Collected Short Fiction, page 316
PART TWO
VI
COSMIC STORM
BE it proclaimed to all technomatons and men, in the name of Tedron Du, Emperor of the Galaxy, by Gugon Kul, Admiral of the Twelfth Sector Fleet of the Galactic Guard:
That all human natives of the planet Earth who escaped the recent destruction of that planet in accordance with the decree of the Emperor, their very escape being overt treason, shall be seized wherever found and dealt to death in the manner reserved for traitors against the Empire of technomatons and men and the person of the Lord of the Stars.
That ominous proclamation had been printed on the recordstrip of the telescreen. Rogo Nug had just completed repair of the burned-out circuits; and big Zerek Oom had suggested, a little apprehensively, that we had better leave the solar system.
“Both you and Barihorn are native Earthmen,” he argued. “That is obvious to anyone familiar with the evolutionary adaptations of the natives of the different planets. If we should happen to be seized by old Gugon Kul—”
His big white hands made an unpleasant gesture.
But Kel Aran shook his yellow head. His gray eyes were cold and clear as polar ice, and there was something startling in their impact.
“No,” he said flatly. “The very proclamation suggests that some refugees escaped the doomed planet. We’re going to search. Until we find Verel and the Stone.” Grief and dread shadowed his eyes. “Or until we find that she is dead and the Stone destroyed.”
He went out with Jeron Roc, in the vacuum armor, to paint the hull of the Barihorn with a dead-black stuff that reflected no light, hence made the little craft all but invisible in the dark gulf of space—unless it chanced to be seen against some luminous body.
Then, hanging cautiously in the bleak abyss, avoiding the fleet of Gugon Kul, we began the weary search, The Moon had been flung away upon an independent orbit, when that incredible force checked the Earth. And there were new mountainous masses flying. In the void that must have been tom from the planet itself.
With telethron-beam equipment coupled to the telescreen, we scanned the Moon and those hurtling fragments. In the rocky wilderness outside the domed cities of the Moon we found a dozen ships that had crossed before the planets had been torn apart.
But two great cruisers were already hanging beside the Moon. And swift patrol boats, looking like tiny gray comets with crimson tails, were darting down upon the refugees. Some tried to hide amid the rocks, or to defend themselves. But they were helpless against the blue, dazzling needles of the barytron rays, whose touch could explode a whole mountain into a frightful inferno.
Kel Aran boiled to witness such slaughter. He stalked up and down the narrow central corridor of the Barihorn, lean jaw white, fists clenched.
“Verel!” he kept muttering. “We must save ourselves, for Verel and the Stone!”
We cruised on to follow the fragments of the Earth, A few survivors clung to them, in the sealed hulls of aircraft, or in improvised breathing masks. But none that we saw bore any likeness to Verel Erin. And scores of quick little patrol boats were already hunting them down, turning flaming rays on every twisted scrap of wreckage that had escaped the greater cataclysm.
KEL ARAN, as we searched, talked a little of the girl. His voice was dry and husky. He would speak of their childhood together, and then come back with a jerk to realization of the present tragedy.
“We were strong children,” he said, “We worked. For there were no robots in that hidden valley. Only the simplest machines. I worked with a hoe in the narrow fields below the spring, And Verel went every day to herd the goats in the dry uplands. Sometimes, when my work was done, I would go with her.—And now she may be dead!”
He bit his lip, and it was a little while before he spoke again.
“Verel was a brave girl,” he said. “She was lithe and tanned. She had impish greenish eyes, and bright red hair. I remember one day when we left the goats, and climbed high up among the rocks toward an eagle’s nest.
“She was lighter and swifter than I, and better at climbing. She was afraid neither of falling nor of the attacks of the screaming birds. She climbed far ahead of me, and reached the nest, and sat laughing at me until I reached her. I wanted to throw the young birds out, for there were the bones of a kid beside the nest. But she pitied their helplessness, and made me leave them.
“It was that day that I first kissed her, and we pledged each other all our love. We would find another unknown valley, we promised, and forget the Stone and the robots and all the trials of mankind. But it was not two years before she was chosen—because all the Warders knew her courage and her strength and her faith—to be the Custodian.
