Star Bridge Part 5

Horn shrugged. The Golden Folk screamed their appreciation. "Eron! Eron! Eron!" they shouted, until it rang against the hills.

"Eron, yes!" Kohlnar said, and his amplified voice overwhelmed the shouting. "But more than that-man! Man's greatest achievement-the civilization of the stars. Eron! Man at his peak, one great culture reaching out from Eron in every direction almost five hundred light years, only possible because of Eron. And here-Eron's most recent victory!"

He stabbed a b.u.t.ton.

The Cl.u.s.ter behind. In front the colossal ruins of the last demolished fortress on Quarnon Four. The surrender of Peter Sair. Small, stout, white-haired, old, the Liberator knelt in front of a tall, stern Kohlnar and signed the articles of capitulation. Behind Sair were the kneeling ranks of his defeated troops, receiving their yellow number disks. Behind them, symbolically, were numbered slaves toiling in the fields and mines and factories beneath hovering, black, gold-banded cruisers.

"Victory!" Kohlnar's voice was husky and low. "Not for Eron. For man. Those who challenge Eron challenge not the Empire but man's greatness. Let this be their answer. Eron will preserve man's goal, man's inheritance-the stars, strong and united. This is Eron's mission. She will not let it die, though we and others die to preserve it. Now, as a symbol of man's continuity of striving, we dedicate this Tube, uniting Eron with the place from which our ancestors launched the first ships toward the stars."

Behind him, the Directors stepped forward. Wendre stepped quickly to his side and placed her right arm around him. Duchane and Matal stood at his right, Fenelon and Ronholm at his left. Kohlnar rested his hand upon a golden switch on top of the railing; the others placed their hands on his. They pushed it closed.

The Tube. Suddenly it was there, golden and real, reaching out from the far side of the black cube toward the east, rising through the air, spearing out into s.p.a.ce, crossing the thirty light years that separated Earth from Eron.

Horn's eyes followed it up and up until the distance narrowed it to a thread and then the thread was gone. He wondered if it was perspective alone that shrank the one-hundred-meter diameter into nothing. He remembered, vaguely, something about a real dwindling....

Earth and Eron, linked now a second time, joined by a new umbilical cord. Not to feed the mother, worn and barren from the long agonies of childbirth, but to drain away the last, slow streams of life.

The Empire, held together by these golden cords, nourishing in the womb a great, greedy child. It had grown too large to live independently. It must protect these cords or starve.

Strange, Horn thought, that strength makes weakness. Through being strong, Eron had become the most dependent world in the Empire.

And yet, looking at the Tube, Horn couldn't deny its beauty.

His eyes slid back down the golden cord. A buzzard brushed incautiously against the Tube wall and burned brilliantly. Here and there along the Tube, it flared as insects leaped at it blindly.

That was the Tube: deadly beauty. Beauty to Eron, food for the greedy child. To all others, it was death.

The guards swirled near the reviewing stand. Horn looked down in time to see Denebolan giants drag a man from under it. Horn stared through the gun sight. It was Wu. The ragged old man was protesting vigorously and clinging desperately to his battered suitcase. There was no sign of Lil. Wu was hurried away. On the back of his neck was a large, red carbuncle Horn had never noticed before.

Horn's lips twisted. So it was the thief who was caught, not the a.s.sa.s.sin.

The gun sight drifted back up the steps to the group on the platform, separated a little now as it acknowledged the audience's enthusiasm.

Like the finger of fate, the sight moved across the faces of the rulers of Eron.

Young, proud Ronholm, flushed with triumph.

Thin, sardonic Fenelon, contemptuous of the herd.

Wendre Kohlnar, radiantly lovely, holding her father's arm with a slim, golden hand.

The dying man, Kohlnar, blinking in the sunlight, his face set with the effort of keeping himself erect.

Duchane, powerful and arrogant, his eyes searching the crowd for those who did not cheer or cheered without enthusiasm.

Short, fat Matal, eyes small and calculating as they estimated how much of the applause was for him.

Which one! The question was idle. Horn knew which one. That was why he was here. To kill a man. To shoot one man down from ambush. The sight wavered.

Why am I here? The answer this time was a little different. Because someone wants this man killed.

It had nothing to do with Horn. He was just an instrument. Suddenly he resented that, resented the necessity of doing something he had no interest in doing. The getting here was something different. This thing was easy and distasteful.

