The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond Hamilton
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to rally them, but in vain.
The men of Jotan who had lighted and flung the new weapons were as horrified as their victims. Khal Kan’s yell aroused them.
“Horses, and after them!” he cried. “Now is our chance to avenge yesterday!”
The gates ground open—and every horsemen left in jotan galloped out after Khal Kan and Golden Wings in pursuit of the routed, green men.
The Bunts made hardly any effort to turn and fight They were madly intent on putting as great a distance as possible between them and Jotan.
“It’s Egir I’m after!” Khal Kan cried to Brusul. “While he lives, no safety for Jotan!”
“See—there he rides!” cried Golden Wings’ silvery voice.
Khal Kan yelled and put spur to his horse as he saw Egir and his Bunt captains riding full tilt toward the Dragals, in an effort to escape.
They rode right through the Seeing Bunts in pursuit of the traitor. They were overtaking him, when Egir turned and saw them coming. The Jotanian renegade uttered a yell, and he and his green captains turned.
“’Ware arrows!” shouted Brusul, behind Khal Kan.
Khal Kan saw the Bunts loosing the vicious shafts, but he saw it only vaguely, for only Egir’s sardonic face was clear to him as he charged.
Sword out, he galloped toward his uncle. Something stung his arm, and he heard a scream from Golden Wings and knew an arrow had hit him.
“My dear nephew, you’ve two minutes to live!” panted Egir, his eyes blazing hate and triumph as they met and their swords clashed. “You’re a dead man now—”
Khal Kan felt a cold, deadly numbness creeping through his arm with incredible rapidity. He summoned all his fast-flowing strength to swing his sword up.
It left his guard open and Egir stabbed viciously as their horses wheeled. Then Khal Kan’s nerveless arm brought his blade down.
“This for my father, Egir!”
The sword shore the traitor’s shoulder and neck half through. And a moment after Egir dropped from the saddle, Khal Kan felt his own numb body falling. He could not feel the impact with the ground.
His mind was darkening and everything was spinning around. It was as though he whirled in a black funnel, and was being sucked down into its depths, yet he could still hear voices of those bending over him.
“Khal Kan!” That was Golden Wings, he knew.
He tried to speak up to them out of the roaring darkness that was engulfing him.
“Jotan—safe now, with Egir gone. The kingship to Brusul. Golden Wings—”
He could not form more words. Khal Kan knew that he was dying. But he knew, at last, that Thar was not a dream, for even though his own life was passing, nothing around him was vanishing. But, his darkening brain wondered, if That had been real all the time—
But then, in a flash of light on the very verge of darkness, Khal Kan saw the truth that neither he nor the other had ever imagined.…
Henry Stevens lay dead upon his bed in the neat bedroom of his little suburban cottage. And in the room, his sobbing wife was trying to tell her story to the physician and the psychiatrist.
“It was all so sudden,” she sobbed. “I awoke, and found that Herry was clenching his fists as though in a convulsion and was shouting—something about Jotan being safe now. And then—he was dead—”
The physician was soothing her as he led her to another room. When he came back, his face was keen as he looked at Doctor Thorn.
“You heard her story?” he said to the psychiatrist. “I telephoned you because I understood he’d been consulting you. I can’t understand this thing at all.”
He pointed to Henry’s motionless figure. “The man had nothing organically wrong with him, as I happen to know. Yet he died in his sleep—as though from terrible mental shock.”
“You’ve hit it, Doctor,” nodded Doctor Thorn thoughtfully. “If my guess is right, he was dreaming, and when his dream-self was killed, Henry Stevens died, also.”
He went on to tell the physician of the case.
The practitioner’s face became incredulous as he heard.
“The poor devil!” he ejaculated. “He had that dream and dream-life all his life long, and when his dream-self died, he died too by mental suggestion.”
“I am not sure that that other life of his, that world of Thar, was a dream,” Doctor Thorn replied soberly.
“Oh, come, Doctor,” protested the other. “If Henry Stevens and Earth were real, and we know they were, Thar and Khal Kan must have been only his dream.”
“I wonder,” replied the psychiatrist. “Did you ever hear of mental rapport? Cases where two people’s minds are so tuned that one experiences the other’s feelings and thoughts, when his own mind is relaxed and quiescent? There have been a good many such provable cases.
“Suppose,” Thorn went on, “that Henry Stevens was a unique case of that. Suppose that his mind happened to be in rapport, from the time of his birth, with the mind of another man—another man, who was not of Earth but of some world far across the universe from ours? Suppose that each man’s subconscious was able to experience the other man’s thoughts and feelings, when his own consciousness was relaxed and sleeping? So that each man, all his life, seemed each night to dream the other man’s life?”
“Good Lord!” exclaimed the practitioner. “If that were true, both Henry Stevens and Khal Kan were real, on far-separated worlds?”
Doctor Thorn nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, and the two men would be so much in rapport that the death of one would kill the other. It’s only a theory, and we can never know if it’s true. Probably he knows, now—”
Henry Stevens, lying there, seemed to be smiling at their speculations. But it was not his own smile that lay upon his face. It was the reckless, gay, triumphant smile of Khal Kan.
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