“If only the Stone had struck at Malgarth when she first received it! For she promised she would beg it to—”
His voice choked off, and he swayed wearily down the corridor again.
Jeron Roc and Rogo Nug and Zerek Oom tired of our perilous quest. My own hope was gone, and I begged Kel Aran to abandon it.
“We’ve seen the fleet search all the solar system,” I told him. “There can’t have been many survivors, and the rays have already burned all we have seen. There can’t be any use—”
“Even now,” insisted Kel Aran, “she may live.”
This lean young fighting man—the last son, perhaps, of the murdered Earth—made some precise adjustment to the controls of the searching telethron-beam. An impatient sweep of his head flung back long yellow hair. His eyes smouldered with a stubborn light.
“Verel,” he insisted, “may be still alive. She may be dinging to some fragment that was hurled beyond the range of the search. She may have been picked up by some passing freighter that carried her to safety.
“No, we must search—so long as we can!”
The Telescreen shimmered and cleared again, and upon it I saw a colossal gray cruiser, driving straight upon us. Her armored nose, bristling with the gleaming crystal needles of barytron projectors, filled half the screen. The flaming atomic exhaust of her repulsors, behind, made a wide crimson halo against the dark of space.
Kel Aran caught a quick little breath of alarm, and spun the dials.
The screen flickered again, and then showed a dark, massive, bearded face. Its lips were thickly sensual, cruel. Its eyes seemed stupid, and they glinted with yellow malice.
“The Admiral,” whispered Kel Aran. “Gugon Kul! He must be giving some command. We’ll listen.”
He touched some control, and a guttural, triumphant voice boomed from the screen. The first word, oddly, had the familiar ring of my own name:
“—Barihorn! The ship is coated with some light-absorbing pigment, but our magnetectors have picked it up. Pirate and Earthman, the Falcon is twice our prey. The Barihorn must be surrounded!”
A HARD bright smile had set the Mace of Kel Aran. The gray eyes narrowed, until he looked almost hawklike in reality.
“So, they’re after us!”
The telescreen shimmered again, and showed a wide black rectangle of space. The Sun was a sharp white disk, and the stars were an unfamiliar pattern—nearly all the constellations I had known had dissolved in a million years of change. And there was a little cluster of crimson points that crept among the rest.
“Half the Twelfth Sector Fleet,” muttered Kel Aran. “Six hundred cruisers—after us!”
He called Jeron Roc from his bunk. They held a swift consultation. Technical terms were confusing to me. But I understood that the space-contraction drive of the Barihorn gave our craft the advantage in maneuverability; and that the newer cosmical repulsion drive of the Admiral’s cruisers, while it left them a little clumsier about getting under way, gave them by far the greater ultimate speed.
“We can keep ahead for a time,” the Saturnian admitted apprehensively. “But in the end they can run us down. And every cruiser carries a hundred patrol boats that is our equal in fighting power—It was simply a mistake to stay and search so long.”
“No,” the Earthman insisted stubbornly. “We must find Verel Erin.”
He consulted the charts—reels of transparent film viewed through a stereoscopic magnifier which gave a three-dimensional image of the array of worlds in space. He rapped swift commands into the ship’s phones. The hull drummed to the swift rhythm of the engines. The Sun diminished to a yellow point behind, and was lost and greater luminaries. But the red stars of the fleet grew brighter, and they spread ever wider across the black of space.
Jeron stood like a grim dark statue over the controls.
“Kel,” he called, in a deep grave voice, “there’s an area of cosmic storm ahead. They’re spreading out, trying to hem us against that. I think we had better double back—there’s one chance in a million—”
“No,” said Kel Aran. “Follow the course I gave you.”
On the telescreen, the navigator showed me the storm. Against the familiar panorama of space; the velvety blackness, the hard changeless many-hued atoms of stars, the nebulous dust of silver—against that stark eternal beauty sprawled an ugly cloud. It was many-armed, like an octopus of darkness, and it flickered with a weird angry green.
