the knocking of his heart against his ribs. Joris stood motionless, waiting. Kerrel counted off the minutes, and at each count his voice became more strained, his eyes less certain.

There were six minutes left when Edri came back with Shairn and thrust her in front of the screen.

"You see?" said Trehearne. "I wasn't lying."

Kerrel forgot to count. He stared at the girl, the strong lines of his face crumbling into indecision. He said her name once. Suddenly he turned and was gone from the screen. They could hear him shouting somewhere beyond, "Hold your fire! Hold your fire! They have a prisoner aboard."

Trehearne knew then that he had not misjudged the depth of the other's passion. And strangely that knowledge was bitter to him.

Kerrel came into view again, and Shairn cried out, "Kerrel, they're after something more than these Orthist exiles! I think they're--"

Trehearne put his hand over her mouth. "It doesn't matter what she thinks. The important thing is her life. How much is it worth to you, Kerrel?"

Kerrel ran his hand nervously over his face and did not answer at once. Trehearne kept his palm firmly on Shairn's mouth.

Kerrel shook his head. "You wouldn't kill her, Trehearne."

"No, I wouldn't," Trehearne answered. "But I'm only one and there are others aboard. Eleven men of Thuvis, who feel that one life is very little to pay for escape from this hell-hole. Come on, Kerrel, how much is Shairn worth to you? You can have her--free, clear and alive."

Kerrel asked, "What do you want?"

"A head start."

"It won't do you any good. You can't outrun a cruiser."

Joris said, "We'll take that chance!"

Again Kerrel hesitated. "What are your terms?"

Trehearne said, "You will allow us to take off and we'll guarantee to land Shairn safely on the other side of this planet. You will keep your ship here until you receive our message that that has been done. We will both be able to check each other's actions by radar and if your generators are started before our second take-off we'll know it."

Kerrel thought, and then asked sullenly, "What assurance have I that you will actually release her?"

"You can take my word for that," Trehearne told him. "Either that or blow her to bits with the rest of us."

There was another long tense moment of silence. And then Kerrel said, "All right." He spoke the words as though they had a taste of vitriol on his tongue.

Joris was out of Communications in one long stride. Kerrel looked at Shairn and cried, "Wait! You must radio your position when you set her down."

"We will."

Trehearne flipped the switch. The screen went blank. The throbbing generators took the ship and lifted it and whirled it away and no gun spoke from the cruiser. Trehearne released his grip on Shairn. Reaction and relief had turned his knees to water, so that it was difficult to stand against the lurching of the ship.

Shairn turned and looked at him. "You're a fool, Michael," she said, "but I'll give you this. You're not a coward."

He had her locked in her cabin again and went back to the bridge. Joris was scowling at the projection of the microfilm chart of the planet.

"There," he said, and pointed to a huge emptiness. "She'll be safe there until they pick her up--there's no predatory life in these deserts." He glanced up at Trehearne. "Good man," he said. "Me, I was beaten."

Trehearne gave him a wry smile. "Me, I bluffed. From here on, Joris, it's all yours. Where's Edri?"

"Shut in his cabin with Arrin. They know the general sector, clear out at the Galaxy's edge. Now they're trying to figure out the true course together." And Joris snorted. "Course! If I can keep one jump ahead of that cruiser I'll be satisfied."

The _Mirzim_ skimmed over the darkling world of Thuvis into the starless night. Trehearne sat and brooded, thinking of Shairn, thinking of the two men who were bent over the final calculations of a dream that had balked men for a thousand years. He thought of what a dream can do to a man, of how far it can lead him away from the good safe life of common sense to the ultimate voids of creation. He hoped that Edri and Arrin would find what they wanted. He hoped they would live to find it.

"Coming down," said Joris. "Better get Shairn a coverall. It's cold down there."

Trehearne found a warm coverall in the equipment locker and took it to Shairn's cabin. She put it on, and he saw how her face was shadowed with weariness and strain.

She said quietly, "Do you still love me, Michael?"

Her question took him by surprise, and the answer came of itself. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I do."

"Then we must stop behaving like two angry children and not throw away the life we can have together."

He bent his head. "I'm sorry you got caught in this."

"It's as much my fault as yours. I was too quick to lose my temper. I should have stopped to think that the Vardda world was so new to you that you had little to judge it by."

She was not now the mocking Shairn of old. Her voice was full of a sombre passion, a pleading for him to understand.

