Part 7

"Orthis refused to give to anyone the whole secret of his mutational process, believing that it was too dangerous in inexpert hands. He himself constructed the apparatus and used it, sowing with his own hands the seed of the Vardda race that would flower in the next generation. And at that time, he was revered by the people of Llyrdis almost as a demigod. But within the next year the troubles arose that almost split the Llyrdian State, and brought Orthis eventually into disgrace. He had given his discovery first to his own people, and now...."

Trehearne read with the most intense interest, trying to pry between the stiff factual lines for whatever force it was that made men like Edri fly in the face of their own best interests. Orthis had no intention of limiting the Vardda race to his own world. He would share his mutational process with the other planets of Aldebaran, and eventually with the star-worlds the original expedition had visited, and which were highly civilized. He wished them all to share in the great new future of star-travel--they and all races that might be discovered in the galaxy with sufficiently high culture-levels to be worthy of it. But when this became known to the embryo Starmen it started a most violent reaction. All sorts of objections were raised, ranging from the selfish but, to Trehearne, quite sensible argument that the Llyrdians had the best right to the mutation, having taken all the chances and done all the work, and therefore they should keep it, at least for a while, to the solemn threat of war on a galactic scale. "Remember," said the President of the Council, "how we helped the more backward worlds of our own solar system to achieve interplanetary flight, and how they repaid us. Remember the wars we have already fought! Let us take thought before we scatter this great power broadcast among the stars."

They took thought, and in spite of the impassioned arguments of Orthis and his followers they would not be hurried into a decision. The situation became so tense that Orthis' laboratory ship was sealed and impounded, and Orthis himself placed under virtual arrest. The battle in the Council Hall dragged on for years, and from the accounts it seemed to Trehearne that those fathers of the Vardda-to-be had not acted entirely from a selfish desire to hang on to a good thing. They were faced with a tremendous problem for which there was no precedent, nothing to go on but their own thoughts and feelings. Some of the Council members--the Llyrdian Congressmen--were obviously motivated by sheer hard-headed self-interest. But there were others who tried honestly to be just, and justice to their own people came first. They were afraid to share the mutation, and the control of it, with anyone. They were afraid to throw open all the unknown doors of space onto Aldebaran. The Orthists were defeated.

Then came the end, the dramatic fireworks. The Orthist party arranged an escape for their leader. They helped him get his ship away. They saw him off into the dark void beyond the sky, and they thought that after all he would be victorious. But by this time the new Vardda race had begun to flourish, and some of them were old enough, just barely, to fly. They went out after Orthis, believing intensely in their own right, as he believed in his. Orthis himself was undoubtedly able to endure ultra-speeds, for it was a long and bitter chase. The new young Vardda partially disabled his ship, but even so he managed to elude them. There was no ultra-wave radar or radio in those days, and after all, the old man had cut his teeth on the stars. They lost him, and that was the end, of Orthis and his ship--all except the message in the drifting life-skiff that was picked up more than a century later. And Trehearne thought, "Whether he was right or not, Orthis was the hell and all of a man!"

He could understand why Orthis had hung on stubbornly all these centuries. Certainly a more noble dream had never been dreamed. For himself, though, he was rather glad it was only a dream. He liked being a Vardda. He liked things the way they were. It had worked pretty well for everybody, and looking back, he could think of an awful lot of people he would have hated to see entrusted with the power to get at their neighbors on other stars. Orthis, that solitary, space-born man, had seen only the ideal, the abstraction. The Council had extrapolated a reality.

He did not discuss the question with anybody. That night in the pleasure-garden had impressed upon him the fact that the whole subject was unhealthy, and especially for him. The thought of Kerrel arose sometimes like a dark shadow in his mind, and linked with it was a gnawing anxiety about Edri, whom he had not seen before he left--not for any reasons of caution, which he would have been ashamed of, but because Edri had gone away somewhere and was not to be reached. He had sent Trehearne a brief message wishing him luck, and that was all.