“There it is,” said the Saturnian. “A condensation of matter so tenuous and vast that its gravitational energies never gathered it into a star. A true cosmic storm!” Awe deepened his voice. “Tempests of incandescent gas. Rain of molten metal. Hail of meteoric fragments. Lightning of atomic energy.—And Kel commands me to drive straight into it!”
The crimson stars behind were brighter, now. Lines of them spread out, to right and to left, above and below—as if to herd us into the storm. And among them flashed points of ominous blue.
The blue points were barytron beams, I knew, jets of barytron particles—the mysterious heavy “X-particles” of the physics of my own day—they could reach out to smash the very atoms in a target a million miles away.
Seeking to vary the strained anxiety of that race for life, I went back into engine room. Hunched gnome-like amid the strange shining bulks of his machines, Rogo Nug was chewing steadily on a wad of his goona-roon. He spat into a purple-stained can, and plaintively observed:
“Look at that! By Malgarth’s brazen bowels, Kel is making me burn the very life out of the converters!”
He pointed to a crystal tube, with drops of water falling swiftly down it.—Water was the fuel of the Barihorn. Hydrogen atoms in the converter, were built into helium, with the “packing fraction” liberated as pure energy to activate the space-contractors, The freed oxygen renewed the atmosphere aboard.
A RED light was flashing, beside it, a gong clanged at monotonous intervals.
“The warning,” muttered Rogo Nug. “Overload!”
Tension of dread drew me back to the pilot-room. That appalling cloud of green-flickering darkness had grown against the diamond field ahead. Its spiral arms reached out as if to grasp us. I tried to comprehend its vastness: a hundred light years meant six hundred trillion miles.
The pursuing cruisers drew inexorably closer. The formation changed again, so that they formed a double circle of crimson flecks, brighter than the stars. The flashes of blue came faster. Abruptly, beside us, flamed out a blue-white sun. I shrank and blinked from its burst of blistering radiation.
“A stray meteor from the cloud, that a beam caught,” commented the impassive dark Saturnian. “It might as well have been the ship.”
His face a grim-set mask, Kel Aran came down from the little ray-gun turret of the Barihorn.
“The range of their beams is about nine times ours,” he said softly. “Means about eighty times the power.” He went to the telescreen. “Wonder what our friend the Admiral has to say by now!”
That stolidly dark, craftily stupid face flashed on the screen again, and the great guttural voice thumped from the cabinet:
“—must not escape, for he is the last surviving Earthman. I have just received a communication that should increase your interest in the chase. The Corporation offers all the revenues of the twelve worlds of Lekhan, to be divided among those responsible for the capture or death of the Falcon, And the Emperor has commanded that, if the Falcon escapes, those held responsible shall die.”
A sudden reckless grin lit the face of Kel Aran. His bright eyes narrowed, and a quick hand swept back his thick yellow hair. And then, while Jeron Roc made a frantic, futile snatch to halt him, he twisted a knob. In a light, taunting voice, he called:
“Greetings, Admiral!”
The dark, thick-featured face stared at him, first in stiff stupefaction, then crimsoned with a seething rage.
“You—Earth-rat!” he choked. “You dare—” He gulped, caught his breath. “Tapping my communicator will be your last bit of insolence,” he bellowed. “We’re taking you, Falcon—for Malgarth!”
Still with that bright smile frozen on his lips, Kel Aran made a little mocking bow.
“The robot’s offer is flattering, Admiral.” His soft low voice had the lilt of a song. “But I’m going to let hint keep his star. And I hope the Emperor doesn’t hold you responsible for letting us slip through your fingers!”
Gugon Kul stood gasping, turning swiftly purple.
“Now, Admiral,” said Kel Aran, “I’m going to sing you a song. I call it the Ballad of the Last Earthman.”
And he began singing into the Admiral’s startled face. His voice was clear and gay, and the tune had a swing that quickened the heart. The words told of his boyhood on the Earth, and his love for the Earth-girl, Verel Erin; of the murder of the Earth, and his long search for his beloved; of his determination to continue the stellar quest, “Till I find her or I die!”
