Collected Short Fiction, page 318
Offer of a few drops of rum spurred the drowsy sandbat to recall a few more crumbs of knowledge gleaned from the Admiral’s brain. Verel had been picked up near the old orbit of Earth, drifting in a self-propelled space-suit with the motor coils burned out. It was one of Gugon Kul’s patrol boats that found her. Chancing to watch her trial, on the telescreen, the Emperor had been struck with her beauty. He had ordered her to be brought to Ledros. She was kept drugged. And she was to be destroyed, like any native of the condemned planet, when he tired of her.
“Drugged,” whispered Kel Aran. His face was a gray taut mask. “At the mercy of Tedron Du!” His eyes lit with a frosty glitter. “We’re going to Ledros, Barihorn. We’re going to take Verel and the Stone. And we’ll pay the Emperor, while we’re there, for the crimes of twenty years.”
Ledros, Jeron warned, was well garrisoned by the Galactic Guard. And the alarm would surely be out by the time we reached it. But Kel Aran would admit no delay or concession to peril. We climbed out, as the ship ran on, to repaint the hull with that invisible black. The papers of the Chimerian Bird were burned, most of the betraying paraphernalia of the circus dumped out into space. And we drove on toward the seat of the Galactic Empire.
Even with the incredible power of the Barihorn’s space-contraction drive, it was a voyage of many days to Ledros. We studied the charts as we flew, and made a dozen futile plans.
“Ledros,” Kel Aran told me, “is the greatest planetary system in the Galaxy. In various orbits, all billions of miles outward from its triple sun, are forty huge planets. Many are covered with the palaces, estates, treasuries, and administration buildings of the Emperor. But half, at least, are devoted to the bases and fortifications of the Galactic Guard. The private fleet of Tedron Du is three times that of our old friend the Admiral.”
But we slipped past the long rows of sinister colossal hulks lying in the void. Veiled in the crimson repulsor-flare of a great freighter carrying food for the soldiers and the bureaucrats and courtezans of the Emperor, we came safely within the ring of fortified planets, and turned aside, at last, toward the pleasure-world of Tedron Du.
The three clustered suns, crimson, blue-white, and a pale eerie green, were now a splendid sight. The two score of giant planets, lit with the changing rays of the triple star, made a string of splendid gems against the night of space. The pleasure planet was itself a gorgeous jewel, covered with well-tended gardens of many-hued vegetation, and with the magnificent palaces, triumphal arches, and colossi erected by a thousand generations of universal rulers.
Approaching the night side of the massive planet, we cut off the power to glide undetected through another patrol of the Galactic Guard—while big Zerek Oom, mopping perspiration from his tattooed forehead, declared ominously:
“Nothing begun so deadly well but turned out very ill!”
FINALLY, however, taking the controls from the Saturnian, Kel Aran dropped us in a silent dive, checked it over a bright-lit palace, and settled into an adjoining garden. Very softly, the Barihorn sank into the shadowed water of a silver-walled bathing pool.
Kel Aran was hardly looking the Falcon of Earth. His face was gray, taut, dewed with sweat. His lean hands trembled. His breath was quick, his voice a low hurried rasp. His whole being, I saw, was the battleground of a tremendous hope and a tremendous fear.
“In half an hour,” he gasped, “we may have her—or we may know that she is dead.”
To my relief, he chose me to go with him above. The ship’s lock worked as well below water as in the vacuum of space. We entered it without space suits, since the air above was breathable, but each wearing two long-tubed disrupter guns. The water of the pool flooded in. I caught a great breath, dived out after the Earthman, swam upward.
Dripping, we clambered over the silver rim, and paused breathless beneath the dead-white foliage of an unfamiliar tree. Still there was no alarm—the silence began to seem tense, uncanny, as if some unseen menace crouched and held its breath!
The emerald sun had been last of the three to set, and an unearthly greenish twilight lingered in the sky. All the shrubs and trees, even the velvet lawns of that vast walled garden, were snowy white. Towers of yellow gold rose beyond, and great windows burned with a blood-red light, and a thin wail of melancholy music reached us.