"Michael, your motives were good--loyalty to a friend, reaction against what seemed to you injustice. But surely now you must see how hopeless this all is. I know you're hunting Orthis' ship. You'll never reach it. Kerrel will run you down. It'll all have been for nothing."

It seemed to Trehearne that what she said was very likely true. But he only answered, "It's too late to think about that now."

"No, Michael! You can still save yourself!" She caught him by the shoulders, her hands urgent on his flesh. "Leave the ship with me! Let Kerrel pick us both up!"

Trehearne smiled mirthlessly. "Kerrel would like that--taking me back to a prison."

"It doesn't have to be prison!" Shairn exclaimed. "You can say you pretended to join Joris and Edri only to save me. I'll back you up and not Kerrel nor anyone else can disprove it. You'll walk out free on Llyrdis."

It crossed his mind that he could do that. It would all fit. It was an out.

"You won't be letting your friends down, either," Shairn insisted. "They'll go on without you. You've done all you can for them."

She clung to him. Her mouth begged him with a silent language of its own. He took her arms slowly from around him and thrust her back and she caught her breath at the pain of his grip.

"No," he said. And again, "No, Shairn."

She stood back and looked at him steadily. "You could go back to the Silver Tower with me but you won't--and for what? So that peoples you've never met on worlds you'll never see can someday fly the stars?"

"There was a man named Trehearne on the world Earth who got his chance to fly the stars," he said. "I thought that others should have their chance too. I have to play it out now."

She was silent and then the dropping speed of the ship told them that it was almost over. Trehearne took her down to the airlock chamber. They stood there together, not finding anything more to say, and all that had been between them came silently and mocked them with the pain of vanished days.

The _Mirzim_ scraped her keel softly on a yielding surface and was still. Trehearne opened the port, looking out on the dark windy desert.

Shairn spoke then. "A strange beginning for us, Michael, and now an even stranger ending."

He held out his hand to help her down and the pressure of her fingers was like something tearing at his heart. She looked up at him, a small lonely figure in the vast dark. He thought her lips moved but the wind came between them and took the words away and he had none of his own for answer.

The warning bell jarred harshly in his ears. He closed the port and she was gone.

Joris' voice roared from the bridge, through the intercom. "Flatten out, all! This is the only start we'll get on Kerrel and I've got to pile it on!"

The cruel hand of acceleration crushed Trehearne down. He lay on the scored plates of the deck and that last vision of Shairn's white face remained with him to remind him of all that he had had and lost.

He said her name over and over in the silence of the empty lock and his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of dust. The _Mirzim_ leaped through space like a wild thing, driving toward the sector that was the goal of a thousand-year hope and quest, toward the Galaxy edge and the shores of outer night.

NINETEEN

They had stepped clear out to the edge of the galaxy, where the fringing stars were lost in the outer void and the dead suns swept forever through the entombing dark, where even the memory of creation was gone, blotted out by unimaginable time. No delimited frontier was here, but a border region between the swarming star-sparks and the black abyss beyond.

Trehearne tried to remember how long it had been since they had taken off from Thuvis. He couldn't. Time seemed oddly elastic when you lost all the familiar frames of reference. He gave it up. It didn't matter. He peered with aching bloodshot eyes into the lightless seas that lie beyond the island universes and tried to remember why he had come here. And that too was dim in his mind.

Edri was bent over a table that had been set up in the bridge. He no longer looked like Edri. He seemed to have been working for a million years. Arrin sat near him. He held his head between his bony hands, a bearded mummy embalmed upright, hardly retaining the semblance of life. There were charts under Edri's hands, endless sheets of calculations and graphs, endless miles of figures. Joris studied them, bending beside Edri. His broad jowls hung down now over his wrinkled collar. His eyes had sunk deep under ridges of bone, peering out as from two shadowed caves.

Edri was talking in a voice that came from far away. The words reached Trehearne in droning snatches from beyond the fog of weariness.

"--so our only way to locate Orthis' ship was to triangulate its position from two separate bearings on it. One bearing was the course of that life-skiff Orthis sent in with his last message, allowing for aberrations caused by the gravitational field of stars. The other bearing was Orthis' course in his last flight. We couldn't get that till I found the part of the Lankar manuscript that Arrin didn't have."

Trehearne heard someone ask, "Who was Lankar?"

