The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert SilverbergЧитать онлайн книгу.
devil’s rage flamed in her face. She yelled, and a lance whistled from the sky and buried itself in the great breast.
“Wocha!” yelled Donovan.
The Donarrian snarled and snapped off the shaft that stood between his ribs. He whirled it over his head, and Valduma’s green eyes widened in fear.
“Donovan!” roared Wocha, and let it fly.
It smashed home, and the Ansan dropped his sword and swayed on his feet. He couldn’t look on the broken thing which had been Valduma.
“Boss, you go home now.”
Wocha laid him in the airlock and slammed the outer valve shut. Turning, he faced the Arzunians. He couldn’t see very well—one eye was gone, and there was a ragged darkness before the other. The sword felt heavy in his hand. But—
“Hooo!” he roared and charged them.
He spitted one and trampled another and tossed a third into the air. Whirling, he clove a head and smashed a rib-cage with his fist and chopped another across. His sword broke, and he grabbed two Arzunians and cracked their skulls together.
They ran, then turned and fled from him. And he stood watching them go and laughed. His laughter filled the city, rolling from its walls, drowning the whistle of the ship’s takeoff and bringing blood to his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, spat, and lay down.
“We’re clear, Basil.” Helena clung to him, shivering in his arms, and he didn’t know if it was a laugh or a sob in her throat. “We’re away, safe, we’ll carry word back to Sol and they’ll clear the Black Nebula for good.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his eyes. “Though I doubt the Navy will find anything. If those Arzunians have any sense, they’ll project to various fringe planets, scatter, and try to pass as harmless humanoids. But it doesn’t matter, I suppose. Their power is broken.”
“And we’ll go back to your home, Basil, and bring Ansa and Terra together and have a dozen children and—”
He nodded. “Sure. Sure.”
But he wouldn’t forget. In the winter nights, when the stars were sharp and cold in a sky of ringing crystal black, he would—go out and watch them? Or pull his roof over him and wait for dawn? He didn’t know yet.
Still—even if this was a long ways from being the best of all possible universes, it had enough in it to make a man glad of his day.
He whistled softly, feeling the words ran through his head:
Lift your glasses high,
kiss the girls good-bye,
(Live well, my friend, live well, live you well)
for we’re riding,
for we’re riding,
for we’re riding out to Terran sky! Terran sky! Terran sky!
The thought came all at once that it could be a song of comradeship, too.
THE SWORDSMEN OF VARNIS, by Geoffrey Cobbe
The twin moons brooded over the red deserts of Mars and the ruined city of Khua-Loanis. The night wind sighed around the fragile spires and whispered at the fretted lattice windows of the empty temples, and the red dust made it like a city of copper.
It was close to midnight when the distant rumble of racing hooves reached the city, and soon the riders thundered in under the ancient gateway. Tharn, Warrior Lord of Loanis, leading his pursuers by a scant twenty yards, realised wearily that his lead was shortening, and raked the scaly flanks of his six-legged vorkl with cruel spurs. The faithful beast gave a low cry of despair as it tried to obey and failed.
In front of Tharn in the big double saddle sat Lehni-tal-Loanis, Royal Lady of Mars, riding the ungainly animal with easy grace, leaning forward along its arching neck to murmur swift words of encouragement into its flattened ears. Then she lay back against Tharn’s mailed chest and turned her lovely face up to his, flushed and vivid with the excitement of the chase, amber eyes aflame with love for her strange hero from beyond time and space.
“We shall win this race yet, my Tharn,” she cried. “Yonder through that archway lies the Temple of the Living Vapour, and once there we can defy all the hordes of Varnis!” Looking down at the unearthly beauty of her, at the subtle curve of throat and breast and thigh, revealed as the wind tore at her scanty garments, Tharn knew that even if the Swordsmen of Varnis struck him down his strange odyssey would not have been in vain.
But the girl had judged the distance correctly and Tharn brought their snorting vorkl to a sliding, rearing halt at the great doors of the Temple, just as the Swordsmen reached the outer archway and jammed there in a struggling, cursing mass. In seconds they had sorted themselves out and came streaming across the courtyard, but the delay had given Tharn time to dismount and take his stand in one of the great doorways. He knew that if he could hold it for a few moments while Lehni-tal-Loanis got the door open, then the secret of the Living Vapour would be theirs, and with it the mastery of all the lands of Loanis.
The Swordsmen tried first to ride him down, but the doorway was so narrow and deep that Tharn had only to drive his swordpoint upwards into the first vorkl’s throat and leap backwards as the dying beast fell. Its rider was stunned by the fall, and Thorn bounded up onto the dead animal and beheaded the unfortunate Swordsman without compunction. There were ten of his enemies left and they came at him now on foot, but the confining doorway prevented them from attacking more than four abreast, and Tharn’s elevated position upon the huge carcass gave him the advantage he needed. The fire of battle was in his veins now, and he bared his teeth and laughed in their faces, and his reddened sword wove a pattern of cold death which none could pass.
Lehni-tal-Loanis, running quick cool fingers over the pitted bronze of the door, found the radiation lock and pressed her glowing opalescent thumb-ring into the socket, gave a little sob of relief as she heard hidden tumblers falling. With agonising slowness the ancient mechanism began to open the door; soon Tharn heard the girl’s clear voice call above the clashing steel, “Inside, my Tharn, the secret of the Living Vapour is ours!”
But Tharn, with four of his foes dead now, and seven to go, could not retreat from his position on top of the dead vorkl without grave risk of being cut down, and Lehni-tal-Loanis, quickly realising this, sprang up beside him, drawing her own blade and crying, “Aie, my love! I will be your left arm!”
Now the cold hand of defeat gripped the hearts of the Swordsmen of Varnis: two, three, four more of them mingled their blood with the red dust of the courtyard as Tharn and his fighting princess swung their merciless blades in perfect unison. It seemed that nothing could prevent them now from winning the mysterious secret of the Living Vapour, but they reckoned without the treachery of one of the remaining Swordsmen. Leaping backwards out of the conflict he flung his sword on the ground in disgust. “Aw, the Hell with it!” he grunted, and unclipping a proton gun from his belt, he blasted Lehni-tal-Loanis and her Warrior Lord out of existence with a searing energy beam.
MOON DOG, by Arthur C. Clarke
When I heard Laika’s frantic barking, my first reaction was one of annoyance. I turned over in my bunk and murmured sleepily “Shut up, you silly bitch.” That dreamy interlude lasted only a fraction of a second. Then consciousness returned—and with it, fear. Fear of loneliness, and fear of madness.
For a moment I dared not open my eyes. I was afraid of what I might see. Reason told me that no dog had ever set foot upon this world, that Laika was separated from me by a quarter of a million miles of space—and, far more irrevocably, by five years of time.
“You’ve been dreaming,” I told myself angrily. “Stop being a fool—open your eyes! You won’t see anything except the glow of the wall-paint.”
That was right, of course. The tiny cabin was empty, the door tightly closed. I was alone with my memories, overwhelmed by the transcendental sadness that often comes when some bright dream fades into drab reality. The sense of loss was