Fugitives of the Stars [The Two Thousand Centuries]

by Edmond Hamilton

  As he straightened up with the little weapon, he saw that Wasek had come around. The look in his pale eyes was like a laser-beam of hate.

  "I'm sorry,” Horne said. “You see, I was telling the truth the first time and I've got to prove it, and this is the only way..."

  Under the blaze of those eyes, his voice trailed away. Then his anger returned and he said, “The hell with you."

  He went and knocked loudly on the door.

  The guard came and opened it. The guard was a careful man but he was not a very fast one. He was not supposed to have any captives more dangerous than drunken spacemen to watch. He tried to get his weapon out but the stunner in Horne's fist buzzed like a baby rattlesnake and the guard went down. Horne dragged him in and laid him beside Wasek. He figured that Wasek would probably work himself loose before the guard woke up which gave him very little time.

  He was keyed up for anything now, and when he went out into the corridor he was ready to use the stunner on anyone who got in his way. It was a slight anticlimax to find that there was nobody. The hour was late and the Port Authority building was not built or run like a prison. It was the simplest thing in the world for Horne to walk downstairs and out a side door.

  The twisting streets of the spacemen's quarter took him in.

  He knocked twenty minutes later at a door in an ill-lighted alley, and the face of a man looked out at him—one of those faces that seemed to have been dragged right through the slime and crime of a hundred planets.

  "You'll remember me,” Horne said. “I was in court here when you were questioned in that vian-smuggling case two years ago. You were guilty as hell, but they couldn't prove it."

  The face smiled. “Ah, yes, Officer Horne. But we are in trouble now, are we not? We have broken detention or jumped bail, and come here for..."

  Horne pushed past him into a dingy room and laid money on the table. “For enough of a disguise to get me past the port police, for a Spaceman First Class ticket, and for a berth on the first ship that goes to Skereth. There's three hundred credits."

  The face laughed out loud. “Really, for a sum as small as that, it is naive to expect."

  "There's more,” said Horne, and reached into his pocket and brought out the stunner. “There's this. A splitting headache for a week. Or would you rather take the credits?"

  Ten days later, looking not very much like himself, Horne was deep in the bowels of a dumpy Fringe trading-ship as it lifted off for Skereth.

  Horne had time to think on the long, slow voyage back out through the Fringe. He had time to turn over and over in his mind everything he knew about Ardric. There wasn't very much, and the main part of it was that Ardric had said his home was at Rillah, which was the old ruling city of Skereth and lay across a small landlocked sea from the new spaceport town. Of course, Ardric might have lied about that as he had lied about everything else...

  When he thought too long about Ardric, his hands would tremble a little. He had begun to fear that if he ever did find Ardric he would kill him outright instead of making him tell the truth. Then the black depression would come back on him and whisper to him that Ardric was really dead, that he could never have made it away from the wreck in time, and that he was an idiot to go hunting a dead man, a phantom...

  Skereth finally rolled toward the freighter, a tawny globe. When the ship went down through the eternal cloud-layer to the busy spaceport at Skambar, Horne felt a pang, thinking of how short a time ago he had left here as the Chief Pilot of a good ship without a worry in the world.

  When the freighter docked, Horne did not leave it with the rest of the crew. He deliberately scamped on a job, and had timed it so that a cursing Second Officer swore that he would have no planet-liberty until he did his task over. Horne sulked and went to work, using every opportunity to keep an eye on the docks outside the ship.

  There was a little group of Skereth men outside the dockgate. They were not officials, but they stood there talking among themselves and watching every man who came out of the ship. From time to time one or two of them went away and then came back in cone-fliers.

  Were they police?

  Maybe. Horne had known quite well that his escape would be broadcast, and that officials on Skereth would receive the warning.

  But what if they weren't police? Unless he was dead wrong in all his deductions, there was a big, deep conspiracy on Skereth ... one that had used Ardric to kill Morivenn so that Skereth would stay out of the Federation. He, Horne, had implied as much in the testimony he had given at his hearing, and nobody had believed him.

  "No, not police,” thought Horne. “The men who sent Ardric on his errand..."

  They would guess that Jim Horne, escaped prisoner, might come back to Skereth looking for Ardric. He had shouted his charges against Ardric loudly enough. And if Jim Horne came back to Skereth they were, quite apparently ready for him.

  Horne revised his plans. He was not going to be able to walk out and take the first public flier across the landlocked sea to Rillah. He would have to go some other way.

  He made his work last until night, was profanely forbidden liberty that night, and went to his bunk. In the small hours of the morning, in the forever starless darkness, Horne slipped out of the ship. The watchers were still out there, though there were only three of them now. He could use the stunner, but he had a pretty sound idea that there would be others close by, and he did not think he would get very far that way.

  There was an electrical barrier around the ship, not lethally charged but highly unpleasant if you touched it. Horne touched down in the dark on the other side of the ship from the gate, and began work with the insulated tools he had filched out of the ship.

  Twice he had to stop and crouch like a motionless shadow while cone-fliers went by overhead with a lazy, whistling sound. He was pretty sure that these were other watchers. They were, it seemed to Horne, awfully thorough about this.