I saw the sandbat clinging to Kel’s shoulder. She fluttered her six glittering arms, to fling off a shower of tiny drops. And I heard her cooing voice:
“Now she’s dancing, Kel. She’s lovely before the Emperor. Her body is a wind-tossed foam of light. Lovely, Kel, so lovely! But her mind thinks nothing that I can tell. She feels nothing, Kel. Remembers nothing. Hopes nothing. She is a robot dancing, Kel, before the eyes of Tedron Du!”
The bright pancake of Setsi fluttered again; its million bright gleams shimmered with a blue of dread.
“The eyes of Tedron Du! Oh, what dreadful eyes! They are thirsty, Kel. They are hungry. They are eager. They are cruel! How beautifully she dances, Kel! How gracefully—even if her mind is dead! The Emperor holds his breath. His fingers coil beside him. He’s thirsty, Kel. Ah, so fearfully thirsty for her blood!”
We had wrung the water from our garments, dried and tested our weapons. Kel Aran was tense and white, as he listened to Setsi’s whirring. And a grim cold light burned up in his eyes.
“Wait here, Barihorn,” came his strained low whisper. “Guard the ship and my retreat. I’m going after Verel.”
I started to insist that I should go along. But one quick gesture silenced me. He strode a way through the dead-white garden, toward the scarlet windows and the music. And I was left alone, The air was heavy with a scent like funeral lilies. And that breathless, crouching silence became more and more intolerably oppressive.
It was a long, long time that I waited. All the green dusk faded. The stars were strange and cold in the sky, and the great bright planets of Ledros made a vari-colored trail among them. And still that lurking silence leered.
I LISTENED to the thin sounds in the distance, trying to read the progress and the fate of Kel Aran. The music had an orgiastic rhythm—a million years before, I should have called it “swing.” Sometimes there was a peal of drunken laughter, and once I heard a woman scream.
But what of Kel Aran? Eternal minutes dragged away. The dead-white trees were ghostly shapes about the pool. And a dull glow of crimson touched the sky’s dark rim, for the red sun would be the first to rise. And yet that silence thickened, clotted.
Then abrupt uproar! Shrieks and loud commands. The snarl of cathode guns, and the thin cold hiss of disruptors. The crash of a shattering explosion. And then I saw Kel Aran!
The crystal panes burst from a great window. For a moment I saw him standing in it alone, his lean crouching figure outlined against the red beyond. A disruptor stabbed its white blade from his hand. Then he leaned down, lifted a slim girl into his arms, and leapt out into the darkness.
Dark smoke poured out of the great window behind him. It was lit with bickerings of orange. And the tide of confusion swept upward. The roar of flames drowned shouts and screams. Great engines dropped out of the sky, and began deluging the flaming palace with great white streams.
I saw movement in the white foliage, and almost rushed to meet Kel Aran. But it was a Galactic Guard detachment, a score of men in red-and-yellow, running. I dropped beside the pool until they had passed.
“The Falcon!” The panting words came back to me. “Fired the palace! Out here—with the Emperor’s dancer!”
The crimson dawn grew thicker. The smoke and flame gushed higher from the palace—it was a losing fight, against the conflagration. I crouched under the white leaves, waiting with a hand on my gun.
“Barihorn!”
Kel Aran had whispered my name, and I started as if a gun had cracked. He was standing behind me, at the brink of the pool. His arm was around a panting girl. Torn scraps of silken gauze clung to her slim white loveliness, and a deep splendor glowed at her waist.
“I found her,” he whispered triumphantly. “And the Stone!”
He touched the great jewel at her waist—and I saw that indeed it had the shape of the diamond block, into which, as I slept, I had seen the eternal mind of Dondara Keradin transferred.
I stared at the trembling, gasping woman. She was beautiful, yes. But something was wrong. And it was not that she was drugged. Her eyes were alert, watchful. Something in them was cold, calculating, hostile.
“Verel!” Kel was whispering. “We’ll make it—even though they got poor Setsi! And still I can’t believe—Mine again, when I thought you must be dead!” He drew her white loveliness close. “Even the Stone!”
“Kel!” she sobbed in his arms. “My darling Kel!”
I heard a hoarse command, saw another squad of searchers break out of a white hedge toward the burning palace. Even as I touched the Earthman’s shoulder, in warning, a booming challenge reached us:
“Halt, Falcon! Yield yourself—or die!”