About Shairn he thought as little as possible. He didn't want to know what she was doing. He preferred to remember the two weeks he had spent at the Silver Tower as ending against a blank wall.

He read on in the thundering saga of Vardda exploration, opening the starways. He studied his laws and codes. And he studied the ship. His bunkmates were more than willing to show off their knowledge to a greenhorn, particularly one older than themselves. Perri explained to him the inner workings of the purring metal giants that drove the ships--adaptations of the cosmotron for use as a generator, with centrifuges keyed to ultra-speeds that created the fifth-order rays. Rohan let him punch keys on the computers that did astral mathematics--he was not much interested in those--and Yann taught him how to read the radar screens that functioned not by slow electro-magnetic waves but by rays akin to those that powered the ship, moving far faster than light. He listened in Communications to Vardda ships talking across the galaxy in thin ghostly converse by those same super-swift rays. The Skipper unbent briefly and allowed him--and this was like realizing an impossible dream--to hold the controls of the _Saarga_ in his hands.

Yann did a good bit of tolerant jeering. "You're just starting out, and it's still fun. Wait till you're as old in the game as I am." He was twenty-eight. "I've made nine voyages into the Cluster, and I'm tired of it. All I want is my own ship, which I will let somebody else fly while I sit comfortably on Llyrdis and catch up on my wine and women."

"Have you any chance of getting one?" asked Trehearne.

"This trip will do it."

Rohan let out a loud laugh. "Hark at him! Don't let him kid you, Trehearne. We do well, but not that well."

Yann said seriously, "I mean it."

"Would you mind telling me how?"

"I saved my money," Yann told him virtuously. Then he grinned. "Besides, you're forgetting that I spent almost a year on the ground, filling in for some damned Vardda factor that died. I didn't waste my time." He turned to Trehearne. "Wait until we hit that system. I'll show you things you never saw before. Real barbarism. Good people, though. I got along with 'em fine."

"I guess," said Trehearne, "that there are all kinds of worlds in the Cluster."

"Just wait," said Rohan sourly. "You'll have a bellyful before you're through. There are beautiful ones, and picturesque ones, and very quaint ones, all right, and some are even civilized. But there's a hell of a lot that are just plain godawful. You must have guessed that there's a reason for the high pay on this run."

The great Cluster of Hercules grew from a patch of hazy brilliance lost in the blaze and crash and thunder of the universe, to a monstrous star-swarm, blinding even through a darkened port--a swirling hive of suns, white, red, yellow, peacock blue and vivid green, booming across the eternal void with the rush and roar of a cosmic avalanche toward some unknown destination, guided by the evil blinking eyes of the Cepheid variables. The _Saarga_ plunged in at last among the edges of the swarm, and Trehearne discovered at least one reason why Edri had warned him about the Hercules run.

"All the globular clusters are bad," Yann told him cheerfully. "Omega Centauri--there's another one to break a starman's heart. A strong ship, a strong captain, and no imagination--that's what it takes for a voyage like this."

Trehearne was introduced to gravity tides and for the first time in his life he knew what real fear was. The generators throbbed incessantly. The _Saarga_ groaned and shrieked in all her iron bones, moving in erratic bursts of speed and sudden brakings, pitching and swerving as she felt her way in through shoals of suns, fighting the complex, ever-shifting gravitational fields. Trehearne got the feeling that he was trapped inside a giant football being battered back and forth between the stars.

Yann grinned. "It gets worse as you go farther in."

It did. Trehearne thought it was impossible for any ship to live in those mighty cross-currents of gravitation as the suns thickened like swarming bees. Forty times a day he was convinced that his end had come, and his only comfort was that the Hercules Cluster was a more noble place to die in than any he had seen on Earth. He wore out his emotional potential until he had no more to give and merely suffered the noises and the violent pitchings as the _Saarga_ rolled doggedly on her way. He had an idea that they must be deep into the heart of the cluster, and was somewhat daunted to learn, when the ship made her first landing, that they were still only on the fringe. He was too far gone to care much. All he wanted then was solid ground under his feet.