"One of Orthis' last pursuers, who left a secret log of the pursuit to ease his guilty conscience. Enough of it survived--"

Joris said, "The hell with Lankar. Get on with it."

"We had to push the star-maps back in time--galactic motion, star streaming, a million complicated problems of relative motion and proper motion, back five hundred years and then another five hundred, and then correlate them. Handling an almost unlimited number of variables like that, it could only be done on the biggest math-machines and electronic computers at Llyrdis. And that meant it all had to be done secretly, bit by bit. That work's been going on for a long, long time."

Edri drew a long breath that was coupled with a racking yawn.

"The resultant charts indicate an unnamed dark star following an orbit here, outside the main stream of the Galaxy." He traced a line with his finger. "These charts for the fringing stars are incomplete, as you know. There's nothing to draw anyone out to these godforsaken regions and they've never been properly explored. But according to our calculations, that dark star was in the right place a thousand years ago and Orthis' life-skiff was launched from there. Now the wheel of the Galaxy has turned so, taking the dark star with it...."

He laid his hand on the crossing of two marked lines on the chart, and looked at them.

"That's our destination, Joris. If we're right, the ship of Orthis is there. If we're wrong--well, somebody else will have to try again in another thousand years."

He remained standing, silent, his hands braced on the table, too tired to move. Joris rubbed his bleary eyes and began to read the coordinates aloud from the chart. Mechanically the Second Officer set up the combination on the finder.

Joris moved heavily back to the pilot chair. When the finder clicked off the new course, he set the Mirzim on it. Then he spoke over the intercom to Radar. "What's the position of that cruiser?"

A croaking voice answered him. He listened, and then turned to the others. "Closer," he said. "Always closer."

Trehearne's mind turned back to its constant half-waking nightmare. The cruiser, following, hanging on, dogged, persistent, relentless. He lived over painfully every maneuver, every trick by which Joris had managed to delay their pursuer, to grasp a little more time, a little more distance.

He remembered the last-minute plunge into a dark nebula when the cruiser was almost close enough to range them. He remembered the turning and twisting and doubling inside the blackness of the cloud, where the absorptive cosmic dust fogged the radar. They had lost the cruiser there. They had got clear away and for a time they had hoped. They had made it to this fringe sector--and then the red spark showed again on the screen, coming closer, always closer.

There were times when Trehearne forgot the physical fact of the cruiser, a ship of ordinary metal officered and manned by ordinary Vardda spacemen. At such times it seemed to him that the _Mirzim_ was pursued by a demoniac nemesis striding naked across the plunging gulfs--a nemesis wearing Kerrel's face with Kerrel's hands outstretched to grasp them.

Sometimes Shairn's face was there beside Kerrel's, white, unreadable, a misty cloud that blotted out the stars.

The hoarse voice of the radar man croaked at intervals. The ship fled on toward the dark star.

Joris finally turned around. The table had been taken out, the charts and the toilsome calculations rolled up and shoved away. Arrin lay on the deck against the after bulkhead, sleeping. He would not leave the bridge until he knew whether or not his life and work had gone for nothing. Edri sat beside him. He was not asleep.

Joris said flatly, "It isn't going to work."

Edri said nothing. He waited.

Joris went on, as though he hated what he was saying, but had to say it. "Look at it. As soon as I start deceleration the cruiser will begin to cut our lead to nothing. And they're stressed for less deceleration time than I can make without tearing the _Mirzim_ to pieces. What'll happen? They'll be down on us before we can even begin our search."

Edri nodded. He leaned back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. He said, "They know now what we're after. What do you suppose Kerrel would do if he found the ship of Orthis?"

Nobody answered that. There was no need to answer. A heavy silence followed, during which Trehearne thought of the messages that had gone out across the Galaxy from the cruiser's ultra-wave--guarded messages that betrayed by their very spareness the desperate nature of this mission, urgent requests for other Council cruisers to close up with all speed. But those others were still too far away to matter. Whatever happened would have happened before they could come up. Kerrel was going to finish this alone.

Edri said, "What are we going to do?"