The dark-flushed Admiral listened for a little while. Then he began shouting orders for the fleet to close in. He thought of something; his big hairy hand moved quickly; and the screen became a giddy blur.
The stellar cloud now was close ahead. A faint green light pervaded it—the eerie green of mysterious nebulium, it was just strong enough to outline jagged plunging masses of stone spinning in inconceivable vortices. Brief explosive crimson fiickerings, beyond, suggested the appalling vastness and power of the cloud.
THE Admiral’s cruisers were closing in behind, a double ring of scarlet flares. Blue flickered among them. And white stars burst out in a blinding swarm about us—meteoric fragments exploded by the rays.
The big dark Saturnian looked gravely from his instruments to Kel.
“Still, Kel,” he said, “there’s the shadow of a chance—if we turn back among them!”
Kel Aran shook his yellow head, and his lips parted with a smile that welcomed danger.
“No,” he said again. “I’m taking over now.” And his bright, reckless face turned to me. “Now, Barihorn!” he whispered, “If your life is eternal—” Then the dark sky behind and the pursuing crimson stars were blotted out. We were within the cloud!
VII
CIRCUS OF SPACE
THE lurid glow of death was shining all around us. Death rode down upon us on gigantic ragged boulders, Death shrieked at us from hurricanes of greenly incandescent gas, and tugged and battered at the ship. Death bathed us in rains of molten metal, and knocked upon the hull with a hail of meteoric fragments.
And Kel Aran met death, and mocked it, with the same lilting song that he had sung the Admiral. He had taken the big Saturnian’s place at the controls. His lean hands moved with a quickness I had never seen. And the twisting, spinning ship seemed to respond to the life and the rhythm of his song.
As for my own life, I could not feel it at all eternal. The freaks of chance might have kept me alive a million years—but no chance, I felt, could pick a safe path through this insane chaos.
“I think,” the Earthman interrupted his song, “that the Admiral will not care to follow us here—not even for Malgarth’s star!”
Jeron Roc stood rigidly by, clinging to a hand rail against the wild lurching of the ship. I saw Zerek Oom, the fat, tatooed cook, standing startled and petrified at the end of the corridor. I saw him again, after Kel Aran had earned another trick from death, and now all his tattooing had a background of sickly green. I looked again, and he was swaying aft at an unsteady run, toward the lavatory.
Some iron fragment must have struck the hull, despite all the well-tried skill of Kel Aran, for it rang like a great bell and the little ship began to spin end over end. I clung with both sweating hands to the rail, and felt as ill as Zerek Oom.
When the ship was steadier again, I tried to go back to my bunk, and stumbled headlong in the corridor. Jeron came to help me, and then made me take another dose of his bitter, nauseating medicine.
“I’ve lived a million years,” I gasped, “without you to doctor m—”
The walls about me rang to another fearful crash, and the ship began to spin again. A blistering heat was creeping through the insulated hull. The air was stifling. I felt the faint, deadly sting of some penetrating radiation. And then a great hand of darkness extinguished all my spinning, tortured world.
The next I knew, the Barihorn was humming smoothly again through the dark vault of stars. The coiling nightmare cloud was already lost behind. We had emerged from one of its spiral arms, Kel Aran informed me, at right angles from the direction of our entrance.
“Old Gugon Kul tried to patrol all the borders of the cloud. But that would have spread a hundred fleets too wide. Anyhow, he wasn’t looking for us to come out alive.”
“So he thinks we’re dead?” Relieved, I sat up on the bunk. “He won’t be hunting us any more?”
But big Zerek Oom came waddling out of his galley, wiping his fat tattooed hands on a white apron, to rid me of that comforting illusion.
“Worse luck, Barihorn,” he sighed, with a sad look at Kel Aran, “Indeed the Admiral believed us lost. He called the offices of the Corporation—we picked up the message on the telescreen—and reported that we had perished in the cloud. And the reply was relayed from black Mystoon—from the unknown lair of Malgarth himself—that the reward of a stellar system would be duly paid for the death of the Falcon.”
