Part 12

Joris was out of Communications in one long stride. Kerrel looked at Shairn and cried, "Wait! You must radio your position when you set her down."

"We will."

Trehearne flipped the switch. The screen went blank. The throbbing generators took the ship and lifted it and whirled it away and no gun spoke from the cruiser. Trehearne released his grip on Shairn. Reaction and relief had turned his knees to water, so that it was difficult to stand against the lurching of the ship.

Shairn turned and looked at him. "You're a fool, Michael," she said, "but I'll give you this. You're not a coward."

He had her locked in her cabin again and went back to the bridge. Joris was scowling at the projection of the microfilm chart of the planet.

"There," he said, and pointed to a huge emptiness. "She'll be safe there until they pick her up--there's no predatory life in these deserts." He glanced up at Trehearne. "Good man," he said. "Me, I was beaten."

Trehearne gave him a wry smile. "Me, I bluffed. From here on, Joris, it's all yours. Where's Edri?"

"Shut in his cabin with Arrin. They know the general sector, clear out at the Galaxy's edge. Now they're trying to figure out the true course together." And Joris snorted. "Course! If I can keep one jump ahead of that cruiser I'll be satisfied."

The _Mirzim_ skimmed over the darkling world of Thuvis into the starless night. Trehearne sat and brooded, thinking of Shairn, thinking of the two men who were bent over the final calculations of a dream that had balked men for a thousand years. He thought of what a dream can do to a man, of how far it can lead him away from the good safe life of common sense to the ultimate voids of creation. He hoped that Edri and Arrin would find what they wanted. He hoped they would live to find it.

"Coming down," said Joris. "Better get Shairn a coverall. It's cold down there."

Trehearne found a warm coverall in the equipment locker and took it to Shairn's cabin. She put it on, and he saw how her face was shadowed with weariness and strain.

She said quietly, "Do you still love me, Michael?"

Her question took him by surprise, and the answer came of itself. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I do."

"Then we must stop behaving like two angry children and not throw away the life we can have together."

He bent his head. "I'm sorry you got caught in this."

"It's as much my fault as yours. I was too quick to lose my temper. I should have stopped to think that the Vardda world was so new to you that you had little to judge it by."

She was not now the mocking Shairn of old. Her voice was full of a sombre passion, a pleading for him to understand.

"Michael, your motives were good--loyalty to a friend, reaction against what seemed to you injustice. But surely now you must see how hopeless this all is. I know you're hunting Orthis' ship. You'll never reach it. Kerrel will run you down. It'll all have been for nothing."

It seemed to Trehearne that what she said was very likely true. But he only answered, "It's too late to think about that now."

"No, Michael! You can still save yourself!" She caught him by the shoulders, her hands urgent on his flesh. "Leave the ship with me! Let Kerrel pick us both up!"

Trehearne smiled mirthlessly. "Kerrel would like that--taking me back to a prison."

"It doesn't have to be prison!" Shairn exclaimed. "You can say you pretended to join Joris and Edri only to save me. I'll back you up and not Kerrel nor anyone else can disprove it. You'll walk out free on Llyrdis."

It crossed his mind that he could do that. It would all fit. It was an out.

"You won't be letting your friends down, either," Shairn insisted. "They'll go on without you. You've done all you can for them."

She clung to him. Her mouth begged him with a silent language of its own. He took her arms slowly from around him and thrust her back and she caught her breath at the pain of his grip.

"No," he said. And again, "No, Shairn."

She stood back and looked at him steadily. "You could go back to the Silver Tower with me but you won't--and for what? So that peoples you've never met on worlds you'll never see can someday fly the stars?"

"There was a man named Trehearne on the world Earth who got his chance to fly the stars," he said. "I thought that others should have their chance too. I have to play it out now."

She was silent and then the dropping speed of the ship told them that it was almost over. Trehearne took her down to the airlock chamber. They stood there together, not finding anything more to say, and all that had been between them came silently and mocked them with the pain of vanished days.

The _Mirzim_ scraped her keel softly on a yielding surface and was still. Trehearne opened the port, looking out on the dark windy desert.

