The Short Stories of Edmond Hamilton: Volume II Read online

  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 flung a sudden question at Shearing, and almost without thinking he followed it to surprise the answer in Shearing's mind. The question was, Who are you working for? And the answer was a woman, a tall and handsome woman with angry eyes, standing against a drift of 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 that's how MacDonald died, Hyrst thought--and so I died. They said I forced the secret of his Titanite find out of him, and then killed him.

  Shearing asked swiftly, "MacDonald never gave you any hint of where he'd hidden the Titanite?"

  "No," said Hyrst. He paused, and then said, "It's the Titanite you're after?"

  Shearing answered carefully. "In a way, yes. But we didn't kill MacDonald for it. Those who did kill him are the men who are after you now. They're afraid you might lead us to the stuff."

  Hyrst swore, shaking with sudden anger. "Damn it, I won't be treated like a child. Not by you, by anyone. I want--"

  "You want the men who killed MacDonald," said Shearing. "I know. I remember what was in your mind when you met your son."

  A weakness took Hyrst and he leaned his forehead against the cold stone wall.

  "I'm sorry," said Shearing. "But we want what you want--and more. So much more that you can't dream it. You must trust us."

  "Us? That woman?"

  Once again in Shearing's mind Hyrst saw the woman with her head against the stars, and the ship looming darkly. He saw the woman much more clearly, and she was like a fire, burning with anger, burning with a single-minded, dedicated purpose. She was beautiful, and frightening.

  "She, and others," said Shearing. "Listen. We must go soon. We're to be picked up, secretly. Will you trust us--or would you rather trust yourself to those who are hunting you?"

  Hyrst was silent. Shearing said, "Well?"

  "I'll go with you," said Hyrst.

  They went out into the cold darkness, and Hyrst heard Shearing say in his mind, "I wouldn't try to run--"

  But it wasn't Shearing speaking in his mind now, it was a third man.

  "I wouldn't try to run--"

  Frantically startled, Hyrst threw out his mental vision and saw the men who stood around them in the darkness, four men, three of them holding the wicked little weapons called bee-guns in their hands. The fourth man came closer, a dark slender man with a face like a fox, high-boned, narrow-eyed, smiling. It came to Hyrst that the three with weapons were only ordinary men, and that it was this fourth man whose mind had spoken.

  He was speaking aloud now. "I want you alive, believe me--but there are endless gradations between alive and dead. My men are very accurate."

  Shearing's face was suddenly drawn and exhausted. "Don't try anything," he warned Hyrst wearily. "He means it."

  The dark man shook his head at Shearing. "This wasn't nice of you. You knew we had a particular interest in Mr. Hyrst." He turned to Hyrst and smiled. His teeth were small and very neat and white. "Did you know that Shearing has been keeping a shield over your mind as well as his? A little too large a task for him. When you jarred his mind open for an instant, it was all we needed to lead us here."

  He went on. "Mr. Hyrst, my name is Vernon. We'd like you to come with us."

  Vernon nodded to the three accurate men, and the whole little group began to walk in the direction of the spaceport. Shearing seemed almost asleep on his feet now. It was as though he had expended all his energy on a task, and failed at it, and was now quiescent, like an empty well waiting to fill again.

  "Where are we going?" Hyrst asked, and Vernon answered:

  "To see a gentleman you've never heard of, in a place you've never been." He added, with easy friendliness, "Don't worry, Mr. Hyrst, we have nothing against you. You're new to this--ah--state of life. You shouldn't be asked to make decisions or agreements until you know both sides of the question. Mr. Shearing was taking an unfair advantage."

  Remembering the dark hard purpose Shearing had let him see in his mind, Hyrst could not readily dispute that. But he put out an exploring probe in the direction of Vernon's mind.

  It was shut tight.

  They walked on, toward the spaceport gates.

  CHAPTER III

  All space was before him, hung with the many-colored lights of the stars, intensely brilliant in the black nothing. It was incredibly splendid, but it was too much like what he had looked at with his cold unseeing eyes for fifty years. He looked down--down being relative to where he was standing in the blister-window--and saw the whole Belt swarming by under him like a drift of fireflies. He quivered inwardly with a chill vertigo, and turned away.

