Collected Short Fiction, page 315
A cold bright light flashed in the eyes of the stranger.
“My name,” he said, “is Kel Aran. But to the Emperor’s Galactic Guard, and to the Space Police of Malgarth’s Corporation, I am just the Falcon. Or sometimes the Falcon of Earth—for I was born on your own planet, Barihorn!”
I was reeling on my feet. He reached out a strong argent arm to steady me.
“The Stone?” I whispered.
“The Stone is on the Earth.” A reverence was in his voice, as if he had spoken of a living god—or goddess. “I saw it once when I was a child on Earth. For my father was a Warder of the Stone. And now—”
I wondered at the softness in his voice, the shadow of agony on his cragged face.
“Now,” he said, “Verel Erin is the Stone’s Custodian. She is a red-haired girl of Earth. I loved her when we were children in the desert valley where the Stone is hidden. I loved her—but the Warders chose her to be the Custodian.”
His lean face was white, and his tone had the break of tragedy. Darkness was crowding upon me. But I found the strength for one more question.
“Malgarth—”
THE silver shoulders of Kel Aran drew square, and his gray eyes shone with a fighting glint.
“Malgarth still rules the Corporation,” he said. “And the Corporation has grown mightier than the Empire. Your prophesied return is in good time, Barihorn, for the struggle is at hand! It will be the robots, or mankind—both cannot survive.”
“War?” My dry lips moved without sound. “There will be war?”
“Men have been enslaved,” rang the voice of Kel Aran. “Now they fight for freedom. We have cruised the Galaxy from Koridos to Tenephron, and everywhere there is rebellion—brave and yet hopeless rebellion against the iron might of the Space Police and the fleets of the Galactic Guard! For Malgarth moves the Emperor like a puppet, to the murder of his own wretched kind.
“We have come now to beg the aid of the Stone—for without the ancient secret that you sealed within its crystal brain, Barihorn, there is hope of nothing save death. The Stone, I know, is slow to act—there was a legend that it would never strike until you returned, Barihorn. But we had hopes that it would move when we told of all the suffering we have seen—mankind enslaved and tortured and destroyed beneath the iron wheels of the Corporation!
“But we found a great fleet of the Galactic Guard blockading the Earth. Hanging here, waiting for a chance to slip through, we discovered you, Barihorn—incredible good fortune, if you can move the Stone to strike! But there was something more alarming—a haze of fire and darkness that wrapped the Earth.”
Weakly fighting those mounting tides of blackness, I remembered the flying red stars I had seen, and the flicker of the Earth. I shared the puzzled apprehension in the voice of Kel Aran:
“We cannot understand—”
He was interrupted by a sharp metallic rapping on the inward valve. It clanged open, and I saw three anxious men in the corridor beyond. Three blurred figures, one dark and gigantic, one pale and corpulent, the third a mere brown wisp.
“Kel!” It was a chorus of terror. “The Earth—”
A last black billow overwhelmed me.
V
WORLD CONDEMNED
I WOKE on a narrow bunk aboard the Barihorn, and slept again at intervals. For a long time my mind was blurred with weakness. Yet I sensed the air of haste and desperate tension aboard the craft; I could hear the hard-driven whine of her machinery.
I knew that Kel Aran was battling to reach the Earth—and the Earth girl that he loved, Verel Erin, lovely Custodian of the Dondara Stone. And I knew that he was about to fail.
“A most desperate raid!” I remember the words of Zerek Oom, once when he brought me a bowl of thin hot soup. “There’s all the Twelfth Sector Fleet of Admiral Gugon Kul, against us; and some fearful weapon of Malgarth’s, attacking the Earth, that has not been seen before. If we win through, to reach Verel Erin and the Stone, it will be through your ancient power, Barihorn!”
Even the cook showed an awed faith in me, as a sort of supernatural deliverer. That gave me an uncomfortable hollow feeling. In incredible fact, I had lived somewhat more than a million years. But I failed to see how that would make me a very formidable champion of mankind, in the long-delayed rebellion against the iron tyranny of Malgarth.
