The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond Hamilton
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has! People talk of someday reaching other stars, but nobody tried yet, nobody could try—” He broke off, suddenly remembering a dark, lonely ship, and a woman with angry eyes watching it. Even in his astonishment, things began to come clearer to him. “So that’s it—a starship. And Bellaver wants it?”
Shearing nodded.
“Well,” said Hyrst. “Go on.”
“You’ve already developed some amazing mental capabilities since you came back from beyond the door. You’ll find that’s only the beginning. The radiation, the exposure—something. The simple act of pseudo-death, perhaps. Anyway, the brain is altered, stepped up, a great deal of its normally unused potential released. You’ve always been a fair-to-middling technician. You’ll find your rating boosted, eventually, to the genius level.”
The skiff veered wildly as Shearing dodged a whizzing chunk of rock the size of a skyscraper.
“That’s one reason,” he said, “why we wanted to get you before Bellaver did. The number of technicians undergoing the Humane Penalty is quite small. We—the brotherhood—need all of them we can get.”
“But that wasn’t the main reason you wanted me?” pressed Hyrst.
Shearing looked at him. “No. We wanted you mainly because you were present when MacDonald died. Handled right—”
He paused. The asteroid was rushing at them, and Bellaver’s ships were close behind. Hyrst was already in a vac-suit, all but the helmet.
“Take the controls,” said Shearing. “As she goes. Don’t worry, I’ll make the landing.” He pulled the vac-suit on. “Handled right,” he said, “you might be the key to that murder, and to the mystery behind it that the brotherhood must solve.”
He took the controls again. They helped each other on with their helmets. The asteroid filled the port, a wild, weird jumble of vari-colored rock.
“I don’t see how,” said Hyrst, into his helmet mike.
“Latent impressions,” answered Shearing briefly, and sent the skiff skittering in between two great black monoliths, to settle with a jar on a pan of rock as smooth and naked as a ballroom floor.
“Make it fast,” said Shearing. “They’re right on top of us.”
* * * *
The skiff, designed as Sheering had said for short hops, could not accommodate the extra weight and bulk of an airlock. You were supposed to land in atmosphere. If you didn’t, you just pushed a release-button and hung on. The air was exhausted in one whistling swoosh that took with it everything loose. The moisture in it crystallized instantly, and before this frozen drift had even begun to settle, Hyrst and Shearing were on their way.
They crossed the rock pan in great swaggering bounds. The gravity was light, the horizon only twenty or so miles away. Literally in his mind’s eye Hyrst could see the three ships arrowing at them. He opened contact with Vernon, knowing Shearing had done so too. Vernon had been looking for them.
“Mr. Bellaver still prefers to have you alive,” he said. “If you’ll wait quietly beside the skiff, we’ll take you aboard.”
Shearing gave him a hard answer.
“Very well,” said Vernon. “Mr. Bellaver wants me to make it clear to you that he doesn’t intend for you to get away. So you can interpret that as you please. Be seeing you.”
He broke contact, knowing that Hyrst and Shearing would close him out. From now on, Hyrst realized, he would keep track of them the way he and Shearing had kept track of obstructions in the path of flight, by mental “sight”. The yacht was extremely close. Suddenly Hyrst had a confused glimpse of a hand on a control-lever over-lapped by a view of the black-mouthed tubes of the yacht’s belly-jets. He dived, literally, into a crack between one of the monoliths and a slab that leaned against its base, dragging Shearing with him.
The yacht swept over. Nothing happened. It dropped out of sight, braking for a landing.
“Imagination,” said Shearing. “You realize a possibility, and you think it’s so. Tricky. But I don’t blame you. The safe side is the best one.”
Hyrst looked out the crack. One of the tugs was coming in to land beside the skiff, while the other one circled.
“Now what?” he said. “I suppose we can dodge them for a while, but we can’t hide from Vernon.”
Shearing chuckled. He had got his look of tough competence back. He seemed almost to be enjoying himself. “I told you you were only a cub. How do you suppose we’ve kept the starship hidden all these years? Watch.”
In the flick of a second Hyrst went blind and deaf. Then he realized that it was only his mental eyes and ears that were blanked out as though a curtain had been drawn across them. His physical eyes were still clear and sharp, and when Shearing’s voice came over the helmet audio he heard it without trouble.
“This is called the cloak. I suppose you could call it an extension of the shield, though it’s more like a force field. It’s no bar to physical vision, and it has the one great disadvantage of being opaque both ways to mental energy. But it does act as a deflector. If Vernon follows us now, he’ll have to do it the hard way. Stick close by me, so I don’t have too wide a spread. And it’ll be up to you to lead. I can’t do both. Let’s go.”
Hyrst had, unconsciously, become so used to his new perceptions that it made him feel dull and helpless to be without them. He led off down one of the smooth rock avenues, going away from the skiff and the tug which had just landed.
On either side of the avenue were monoliths, irregularly spaced and of different sizes and heights but following an apparently orderly plan. The light of the distant sun lay raw and blinding on them, casting shadows as black and sharp-edged as though drawn upon the rock with india ink.
You could see faces in the monoliths. You could see mighty outlines, singly and in groups, of gods and beasts and men, in combat, in suppliance, in death and burial. That was why these asteroids were called Valhallas. Twenty-six of them had been found so far, and studied, and still no one could say certainly whether or not the hands of any living beings had fashioned them. They might be actual monuments, defaced by cosmic dust, by collision with the myriad fragments of the Belt, by time. They might be one of Nature’s casual jokes, created by the same agencies. No actual tombs had been found, nor tools, nor definitely identifiable artifacts. But still the feeling persisted, in the airless silence of the avenues, that some passing race had paused and wrought for itself a memorial more enduring than its fame, and then gone on into the great galactic sea, never to return.
* * * *
Hyrst had never been on a Valhalla before. He understood why Shearing had not wanted to land and he wished now that they hadn’t. There was something overwhelmingly sad and awesome about these leaning, towering figures of stone, moving forever in their lonely orbit, going nowhere, returning to nowhere.
Then he saw the second tug overhead. He forgot his daydreams. “They’re going to act as a spotter,” he said. Shearing grunted but did not speak. His whole mind was concentrated on maintaining the cloak. Hyrst stopped him still in the pitchy shadow under what might have been a kneeling woman sixty feet high. He watched the tug. It lazed away, circling slowly, and he did not think it had seen them. He could not any longer see the place where they had landed, but he assumed that by now the yacht had looped back and come in—if not there somewhere close by. They could figure on nine to eleven men hunting them, depending on whether they left the ships guarded or not. Either way, it was too many.
“Listen,” he said aloud to Shearing. “Listen, I want to ask you. What you said about latent impressions—you think I might have seen and heard the killer even though I was unconscious?”
“Especially heard. Possible. With your increased power, and ours, impressions received through sense-channels but not recognized at the time or remembered later might be recovered.” He shook his head. “Don’t bother me.”