Kel swung the girl toward the pool.
“Dive!” he whispered. “We must swim into the valve.”
“Where?” Her cold eyes were staring at him, strangely.
“Hurry!” His pleading voice held a sudden agony of doubt. “The ship is in the pool.”
THE crouched abruptly. Her white lithe body, marked with red scratches from the flight, was tensely pantherlike. Her eyes had a malific greenish luster. Thin and high, her voice shrieked out:
“Here! Here’s Kel Aran, the Falcon. Take him!”
She leapt catlike at the Earthman, sweeping him back from the silver brink. He struggled with her.
“Help me, Barihorn!” he gasped. “We must take her! Mai earth—She doesn’t know herself.”
Shouts had answered the girl. White warning rays hissed above us. I saw two more squads rushing down upon us, beside the first. I tried to help Kel Aran drag the girl into the pool. But her slim white arms had a maniac strength. She picked us both up, carried us back again from the silver rim.
“Strong!” Kel was gasping. “She’s strong as a robot!” A choking sob of startled horror. “She is—”
Then I saw the appalling thing. Struggling to get his feet on the ground again, Kel had caught the red curls of her hair. And the hair had come off! Her head had come off—all the outside of it.
For all her white beauty had been a painted mask.
Still her red-scratched, naked body had all its loveliness. But the thing on its shoulders was the compact metal brain-case of a robot, its weird eye-lenses glittering with a cold and triumphant green.
Chilled with a startled horror, I struggled against those binding arms, so far stronger than any arms of flesh.
“I see it now!” came the despairing gasp of Kel Aran. “This was all a trap of Malgarth’s. And the bait was not Verel, but her robot simulacrum!”
We were suddenly flung down upon the dead-white grass. Scores of men stood around us, in the light of the flaming palace, covering us with bright weapons. And the hideous robot-head, glittering eerily on the white-curved shoulders of Verel Erin, began to laugh like a machine gone mad.
“Look!” A new despair choked Kel Aran, “It was not even the Stone!”
He pointed back to the pool’s white rim. I saw that the great jewel had fallen there, and shattered. The fragments had no fire. I knew that it had not been the Dondara Stone, but only a mockery of glass.
That appalling mechanical laughter rang louder in our ears, maddening.
IX
THE ROBOT AND THE EMPEROR
THE blood-red dawn of Ledros grew more ghastly bright. Still, across the dead-white gardens, the fired palace burned like the funeral pyre of the Galactic Empire. Stripped of weapons, Kel Aran and I were now manacled together. A full hundred of the Emperor’s guardsmen, in their trim red-and-yellow, waited watchfully about us.
A little squad of men, behind us, were gingerly lowering a bright metal cylinder into the silver-walled pool where the Barihorn lay hidden, at the end of an insulated cable. The Earthman looked from them to me, with a hopeless shrug. He jerked his bare yellow head wearily toward the sky, and I saw the dim mile-long bulk of a Galactic Guard cruiser floating lazily above, the pale red cone of the repulsor-flare spread from her stem.
“An ato-converter bomb.” His whisper was dull, lifeless. “They mean to blow our comrades up before there’s any warning. And the space cruiser’s waiting, in case they try to get away.”
I thought of the three men under the pool. The tall grave Saturnian waiting alertly by the controls, no doubt. Scrawny little Rogo Nug standing by the converters, probably chewing goona-roon the while. Big Zerek Oom in his galley, perhaps seeking ease from the long strain of waiting from his hoarded bottle. Doomed. And we, captured, had no way to warn them.
“Sets!—” Kel was whispering. “If she were here—”
“The sandbat?” I demanded. “What happened to her?”
“She guided me into the palace,” whispered the Earthman. “A dozen times her intuition warned me to hide. She showed me the way to Verel—or to that—”
His breath caught sharply, and he jerked his head at the robot that had worn the guise of womanhood.