Joris rubbed his big hand over his stubbled face and blinked and said, "Our only chance, if Orthis' ship and secret are really there, is to get the ultra-wave equipment to it in time for what we planned." He went on slowly, "I think our life-skiff could carry that equipment. If we drop the skiff it could travel on constant velocity for a while before it would have to decelerate. Meanwhile I could swing the _Mirzim_ on another course, running back along the rim of the Galaxy, away from the dark star. The cruiser would follow me. Chances are, with their radar concentrated on me to catch my lateral-impulse pattern, they wouldn't notice the skiff at all when she started deceleration."

He sighed. "They'd catch us, of course. But the _Mirzim_ isn't going to keep on forever after the beating she's taken. The generators are in bad shape. But we could keep going long enough to give you time."

Edri thought it over. "I don't like it," he said. "But it looks as though it's that or nothing."

Joris was muttering under his breath about maximum loads and capacity. "The main ultra-wave equipment," he said, "and three men. The skiff would keep that. We'd keep the auxiliary ultra-wave set here, of course."

"Who can you spare? You'll need all your flight-technicians."

"He can spare me," said Trehearne. "I'm the most non-essential. And I can still stand up if I have to."

Joris nodded. "Yes. Quorn has to go to handle the ultra-wave, of course--and he can handle the skiff all right."

"Who else?"

"You," said Joris.

Edri looked at the sleeping Arrin. "He ought to go instead of me. He's worked for it longer than I have." It was obvious that Arrin was unable to go anywhere, and Edri sighed. He pulled himself erect. "All right, then. Come on, Trehearne. We'll start loading."

The skiff was contained in a cell of its own, sunk in the side of the _Mirzim_--a miniature starship with a flight range long enough to give the crew of a disabled ship a chance to reach safety. But there was no use trying to think of safety any longer.

Trehearne routed out every man that was off-station and could stand erect. Following Edri's orders he stripped the skiff of everything they wouldn't need. Quorn oversaw the removal of the heavy ultra-wave radio equipment from the _Mirzim_ and its loading into the skiff. He seemed unnecessarily particular about it. Trehearne swore and sweated but got it done. Then he went back to the bridge with Edri and Quorn. Joris studied his instruments.

"Pretty soon," he said. He gave Quorn his flight instructions. "Trehearne is still a lubber," he remarked, "but he knows enough by now to give you a hand when you need it."

Edri said, "Surrender as soon as you're challenged, Joris."

Joris laughed, a pallid ghost of his old loud roar. "I will. Right now, I'm too tired to die." He glanced again at the instruments. "Time to go."

They looked at each other, these fatigue-drunken red-eyed men whom a dream had dragged to the edge of the universe, and could find nothing to say in this moment of their parting.

"Good luck," muttered Edri then and turned away.

"You're the ones who're going to need it," Joris called after them.

Trehearne went through after Quorn and Edri into the skiff. They sealed off and then Quorn took the controls and waited, watching his chronometer. His hand grasped loosely about a red switch marked RELEASE.

He closed the switch.

There was a squeal and grind of machinery, a sense of super-swift forces at work as the complicated releasing-gear did its work, an instant of extreme pressure, and the skiff had left the _Mirzim_. They could see nothing but they knew that skiff and ship had already diverged far apart at their unthinkable speeds.

Quorn watched his instruments while Trehearne and Edri sat looking at nothing, afraid to sleep lest they should not be able to wake again. They sat, and swayed, and waited, until presently Quorn started his forward generator and began deceleration.

Trehearne lost track of things. Part of the following time he was unconscious, or nearly so. The rest of it he observed as in a confused dream. He thought of how he had once been wildly eager for starflight. But he managed to do the things that Quorn required of him.

The port cleared. It had no adapter and functioned as a port only at visual speeds. Now, ahead of them, Trehearne could see a huge bulk of darkness against the outer dark, illumined only faintly by the galactic light.

"There it is," said Edri. "The dark star." His voice shook a little.

They swept closer, still slowing down. "It has a planet," said Quorn. "There, catching the starshine--"

"Two," said Trehearne. "I see two."

Two dimly gleaming bodies, dead worlds clinging to a long dead sun out here at Galaxy edge. The glow of the Milky Way touched them, the ghostly glow of candles at a wake, and only emphasized their drear darksomeness and lonesomeness.

Edri whispered, "Well try the outer planet first. Give me a hand, Trehearne."

They crawled aft between the crowded banks of equipment to a detector that had come from the _Mirzim's_ hold. Edri fumbled at it.

"In Orthis' day they used radioactive fuel, of course," Edri mumbled. "We calculated its half-life. Even supposing his bunkers were nearly empty there should be enough left to register on this counter. A teacupful would do it."