VI
COSMIC STORM
BE it proclaimed to all technomatons and men, in the name of Tedron Du, Emperor of the Galaxy, by Gugon Kul, Admiral of the Twelfth Sector Fleet of the Galactic Guard:
That all human natives of the planet Earth who escaped the recent destruction of that planet in accordance with the decree of the Emperor, their very escape being overt treason, shall be seized wherever found and dealt to death in the manner reserved for traitors against the Empire of technomatons and men and the person of the Lord of the Stars.
That ominous proclamation had been printed on the recordstrip of the telescreen. Rogo Nug had just completed repair of the burned-out circuits; and big Zerek Oom had suggested, a little apprehensively, that we had better leave the solar system.
“Both you and Barihorn are native Earthmen,” he argued. “That is obvious to anyone familiar with the evolutionary adaptations of the natives of the different planets. If we should happen to be seized by old Gugon Kul—”
His big white hands made an unpleasant gesture.
But Kel Aran shook his yellow head. His gray eyes were cold and clear as polar ice, and there was something startling in their impact.
“No,” he said flatly. “The very proclamation suggests that some refugees escaped the doomed planet. We’re going to search. Until we find Verel and the Stone.” Grief and dread shadowed his eyes. “Or until we find that she is dead and the Stone destroyed.”
He went out with Jeron Roc, in the vacuum armor, to paint the hull of the Barihorn with a dead-black stuff that reflected no light, hence made the little craft all but invisible in the dark gulf of space—unless it chanced to be seen against some luminous body.
Then, hanging cautiously in the bleak abyss, avoiding the fleet of Gugon Kul, we began the weary search, The Moon had been flung away upon an independent orbit, when that incredible force checked the Earth. And there were new mountainous masses flying. In the void that must have been tom from the planet itself.
With telethron-beam equipment coupled to the telescreen, we scanned the Moon and those hurtling fragments. In the rocky wilderness outside the domed cities of the Moon we found a dozen ships that had crossed before the planets had been torn apart.
But two great cruisers were already hanging beside the Moon. And swift patrol boats, looking like tiny gray comets with crimson tails, were darting down upon the refugees. Some tried to hide amid the rocks, or to defend themselves. But they were helpless against the blue, dazzling needles of the barytron rays, whose touch could explode a whole mountain into a frightful inferno.
Kel Aran boiled to witness such slaughter. He stalked up and down the narrow central corridor of the Barihorn, lean jaw white, fists clenched.
“Verel!” he kept muttering. “We must save ourselves, for Verel and the Stone!”
We cruised on to follow the fragments of the Earth, A few survivors clung to them, in the sealed hulls of aircraft, or in improvised breathing masks. But none that we saw bore any likeness to Verel Erin. And scores of quick little patrol boats were already hunting them down, turning flaming rays on every twisted scrap of wreckage that had escaped the greater cataclysm.
KEL ARAN, as we searched, talked a little of the girl. His voice was dry and husky. He would speak of their childhood together, and then come back with a jerk to realization of the present tragedy.
“We were strong children,” he said, “We worked. For there were no robots in that hidden valley. Only the simplest machines. I worked with a hoe in the narrow fields below the spring, And Verel went every day to herd the goats in the dry uplands. Sometimes, when my work was done, I would go with her.—And now she may be dead!”
He bit his lip, and it was a little while before he spoke again.
“Verel was a brave girl,” he said. “She was lithe and tanned. She had impish greenish eyes, and bright red hair. I remember one day when we left the goats, and climbed high up among the rocks toward an eagle’s nest.
“She was lighter and swifter than I, and better at climbing. She was afraid neither of falling nor of the attacks of the screaming birds. She climbed far ahead of me, and reached the nest, and sat laughing at me until I reached her. I wanted to throw the young birds out, for there were the bones of a kid beside the nest. But she pitied their helplessness, and made me leave them.
“It was that day that I first kissed her, and we pledged each other all our love. We would find another unknown valley, we promised, and forget the Stone and the robots and all the trials of mankind. But it was not two years before she was chosen—because all the Warders knew her courage and her strength and her faith—to be the Custodian.
