The Lani People Part 34

"But you didn't," Kennon said, "and to show my grat.i.tude I'm letting you get away with a whole skin. I don't expect you to be grateful, but at least you'll not be on my conscience. I don't enjoy killing, not even things like you."

Douglas sneered. "You're soft--a soft sentimental fool."

"Admitted," Kennon said, "but that's my nature."

"Yet you'd destroy the family, wreck Outworld Enterprises, and throw a whole world into chaos over a few thousand animals. I don't understand you."

"They're human," Kennon said flatly.

"Admitting they might once have been, they're not now."

"And whose fault is that?"

"Not ours," Douglas said promptly. "If there is any fault it's that of the court who decided they were humanoid."

"You didn't help any."

"Why should we? Does one treat a shrake like a brother?--or a varl?--or a dog? We treat them like the animals they are. And we've done no worse with the Lani. Our consciences are clear."

Kennon laughed humorlessly. "Yet this clear conscience makes you want to kill me, so you can keep on treating them as animals--even though you know they're human."

"I know nothing of the sort. But you're right about the killing, I'd kill you cheerfully if I had the chance. It's our necks if you get away with this. Of course, you probably won't, but why take the chance. I like my neck more than I like yours."

"You're honest at any rate," Kennon admitted. "And in a way I don't blame you. To you it's probably better to be a rich slaver living off the legacy of a Degrader than a penniless humanitarian. But you've lost your chance."

Douglas screamed with rage. He whirled on Kennon, his face a distorted mask of hate.

"Hold it!" Kennon barked. "I don't want to kill you, but I'll burn a hole clear through your rotten carca.s.s if you make another move. I have no love for your kind."

Douglas spat contemptuously. "You haven't got the guts," he snarled. But he didn't move.

"Just stand still--very still," Kennon said softly. The iron in his voice was not hidden by the quiet tone.

Douglas shivered. "I'll get you yet," he said, but there was no force in the threat.

"Here's the rope you wanted," Copper said as she emerged abruptly from the darkness. "I had a hard time finding it."

"You haven't been too long," Kennon said. "Now tie Douglas' hands behind him while I keep him covered."

"It's a pleasure," Copper murmured.

CHAPTER XVIII

"I'm frightened," Copper said, twisting uncomfortably in the shock chair beside Kennon's.

"After you have been so brave?" Kennon asked. "That's nonsense. It's just nervous reaction. Now web in like I showed you. It's time for blast-off. We don't dare wait much longer."

"All right--but I have a feeling that this isn't right. Something is going to go wrong."

"I hope you don't have precognition." Kennon smiled. "I've checked everything. The ship is as good as she'll ever be. There's nothing more that we can do."

"There's one consolation," Copper said wanly. "At we'll die together."

"There's a better chance that we'll live together."

"I hope so."

"Ready?" Kennon asked.

She nodded.

He flipped the switches that would send the fuel rods into the reactor.

Below them a soft, barely audible whine ascended the sonic scale to a point of irritating inaudibility. Kennon smiled. The spindizzy was functioning properly. He flipped a second bank of switches and a dull roar came from the buried stem. Ashes and pumice heated to incandescence were blown through the air. Molten drops of radioactive lava skittered across the durilium hull as Kennon advanced the power. The whole stem of the ship was immersed in a seething lake of bolling rock as the Egg lifted slowly with ponderous dignity into the night sky.

"Hang on!" Kennon said. "I'm going to hyper." His hand moved a red lever and the Egg shimmered and vanished with a peculiar wrenching motion into an impossible direction that the mind could not grasp. And the interceptor missile from Otpen One nosed through the s.p.a.ce the Egg had occupied.

"We made it!" Kennon said, looking across the writhing semifluid control board, shifting oddly in the harsh yellow monochromatic light that pervaded the cabin. The screens were leaking like sieves, but they were holding well enough to keep Cth yellow from being anything more than an annoyance. He glanced over at Copper, a fantastically elongated Copper who looked like a madman's dream of chaos.

And Copper screamed! The sound echoed and re-echoed, dying away with a lingering discordant reverberation that made his skin tingle.

"Copper! It's all right! It's all fight! Stop it!"

Copper screamed again and her elongated figure suddenly foreshortened and collapsed into a small writhing ball from which two small pink hands emerged clutching at a gelid ma.s.s of air that flowed sluggishly around them.

And Kennon knew what he had forgotten! Hypers.p.a.ce with leaky screens was nothing to inflict upon an unprepared mind. It is one thing to endure partial exposure after months of training, with experienced medics standing by to help you through the shock phase, but quite another to be thrust from a safe and sheltered existence into the mind shattering distortions of the Cth continuum.

The Egg was old. Her screens, never good at best, were hardly more than filters. Through the hull, through the drive lattice, the viciously distorted Cth environment seeped into the ship turning prosaic shapes of controls and instruments into writhing ma.s.ses of obscene horror that sent extensions wiggling off into nothingness at eye-aching angles. A s.p.a.ceman could take this--knowing it wasn't real--but a tyro could not.

Copper collapsed. Her mind, a.s.saulted by sensations no untrained person should experience, went into shock. But she wasn't granted the mercy of unconsciousness. Terrified by a pseudo reality that surpa.s.sed her wildest nightmares, she stared wide-eyed at the control room and the thing that had been Kennon. She screamed until her throat was raw, until the monster beside her touched her with Kennon's hands. Then, mercifully, she felt a stinging in her arm and all sensation ceased.

Kennon stared glumly at the controls. Fleming alone knew how many objective years were pa.s.sing outside as they hurtled through four-s.p.a.ce.

Subjectively it would only be hours aboard the Egg, but a decade--or maybe a century--might pa.s.s outside this mad universe where neither time nor speed had meaning. The old ships didn't have temporal compensators, nor could they travel through upper bands of Cth where subjective and objective time were more nearly equal. They were trapped in a semi-stasis of time as the ship fled on through the distorted monochromatic regions that bypa.s.sed normal s.p.a.ce.

The Egg slipped smoothly out of the hyper jump, back into the normal universe. Beta floated above them, the blue shield of her atmosphere shining softly in the light of Beta's sun.

"Couldn't hit it that good again in a hundred tries," Kennon gloated.

"Halfway across the galaxy--and right on the nose." He looked at the shock chair beside him. Copper was curled into a tight ball inside the confining safety web, knees drawn up, back bent, head down--arms wrapped protectingly around her legs--the fetal position of catatonic shock.

He shook her shoulder--no response. Her pulse was thready and irregular.

Her breathing was shallow. Her lips were blue. Her condition was obvious--s.p.a.ce shock--extreme grade. She'd need medical attention if she was going to live. And she'd need it fast!

"Just why, you educated nitwit," he snarled at himself, "didn't you have sense enough to give her that injection of Sonmol before we hypered! You haven't the sense of a decerebrate Capellan grackle!"

He turned on the radio. "Emergency!" he said. "Any station! s.p.a.ce-shock case aboard. Extreme urgency."