But the necessity was there. He had taken the money to do a job. The job was not yet done.

The crosshairs steadied. They centered themselves on the dying man.

Horn gave the thumbscrew another half-twist, estimated the air velocity, and peered through the sight once more. The gun, resting on the wall, didn't waver. The General Manager of Eron seemed only a few meters away. The symbol of Empire waited for the executioner.

Slowly Horn's finger squeezed the trigger. The pistol jumped, just a little. For a second Kohlnar looked surprised, and then his face sagged, blankly, and his body folded gently to the platform.

THE HISTORY.

Star-wandering....

That strange, wonderful period after the breakdown of the first interplanetary civilization. That irresistible bursting-forth which scattered man's seed hundreds of light years across the stars. That time of struggle and adventure, villainy and heroism.

There were heroes in those days, men larger than reality and magnified in the retelling. Men like Roy Kellon, they became the demi-G.o.ds of a new mythology.

Man didn't emerge from the star-wandering quite the same. The engines of the first interstellar ships were poorly shielded; that changed him. The worlds he settled changed him. Isolation changed him. And he traced his ancestry from heroes and demi-G.o.ds.

From such origins should come the superman. But the changes were insignificant. Men were still men, even the three-meter Denebolan giants who formed Eron's elite guard.

Even the Golden Folk of Eron, who lived, loved, and died like other men.

Still, it is unwise to underestimate the psychological importance of a slight variation in pigmentation.

How do you define the superman? The Golden Folk knew....

6.

FLIGHT.

The scene was frozen under an afternoon sun. All eternity seemed concentrated into a moment, unchanging, unchangeable. And then- Chaos....

The Directors scattered. Only Wendre remained, kneeling beside the crumpled thing that had been her father, then rising, straight and unafraid, to search the edge of the field.

Horn held her face in the gun sight. It was a caress. His finger was far from the trigger.

The charging guards reached the platform. Their ranks became a living shield, three meters high. The last thing Horn saw was the black hulk of Duchane's hunter. It was dead against the monument. The bullet had pa.s.sed through Kohlnar and struck down another killer.

The amplifier shouted orders in a sure, powerful voice. Duchane, Horn thought.

The voice was quick and accurate. No one would move except the guards. They would a.s.semble under their officers at this side of the monument.

Scoutships climbed into the sky, were launched by battleships, circled with misleading laziness around the field. Companies of guards moved outward from the monument. They carved a pie-shaped sector. Its point was Kohlnar's body; its base enclosed, unerringly, Horn's hiding place in the hollow behind the wall.

"The General Manager is dead," Duchane said softly. It was a voice used to announce sacrilege and desecration.

For the first time, Horn realized what he had done. To Eron, it was sacrilege, it was desecration. Horn had shattered the symbol of empire, and Eron could not rest until he was caught and punished. All the resources of Eron would be thrown into the search.

Psychological factors are almost as important to empires as the fleets they can muster or the firepower they can a.s.semble. Revolt would be futile, true; Eron could crush any world in a few hours. But let rebellion spring up here and there, continually, let the flow of trade falter, let the mercenaries themselves grow restless-and Eron would tremble.

Eron's rule rested upon a pedestal of omnipotence. No distance was too great for her fleet to go; no slight was too small for her dignity to overlook. Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them.

Omnipotence. How else could the Empire control a conquered population exceeding that of the Golden Folk by a million times? But let the slave worlds suspect that the pedestal is cracked-!

If not in outrage, then in calculated policy, Eron had to capture the a.s.sa.s.sin. Had to! No effort could be too great. And, once captured, his punishment must be salutory. Long, excruciating, and public.

Horn licked his lips. An empire against one man. It was like a death sentence. His chest heaved, sucked air deep into his lungs. The air smelled sweet to the dead man. The sun felt warm.

Horn shook himself. He was still alive. They must catch him first. He would give them a chase yet.

The guards had almost reached the base of the battleship towering close to Horn. The buzzards circling blackly overhead were wingless. It was time to leave.

Horn faded back through the branches of the juniper into the hidden mouth of the tunnel. As he turned his back to the light, he clipped the pistol to the cord around his shoulder and let the cord pull the gun tight to his chest. A few hundred paces into the darkness, a searching hand retrieved the torch. A moment later it was flaming.