“If only the Stone had struck at Malgarth when she first received it! For she promised she would beg it to—”
His voice choked off, and he swayed wearily down the corridor again.
Jeron Roc and Rogo Nug and Zerek Oom tired of our perilous quest. My own hope was gone, and I begged Kel Aran to abandon it.
“We’ve seen the fleet search all the solar system,” I told him. “There can’t have been many survivors, and the rays have already burned all we have seen. There can’t be any use—”
“Even now,” insisted Kel Aran, “she may live.”
This lean young fighting man—the last son, perhaps, of the murdered Earth—made some precise adjustment to the controls of the searching telethron-beam. An impatient sweep of his head flung back long yellow hair. His eyes smouldered with a stubborn light.
“Verel,” he insisted, “may be still alive. She may be dinging to some fragment that was hurled beyond the range of the search. She may have been picked up by some passing freighter that carried her to safety.
“No, we must search—so long as we can!”
The Telescreen shimmered and cleared again, and upon it I saw a colossal gray cruiser, driving straight upon us. Her armored nose, bristling with the gleaming crystal needles of barytron projectors, filled half the screen. The flaming atomic exhaust of her repulsors, behind, made a wide crimson halo against the dark of space.
Kel Aran caught a quick little breath of alarm, and spun the dials.
The screen flickered again, and then showed a dark, massive, bearded face. Its lips were thickly sensual, cruel. Its eyes seemed stupid, and they glinted with yellow malice.
“The Admiral,” whispered Kel Aran. “Gugon Kul! He must be giving some command. We’ll listen.”
He touched some control, and a guttural, triumphant voice boomed from the screen. The first word, oddly, had the familiar ring of my own name:
“—Barihorn! The ship is coated with some light-absorbing pigment, but our magnetectors have picked it up. Pirate and Earthman, the Falcon is twice our prey. The Barihorn must be surrounded!”
A HARD bright smile had set the Mace of Kel Aran. The gray eyes narrowed, until he looked almost hawklike in reality.
“So, they’re after us!”
The telescreen shimmered again, and showed a wide black rectangle of space. The Sun was a sharp white disk, and the stars were an unfamiliar pattern—nearly all the constellations I had known had dissolved in a million years of change. And there was a little cluster of crimson points that crept among the rest.
“Half the Twelfth Sector Fleet,” muttered Kel Aran. “Six hundred cruisers—after us!”
He called Jeron Roc from his bunk. They held a swift consultation. Technical terms were confusing to me. But I understood that the space-contraction drive of the Barihorn gave our craft the advantage in maneuverability; and that the newer cosmical repulsion drive of the Admiral’s cruisers, while it left them a little clumsier about getting under way, gave them by far the greater ultimate speed.
“We can keep ahead for a time,” the Saturnian admitted apprehensively. “But in the end they can run us down. And every cruiser carries a hundred patrol boats that is our equal in fighting power—It was simply a mistake to stay and search so long.”
“No,” the Earthman insisted stubbornly. “We must find Verel Erin.”
He consulted the charts—reels of transparent film viewed through a stereoscopic magnifier which gave a three-dimensional image of the array of worlds in space. He rapped swift commands into the ship’s phones. The hull drummed to the swift rhythm of the engines. The Sun diminished to a yellow point behind, and was lost and greater luminaries. But the red stars of the fleet grew brighter, and they spread ever wider across the black of space.
Jeron stood like a grim dark statue over the controls.
“Kel,” he called, in a deep grave voice, “there’s an area of cosmic storm ahead. They’re spreading out, trying to hem us against that. I think we had better double back—there’s one chance in a million—”
“No,” said Kel Aran. “Follow the course I gave you.”
On the telescreen, the navigator showed me the storm. Against the familiar panorama of space; the velvety blackness, the hard changeless many-hued atoms of stars, the nebulous dust of silver—against that stark eternal beauty sprawled an ugly cloud. It was many-armed, like an octopus of darkness, and it flickered with a weird angry green.