Trehearne helped Edri adjust the shielding apparatus on the mechanism until the needle was still.

"What about natural radioactive deposits on the planets themselves?" he asked.

"We get a break there. Too old. The last radioactive element will have practically died out millions of years ago." He raised his voice. "Keep the skiff as low as you dare, Quorn. The counter has a wide sweep. Take it slow."

He crouched over the telltale needle. Trehearne moved forward again.

The planet was small, less than two thousand miles in diameter. Between the intense gloom and the motion of the skiff he could see nothing but a black featureless desolation, rifted here and there with white that he took to be the frozen remains of an atmosphere. He thought what it would be like to land there and shivered.

They quartered and swept the planet carefully. The telltale needle of the counter remained motionless. Edri said, heavily, "We'll go on. Pray we find it on the other planet. Pray Orthis didn't come down on the dark star. It would take forever to find him there."

Quorn fed in power and cleared away. The port dimmed again, and Edri moaned.

"He's about out," Quorn said. "Looks like whatever is done, we'll have to do the most of it."

The second world was larger than the first by three times or more. It was not content to be featureless. It thrust up gnawed and shattered ranges, stripped bones of mountains sheathed in frozen gases. It showed forth dreary plains coated white with congealed air, glistening faintly in the light of the great galactic wheel. It turned toward the watchers the naked beds of its vanished oceans, sucked dry to the deepest gulf. It displayed the scars of its long dying, the brutal wounds of internal explosion, the riven gashes of a shrinking crust. A hideous world that seemed to remember beauty still and to resent the cruelty of death.

Edri whispered, "Pray--pray that the damned thing moves." Instead of doing so, he cursed the needle that it did not stir.

"Keep going," said Trehearne.

They kept going.

The needle quivered.

Edri let out a hoarse cry. "Easy! _Easy!_" Tears began to run down his cheeks. He sobbed. The needle was still again.

"Circle!" Trehearne shouted to Quorn. "Circle till we get it centered."

He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted salt, and wondered how it got there.

Quorn swung the skiff around in a tightening spiral until Edri said, "Now! Let her down."

He scrambled forward, thrusting his face against the port, trying to see. Quorn switched on a landing-light. The blue-white blaze lit up a circular area below, the light intensely bright, the shadows intensely black. Its beam went sharply down.

They followed it. It was as though the skiff were poised on that pillar of light, sinking downward. They were above a planetary surface racked and tortured by final diastrophism. Towering miles high, loomed a mighty cliff of riven rock. In front of it a chasm yawned, and beyond the chasm a drear and tumbled landscape stretched dim under the great sword of the Galaxy.

They started down along the face of the titanic cliff. Looking at the chasm at its base Trehearne began to get uneasy.

"There's no ship here," he said. "The counter must have picked up some last radiation from deep down in that chasm."

Quorn agreed with him. But Edri said, "No, keep going." Trehearne could feel him tremble.

They went on down the face of the giant, looming wall. Trehearne pointed suddenly. "Isn't that a ledge?"

The hard bright edge of the beam cut across a shelf of rock that jutted out halfway down the cliff. Quorn swung the skiff in closer. Something on the ledge glistened dully under the light. Quorn let the skiff drop with a sickening rush. Detail sprang clear--shattered rock, ancient magma, puddles of frozen air in the hollows. And among them an ovoid shape, symmetrical, smooth, giving back a metallic glint.

Edri said the name of Orthis, as though it were a prayer.

TWENTY

Quorn had set the skiff down on the ledge. They had scrambled into pressure suits. They had forgotten that they were already three-quarters dead. Awkward in the clumsy armor, stumbling on the jagged rock, slipping on the patches of frozen air, they clawed their way toward the goal they had crossed a Galaxy and gambled their lives to find. Above them the ghastly cliff leaned outward against nothingness, below them the abyss plunged down into the dead heart of a world. Beyond them was a spreading desolation, and in the black sky the awful rim of the Galaxy lay like a blazing sword of light.

Trehearne was aware of the silence. He had never been on an airless world before. He felt the impact as his metal boot struck against a shard of rock, but it made no sound. All he could hear was the harsh breathing of Quorn and Edri, transmitted to him by the helmet audio.