He emerged from the airlock into the light of a waning star, inexpressibly dim and sad, and looked out over a shadowy plain that glimmered even at midday with the distant glories of other suns, burning unconcerned. The plain was barren, scoured to the underlying rock by the winds that blew across it, dry and withering and cold. But there was a town there, very neat and gay with colors. It made Trehearne think of too-bright cosmetics on the face of a corpse. The _Saarga_ discharged food and ores and many small luxuries, receiving payment in gems of royal purple mined out of the grey rock by little men with sorrowful eyes. The place began to get on Trehearne's nerves. His duties kept him by the ship, checking bills of lading, but he watched the people who came out from the town. They were healthy, well-fed, well-dressed. But their bodies were stunted, and even the children's faces held a sadness that seemed as much a part of them as their skin, seeping into them from the dying sunlight and the dying soil. He saw the way they looked at the great ship and the men who flew in her, and how they glanced then at the hot flaming suns that were beyond their reach. They did not talk much. They only stood and looked. But once a group of children crept close to him and a small boy asked, in the _lingua franca_ of the trade worlds, "What is it like to fly the stars?"

The _Saarga_ did not stay there long, and Trehearne was glad. "Christ!" he said to Yann. "Those poor kids would break your heart. Couldn't they be moved or something? They're just dying slowly with their world."

Yann shook his head. "It's been tried, but it doesn't work. At planetary velocities, even a relatively short hop between stars takes years, and most people just can't take it psychologically. They crack up in all directions, or else they sort of wither and die. Besides, I suppose there's a sort of interstellar ecology. Old worlds die, and new ones are born, and if you started upsetting the normal balance you'd have every livable planet overrun with more population than it could support."

Thinking of the children, Trehearne said, "Ecology, hell. They're human beings."

Young Perri shrugged. "We all take our chances. You'll get used to it. Anybody know where we touch next?"

"It's on the board," Yann said. "A lovely place. Trehearne will like it. There aren't any people there at all."

Trehearne's education into the rights, privileges, and duties of a Vardda were only beginning. The _Saarga_ slowed again close to a cumulid variable of the most evil aspect and picked up a planet that turned out to be a worthy child of its parent. "Here's where we earn our money," Yann said. "Radiation suits, Trehearne. Full kit. Only the Old Man is exempt from this."

"What do we do?" Trehearne wanted to know.

"We pick fungus," Rohan told him not joyfully. "It makes a particularly fine antibiotic when it's been treated, but meanwhile don't get it on you. It's poisonous as hell. And be sure your oxygen lines are clear. The air is full of methane."

"He doesn't care," said Yann. "He's still full of the wonder of new worlds."

"Jeer away," Trehearne said equably. "I am."

ELEVEN

Trehearne trailed out with the rest of them, almost the whole ship's company, to gather the weird harvest. The radiation-suit he wore was not too heavy in weight--it couldn't be, for men who had to do hard work--a simple coverall of flexible metallic fabric, with a phone-equipped helmet and a separate knapsack oxygen-pack that could be quickly replaced when its oxygen was worked out.

The world he stood on was like something out of nightmare. Fungi higher than his head grew thickly, like a gruesome travesty of a forest, and in colors ranging from black to crimson and a yellow like spilled brains. The giant star--a sick, mad star, Trehearne thought, like all the short-period true variables--brooded in the poisonous sky, past the maximum peak of its brilliance now but still pouring out its febrile energies in a purplish glare. Trehearne grimaced, and shook his head. "This," he said, "is a planet only Weizsacker could love."

Perri's voice came over the helmet phone, curiously thin but so close at hand that Trehearne started. "Who's Weizsacker?"

"An Earthman with a theory. He advanced the idea that most stars have planets."

Rohan said incredulously, "You mean that anyone ever doubted it?"

"Oh, yes. Matter of fact, the general belief still is that Sol is unique in possessing planets, and that Sol Three, otherwise Earth, is unique in possessing life, particularly intelligent life."

Rohan swore, and then he laughed. "I never heard of such conceit. I thought you said Earthmen were civilized. Only savages have that wonderful conception of their own importance."