“She warned me that she couldn’t reach its mind—I should have suspected I But we found it. And we were challenged. There was fighting. I fired the tapestries with my disruptor, to make a diversion. And must have burned down a dozen of the guards. And Setsi fought—you wouldn’t believe it! Rolled up like an arrow of glass, she can drive a neat round hole in a skull! I picked up Verel, and she tried to guard the retreat. There was a cathode beam from a robot cop. I looked back, and she had fallen. And we had just time to beat the flames to the window. We got there. By the Stone—to think that Setsi died for that!”
With a glazed stricken look in his eyes, the Earthman was staring at the thing he had brought from the palace—as weird a sight as I had ever seen. Its stripped white body had all the loveliness of a slender girl’s. Crimson drips still fell, even, from where arm and thigh and firm round breast had been injured in the struggle.
But its head was a monstrous thing.
The metal of it glinted red in the torchlight of the palace. Its eyes shone cold green, watchfully. And it was grotesquely small, for it had been covered with the mask of Kel Aran’s beloved, that now lay collapsed beside it on the ground. Its crystal eyes had glittered malignly as the soldiers took our disruptors, and still it was laughing. Insanely—if a machine can be insane!
A smooth girl’s arm, dripping red droplets, pointed at Kel Aran. A slot snapped open in that glittering metal mockery of a head. And a voice—a woman’s soft voice—said mockingly:
“So you are the Falcon of Earth, snared at last! Against the Master, you might have called yourself—Sparrow! But you are the last of your poor kind that he feared. Now that you are taken, the rest will die with you.”
KEL ARAN turned shakily away from this thing that was half the girl he loved, half fantastic mechanism. Fetters jingled as he clutched my hand.
“It’s too much for me, Barihorn,” he whispered. “There’s nothing left.”
“Perhaps Verel is safe,” I tried to encourage him. “With the Stone.”
His bowed yellow head shook again, hopelessly.
“No, Malgarth has her,” he whispered. “For this—” he choked. “This is a perfect copy. This is the figure and the manner and the voice of Verel.” He shuddered. “Even her laughter.”
The guards then began to move us back from the pool, for the bomb was ready to set off. Kel Aran swayed drunkenly in his fetters, and one of the men stabbed him with a thin torturing flicker of his ray, and laughed as his muscles leapt and writhed in agonized response.
The robot strode free-limbed beside him.
“Sparrow, if you wish to know,” came the mocking bell of its voice, “your trial and sentence will be within the hour. When the last Earthman is dead, the Master will be free—”
The hybrid paused and turned its robot’s head. And I heard a distant confusion in the direction of the palace, which now had been abandoned to the flames. A bright-clad figure appeared in a moment, running desperately toward us across the snowy, red-lit lawns. An astonished consternation stopped, the guardsmen in their tracks.
“The Emperor!” Cries of startled wonder. “It is Tedron Du!”
The fugitive was a slender man, his figure almost girlish. His pale thin face, now grotesquely strained with terror, was painted like some courtezan’s. His long blond hair was flying loose, and his scarlet robes were torn.
All the catalog of his crimes, that Kel Aran and his comrades had so bitterly recited, came back to me. This was the man who had betrayed the universe to Malgarth, who had ordered the legions and fleets of the Galactic Guard to fight beside the robots, against rebelling mankind. He seemed a small, a feeble figure, to have been guilty of all the infamies of which I had heard. He was making thin, breathless shrieks, as he ran. And now I saw the cause of his terror.
A robot was behind him.
One of the Corporation’s notorious Space Police, it was a grotesque lumbering monstrosity. Ten feet tall, it must have weighed a ton. It was red-painted, and bore the black wheel that was Malgarth’s insignia. The short, clumsy-looking mechanism of a cathode gun was clutched in its metal talons.
“Stop the robot,” shouted an officer of the guardsmen. “We must save the Emperor.”
“Emperor!” Kel Aran spat on the ground. “He was never more than the degenerate puppet of Malgarth’s Corporation. Now that we are caught and Malgarth no longer fears the Stone, he doesn’t need his two-legged cur.”
The panting ruler came straight toward us at the pool.
“Help me, men!” he screamed breathlessly, “Kill the robot. For half the Galaxy—”
THE officers were rapping swift commands. The guardsmen snapped into a new line before Kel Aran and me. Their slender disruptor guns came level, a hundred against the cathode weapon of the robot.