The ship of Orthis loomed before them, lightless, lifeless, cradled in the ashes of destruction. It had a look of patience. It had lain here for a thousand years, untouched by time or rust, entombed in silence and the endless night, eternal as the dead suns that rove forever in uncorrupting space. It seemed that it could wait until the end of the universe, cherishing its trust. Awe came upon Trehearne, and with it a kind of fear.

They found the lock port. It stood wide open, the valves still clean and shining. There could be no corrosion here, with every atom of air and moisture frozen in the purifying cold. The light of Trehearne's belt-lamp showed him, on the floor of the lock chamber, the scored marks of a man's boot. They might have been made only yesterday.

The three men paused outside that open port. They looked at each other through the glassite plates of their helmets, and their faces were strange. Then Trehearne stepped aside, and Quorn also. Edri bent his head. He moved forward to the port. Slowly, without sound, he clambered into the ship of Orthis.

The others were close behind him. Their belt lamps cut hard slashes of light across the airless dark. They passed through the lock chamber and came into a corridor running fore and aft. It was utterly still. The heavy drag of their boots on the metal deck made not the slightest sound. It was like walking in a fever-dream, and the deadness of the ship, the black, inert, unstirring deadness, was more oppressive than the desolation in which it lay. The rocks and cliffs had never moved, they had never been built by the hands of men, no thought or hope had ever entered into them. Trehearne's skin crept in little waves of cold. He could hear the beating of his own blood in his ears, the dull throbbing of his own heart. He moved with the others, lonely figures in a tomb, and he started like a child at every shape the light picked out.

The whole after section of the ship was a laboratory. Much of the delicate equipment was shattered, either by speed-vibration or a hard landing. Trehearne could make nothing of the tortured mass of metal and splintered crystal, but Quorn said, very softly, "He was studying interstellar radiation. Most of that stuff is beyond me, but I can see that much."

One section of the laboratory contained a complicated mass of coils and prisms and intricate banks of reflectors arranged around what must have been a great central tube. There was a small platform at the focal point of the mechanism, fitted with straps. Along one bulkhead was a stack of metal cages for experimental animals. Several of the little creatures were still there. They had died, the quick death of airlessness and cold, but their bodies were still perfect. They had, then, survived the voyage. The ultra-speeds of interstellar flight had not harmed them.

The men searched for a time among the wreckage, and then Edri said, "There's nothing for us here. No good trying to figure out the apparatus. They couldn't do that in all the years they had the ship impounded, when it was all in shape. Most of it Orthis designed and built himself."

Trehearne looked again at the small furry bodies in the cages, lying as though in sleep. Somehow they made the betrayal of Orthis doubly cruel--that even beasts could be given the freedom of the stars, that so many generations of the races of so many worlds had been denied.

They went into the corridor, retracing their steps, and passed on forward. They found the living quarters, small and spare and monastically neat. The coverings of the bunk were rumpled and the pillow still retained the hollow where a man's head had lain. Trehearne shivered. Presently they went on, to the bridge.

Trehearne realized then what an act of heroism it had been to push this antique ship to the limits of the Galaxy and beyond. The instruments were so few and rudimentary, the system of controls so crude. There was a locking device, a primitive Iron Mike that could keep the ship on its course without human attention, and he thought that only that had made Orthis' lonely flight possible. But the science of star-craft had come a long way since then.

Quorn's voice, held to a whisper as one speaks in a church, reached him on the helmet phone. "It's incredible. This ship wasn't even built for voyaging, it was a spatial laboratory. It's a wonder it survived at all."

Edri drew a long breath, with a quiver in it like a sob. "We still haven't found what we're looking for. Do you suppose it isn't here? Do you suppose that after all...." He didn't finish.

They began to search again. It was Trehearne who found the door in the after bulkhead of the bridge. He pushed it open and looked through into the cabin beyond. The beam of his belt-lamp speared brightly into the immemorial dark.

Involuntarily, he screamed.

Quorn and Edri ran to him. He was clinging to the bulkhead. Cold sweat poured down his face, and his eyes were wide and wild. They looked past him, over his shoulder.

The cabin was small. It was fitted as a library, crammed with metal cases of books, some of them micro-tape volumes of an ancient type, some of them thick ragged notebooks. The knife-sharp light-beams picked them out, in brilliant highlight and black shadow. There was a great table, bolted down, and on the table was a metal box. A man's hand rested there, the fingers open, curled slightly over the edge of the box, protectively, possessively, as though it were something loved and precious.