  Vernon was talking aloud. He had been talking for some time. He was stretched out on a soft, deep lounge, smoking, pretending to sip from a tall glass.

  "So you see, Mr. Hyrst, we can help you a lot. It's not easy for a Lazarite--for one of us--to get a job. I know. People have a--well, a feeling. Now Mr. Bellaver--"

  "Where is Shearing?" asked Hyrst. He came and stood in the center of the room, with the soft lights in his eyes and the soft carpets under his feet. His mind reached out, uneasy and restless, but it seemed to be surrounded by a zone of fog that tangled and confused and deflected it. He could not find Shearing.

  "We've been here for hours," he said. "Where is he?"

  "Probably talking a deal with Mr. Bellaver. I wouldn't worry. As I was saying, Bellaver Incorporated is interested in men like you. We're the largest builders of spacecraft in the System, and we can afford--"

  "I know all about it," said Hyrst impatiently. "Old Quentin Bellaver was busy swallowing up his rivals when I went through the door."

  "Then," said Vernon imperturbably, "you should realize how much we can do for you. Electronics is a vital branch--"

  Hyrst moved erratically around the room, looking at things and not really seeing them, hearing Vernon's voice but not understanding what it said. He was growing more and more uneasy. It was as though someone was calling to him, urgently, but just out of earshot. He kept straining, with his ears and his mind, and Vernon's voice babbled on, and the barrier was like a wall around his thoughts.

  They had been aboard this ship for a long time now, and he had not seen Shearing since they came through the hatch. It was not really a ship, of course. It had no power of its own, depending on powerful tugs to tow it. It was Walter Bellaver's floating pleasure-palace, and the damnedest thing Hyrst had ever seen. Vernon said it could and often did accommodate three or four hundred guests in the utmost luxury. There was nobody aboard it now but Bellaver, Vernon, Hyrst and Shearing, the three very accurate men, and perhaps a dozen others including stewards and the crews of the tugs and Bellaver's yacht. It was named the Happy Dream, and it was presently drifting in an excessively lonely orbit high above the ecliptic, between nothing and nowhere.

  Vernon had been with him almost constantly. He was getting tired of Vernon. Vernon talked too much.

  "Listen," he said. "You can stop selling Bellaver. I'm not looking for a job. Where's Shearing?"

  "Oh, forget Shearing," said Vernon, impatient in his turn. "You never heard of him until a few days ago."

  "He helped me."

  "For reasons of his own."

  "What's your reason? And Bellaver's?"

  "Mr. Bellaver is interested in all social problems. And I'm a Lazarite myself, so naturally I have a sympathy for others like me." Vernon sat up, putting his glass aside on a low table. He had drunk hardly any of the contents.

  "Shearing," he said, "is a member of a gang who some time ago stole a particular property of Bellaver Incorporated. You're not involved in the quarrel, Mr. Hyrst. I'd advise you, as a friend, to stay not involved."

  Hyrst's mind and his ears were stretched and quivering, straining to hear a cry for help just a little too far away.

  "What kind of a property?" asked Hyrst.

  Vernon shrugged. "The Bellavers have never said what kind, for fairly obvious reasons."

  "Something to do with ships?"

  "I suppose so. It isn't important to me. Nor to you, Mr. Hyrst."

  "Will you pour me a drink?" said Hyrst, pointing to the cellaret close beside Vernon. "Yes, that's fine. How long
ago?"

  "What?" asked Vernon, measuring whisky into a glass.

  "The theft," said Hyrst, and threw his mind suddenly against the barrier. For one fleeting second he forced a crack in it. "Something over fifty--", said Vernon, and let the glass fall. He spun around from the cellaret and was halfway to his feet when Hyrst hit him. He hit him three or four times before he would stay down, and three or four more before he would lie quiet. Hyrst straightened up, breathing hard. His lip was bleeding and he wiped it with the back of his hand. "That was a little too big a job for you, Mr. Vernon," he said viciously. "Trying to keep my mind blanked and under control for hours." He stuffed a handkerchief into Vernon's mouth, and tied him up with his own cummerbund, and shoved him out of sight behind an enormous bed. Then he opened the door carefully, and went out.