The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond HamiltonЧитать онлайн книгу.
still living. So was he, and he intended to stay that way, at least until he had done what he set out to do.
“Old Bellaver was behind that killing, wasn’t he? Old Quentin, this one’s grandfather.”
“Yes. Don’t bother me.”
“One thing more. Do we Lazarites live longer than men?”
Shearing gave him a curious, brief look. “Yes.”
The tug was out of sight behind a massive rearing shape that seemed to clutch a broken ship between its paws. Symbolic, perhaps, of space? Who knew? Hyrst led Shearing in wild impala-like leaps across an open space, and into a narrow way that twisted, filled with darkness, among the bases of a group that resembled an outlandish procession following a king.
“How much longer?”
“Humane Penalty first came in a hundred and fourteen years ago, right? After Seitz’ method was perfected for saving spacemen. I was one of the first they used it on.”
“My God,” said Hyrst. Yet, somehow, he was not as surprised as he might have been.
“I’ve aged,” said Shearing apologetically. “I was only twenty-seven then.”
They crouched, beside a humped shape like a gigantic lizard with a long tail. The tug swung overhead and slowly on.
Hyrst said, “Then it’s possible the one who killed MacDonald is still alive?”
“Possible. Probable.”
Hyrst bared his teeth, in what was not at all like a smile. “Good,” he said. “That makes me happy.”
They did not do any talking after that. They had had their helmet radios operating on practically no power at all, so that they couldn’t be picked up outside a radius of a few yards, but even that might be too close, now that Bellaver’s men had had time to get suited and fan out. They shut them off entirely, communicating by yanks and nudges.
* * * *
For what seemed to Hyrst like a very long time, but which was probably less than half an hour in measured minutes, they dodged from one patch of shadow to another, following an erratic course that Hyrst thought would lead them away from the ships. Once more the tug went over, slow, and then Hyrst didn’t see it again. The idea that they might have given up occurred to him but he dismissed it as absurd. With the helmet mike shut off, the silence was beginning to get on his nerves. Once he looked up and saw a piece of cosmic debris smash into a monolith. Dust and splinters flew, and a great fragment broke off and fell slowly downward, bumping and rebounding, and all of it as soundless as a dream. You couldn’t hear yourself walk, you couldn’t hear anything but the roar of your own breathing and the pounding of your own blood. The grotesque rocky avenues could hide an army, stealthy, creeping—
There was a hill, or at least a higher eminence, crowned with what might have been the cyclopean image of a man stretched out on a noble catafalque, with hooded giants standing by in attitudes of mourning. It seemed like the best place to stop that Hyrst had seen, with plenty of cover and a view of the surrounding area. With luck, you might stay hidden there a long time. He jogged Shearing’s elbow and pointed, and Shearing nodded. There was a wide, almost circular sweep of open rock around the base of the hill. Hyrst looked carefully for the tug. There was no sign of it. He tore out across the open, with Shearing at his heels.
The tug swooped over, going fast this time. It could not possibly have missed them. Shearing dropped the cloak with a grunt. “No use for that any more,” he said. They bounded up the hillside and in among the mourning figures. The tug whipped around in a tight spiral and hung over the hill. Hyrst shook the sweat out of his eyes. His mind was clear again. The tug’s skipper was babbling into his communicator, and in another place on the asteroid Hyrst could mentally see a thin skirmish line spread out, and in still another four men in a bunch. They all picked up and began to move, toward the hill.
Shearing said, nodding spaceward, “Our friends are on the way. If we can hold out—”
“Fat chance,” said Hyrst. “They’re armed, and all we’ve got is flare-pistols.” But he looked around. His eyes detected nothing but rock, hard sunlight, and deep shadow, but his mind saw that one of the black blots at the base of the main block, the catafalque, was more than a shadow. He slid into a crack that resembled a passage, being rounded rather than ragged. Shearing was right behind him. “I don’t like this,” he said, “but I suppose there’s no help for it.”
The crack led down into a cave, or chamber, too irregularly shaped to be artificial, too smoothly surfaced and floored to be natural. There was nothing in it but a block of stone, nine feet or so long and about four feet wide by five feet high. It seemed to be a natural part of the floor, but Hyrst avoided it. On the opposite, the sunward side, there was a small windowlike aperture that admitted a ray of blinding radiance, sharply defined and doing nothing to illumine the dark on either side of it.
Vernon’s thought came to them, hard, triumphant, peremptory. “Mr. Bellaver says you have ten minutes to come out. After that, no mercy.”
CHAPTER V
The minutes slid past, sections of eternity arbitrarily measured by the standards of another planet and having no relevance at all on this tiny whirling rock. The beam of light from the small aperture moved visibly across the opposite wall. Hyrst watched it, blinking. Outside, Bellaver’s men were drawn up in a wide crescent across the hill in front of the catafalque. They waited.
“No mercy,” said Hyrst softly. “No mercy, is it?” He bent over and began to loosen the clamps that held the lead weights to the soles of his boots.
“It isn’t mercy we need,” said Shearing. “It’s time.”
“How much?”
“Look for yourself.”
Hyrst shifted his attention to space. There was a ship in it, heading toward the asteroid, and coming fast. Hyrst frowned, doing in his head without thinking about it a calculation that would have required a computer in his former life.
“Twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds,” he said, “inclusive of the four remaining.”
He finished getting the weights off his boots. He handed one to Shearing. Then he half-climbed, half-floated up the wall and settled himself above the entrance, where there was a slight concavity in the rock to give him hold.
“Shearing,” he said.
“What?” He was settling himself beside the mouth of the crack, where a man would have to come clear inside to get a shot at him.
“A starship implies the intention to go to the stars. Why haven’t you?”
“For the simplest reason in the world,” said Shearing bitterly. “The damn thing can’t fly.”
“But—” said Hyrst, in astonishment.
“It isn’t finished. It’s been building for over seventy years now, and a long and painful process that’s been, too, Hyrst—doing it bit by bit in secret, and every bit having to be dreamed up out of whole cloth, and often discarded and dreamed up again, because the principle of a workable star-drive has never been formulated before. And it still isn’t finished. It can’t be finished, unless—”
He stopped, and both men turned their attention to the outside.
“Bellaver’s looking at his chrono,” said Hyrst. “Go ahead, we’ve got a minute.”
Shearing continued, “unless we can get hold of enough Titanite to build the hyper-shift relays. Nothing else has a fast enough reaction time, and the necessary load-capacity. We must have burned out a thousand different test-boards, trying.”
“Can’t you buy it?” asked Hyrst. The question sounded reasonable, but he knew as he said it that it was a foolish one. “I mean, I know the stuff is scarcer than virtue and worth astronomical sums—that’s what MacDonald was so happy about—but—”