Shairn spoke then. "A strange beginning for us, Michael, and now an even stranger ending."

He held out his hand to help her down and the pressure of her fingers was like something tearing at his heart. She looked up at him, a small lonely figure in the vast dark. He thought her lips moved but the wind came between them and took the words away and he had none of his own for answer.

The warning bell jarred harshly in his ears. He closed the port and she was gone.

Joris' voice roared from the bridge, through the intercom. "Flatten out, all! This is the only start we'll get on Kerrel and I've got to pile it on!"

The cruel hand of acceleration crushed Trehearne down. He lay on the scored plates of the deck and that last vision of Shairn's white face remained with him to remind him of all that he had had and lost.

He said her name over and over in the silence of the empty lock and his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of dust. The _Mirzim_ leaped through space like a wild thing, driving toward the sector that was the goal of a thousand-year hope and quest, toward the Galaxy edge and the shores of outer night.

NINETEEN

They had stepped clear out to the edge of the galaxy, where the fringing stars were lost in the outer void and the dead suns swept forever through the entombing dark, where even the memory of creation was gone, blotted out by unimaginable time. No delimited frontier was here, but a border region between the swarming star-sparks and the black abyss beyond.

Trehearne tried to remember how long it had been since they had taken off from Thuvis. He couldn't. Time seemed oddly elastic when you lost all the familiar frames of reference. He gave it up. It didn't matter. He peered with aching bloodshot eyes into the lightless seas that lie beyond the island universes and tried to remember why he had come here. And that too was dim in his mind.

Edri was bent over a table that had been set up in the bridge. He no longer looked like Edri. He seemed to have been working for a million years. Arrin sat near him. He held his head between his bony hands, a bearded mummy embalmed upright, hardly retaining the semblance of life. There were charts under Edri's hands, endless sheets of calculations and graphs, endless miles of figures. Joris studied them, bending beside Edri. His broad jowls hung down now over his wrinkled collar. His eyes had sunk deep under ridges of bone, peering out as from two shadowed caves.

Edri was talking in a voice that came from far away. The words reached Trehearne in droning snatches from beyond the fog of weariness.

"--so our only way to locate Orthis' ship was to triangulate its position from two separate bearings on it. One bearing was the course of that life-skiff Orthis sent in with his last message, allowing for aberrations caused by the gravitational field of stars. The other bearing was Orthis' course in his last flight. We couldn't get that till I found the part of the Lankar manuscript that Arrin didn't have."

Trehearne heard someone ask, "Who was Lankar?"

"One of Orthis' last pursuers, who left a secret log of the pursuit to ease his guilty conscience. Enough of it survived--"

Joris said, "The hell with Lankar. Get on with it."

"We had to push the star-maps back in time--galactic motion, star streaming, a million complicated problems of relative motion and proper motion, back five hundred years and then another five hundred, and then correlate them. Handling an almost unlimited number of variables like that, it could only be done on the biggest math-machines and electronic computers at Llyrdis. And that meant it all had to be done secretly, bit by bit. That work's been going on for a long, long time."

Edri drew a long breath that was coupled with a racking yawn.

"The resultant charts indicate an unnamed dark star following an orbit here, outside the main stream of the Galaxy." He traced a line with his finger. "These charts for the fringing stars are incomplete, as you know. There's nothing to draw anyone out to these godforsaken regions and they've never been properly explored. But according to our calculations, that dark star was in the right place a thousand years ago and Orthis' life-skiff was launched from there. Now the wheel of the Galaxy has turned so, taking the dark star with it...."

He laid his hand on the crossing of two marked lines on the chart, and looked at them.

"That's our destination, Joris. If we're right, the ship of Orthis is there. If we're wrong--well, somebody else will have to try again in another thousand years."

He remained standing, silent, his hands braced on the table, too tired to move. Joris rubbed his bleary eyes and began to read the coordinates aloud from the chart. Mechanically the Second Officer set up the combination on the finder.

Joris moved heavily back to the pilot chair. When the finder clicked off the new course, he set the Mirzim on it. Then he spoke over the intercom to Radar. "What's the position of that cruiser?"