  Too thorough, too ruthless. There must be more to all this than just a political bias against Skereth joining the Federation. But what could it be?

  Horne made his opening and slipped through it, and bumped head-on into two figures coming along so quietly he hadn't heard them.

  He jumped back, and then he saw that they were Nightbirds. They raised no alarm, they did not even glance twice at him, but minced along on their ridiculous avian feet, soundless as shadows. He saw them go on around the dock and pass the little group at the gate without stopping, and he remembered how Mica had said that they worked in the spaceport area by night and had little to do with humans and nothing to do with human police.

  He had been sorry for that, the night that he and Vinson were attacked. He was glad of it, now.

  Within an hour, Horne stood in the heavy darkness on the fishermen's wharf of Skambar. The light metal powerboats lay along the narrow wharves chuckling sloppily among themselves as they rose and fell. There was no watchman on the wharf. The landlocked sea of Skereth was so famously full of hideous forms of life, that only the hardiest of men fished it by day and no one in their eight mind would take a boat out on it at night.

  "So I'm not in my right mind,” Horne muttered, and picked out the likeliest boat for his purpose, a metalloy two-man skiff with good power.

  It occurred to him, as he took it out, that he was taking some fisherman's wealth and livelihood. The old Jim Horne would have felt pangs of conscience about that. The new Horne dismissed the thought. All that mattered now was that he was on his way to Rillah ... and Ardric.

  CHAPTER VI

  A GREAT SINUOUS shining arm reached out of the black water directly ahead of the skiff. Horne slammed the steering lever hard over with one hand and reached for his stunner with the other. The little bullet-shaped craft shot off on a frantic tangent drawing swirls of cold phosphorescent fire from the water under its metalloy hull. The arm continued its lazy motion without any sign of disturbance. Horne began to laugh. It was only a long, thick coil of weed, given a semblance of life by the
rolling of the whole bed in some hidden undercurrent.

  His laughter became rather too loud, ringing with a shocking loneliness across the empty sea. Horne stopped it. He couldn't let himself get edgy now. He had come a long way and a brutal hard one, but he had a longer and harder way yet to go to the city of Rillah in quest of a ghost.

  "Maybe,” he muttered to himself, “I better get some sleep."

  He was sweating and shaking in a way that alarmed him.

  He pulled back the speed lever until the skiff was moving at a safe rate of speed. Its radar beam would take it around rocks or islands of floating weed too thick for passage, bringing it back to the course he had set. The night would go on for a long time yet, for nights here endured almost as long as three Earth days.

  He lay down in the narrow well and slid the plastic canopy over him in case it rained. Rain on Skereth was not merely a matter of getting wet. A shower could swamp the skiff before he even had time to wake up.

  He lay still, feeling the quiet lift and fall of the black water like the breathing of a slumbering giant. He was exhausted, burned out inside by the intensity that life had taken on for him in these last weeks.

  Lying there, he thought suddenly of Denman. He remembered how sorry he had felt for the little Federation man when they had dropped him on that barbaric planet to live with humanoids in order to try and trace” the slavers who were oppressing them. He had felt almost guilty to be leaving Denman there.

  "I should have saved my pity for myself,” Horne thought.

  He lay staring up at the sky through the transparent canopy, waiting for sleep, and he noticed what he thought was a dim star, low and far off in the west.

  "The clouds must have broken,” he thought, and closed his eyes. The skiff moved gently over the breathing sea.

  Broken clouds, a star ... that meant tomorrow the sun would shine.

  Horne started up, flinging back the canopy. He had been half asleep or he would have remembered that not once in a generation did the clouds break on Skereth.

  Whatever the light was in the sky, it was not a star.

  It was still there, but brighter, and as he watched it now he could see that it moved back and forth as well as forward. It reminded him of a man with a flashlight walking in a dark place, looking for something.

  Looking for something.

  He watched it, crouched over the controls of the skiff. His heart was beating hard again and his hands quivered.

  Back and forth the light went, coming ever closer, sweeping the dark sea.

  Looking for something...

  Looking for him...

  The light moved, unhurried, methodical, restless. He started to push the speed lever forward and then changed his mind. The damned phosphorescence would give him away if he made a wake. From the sky it would show like a fiery arrow pointing right at him. Even his present rate of speed was now too much. He shoved the lever into the off slot and stood looking desperately around, wondering what to do. If he stayed drifting where he was, eventually the sweeping light would catch him in its beam and the men behind it would either take him back to be tried or shoot him dead, probably the latter. He had to hide. But where in the open sea did you hide?

  A weed island if you could find one and if you could get to it in time.

  He peered and squinted into the night.

  A smear of luminescence showed, soft and faint to his left, too high to be merely a surface patch. He glanced again at the light and then he began feverishly to strip to his shirt and shorts. His feet were already bare. There was a plastic mooring line reeled up forward for use where no magnetic moorings were available. He tied the end of it around his waist and slid over the side, trying not to splash.

  The water was warm. It was calm, but with the great slow pulsing aliveness of the sea that is never quite still. It was very wide and black and there were creatures in it more hideous and hungry than any in the oceans of Earth. Horne, swam slowly, with infinite care, towing the skiff behind him, moving his head constantly from side to side looking for tell-tale gleams.