“There it is,” said the Saturnian. “A condensation of matter so tenuous and vast that its gravitational energies never gathered it into a star. A true cosmic storm!” Awe deepened his voice. “Tempests of incandescent gas. Rain of molten metal. Hail of meteoric fragments. Lightning of atomic energy.—And Kel commands me to drive straight into it!”
The crimson stars behind were brighter, now. Lines of them spread out, to right and to left, above and below—as if to herd us into the storm. And among them flashed points of ominous blue.
The blue points were barytron beams, I knew, jets of barytron particles—the mysterious heavy “X-particles” of the physics of my own day—they could reach out to smash the very atoms in a target a million miles away.
Seeking to vary the strained anxiety of that race for life, I went back into engine room. Hunched gnome-like amid the strange shining bulks of his machines, Rogo Nug was chewing steadily on a wad of his goona-roon. He spat into a purple-stained can, and plaintively observed:
“Look at that! By Malgarth’s brazen bowels, Kel is making me burn the very life out of the converters!”
He pointed to a crystal tube, with drops of water falling swiftly down it.—Water was the fuel of the Barihorn. Hydrogen atoms in the converter, were built into helium, with the “packing fraction” liberated as pure energy to activate the space-contractors, The freed oxygen renewed the atmosphere aboard.
A RED light was flashing, beside it, a gong clanged at monotonous intervals.
“The warning,” muttered Rogo Nug. “Overload!”
Tension of dread drew me back to the pilot-room. That appalling cloud of green-flickering darkness had grown against the diamond field ahead. Its spiral arms reached out as if to grasp us. I tried to comprehend its vastness: a hundred light years meant six hundred trillion miles.
The pursuing cruisers drew inexorably closer. The formation changed again, so that they formed a double circle of crimson flecks, brighter than the stars. The flashes of blue came faster. Abruptly, beside us, flamed out a blue-white sun. I shrank and blinked from its burst of blistering radiation.
“A stray meteor from the cloud, that a beam caught,” commented the impassive dark Saturnian. “It might as well have been the ship.”
His face a grim-set mask, Kel Aran came down from the little ray-gun turret of the Barihorn.
“The range of their beams is about nine times ours,” he said softly. “Means about eighty times the power.” He went to the telescreen. “Wonder what our friend the Admiral has to say by now!”
That stolidly dark, craftily stupid face flashed on the screen again, and the great guttural voice thumped from the cabinet:
“—must not escape, for he is the last surviving Earthman. I have just received a communication that should increase your interest in the chase. The Corporation offers all the revenues of the twelve worlds of Lekhan, to be divided among those responsible for the capture or death of the Falcon, And the Emperor has commanded that, if the Falcon escapes, those held responsible shall die.”
A sudden reckless grin lit the face of Kel Aran. His bright eyes narrowed, and a quick hand swept back his thick yellow hair. And then, while Jeron Roc made a frantic, futile snatch to halt him, he twisted a knob. In a light, taunting voice, he called:
“Greetings, Admiral!”
The dark, thick-featured face stared at him, first in stiff stupefaction, then crimsoned with a seething rage.
“You—Earth-rat!” he choked. “You dare—” He gulped, caught his breath. “Tapping my communicator will be your last bit of insolence,” he bellowed. “We’re taking you, Falcon—for Malgarth!”
Still with that bright smile frozen on his lips, Kel Aran made a little mocking bow.
“The robot’s offer is flattering, Admiral.” His soft low voice had the lilt of a song. “But I’m going to let hint keep his star. And I hope the Emperor doesn’t hold you responsible for letting us slip through your fingers!”
Gugon Kul stood gasping, turning swiftly purple.
“Now, Admiral,” said Kel Aran, “I’m going to sing you a song. I call it the Ballad of the Last Earthman.”
And he began singing into the Admiral’s startled face. His voice was clear and gay, and the tune had a swing that quickened the heart. The words told of his boyhood on the Earth, and his love for the Earth-girl, Verel Erin; of the murder of the Earth, and his long search for his beloved; of his determination to continue the stellar quest, “Till I find her or I die!”