A croaking voice answered him. He listened, and then turned to the others. "Closer," he said. "Always closer."

Trehearne's mind turned back to its constant half-waking nightmare. The cruiser, following, hanging on, dogged, persistent, relentless. He lived over painfully every maneuver, every trick by which Joris had managed to delay their pursuer, to grasp a little more time, a little more distance.

He remembered the last-minute plunge into a dark nebula when the cruiser was almost close enough to range them. He remembered the turning and twisting and doubling inside the blackness of the cloud, where the absorptive cosmic dust fogged the radar. They had lost the cruiser there. They had got clear away and for a time they had hoped. They had made it to this fringe sector--and then the red spark showed again on the screen, coming closer, always closer.

There were times when Trehearne forgot the physical fact of the cruiser, a ship of ordinary metal officered and manned by ordinary Vardda spacemen. At such times it seemed to him that the _Mirzim_ was pursued by a demoniac nemesis striding naked across the plunging gulfs--a nemesis wearing Kerrel's face with Kerrel's hands outstretched to grasp them.

Sometimes Shairn's face was there beside Kerrel's, white, unreadable, a misty cloud that blotted out the stars.

The hoarse voice of the radar man croaked at intervals. The ship fled on toward the dark star.

Joris finally turned around. The table had been taken out, the charts and the toilsome calculations rolled up and shoved away. Arrin lay on the deck against the after bulkhead, sleeping. He would not leave the bridge until he knew whether or not his life and work had gone for nothing. Edri sat beside him. He was not asleep.

Joris said flatly, "It isn't going to work."

Edri said nothing. He waited.

Joris went on, as though he hated what he was saying, but had to say it. "Look at it. As soon as I start deceleration the cruiser will begin to cut our lead to nothing. And they're stressed for less deceleration time than I can make without tearing the _Mirzim_ to pieces. What'll happen? They'll be down on us before we can even begin our search."

Edri nodded. He leaned back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. He said, "They know now what we're after. What do you suppose Kerrel would do if he found the ship of Orthis?"

Nobody answered that. There was no need to answer. A heavy silence followed, during which Trehearne thought of the messages that had gone out across the Galaxy from the cruiser's ultra-wave--guarded messages that betrayed by their very spareness the desperate nature of this mission, urgent requests for other Council cruisers to close up with all speed. But those others were still too far away to matter. Whatever happened would have happened before they could come up. Kerrel was going to finish this alone.

Edri said, "What are we going to do?"

Joris rubbed his big hand over his stubbled face and blinked and said, "Our only chance, if Orthis' ship and secret are really there, is to get the ultra-wave equipment to it in time for what we planned." He went on slowly, "I think our life-skiff could carry that equipment. If we drop the skiff it could travel on constant velocity for a while before it would have to decelerate. Meanwhile I could swing the _Mirzim_ on another course, running back along the rim of the Galaxy, away from the dark star. The cruiser would follow me. Chances are, with their radar concentrated on me to catch my lateral-impulse pattern, they wouldn't notice the skiff at all when she started deceleration."

He sighed. "They'd catch us, of course. But the _Mirzim_ isn't going to keep on forever after the beating she's taken. The generators are in bad shape. But we could keep going long enough to give you time."

Edri thought it over. "I don't like it," he said. "But it looks as though it's that or nothing."

Joris was muttering under his breath about maximum loads and capacity. "The main ultra-wave equipment," he said, "and three men. The skiff would keep that. We'd keep the auxiliary ultra-wave set here, of course."

"Who can you spare? You'll need all your flight-technicians."

"He can spare me," said Trehearne. "I'm the most non-essential. And I can still stand up if I have to."

Joris nodded. "Yes. Quorn has to go to handle the ultra-wave, of course--and he can handle the skiff all right."

"Who else?"

"You," said Joris.

Edri looked at the sleeping Arrin. "He ought to go instead of me. He's worked for it longer than I have." It was obvious that Arrin was unable to go anywhere, and Edri sighed. He pulled himself erect. "All right, then. Come on, Trehearne. We'll start loading."