  Behind him the light searched closer and closer.

  He swam faster toward the pale glow ahead of him.

  Cold slippery tentacles of weed came fingering his bare flesh. He shrank from it but there was no other way, so he forced himself on into the mass that grew thicker and thicker as he went until he could almost stand in it. Soon the high-growing fronds curved over his head like trees, so that he moved in a tangled tracery of soft light, leaf, steam and branch all glowing silver against the blackness of sea and sky.

  He could no longer see the searching presence in the sky. The mat of weed was slimy but solid under foot. He braced himself and pulled on the skiff until it was well in under the tree-like fronds. Then he climbed hastily back in, shuddering with revulsion from the touch of the weed. He began to pull streamers of the stuff over the metal hull and over the partly closed canopy so that no tell-tale glint would give him away. Then he hunched up as in a cave surrounded by the silver-glowing weed and waited.

  There was a kind of lazy whistling in the sky now. He could not see the craft but, by the sound, he figured it was one of the cone-fliers. The scientists of Skereth had learned to control the G-particle in the nucleus of the iron atom some time before the scientists of Earth had even discovered its existence. This one sounded like a compressed-air unit for low-velocity flight.

  The soft luminescence of the weed was blanked out by a harsher and more brilliant light. It moved with agonizing slowness across the floating island, seeking, probing.

  Horne drew his head down between his shoulders, as though that would help.

  Through the open end of the canopy, looking over the stem, Horne could see the weed now as an ugly tangle of pallid wormy stems and flabby leaves, all its fairy-like beauty destroyed by the pitiless light. And he saw something else.

  Something large and wetly glistening and independently alive.

  Horne froze where he crouched, one hand outstretched to touch the little stunner laid ready beside him, but not picking it up.

  The large glistening thing flowed and contracted, flowed and contracted, moving with a kind of single-minded determination that was horrible to watch. All Horne's boyhood nightmares returned to him. Long ago and far away on Earth he had lived near the sandy beaches, loving the sea but wondering why it had to spawn such disgusting creatures in its splendid depths. Now the ultimate in horror was lapping steadily toward him, and the damned cone hovered overhead sweeping its searchlight back and forth, suspicious of the island which was the only place where a man might hide a stolen skiff and himself.

  Horne sat, trapped. He didn't dare to make any undue disturbance in the weed by using the stunner to fight the thing off.

  He did not dare let it get into the skiff with him, either.

  The light penetrated through his camouflage of weed fronds and lit up the inside of the skiff so that he felt as though everybody in the universe could see him. He swore at it under his breath, muttering, “Go on, can't you? Go on!” He drew himself together, flinching from the momentarily expected blast of destruction from above, and staring hollow-eyed at the hungry creature that was only interested in getting its dinner, flowing at him over the wet weed. Finally he couldn't stand it any longer. He slid the canopy the rest of the way shut, nipping a rubbery gelatinous edge that was already flapping over the stem. It was a very small movement. If they saw it overhead they would have to see it, that was all.

  Apparently they did not. The light filtering into the skiff got dimmer. At first he thought it was all because the sea-thing was climbing up over the top of the canopy. But then he realized that the cone had moved on. The whistling of its propulsion unit became more distant, fading slowly as the cone continued its sweeping operations out over the sea again.

  He picked up the stunner and waited, feeling the stern sink a little with the dragging weight, watching the underside of the creature slide up over the canopy and hoping the plastic
would hold.

  When the weed was all gleaming silver again and the sound of the cone was quite gone, Horne did several things with almost hysterical swiftness. With his left hand he punched the firing key that started the skiff's small jet. Simultaneously, with his right hand, he wrenched canopy back a few inches and triggered the stunner directly into the creature, praying that the thing had at least enough of a nervous system to feel it.

  It had. The creature began a slow, enormous flopping that shook the weed island and threw the skiff around so violently that Horne was tumbled with bone-cracking force against ‘the side, where he managed to hang on. After a few minutes the motion subsided and he looked up and saw that the canopy was clear. The shaking of the weed had subsided outside. He shut off the jet and peered cautiously over the stern, pushing the canopy back. The thing, not liking the stunner's shock, had floundered deep in the water and only ripples from underneath rocked the weed. Horne waited until they had died away and crept to the bow of the skiff. Then with the utmost reluctance he entrusted himself to the weed again.

  When he had hauled the skiff into open water again he clambered into it and dried himself and pulled his clothes on, and then took a couple of deep pulls on a flask he had found among the meager stores. The dim “star” was still visible, this time moving away toward the eastern horizon. He looked after it, hatefully. He'd been lucky this time, but it was in no sense a victory.

  If they were hunting for him on Skereth they knew why he was here and where he was most likely to go to Rillah, Ardric's home city. Their course across this landlocked sea was also the course to Rillah, and they would inevitably be there long before him. So he would have to change all of his plans, such as they were. He would not head straight for Rillah now, but would have to land somewhere many miles out of his way and circle around to come at the city from another direction. Because, of course, they would be waiting for him.