Armed with curved knives and big sacks of a thin plasticoid substance as flexible as cloth but air tight when it was sealed, the men spread out through the fungoid jungle. They kept more or less together in small groups. Trehearne could hear them talking, a confusion of voices over the helmet phone. He talked a lot himself, not about anything in particular, just talking for the sake of hearing something human. There was a strange and increasingly unpleasant feeling of isolation, locked up in his armor, breathing artificial air, unable to see much because of the helmet that restricted his field of vision. He moved with difficulty over spongy dust that sucked him down almost to the knees at every step. The light was lurid and hard on the eyes, and the ugly growths grew uglier by the minute, their vivid colors more revolting. It was hard to tell who was near him, with everyone masked out of human semblance by the shapeless suits. He tried to keep close to Yann and the two youngsters, checking them by voice.

"Don't bother with the big ones," Yann told him. "They aren't any good. Here, see the little pretties just coming up? Those are what we want."

Trehearne looked doubtfully at the size of his sack, and then at the nasty little mushroom-like heads thrusting up from the ground. "It'll take a long time to fill this thing."

"Hours. Might as well dig in."

Trehearne began patiently to work, bent over double or squattering clumsily along on his knees. The uncleanness of the place began to get on his nerves. Unavoidably he broke the adult growths from time to time and was showered with sooty black, or liverish pink, or ugly red and yellow dust, or was enveloped in clouds of spores. He tried to watch the others, but he lost track of them now and then. Sometimes they did not answer when he called them. A slow claustrophobia grew on him and had to be fought down. He sweated heavily inside his armor. His muscles tired, and still the huge sack was not filled.

The light of the cumulid star began visibly to fade.

Trehearne looked around. A wall of leprous color closed him in. There was no one in sight. "Yann?" he called. "Perri?"

"Hoi!" That was Perri. "Dull work, isn't it?"

"Disgusting. Where's Yann?"

"I don't know. Yann?"

"Here, damn it. If you'd pick more and talk less we'd be out of this pleasure garden sooner."

Trehearne could not place their positions. They sounded alike, all as though they spoke inside his own helmet. He worked on, hoping to catch sight of someone. The sick sun had worn out its burst of energy and was sinking into exhaustion, dimmer, redder, with the effect of an abnormal sunset. A kind of shadowy dusk crept between the feet of the tall distorted growths. Trehearne began to feel uneasy. He knew it was only the cumulative effect of the surroundings and the prisoning armor. He refused to pay attention to it. But it would not go away. It came in waves, with a prickling of nerve-ends and a lifting of the hair. He continued doggedly to throw the small fungi into his sack. He wanted to talk now more than ever, but he was afraid to, afraid that his unreasoning fear would show in his voice and disgrace him. He began to make long swings back and forth, trying to find somebody, but he could not, though he knew they must be close by. He was very hot, but his back turned cold and trickles of icy moisture ran down it. The unhealthy dusk grew thicker, and the shadows were red. He began to see movement out of the tail of his eye, as though something or someone walked stealthily just out of sight behind the screening growths.

"Yann?"

"What?" The bodiless, distanceless voice, speaking thinly in his ear.

"There's no life here, is there? I mean, outside of these stinking mushrooms."

"Not that anyone knows about. Why?"

"Nothing. It was only a trick of the shadows, I guess."

"Getting nervy, little Earthling?"

"Listen, the hell with you and your smart cracks."

"Think nothing of it," Yann said unabashed. "We all get nervy. I'm almost finished. How about you?"

"Pretty soon."

"Well, hurry up."

Silence. An occasional burst of voices over the helmet phones, confusing, jumbled. The men weren't talking so much now. They were tired, and the place oppressed them. Their spirits were going down like the light of the sun, sprawling hugely over half the sky with the red light running out of it like blood. Trehearne watched the shadows constantly, turning uneasily round and about with a blind feeling at his back. His nerves still pricked and rippled, and would not be quieted.