The fugitive's walk was swift but unhurried. When legs are matched against ships, hurry is pointless. The pursuers would think of the desert long before the fugitive got there.

But how soon would they find the tunnel mouth? The hunted man broke into a trot. The trot became a headlong run. Panic ran with him.

Down the long ramps into vast blacknesses. Running through them wildly, the torch flame dancing and leaping into the darkness and swallowed up immediately. Running ... running ... lost....

The tunnel went down too fast. It ended in a black pool. The hunted man stared at it with wide, dazed eyes. His gasping lungs began to ease. His mind cleared a little. Somewhere he had turned the wrong way.

He retraced his steps. In the echoing chambers, he tried to reconstruct the location of the right tunnel. Where it should have been was rubble. The hunted man fought his way through it, tossing the stones behind him with growing haste. The torch brushed out against a wall, and he worked in night, complete, impenetrable.

At last he felt a breath of air against his sweaty face. There was s.p.a.ce in front of him. He scrambled upright and began to run again. One hand clung desperately to a useless stick of tar-soaked wood.

A subtle warning told him to slow down: a distant tinkling? A change in the echoes of his frantic footsteps? He stopped. He began to breathe again. Once more he started to think. He lit the torch again.

He raised the torch in front of him. A meter away was the pit, gaping blackly, hungrily. He walked toward it, his legs trembling wearily. He put one foot on the girder and stopped. He remembered Wu tottering, falling....

He had crossed this bridge so easily a few hours ago. What stopped him now? The hunted man knew. This morning he hadn't known the shape of fear. He knew it now, and everything was tinged with it. His heart beat swiftly. His chest drew in greedy gasps of air. His hands trembled.

But behind him was certain death. Ahead was uncertainty. He edged out on the girder, carefully, thinking about the long way there was to fall, and the thinking made him weak and dizzy. He swayed, caught himself, and crossed the last meter in a clumsy run.

Panic caught him again, jumping the pit effortlessly, and shot adrenaline through his veins and spurred his feet, and he ran again and crawled where he couldn't run, and slithered where he couldn't crawl. And at last the light came, ghostly at first but growing, and it was like a promise of resurrection from the night of death. The hunted man threw down the torch and ran toward the light.

He stopped at the mouth of the tunnel, high above the little valley, and the sight calmed him. The panic was gone, suddenly, and he couldn't understand why it had ever driven him, and the long flight through the tunnel was like something that had happened to someone else. He was sane again.

More than half the valley was in shadows. Soon the cliffs would rise up in front of the sun, and the valley would be dark, and after that the sky would begin to deepen and the night would come. By that time he must be out on the desert. Night would be his chance. Once it had been an enemy; now it would be a friend.

Before dark he would have to be rested and sure of himself. His stomach complained. It must be fed. After getting away from the hunters, his body must take him far across the red-dust desert.

Horn picked his way carefully down the uncertain, rocky slope. He pressed through the bushes to the little stream. His hands worked quickly. They fashioned snares out of vines and branches and notched twigs. He glanced occasionally at the slowly darkening sky, but it was empty. So far, the hunters hadn't discovered this oasis.

With a bundle of leaves, he brushed away the human traces around the snares and backed away up the icy stream. He stopped when he reached a pool, dammed behind a fallen tree trunk, packed leaves, and pebbles. Horn knelt and drank deeply and refilled his half-empty canteen.

He stripped off his soaked boots and ragged clothes and plunged into the water. It bit into the cuts and bruises that scarred and mottled his chest and back, and it set his teeth to chattering in spite of a grim jaw. In a moment the shivers stopped, and his body began to glow as he splashed vigorously. Again and again he ducked his head under the water and came up shaking it from his hair in a flying spray.

When he finally pulled himself out and rubbed himself dry with his ragged shirt, he felt renewed. He pa.s.sed his hand reflectively over his beard, got a long pocket knife out of a pants pocket, and honed it against a smooth pebble. He hacked at the beard, honed the knife again, and in a few minutes his face was reasonably smooth. His chin and cheeks were pale against the dark tan of his face, and the unveiled mouth was surprisingly sensitive.

Life surged powerfully through his body. With it came purpose and determination. He was clean again and young and strong and alive. He had done what he had set out to do, what he had been paid to do, what no one had thought possible. Maybe it hadn't been a proud thing, to shoot a man from ambush, but Kohlnar hadn't been innocent. There had been blood on his hands.