My body seemed no more than a shrunken lump of thirst and ravening hunger. I must have drunk a good many gallons of water and wine and soup before I was able to leave the bunk. Once I glimpsed myself in the mirror of a tray. My skin was yellow and cadaverously drawn; my long-grown hair and beard had turned completely white. Very moderate changes, I suppose, considering my age. But the impact was startling.
Lean little Rogo Mug, the engineer, had rubbed my skin with a vile-smelling ointment that he cooked up in the galley. It burned savagely at first, but softened that brittle dryness. And big Jeron Roc forced me to take some bitter internal medicine.
In the confused intervals of halfawakening, I learned a little of the three companions of Kel Aran, and how they had come to join the Earthman’s outlaw crusade against the Corporation. Each of them had suffered some grave injury from the robots.
For the ultimate object of Malgarth, they believed, was the total extirpation of mankind. On every planet the agencies of the far-flung Corporation had been growing more wealthy, at the expense of human owners. The robot legions of Malgarth’s Space Police were gathering power. Everywhere it was becoming more and more difficult for a mere human being to own anything, to find a job, to feed himself and his dependents, or even to get into the relief lines to receive synthetic gruel.
“Why waste with human labor?” ran an old slogan of the Corporation. “Let a robot do your work—efficiently.”
And now the very existence of mankind, said Jeron Roc, seemed a waste to Malgarth. The Corporation’s loftily-named “technomitanization” campaign was in reality a cunning and ruthless effort to supplant mankind.
Jeron Roc, navigator of the Barihorn, was a native of Saturn. He was massively tall, dark-skinned, with the piercing eyes of intellectual power. He came of a proud and ancient family; his father had been the foremost astronomer of the solar system—until a new edict of the Emperor reserved scientific research for the robots alone.
“The will of Malgarth is now the law of the Empire,” he explained. “For the Corporation owns nine tenths of the property in the Empire. Without the taxes paid by the robots, the Emperor and his bureaucrats would starve. Therefore the fleets of the Galactic Guard support the outrageous claims of the Corporation.”
The proud old savant, anyhow, had refused to surrender his observatory. A mob of robots from the local agency stormed the building, smashed priceless instruments, and killed the old astronomer.
Returning from the great university on Titan—because another imperial edict had closed it to human students—Jeron Roc found the burned ruins of the observatory still smoking, and saw his father’s body under the iron heel of a robot policeman.
THE disruptor gun had flamed of itself in his hand. The technomaton exploded with a blue flicker of hydrogen. Dazed by his audacity, Jeron fled—for he had destroyed Corporation property and resisted the Space Police, hence was twice liable to death—and at last escaped into space.
Of the two others, I had not learned so much. But Rogo Nug, who served the atom-converter generators and space-contraction drive of the Barihorn, was a veteran “space-rat.” A brown little wisp of a man, thin lips purpled with the roots called goona-roon which he chewed incessantly, he cursed picturesquely if sometimes lewdly by the anatomical divisions of the Emperor and the mechanical parts of Malgarth. He could not recall the planet of his birth. But his father, a stevedore of space, had been executed for the crime of striking against the Corporation; his mother, cut off relief for “harboring traitorous sympathies,” perished; and Rogo Nug had become an orphan waif of the spaceways.
The cook, Zerek Qom, was inordinately fat, totally bald, and extremely white—being a native of one of the cloud-veiled worlds of Canopus. He was decorated with the most brilliant and remarkable tattooing I had ever seen. He had inherited vast estates, but the “technomitanization” laws had forced him to discharge his human laborers to starve, and rent robots in their stead; then, when a hungry world had no money to buy his crops, he went bankrupt, and the Corporation took his lands in lieu of robot-hire. His chief regret appeared to be loss of the wine cellars beneath his old mansion.
Kel Aran himself, commander of the Barihorn and operator of the crystal-needled barytron gun, was more than a mere pirate of space. True, he had many times raided ships and agencies of the Corporation. True, vast rewards had been offered “for the body, dead or living, of that outlaw Earthman called the Falcon.”
Pausing once beside my bunk, while Jeron Roc was at the controls, he told me a little more of himself. A lean, straight athletic figure, tense now with the urgency of this battle to reach the Earth. An ice-blue light glinted in his eyes.