His sack was nearly full. He thought about the ship, about lights and familiar faces and getting off the suffocating armor. There was a monstrous fan-shaped growth glaring crimson in the sinking glow. It was flanked on one side by a bloated puffball colored black, and on the other by a crinkled, convoluted monster blotched with brown and yellow. It had at its feet a brood of little ones, enough to fill the remaining space in Trehearne's sack. He walked toward it, brushing by the blotched and convoluted thing. He felt at his back a sudden tug and a snapping. He turned, floundering in the soft mould with his heavy boots. He turned as fast as he could but there was no one, nothing, and then it dawned on him what had happened. His oxygen line had been ripped loose.

He began to shout. He didn't mind using his breath. He had very little left to use. He shouted in wild panic and began to run, nowhere in particular, butting and stumbling into the fungi, searching desperately for someone to help him before he died. "Where are you?" the voices were clamoring in his helmet. "Where are you?" And he kept screaming, "Here!" as though the word had any meaning, as though they could tell from the sound of his voice whether he was ten feet or half a mile away. The automatic valve-seal had closed at once to prevent the escape of what air there was in the armor, but it was getting hard to breathe. His lungs would exhaust the last of the oxygen in a minute or two, and then he could either suffocate in his armor, or rip off his helmet and burn his insides out with the methanated poison this world used for atmosphere. It was a lousy way to die and he didn't like it, and he couldn't figure out how it had happened. He must have fouled his line on some part of the fungus, that nasty one that looked like a monstrous brain. He must have passed too close to it and got hooked on some tough projection.... It was getting dark and he was sick at his stomach and his lungs were pumping, laboring, achieving nothing.

He tried to yell again, and couldn't make it. His knees caved under him and he fell, almost into the arms of a shapeless but human figure that was saying a lot of things he couldn't understand. He felt himself rolled over. There was a moment when the darkness closed down almost completely and then a stream of oxygen, pure and fresh, poured into his helmet. The mechanism that had so nearly stopped began to work again, not smoothly, with a good deal of gagging and choking, but working. Somebody's voice penetrated to him, telling him for God's sake not to get sick in his helmet, and he managed to sit up and look around.

Two men were bending over him, and a third stood behind them. He could recognize them through their face-plates. None were his bunkmates. There was somebody else behind him, holding him up. Voices were still clattering inside his helmet, demanding to be answered. He thought he heard Rohan and Perri, but he wasn't sure. "Who's that behind me?" he asked. His own voice came out as though there were hooks on it. His throat hurt. "Who's there?"

"Me. Yann. Welcome back, Trehearne. I thought for a minute you'd gone over the edge."

"Damn near it." His tongue felt like a feather bolster. "I don't know what happened...."

"Your air-line got snagged," said one of the men helpfully, telling Trehearne no news. He grunted and said,

"But how? I thought I must have hooked it on one of these ugly brutes, but they break so easily...."

"They toughen up as they age. Look here." The man reached out and took a horny protuberance in his hand. "Plenty of resistance, especially if your coupling was not properly tightened."

He didn't remember any such protuberances, and the blotched brain-shaped thing had looked bright and youthful. But he let it drop. He didn't know quite what other answer there could be, and right now he didn't want to think about it any more. Everything was lost in an overpowering desire to get back to the ship. He started to flounder up onto his feet, and Yann's powerful arm helped him. "Anyway," he said to the men in front of him, "thanks for saving my neck."

"Thank Yann. He had your air-line recoupled by the time we came. You were running right toward us, but you might not have made it if he hadn't found you first."

Trehearne turned round to face Yann. "Thanks."

"No trouble at all. I don't say I'd save you out from under the claws of something or other at the risk of my own skin, Trehearne, but since this was a simple task, think nothing of it. I was just lucky to find you. And next time don't stray so far away." He grinned and shoved Trehearne forward. "You aren't finished yet. You still have to explain to the Old Man why you lost your sack."

"Oh God," Trehearne muttered. But he didn't turn back. If the Skipper wanted that sack he could go and look for it. For the time being, Trehearne was through.