The skiff was contained in a cell of its own, sunk in the side of the _Mirzim_--a miniature starship with a flight range long enough to give the crew of a disabled ship a chance to reach safety. But there was no use trying to think of safety any longer.

Trehearne routed out every man that was off-station and could stand erect. Following Edri's orders he stripped the skiff of everything they wouldn't need. Quorn oversaw the removal of the heavy ultra-wave radio equipment from the _Mirzim_ and its loading into the skiff. He seemed unnecessarily particular about it. Trehearne swore and sweated but got it done. Then he went back to the bridge with Edri and Quorn. Joris studied his instruments.

"Pretty soon," he said. He gave Quorn his flight instructions. "Trehearne is still a lubber," he remarked, "but he knows enough by now to give you a hand when you need it."

Edri said, "Surrender as soon as you're challenged, Joris."

Joris laughed, a pallid ghost of his old loud roar. "I will. Right now, I'm too tired to die." He glanced again at the instruments. "Time to go."

They looked at each other, these fatigue-drunken red-eyed men whom a dream had dragged to the edge of the universe, and could find nothing to say in this moment of their parting.

"Good luck," muttered Edri then and turned away.

"You're the ones who're going to need it," Joris called after them.

Trehearne went through after Quorn and Edri into the skiff. They sealed off and then Quorn took the controls and waited, watching his chronometer. His hand grasped loosely about a red switch marked RELEASE.

He closed the switch.

There was a squeal and grind of machinery, a sense of super-swift forces at work as the complicated releasing-gear did its work, an instant of extreme pressure, and the skiff had left the _Mirzim_. They could see nothing but they knew that skiff and ship had already diverged far apart at their unthinkable speeds.

Quorn watched his instruments while Trehearne and Edri sat looking at nothing, afraid to sleep lest they should not be able to wake again. They sat, and swayed, and waited, until presently Quorn started his forward generator and began deceleration.

Trehearne lost track of things. Part of the following time he was unconscious, or nearly so. The rest of it he observed as in a confused dream. He thought of how he had once been wildly eager for starflight. But he managed to do the things that Quorn required of him.

The port cleared. It had no adapter and functioned as a port only at visual speeds. Now, ahead of them, Trehearne could see a huge bulk of darkness against the outer dark, illumined only faintly by the galactic light.

"There it is," said Edri. "The dark star." His voice shook a little.

They swept closer, still slowing down. "It has a planet," said Quorn. "There, catching the starshine--"

"Two," said Trehearne. "I see two."

Two dimly gleaming bodies, dead worlds clinging to a long dead sun out here at Galaxy edge. The glow of the Milky Way touched them, the ghostly glow of candles at a wake, and only emphasized their drear darksomeness and lonesomeness.

Edri whispered, "Well try the outer planet first. Give me a hand, Trehearne."

They crawled aft between the crowded banks of equipment to a detector that had come from the _Mirzim's_ hold. Edri fumbled at it.

"In Orthis' day they used radioactive fuel, of course," Edri mumbled. "We calculated its half-life. Even supposing his bunkers were nearly empty there should be enough left to register on this counter. A teacupful would do it."

Trehearne helped Edri adjust the shielding apparatus on the mechanism until the needle was still.

"What about natural radioactive deposits on the planets themselves?" he asked.

"We get a break there. Too old. The last radioactive element will have practically died out millions of years ago." He raised his voice. "Keep the skiff as low as you dare, Quorn. The counter has a wide sweep. Take it slow."

He crouched over the telltale needle. Trehearne moved forward again.

The planet was small, less than two thousand miles in diameter. Between the intense gloom and the motion of the skiff he could see nothing but a black featureless desolation, rifted here and there with white that he took to be the frozen remains of an atmosphere. He thought what it would be like to land there and shivered.

They quartered and swept the planet carefully. The telltale needle of the counter remained motionless. Edri said, heavily, "We'll go on. Pray we find it on the other planet. Pray Orthis didn't come down on the dark star. It would take forever to find him there."

Quorn fed in power and cleared away. The port dimmed again, and Edri moaned.

"He's about out," Quorn said. "Looks like whatever is done, we'll have to do the most of it."