“We must reach the Earth and the Stone, Barihorn,” he whispered. “That seems the only hope to break the iron dominion of Malgarth—the secret that you sealed into the Stone a million years ago. That is,” he looked at me hopefully, “if you cannot recall it.”
And I could not recall it—for the maker of Malgarth, one with me in the legend, had been separated in reality by a hundred thousand years of scientific progress.
“Twelve years have gone, as Earth measures time,” he told me, “since Verel Erin was chosen to be Custodian of the Stone. My boyhood had been happy enough, in that secret desert valley where the Stone is kept, because I loved her. When she told me, sobbing, I did not try to dissuade her; for that is a duty of honor—no human being could ask a higher task than to guard the Stone. Yet I knew that I could not endure to live on Earth, never tasting her kisses again, or feeling her brighthaired beauty in my arms. I told her farewell, on the night before she received the Stone and went out of the valley.
“In the mines and the plantations of the Earth I saw the hard lot of mankind, beneath the robots. All save the meanest work was forbidden me, reserved for the technomatons. And the pay barely kept me alive. I saw that all the Earth, save only our hidden valley, was lost to the iron talons of Malgarth.
“I joined the Galactic Guard, hoping for a chance to fight for the rights of men. But I found that the Emperor was but a tool of Malgarth. On one planet we were ordered to bomb a band of men whose crime was that they had risen against slavery, and left the fields of the Corporation, and gone to make homes for themselves in the barren hills.
“Therefore I deserted from the Galactic Guard.” A malicious grin lit the face of the Earthman, and he pushed back this thick yellow hair, “I took the private space launch of the Admiral, Gugon Kul. It was a swift, spaceworthy craft. It outran all his fleet. It is now the Barihorn!
“Everywhere I have found men discontent with slavery, stirring under the iron heel of Malgarth. I have sought to aid them. Our raids have been for money and food and arms, to aid the rebellion.
“Chance has given me three kindred companions. Jeron, the scholar, the strategist of revolt—I took him from a cathode squad of the Space Police. Rogo Nug, the spy—he has been through the private papers of Gugon Kul, on his own flagship! He came abroad the Barihorn to steal our instruments, and stayed when he found that we were also against the robots. Zerek Oom I found in a concentration camp, subsisting on half a cup of synthetic slop every other day. Sober, he is silent enough. But make him half drunk, and his oratory could lift the dust of the dead to fight Malgarth!”
Kel Aran shook his yellow head.
“Three loyal companions.” His voice was weary. “Jeron has made a hundred plans. Zerek Oom has fanned revolt on a hundred planets. I have led a hundred raids. But we are beaten everywhere. We can’t fight the Corporation and the Empire, too—not unless the Stone will aid us.
“Your return, Barihorn, is our first good fortune—”
SUDDEN interruption. Rogo Nug burst in upon us, trembling, his dark scarred face oddly ashen.
“Kel!” he gasped. “Come to the bridge—Jeron wants you! It is the Earth—that haze again! Still we cannot pass the fleet—by the brazen beak of Malgarth, there was never such a blockade! And the Earth, Kel—it is dropping into the Sun!”
“I must leave you, Barihorn!” And Kel Aran rushed forward.
Still unable to leave the bunk, I knew from muttered words and tense white faces and the racing drone of the engines that we were making a desperate attempt to run the blockade, darting up through the Earth’s cone of shadow.
And I knew when we were halted by the fleet. The generators stopped. And Zerek Oom, slipping forward, whispered that the commander of a Galactic Guard cruiser had challenged us on the telescreen communicator. Faintly, down the silenced corridor, I heard the voice of Kel Aran:
“But, Commander, we are only a gang of space-rats. We’ve been mining the drift off beyond Pluto. Our supplies are gone, all but a few tins of syntholac, and a few mouldy space biscuits.” His tone had an assumed whining ring. “We’re only putting in to this planet, sir, to trade our metal for food and grog and a breath of fresh air.”