"Oh God," whispered Quorn, "look at him...."

He sat in a metal chair behind the table. His head was lifted, looking toward the port in the outer wall that showed the black sky slashed across with the mighty fires of the Galaxy. The hard light showed him clearly. He was an old man. The years of his life had been many and unkind. They had shaped his face as though from iron, gouging the lines deep, hammering the ridges hard, driving out all traces of youth and hope and whatever laughter there might have been to forge a mask of bitter anger, and reproach, and in the end, despair. It seemed to Trehearne that he could read a whole life history in that face, caught forever in the moment of death, when surely the man was crying out upon whatever gods he worshipped, demanding _Why?_

Edri began suddenly to laugh. "Orthis. It's Orthis. He's been here waiting for us to come in...."

Quorn raised a hand in its heavy gauntlet and struck Edri's helmet so that Trehearne could hear the ringing in his own audio. "Shut up. Damn you, Edri. Shut up." Edri stopped laughing. After a moment he said, "For a moment I thought...."

Trehearne muttered, "So did I." Here in the airless utter cold, death held no decay, no change. But there was more to it than the lack of physical corruption. The fire in this man had burned so deep that even death could not erase its scars. Where the lamp-beams caught them, his open eyes seemed still to glow with the unforgotten embers.

For a long time the three men stood, not moving, grouped in the doorway. Trehearne said once, "I think he wanted whoever found him to look inside that box, there under his hand." Orthis' life-work, the future of the Galaxy, held in a little box. They knew it. But still they were not quite ready to go in and take away from Orthis the thing that he had kept so long. And it was strange, Trehearne thought, that in this moment when their emotions ought to be at the highest pitch, when they should be feeling most poignantly the weight of all the centuries of sacrifice and struggle that had led them here, and what it was all going to mean, they were too tired to feel anything very much, only the edges of awe and an instinctive reluctance to approach the dead. He wanted to get away from this funeral ship. Finally he wanted it so much that he went in and tried to move Orthis' hand from off the box. The arm was frozen rigid as a steel bar, and he gave it up, working the box carefully out from under the icy fingers, in horror lest they break.

The others had come slowly in beside him. The box was not locked. He lifted up the lid, and the lamplight showed a notebook bound in cloth. On top of it lay a loose sheet of paper with a few angular lines of writing. Edri picked it up, very clumsily in his armored hands, and held it to the light, reading aloud in a queer flat voice. "I have clung to life this much longer...."

Edri stopped, and coughed, and started over, and Trehearne thought that Orthis listened.

"I have clung to life this much longer to write down for the first time all my formulae, complete and simplified so that they can be understood and used. In them lies the freedom of the stars. I, the first of the star-born, was rejected by the greed and fear of the planet-born. But it will not always be so.

"I shall not see what comes. My ship has already flown too far, I have little fuel, and I am old. Therefore I have set the airlock control and in a few minutes it will open. A swift death, and better than a slow one as the air-pumps fail. After that, I shall wait. What I dreamed will never be forgotten. Some day there will come others who believe as I have always believed, that the stars are for all men."

Edri fell silent. And Quorn said, "He watched the Galaxy for a thousand years, and waited."

Trehearne forced himself to move, to break the spell. "Unless we hurry, it will not have done him any good." He reached out and took the box and shut it, and thrust it into Edri's hands. "Come on. Edri, do you hear me? Come on! We haven't got much time."

Edri looked at the box, and then at Orthis, who had had a thousand years of time. Then he turned and went out, and Quorn went after him, and Trehearne, down the dark corridor and out of the silent ship. Trehearne looked up at the flaming river of stars in the sky and thought what a mighty dream the first of the star-born men had carried with him into the long night.

A sudden panic of haste came over him. Orthis had given them this trust literally with his own hand. If they failed now because they were too slow, too worn out now, at the last, to do what needed to be done.... He began to run toward the skiff, shouting at the others, urging them on, harrying them until they ran too, staggering over the blasted rock. He pushed them inside, a little crazy now himself, talking incessantly about the need for haste. Quorn took off from the ledge. They did not want to be near the ship of Orthis when they did what they were going to do. He sent the light craft racing across the dead world, searching for a place to land.

"Hurry," said Trehearne. "Got to hurry!"