Let all Eron come against him; he would survive, because survival is more than an instinct-it is a desire, and in him the desire was strong.

These were the things he told himself as he strapped the heavy moneybelt around his waist, pulled on pants and boots, drew the still damp rags of the shirt around his shoulders, slipped on the cord of the pistol, lifted the canteen by its strap, and set out to inspect his snares.

They were empty, all of them. The sun was gone, twilight was fading, and he would have to go hungry into the desert.

He shrugged and followed the creek as it dwindled into a rivulet and almost disappeared close to the hole in the cliff wall. He crept through the small tunnel on hands and knees, annoyed by the way it seemed to whine, cautiously parted the bush at the far end, and peered into the lesser darkness. Here the whine was louder. It was not the tunnel; it was ships, many of them, in the sky above the desert.

The lesser darkness was broken by patches of light. They moved aimlessly across the desert. Horn crawled out onto the flat rock and stood up in the night, his back pressed against the warmth of the rock face behind.

The patches of light were almost square. They made a shifting, restless chessboard out of the desert: dark and light, light and dark, moving....

Horn threw himself down at the base of the cliff, huddling close to the bush, just before the searchlight pa.s.sed over him. A second later the whine came down to him, and he watched the light sweep into the desert.

Horn watched the crisscrossing lights, and there was a pattern. There was a consistency to the way the dark and light squares moved. The ships were using the sector principle. Hundreds of them swept the desert with eager, deadly fingers. Complicating the pattern were una.s.signed ships operating on a random-choice principle, lights on, lights off, darting here and there. There was no way of being certain exactly when a particular patch of desert would be safely dark or fatally brilliant.

Yet there was a pattern, and the fact that Horn could find it was a commentary upon empire. Ma.s.s government is government by rule and regulation. Obedience and conformity are overriding virtues; initiative is punished more often than rewarded. There are prescribed procedures for conducting a search, and no man can be punished for choosing rules over reality.

And yet, insofar as there is virtue in patterns, this was a good one. The sky whined with leashed desire, waiting to collapse on the hunted man. Horn crouched close to the protection of the bush, listening, studying the chessboard. He followed it on either side, far down the cliffs until it faded into distance and uncertainty. He could imagine what would happen if a sunbright beam chanced to pick him out.

He might dodge it for a moment, running this way and that in sudden twists and turns, but the ships would converge, pool their brilliance, and lay out a huge daylit square upon the night desert. In that square would be death.

He timed the pa.s.sage of the ship in front of him, counting slowly to himself. When a random-flying ship crossed the pattern, he started to sprint, counting, choosing the safe, dark squares of the chessboard. Light and dark, light and dark. The patterns shifting, sweeping behind him. Veer this way, jump that way. Light and dark. Dark, dark. Jump!

He had almost miscalculated the ship's speed. It had come up behind him, and he had sailed into darkness just as the ship had turned upon another leg of its pattern. Horn picked himself up out of the dust and began studying the next pattern.

Only after three lines of ships lay behind him did Horn grow discouraged. The chessboard still marched across the desert in front of him. There was no end to it. The sky still whined above his head. It would go on forever; the whine had become a part of him, fraying his nerves, nagging at his mind until thought was an effort.

Then he heard the baying. A mounted party of hunters pa.s.sed through a sweeping finger of light. The hunters circled there, back and forth, waiting for the man who was clever enough to pa.s.s the lights.

A line of hunting dogs, h.e.l.l-hounds, completely encircling the patterns of light. That was how Horn would have planned it. They would have their sectors, too. They would patrol them, relieved by fresh hunters and mounts when they grew tired, and if he managed to slip between them, they would quickly pick up his scent and be after him. How long could he evade them on foot?

And beyond them, what? Another line of guards with ready guns? And beyond them another?

The desert night was cool, but Horn was sweating. His situation was hopeless. One man can never hope to escape an empire, if the empire is determined to find him. Not here on the desert, where there was no place to hide. The daylight would be more merciless than the searchlights. With the daylight he was dead. With the daylight, they would scout the hills and send parties of men ferreting out the smallest hiding places. They would leave no crevice unexplored. An empire had to find the a.s.sa.s.sin.

Horn realized then what he would have to do. A haystack is no place to hide a needle. The best place is among other needles. The best place to hide a grain of sand is on a beach. A man can only hide among other men. Horn knew where he would have to go.