Then a gruff voice thumped from the communicator:
“Drift miners? Your ship is very trim and swift for a space-rat’s crate? And why were you running up the shadow?—I’d hold you on suspicion, if there weren’t bigger business afoot.”
I caught the hard swift voice of Kel Aran, rapping aside into the ship’s phones: “Rogo! Hold the generators ready!” The deep voice boomed on from the telescreen:
“But you won’t get your grog on this planet! For it is quarantined and condemned, by edict of the Emperor. All intercourse and communication is prohibited, until the planet has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” The voice of Kel Aran held desperate alarm. “The Earth destroyed!” Then he remembered the space-rat’s servile whine. “For what cause, sir?”
The official voice thumped again:
“There is rumor of a secret weapon on the Earth, kept hidden against Malgarth since the Master Robot was made by the scientist Barihorn. There is no truth to it, of course—a million years have proved that Malgarth is truly invulnerable. But the rumor is spread by this renegade Earthman, the Falcon, to incite rebellion.
“To end the rumor, therefore, to punish the Falcon, and to remove any possibility that the rebels have a secret base upon the Earth—for those three reasons, the Emperor has decred the destruction of the planet. You’ll get no grog on the Earth!
“And more, space-rats—if your little tub is caught within ray-range of the fleet again, you’ll be burned on suspicion of piracy, sedition, and rebellion!”
The communicator thumped and became silent.
I fought the drowsy weakness that had followed my long, long sleep. I tried to follow the last desperate attempt of Kel Aran to reach the doomed Earth. Through strained, hasty words and the sounds that came to my bunk, I traced the outline of events.
He retreated, in seeming obedience to the space commander. He landed the Barihorn upon a tiny asteroid whose orbit would take us to sunward of the Earth; clung hidden in a fissure of stone, waiting to be carried through the space fleet.
But the Earth was wrapped again in that puzzling haze—and snatched toward the Sun!
Reckless of the guarding fleet, Kel Aran left the asteroid, which was suddenly far behind, and raced after the Earth. From one of the red guarding stars stabbed a narrow lance of blue—a barytron beam whose finger of destruction reached out a million miles.
SIDE by side at the controls, Kel Aran and Jeron Roc fought desperately to avoid it. We escaped the core of the ray. But its edge touched the Barihorn. A hammer of fiery doom!
The impact of terrific energies hurled us backward. The whole ship flamed with blue electric flame; the air stung with ozone. And the whining of our engines ceased.
“Power!” I heard the pleading voice of Kel Aran. “We’ve got to have power—the Earth is almost to the Sun!”
“By the livid liver of the Emperor,” came the plaintive voice of Rogo Nug from somewhere aft, “the overload burned out the converter circuit. There is no power!”
“The Earth!” There was stark, hopeless horror in the voice of Kel Aran. “What can we do?”
I dragged myself out of the bunk and tottered toward to the compact pilot-room in the nose of the Barihorn. With black, impassive eyes, the big Saturnian was staring through a pert. Husky-voiced, stricken, the Earthman was gasping into the ship’s phone, begging Rogo Nug for power.
Clutching a rail, beside Jeron Roc, I looked out upon that dreadful tableau in space. The Sun filled a vast flaming circle. Softened by filter-screens, it still was blinding. Against its intolerable face I could see the small dark disk of the Earth, still blurred with that haze of sinister force; and, cruising about it, the tiny red stars of the fleet.
The Earth was dwindling swiftly.
“What awful power!” whispered the tall Saturnian. “They’re driving it like a ship—straight into the Sun!”
Kel Aran was beside us. His hard fingers were on my arm, unconsciously contracting until I thought the bone would snap. For the red stars drew suddenly away from the diminishing planet. For an instant, as the haze vanished, it was a sharp black dot against that ocean of merciless white. And then it struck.
A tiny pock of darkness spread on the face of the Sun. It closed again, and in its place was a hotter whiteness. A tongue of white flame lifted and dissolved—oddly like the splash where a raindrop has fallen.
And I knew that the planet Earth, after all its varied millions of years, had come to an end.
“Verel!” It was a dry choked sob from Kel Aran. “Verel, we have failed!”