The dark-flushed Admiral listened for a little while. Then he began shouting orders for the fleet to close in. He thought of something; his big hairy hand moved quickly; and the screen became a giddy blur.
The stellar cloud now was close ahead. A faint green light pervaded it—the eerie green of mysterious nebulium, it was just strong enough to outline jagged plunging masses of stone spinning in inconceivable vortices. Brief explosive crimson fiickerings, beyond, suggested the appalling vastness and power of the cloud.
THE Admiral’s cruisers were closing in behind, a double ring of scarlet flares. Blue flickered among them. And white stars burst out in a blinding swarm about us—meteoric fragments exploded by the rays.
The big dark Saturnian looked gravely from his instruments to Kel.
“Still, Kel,” he said, “there’s the shadow of a chance—if we turn back among them!”
Kel Aran shook his yellow head, and his lips parted with a smile that welcomed danger.
“No,” he said again. “I’m taking over now.” And his bright, reckless face turned to me. “Now, Barihorn!” he whispered, “If your life is eternal—” Then the dark sky behind and the pursuing crimson stars were blotted out. We were within the cloud!
VII
CIRCUS OF SPACE
THE lurid glow of death was shining all around us. Death rode down upon us on gigantic ragged boulders, Death shrieked at us from hurricanes of greenly incandescent gas, and tugged and battered at the ship. Death bathed us in rains of molten metal, and knocked upon the hull with a hail of meteoric fragments.
And Kel Aran met death, and mocked it, with the same lilting song that he had sung the Admiral. He had taken the big Saturnian’s place at the controls. His lean hands moved with a quickness I had never seen. And the twisting, spinning ship seemed to respond to the life and the rhythm of his song.
As for my own life, I could not feel it at all eternal. The freaks of chance might have kept me alive a million years—but no chance, I felt, could pick a safe path through this insane chaos.
“I think,” the Earthman interrupted his song, “that the Admiral will not care to follow us here—not even for Malgarth’s star!”
Jeron Roc stood rigidly by, clinging to a hand rail against the wild lurching of the ship. I saw Zerek Oom, the fat, tatooed cook, standing startled and petrified at the end of the corridor. I saw him again, after Kel Aran had earned another trick from death, and now all his tattooing had a background of sickly green. I looked again, and he was swaying aft at an unsteady run, toward the lavatory.
Some iron fragment must have struck the hull, despite all the well-tried skill of Kel Aran, for it rang like a great bell and the little ship began to spin end over end. I clung with both sweating hands to the rail, and felt as ill as Zerek Oom.
When the ship was steadier again, I tried to go back to my bunk, and stumbled headlong in the corridor. Jeron came to help me, and then made me take another dose of his bitter, nauseating medicine.
“I’ve lived a million years,” I gasped, “without you to doctor m—”
The walls about me rang to another fearful crash, and the ship began to spin again. A blistering heat was creeping through the insulated hull. The air was stifling. I felt the faint, deadly sting of some penetrating radiation. And then a great hand of darkness extinguished all my spinning, tortured world.
The next I knew, the Barihorn was humming smoothly again through the dark vault of stars. The coiling nightmare cloud was already lost behind. We had emerged from one of its spiral arms, Kel Aran informed me, at right angles from the direction of our entrance.
“Old Gugon Kul tried to patrol all the borders of the cloud. But that would have spread a hundred fleets too wide. Anyhow, he wasn’t looking for us to come out alive.”
“So he thinks we’re dead?” Relieved, I sat up on the bunk. “He won’t be hunting us any more?”
But big Zerek Oom came waddling out of his galley, wiping his fat tattooed hands on a white apron, to rid me of that comforting illusion.
“Worse luck, Barihorn,” he sighed, with a sad look at Kel Aran, “Indeed the Admiral believed us lost. He called the offices of the Corporation—we picked up the message on the telescreen—and reported that we had perished in the cloud. And the reply was relayed from black Mystoon—from the unknown lair of Malgarth himself—that the reward of a stellar system would be duly paid for the death of the Falcon.”
