The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond HamiltonЧитать онлайн книгу.
stars. There was a ship, all lonely on a dark plain, and she was pointing to it, and somehow Hyrst knew that it was vitally important to her, and to Shearing, and perhaps even to himself. But before he could do more than register this fleeting vision on his own consciousness, Shearing’s mind slammed shut with exactly the same violent effect as a door slammed in his face. He reeled back, throwing up his arms in a futile but instinctive gesture, and Shearing said angrily,
“You’re getting too good. I’ll give you a social hint—it’s customary to knock before you enter.”
Hyrst said, still holding the pieces of his head together, “All right—sorry. So who is she?”
“She’s one of us. She wants what we want.”
“I want only to find out who murdered MacDonald!”
“You want more than that, Hyrst, though you don’t know it yet. But MacDonald’s murderer is part of what we’re after.”
He took Hyrst’s arm. “We don’t have long. Thanks to my guidance, you slipped them all except this one. But they’ll be hounding after our trail very quickly.”
They went on along the shadowed street. The glare of the lights died back behind them, and they moved in darkness with only the keen stars to watch them, and the cold, gritty wind blowing in from the barrens, and the dark door-ways of the mastaba-like monolithic houses of the humanoids staring at them like sightless eyes. Hyrst looked up at the bright, tiny moon that crept amid the stars, and a deep shaking took him as he thought of men lying up there in the deathly sleep, of himself lying there year after year.…
“In here,” said Shearing. It was one of the frigid, musty tombs that the humanoids called home. It was dark and there was nothing in it at all. “We can’t risk a light. We don’t need it, anyway.”
They sat down. Hyrst said desperately, “Listen, I want to know some things. Exactly what are we doing here?”
Shearing answered deliberately, “We are hiding from those who want you, and we are waiting for a chance to go to our friends.”
“Our friends? Your friends, maybe. That woman—I don’t know her, and—”
“Now you listen, Hyrst. I’ll tell you this much about us now. We’re Lazarites, like you, with the same powers as you. But all Lazarites are not on our side.”
Hyrst thought about that. “Then those others who are hunting us—”
“There are Lazarites among them, too. Not many, but a few. You don’t know us, you don’t know them. Do you want to leave me and go back out and let them have you?”
Hyrst remembered the adder-like face of the young man who had come after him through the shadows. After a long moment he said, “Well. But what are you after?”
“The thing that MacDonald was killed for, fifty years ago.”
Hyrst said, “The Titanite? They said it hadn’t ever been found. But how it could have remained hidden so long—”
“I want you,” Shearing said, “to tell me all about how MacDonald died. Everything you can remember.”
Hyrst asked eagerly, “You think we can find out who killed him? After all this time? God, if we could—my son—”
“Quiet, Hyrst. Go ahead and tell me. Not in words. Just remember what happened, and I’ll get it.”
Yet, by sheer lifetime habit, Hyrst could not remember without first putting it into words in his own mind, as they two sat in the cold, whispering darkness.
“There were four of us out there on Titan, you must already know that. And only four—”
* * * *
Four men. And one was named MacDonald, an engineer, a secretive, selfish and enormously greedy man. MacDonald was the man who found a fortune, and kept it secret, and died.
Landers was one. A lean, brown, lively man, an excellent physicist with a friendly manner and no obvious ambitions.
Saul was one, and he was big and blond and quiet, a good drinking companion, a good geologist, a lover of good music. If he had any darker passions, he kept them hidden.
Hyrst was the fourth man, and the only one of the four still living.…
He remembered now. He saw the black and bitter crags of Titan stark against the glory of the Rings, and he saw two figures moving across a plain of methane snow, their helmets gleaming in the Saturn-light. Behind them in the plain were the flat, half-buried concrete structures of the little refinery, and all around them were the spidery roads where the big half-tracs dragged their loads of uranium ore from the enchaining mountains.
The two men were quarrelling.
“You’re angry,” MacDonald was saying, “because it was I who found it.”
“Listen,” Hyrst said. “We’re sick, all three of us, of hearing you brag about it.”
“I’ll bet you are,” said MacDonald smugly. “The first find of a Titanite pocket for years. The rarest, costliest stuff in the System. If you know the way they’ve been bidding to buy it from me—”
“I do know,” Hyrst said. “You’ve done nothing for weeks but give forth mysterious hints—”
“And you don’t like that,” MacDonald said. “Of course you don’t! It’s no part of our refinery deal, it’s mine, I’ve got it and it’s hidden where nobody can find it till I sell it. Naturally, you don’t like that.”
“All right,” said Hyrst. “So the Titanite find is all yours. You’re still a partner in the refinery, remember. And you’ve still got an obligation to the rest of us, so you can damn well get in and do your job.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve always done my job.”
“More or less,” said Hyrst. “For your information, I’ve seen better engineers in grade-school. There’s Number Three hoist. It’s been busted for a week. Now let’s get in there and fix it.”
The two figures in Hyrst’s memory toiled on, out of the area of roads to the edge of the landing field, where the ships come to take away the refined uranium. Number Three hoist rose in a stiff, ugly column from the ground. It was supposed to fetch the uranium up from the underground storage bins and load it into a specially-built hot-tank ship in position at the dock. But Number Three had balked and refused to perform its task. In this completely automated plant, men were only important when something went wrong. Now something was wrong, and it was up to MacDonald, the mechanical engineer, and Hyrst, the electronics man, to set it right.
Hyrst opened the hatch, and they climbed the metal stairs to the upper chamber. Number Three’s brain was here, its scanners, its tabulating and recording apparatus, its signal system. A red light pulsated on a panel, alone in a string of white ones.
“Trouble’s in the hoist-mechanism,” said Hyrst. “That’s your department.” He smiled and sat down on a metal bench in the center of the room, with his back to the stair. “D Level.”
MacDonald grumbled, and went to a skeletal cage built over a round segment of the floor. Various tools were clipped to the ribs of the cage. MacDonald pulled an extra rayproof protectall over his vac-suit and stepped inside the cage, pressing a button. The cage dropped, into a circular shaft that paralleled the hoist right down to the feeder mechanism.
Hyrst waited. Inside his helmet he could hear MacDonald breathing and grumbling as he worked away, repairing a break in the belt. He did not hear anything else. Then something happened, so swiftly that he had never had any memory of it, and some time later he came to and looked for MacDonald. The cage was way down at the bottom of the shaft and MacDonald was in it, with a very massive pedestal-block on top of him. The block had been unbolted from the floor and dragged to the edge of the shaft, and it could not possibly have been an accident that it tumbled in, between the wide-apart ribs of the cage.
And