Quorn cursed him savagely. "I'm doing all I can. Shut up and listen. Both of you. Keep your pressure suits on and your helmets ready."

Trehearne stopped talking. He sat, holding his hands tight between his knees, shaking all over. Edri was bent over the notebook from the metal box, reading.

"It's all here," he said. His voice was hoarse with weariness, with emotion he was too numb to feel. "The equations, the formulae, the instructions for constructing the equipment, the instructions for using it. I don't understand them, but others will." He looked at Trehearne with red-rimmed eyes. "Orthis has a foreword here. He was the first of the star-born. The mutation began spontaneously on that first long voyage. The constant vibration of speed, not speed as we know it now but more than the human body was used to, speed approaching the velocity of light, and the impact of interstellar radiation on the living cell. That's what did it. Orthis was the end-product of four generations of breeding under those conditions. He was nature's first attempt to create Galactic Man, to readjust the human body to meet new needs. And the thing he labored on so long was the reduction of that long natural process to a workable formula that could accomplish the change in one generation instead of four. God, I'm so tired I'm repeating this stuff like a parrot from Orthis' own words. What you do, of course, is alter the germ plasm of both parents before conception takes place, and ... anyway, it's all here."

Quorn said suddenly, "This place looks as good as any. At least it'll give us a little more cover."

He took the skiff down carefully toward the flat bed of an ancient watercourse. The channel was filled now with frozen air, but in bygone ages it had gouged a deep canyon in the rock, leaving eroded holes and overhangs. Quorn worked the skiff into one of these washed-out places, under the canyon wall.

Edri was going over his book again, making sure, dazed with the hypnosis of exhaustion and the need to be right. He did not dare to fumble or read a single figure wrong. There wouldn't be any time for corrections or recheckings. The weight of the responsibility was so heavy on him that he seemed to be physically shrinking under it. His lips moved constantly. Trehearne did not envy him his job.

Quorn grunted at him and they went aft together to struggle with the ultra-wave equipment. Trehearne was possessed by a demon of urgency, and he had not the slightest idea what he was doing. Quorn gave orders and he obeyed them blindly, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Nerve and temper were worn to the last frayed edge and beyond, and before they were through they were snarling at each other like dogs. Hooking the power leads to the skiff's generators was the hardest task of all, but somehow they finished. They lifted Edri to his feet and sat him down again, still clutching his book, in front of the transmitter. Quorn bent over the control switches. The generators hummed, feeding in the power. Edri was still staring at the book. Trehearne shook him. "Go on," he said. "Talk."

Edri blinked and frowned, looking up at them as though he had forgotten entirely what he had to do. Quorn took Edri's face between his hands and spoke to him, slapping his cheeks gently one after the other as he talked. "Listen, I've got it on the emergency band, covering all channels. Every ultra-wave receiver within its range will pick it up, including non-Vardda communication centers. Edri, do you understand me? The minute Kerrel picks it up he'll be able to center us and come in on our beam. So you've got to make it fast. Fast!"

Edri blinked again, and shivered. "All right. I'll try." He glanced nervously at Trehearne. Quorn made the last dial setting, and then he spoke into the transmitter.

"G-One! G-One! Emergency. Request clearance all channels. Use your recorders! Use your recorders! G-One, clear all channels...."

He motioned violently, and Edri leaned forward. "I may not have time to repeat. We have found the ship of Orthis. Here follow the formulae for the Vardda mutation."

TWENTY-ONE

Edri had begun to read from the notebook. He was going fast, but taking desperate pains to make each syllable clear. Quorn hung tensely over his dials. Trehearne sat motionless, except that his muscles quivered. Sweat ran in his eyes. He was tired. He was so tired that Quorn, three feet away, looked as blurred and indistinct as though he were lost in the haze of distance. Edri's voice went on, and on, and on.

Quorn said hoarsely, "The cruiser has picked us up. They're already trying to jam us. Hurry up."

Edri's face became that of a hunted thing. His voice rose shrill, racing desperately. He turned the last page. He finished it, and then he went back to the beginning and started to repeat. Quorn stood up.

"It isn't any use, we're blanked out. That means the cruiser's close, close enough to...."

He didn't have time to get the rest of the words out. The skiff was shaken suddenly as by a giant hand. Quorn was flung against a bulkhead, and Trehearne lay on the floor. Only Edri, hanging on to the transmitter, still talked.