The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond HamiltonЧитать онлайн книгу.
never knew,” said Hyrst, “where it was.”
“Well,” said the warden, “I’ve asked the question and that’s as far as my responsibility goes. But there’s a visitor who has permission to see you.”
* * * *
He and the doctor went out. Hyrst watched them go. He thought, So I’m not quite human. Not quite human any more. Does that make me more, or less, than a man?
Both, said the secret voice. Their minds are still closed to you. Only our minds—we who have changed too—are open.
“Who are you?” asked Hyrst.
My name is Shearing. Now listen. When you are released, they’ll bring you down here to Mars. I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll help you.
“Why? What do you care about me, or a murder fifty years old?”
I’ll tell you why later, said the whisper of Shearing. But you must follow my guidance. There’s danger for you, Hyrst, from the moment you’re released! There are those who have been waiting for you.
“Danger? But—”
The door opened, and Hyrst’s visitor came in. He was a man something over sixty but the deep lines in his face made him look older. His face was gray and drawn and twitching, but it became perfectly rigid and white when he came to the foot of the bed and looked at Hyrst. There was rage in his eyes, a rage so old and weary that it brought tears to them.
“You should have stayed dead,” he said to Hyrst. “Why couldn’t they let you stay dead?”
Hyrst was shocked and startled. “Who are you? And why—”
The other man was not even listening. His eyelids had closed, and when they opened again they looked on naked agony. “It isn’t right,” he said. “A murderer should die, and stay dead. Not come back.”
“I didn’t murder MacDonald,” Hyrst said, with the beginnings of anger. “And I don’t know why you—”
He stopped. The white, aging face, the tear-filled, furious eyes, he did not quite know what there was about them but it was there, like an old remembered face peeping up through a blur of water for a moment, and then withdrawing again.
After a moment, Hyrst said hoarsely, “What’s your name?”
“You wouldn’t know it,” said the other. “I changed it, long ago.”
Hyrst felt a cold, and it seemed that he could not breathe. He said, “But you were only eleven—”
He could not go on. There was a terrible silence between them. He must break it, he could not let it go on. He must speak. But all he could say was to whisper, “I’m not a murderer. You must believe it. I’m going to prove it—”
“You murdered MacDonald. And you murdered my mother. I watched her age and die, spending every penny, spending every drop of her blood and ours, to get you back again. I pretended for fifty years that I too believed you were innocent, when all the time I knew.”
Hyrst said, “I’m innocent.” He tried to say a name, too, but he could not speak the word.
“No. You’re lying, as you lied then. We found out. Mother hired detectives, experts. Over and over, for decades—and always they found the same thing. Landers and Saul could not possibly have killed MacDonald, and you were the only other human being there. Proof? I can show you barrels of it. And all of it proof that my father was a murderer.”
He leaned a little toward Hyrst, and the tears ran down his lined, careworn face. He said, “All right, you’ve come back. Alive, still young. But I’m warning you. If you try again to get that Titanite, if you shame us all again after all this time, if you even come near us, I’ll kill you.”
He went out. Hyrst sat, looking after him, and he thought that no man before him had ever felt what tore him now.
Inside his mind came Shearing’s whisper, with a totally unexpected note of compassion. But some of us have, Hyrst. Welcome to the brotherhood. Welcome to the Legion of Lazarus.
CHAPTER II
Mars roared and glittered tonight. And how was a man to stand the faces and lights and sounds, when he had come back from the silence of eternity?
Hyrst walked through the flaring streets of Syrtis City with slow and dragging steps. It was like being back on Earth. For this city was not really part of the old dead planet, of the dark barrens that rolled away beneath the night. This was the place of the rocket-men, the miners, the schemers, the workers, who had come from another, younger world. Their bars and entertainment houses flung a sun-like brilliance. Their ships, lifting majestically skyward from the distant spaceport, wrote their flaming sign on the sky. Only here and there moved one of the hooded, robed humanoids who had once owned this world.
The next corner, said the whisper in Hyrst’s mind. Turn there. No, not toward the spaceport. The other way.
Hyrst thought suddenly, “Shearing.”
Yes?
“I am being followed.”
His physical ears heard nothing but the voices and music. His physical eyes saw only the street crowd. Yet he knew. He knew it by a picture that kept coming into his mind, of a blurred shape moving always behind him.
Of course you’re being followed, came Shearing’s thought. I told you they’ve been waiting for you. This is the corner. Turn.
Hyrst turned. It was a darker street, running away from the lights through black warehouses and on the labyrinthine monolithic houses of the humanoids.
Now look back, Shearing commanded. No, not with your eyes! With your mind. Learn to use your talents.
Hyrst tried. The blurred image in his mind came clearer, and clearer still, and it was a young man with a vicious mouth and flat uncaring eyes. Hyrst shivered. “Who is he?”
He works for the men who have been waiting for you, Hyrst. Bring him this way.
“This—way?”
Look ahead. With your mind. Can’t you learn?
Stung to sudden anger, Hyrst flung out a mental probe with a power he hadn’t known he possessed. In a place of total darkness between two warehouses ahead, he saw a tall man lounging at his ease. Shearing laughed.
Yes, it’s me. Just walk past me. Don’t hurry.
Hyrst glanced backward, mentally at the man following him through the shadows. He was closer now, and quite silent. His face was tight and secret. Hyrst thought, How do I know this Shearing isn’t in it with him, taking me into a place where they can both get at me—
He went past the two warehouses and he did not turn his head but his mind saw Shearing waiting in the darkness. Then there was a soft, shapeless sound, and he turned and saw Shearing bending over a huddled form.
“That was unkind of you,” said Shearing, speaking aloud but not loudly.
Hyrst, still shaking, said, “But not exactly strange. I’ve never seen you before. And I still don’t know what this is all about.”
Shearing smiled, as he knelt beside the prone, unmoving body. Even here in the shadows, Hyrst could see him with these new eyes of the mind. Shearing was a big man. His hair was grizzled along the sides of his head, and his eyes were dark and very keen. He reached out one hand and turned the head of the prone young man, and they looked at the lax, loose face.
“He’s not dead?” said Hyrst.
“Of course not. But it will be a while before he wakes.”
“But who is he?”
Shearing stood up. “I never saw him before. But I know who he’s working for.”
* * * *
Hyrst