The second world was larger than the first by three times or more. It was not content to be featureless. It thrust up gnawed and shattered ranges, stripped bones of mountains sheathed in frozen gases. It showed forth dreary plains coated white with congealed air, glistening faintly in the light of the great galactic wheel. It turned toward the watchers the naked beds of its vanished oceans, sucked dry to the deepest gulf. It displayed the scars of its long dying, the brutal wounds of internal explosion, the riven gashes of a shrinking crust. A hideous world that seemed to remember beauty still and to resent the cruelty of death.

Edri whispered, "Pray--pray that the damned thing moves." Instead of doing so, he cursed the needle that it did not stir.

"Keep going," said Trehearne.

They kept going.

The needle quivered.

Edri let out a hoarse cry. "Easy! _Easy!_" Tears began to run down his cheeks. He sobbed. The needle was still again.

"Circle!" Trehearne shouted to Quorn. "Circle till we get it centered."

He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted salt, and wondered how it got there.

Quorn swung the skiff around in a tightening spiral until Edri said, "Now! Let her down."

He scrambled forward, thrusting his face against the port, trying to see. Quorn switched on a landing-light. The blue-white blaze lit up a circular area below, the light intensely bright, the shadows intensely black. Its beam went sharply down.

They followed it. It was as though the skiff were poised on that pillar of light, sinking downward. They were above a planetary surface racked and tortured by final diastrophism. Towering miles high, loomed a mighty cliff of riven rock. In front of it a chasm yawned, and beyond the chasm a drear and tumbled landscape stretched dim under the great sword of the Galaxy.

They started down along the face of the titanic cliff. Looking at the chasm at its base Trehearne began to get uneasy.

"There's no ship here," he said. "The counter must have picked up some last radiation from deep down in that chasm."

Quorn agreed with him. But Edri said, "No, keep going." Trehearne could feel him tremble.

They went on down the face of the giant, looming wall. Trehearne pointed suddenly. "Isn't that a ledge?"

The hard bright edge of the beam cut across a shelf of rock that jutted out halfway down the cliff. Quorn swung the skiff in closer. Something on the ledge glistened dully under the light. Quorn let the skiff drop with a sickening rush. Detail sprang clear--shattered rock, ancient magma, puddles of frozen air in the hollows. And among them an ovoid shape, symmetrical, smooth, giving back a metallic glint.

Edri said the name of Orthis, as though it were a prayer.

TWENTY

Quorn had set the skiff down on the ledge. They had scrambled into pressure suits. They had forgotten that they were already three-quarters dead. Awkward in the clumsy armor, stumbling on the jagged rock, slipping on the patches of frozen air, they clawed their way toward the goal they had crossed a Galaxy and gambled their lives to find. Above them the ghastly cliff leaned outward against nothingness, below them the abyss plunged down into the dead heart of a world. Beyond them was a spreading desolation, and in the black sky the awful rim of the Galaxy lay like a blazing sword of light.

Trehearne was aware of the silence. He had never been on an airless world before. He felt the impact as his metal boot struck against a shard of rock, but it made no sound. All he could hear was the harsh breathing of Quorn and Edri, transmitted to him by the helmet audio.

The ship of Orthis loomed before them, lightless, lifeless, cradled in the ashes of destruction. It had a look of patience. It had lain here for a thousand years, untouched by time or rust, entombed in silence and the endless night, eternal as the dead suns that rove forever in uncorrupting space. It seemed that it could wait until the end of the universe, cherishing its trust. Awe came upon Trehearne, and with it a kind of fear.

They found the lock port. It stood wide open, the valves still clean and shining. There could be no corrosion here, with every atom of air and moisture frozen in the purifying cold. The light of Trehearne's belt-lamp showed him, on the floor of the lock chamber, the scored marks of a man's boot. They might have been made only yesterday.

The three men paused outside that open port. They looked at each other through the glassite plates of their helmets, and their faces were strange. Then Trehearne stepped aside, and Quorn also. Edri bent his head. He moved forward to the port. Slowly, without sound, he clambered into the ship of Orthis.