by Andre Norton
I dragged myself to the hammock, lay weakly back in it. I did not believe at that moment that we had the least chance of breaking through the outer defenses of Waystar. We and our ship must meet some force field which would hold us, intact, as our captors wanted. But some reckless desire to go down fighting made me take the zero stone out in my shaking hands. I broke the disguise it had given me, or hoped I did. Having no mirror I could not be sure.
Now—there was something I could do which would at least confuse them if they slapped a spy ray on us.
“Such comes now,” Eet reported and then closed his mind tightly, intent only on getting us out of the tunnel.
How much time did I have? The stone burned my hands but I held on. I had no mirror to mark the course of my transformation, but I willed it with all the energy and resource I had left. Then I lay back weakly, unable even to put away the precious source of my pain.
I looked blearily down what I could see of my prone body. There were, surely I could not be mistaken, the furred breeches, and above them the brilliance of a space admiral’s tunic. I turned my head a fraction from side to side. My arms were bare, below the elbow wearing the gemmed armlets. I was, I hoped, by the power of the zero stone, a complete copy of the Veep. If they now snooped us with a seeing ray, the change might give us a small advantage, a few moments of confusion among our enemies.
Eet did not turn to look at me but his thought rang in my head.
“Very well done. And—here comes their snoop ray!”
Not having his senses, I must take his word for that. I levered myself up in the hammock with what energy I could summon, which was only enough to keep me braced with some small semblance of alertness. Eet suddenly slapped a furred fist on the board and the answering leap of the LB pinned me against the hammock. My head spun, I was sick—then I was swept into darkness.
XIV
When I roused groggily I lay staring at the rounded expanse above me, not able at once to remember where I was, or perhaps even who I was. With what seemed painful and halting slowness, memory of the immediate past returned. At least we were still in existence; we had not been snuffed out by some defense weapon of the pirate stronghold. But were we free? Or held captive by a force beam? I tried to lever myself up and the LB hammock swayed.
But I had had a look at my own body and I was not now wearing the semblance of the Veep—though a furry dwarf still hunched at the controls of the small craft. My hand went to the bulge in my belt. The sooner I was sure I was myself again, the better. I had a strange feeling that I could not think or plan until I was Murdoc Jern outwardly as well as inwardly, as if the outer disguise could change me from myself into a weak copy of the man my father had been. Eet had been a cat, but I had willed that on him without his desire. This I had taken upon myself by my own wish, meant to be outer, not complete. What did make sense any more?
“You are yourself,” came Eet’s thought.
But there was something else. My hand rested upon a pocket wherein all those days, months, I had carried the zero stone. And there was no reassuring hard lump to be felt. It was flat—empty!
“The stone!” I cried that aloud. I drew myself up, though my body was weak and drained of energy. “The stone—”
Then Eet turned to me. His alien face was a mask as far as I was concerned. I could read no expression there.
“The stone is safe,” he thought-flashed.
“But where—?”
“It is safe,” he repeated. “And you are Murdoc Jern outwardly again. We are through their defenses. The snooper ray caught you in the Veep’s seeming and was deceived long enough for the stone to boost us out of range.”
“So that is the way you used it. I will take it now.” I held myself upright, though I must still clutch at the hammock to keep that position. Eet had used the zero stone even as we had once used it to boost the power of a Patrol scout ship and so escape capture. I was angry with myself for having overlooked that one weapon in our armament. “I will take it now,” I repeated when Eet made no move to show me where it was. Though I had worked on the LB under Ryzk’s direction I could not be sure where Eet had put it for the greatest effect in adding to our present drive.
“It is safe,” he told me for the third time. Now the evasiveness of that reply made an impression on me.
“It is mine—”
“Ours.” He was firm. “Or, rather, it was yours by sufferance.”
Now I was thinking clearly again. “The—the time I turned you into a cat.… You are afraid of that—”
“Once warned, I cannot be caught so again. But the stone is danger if used in an irresponsible fashion.”
“And you”—I controlled my rising anger with all the strength I had learned—“are going to see that it is not!”
“Just so. The stone is safe. And what is more to the purpose—look here.” He pointed with one of his fingers to something which, for the want of other safekeeping, lay in the second hammock.
I loosed one hand to pull that webbing a little toward me. There lay the bowl with the map incised on its outer surface. A moment later I held it close to my eyes.
With the bowl turned over, the bottom was a half sphere on which the small jewels which must be stars winked in the light. And I saw, now that I had the time and chance to view it searchingly, that those varied. My own species rate stars on our charts by color—red, blue, white, yellow, dwarfs and giants. And here it would seem that the unknown maker of this chart had done the same. Save in one place alone, where next to a yellow gem which might denote a sun was a zero stone!
Quickly I spun the bowl around, studying the loose pattern. Yes, there were other planets indicated about those colored suns, but they were done in tiny, amost invisible dots. Only the one was a gem.
“Why, think you?” Eet’s question reached me.
“Because it was the source!” I could hardly believe that we might hold the answer to our quest. I think my unbelief was born in the subconscious thought that it would be one of those quests, such as fill the ancient ballads and sagas, wherein the end is never quite in the grasp of mortals.
But it is one thing to hold a star map and another to find on it some already known point. I was no astro-navigator and unless some point of reference marked on this metal matched our known charts, we could spend a lifetime looking, unable even to locate the territory it pictured.
“We know where it was found,” Eet suggested.
“Yes, but it may be another case of a relic of an earlier civilization treasured by its finder long after and buried with one who never even knew the life form that fashioned it, let alone the planets it lists.”
“The Zacathan may furnish our key, together with Ryzk, who does know these star lanes. The stars this shows may be largely uncharted now. But still, those two together might give us one point from which we can work.”
“You will tell them?” That surprised me somewhat, for Eet had never before suggested hinting to anyone that the caches we had disclosed to the Patrol were not the sum total of the stones now in existence. In fact, our quest had been his plan from its inception.
“What is needful. That this is the clue to another treasure. The Zacathan will be drawn by his love of knowledge, Ryzk because it will be a chance for gain.”
“But Zilwrich is to be returned with the treasure to the nearest port. Of course—” I began to see that perhaps Eet was not so reckless as he seemed in suggesting that we plunge into the unknown with a map which might be older than my species itself as our only guide. “Of course, we did not say when we would return him.”
There was in the back of my mind the thought that the Zacathan might even willingly agree to our plan to go exploring along the bowl route, the thirst for knowledge being as keen as it was among his kind.
But though I held that star map in my hand, my attention returned to the more important point for now.
“The stone, Eet.”
“It is safe.” He did not enlarge upon that.
There was, of course, this other stone, which, compared to the one we had used, was a mere pin point of substance, now so dull as to be overlooked by anyone not aware of its unusual properties. Did the amount of energy booster depend upon the size of the stone? I remembered how Eet had produced that burst of power which had brought us along the barrier of the wreckage. Had all that come from this dull bit which I could well cover with only a fraction of the tip of my little finger? It must be that we had learned only a small portion of what the stones could do.
I was most eager to get back to the ship, away from Waystar. And as the LB was on course, I began to wonder at the length of our trip. Surely we had not been this far from where we had set down on the dead moon.
“The homer—” I moved to see that dial. Its indicator showed set to bring us back on automatics to the Wendwind. Suddenly I doubted its efficiency. Most of the alterations in the controls of the LB had been rigged by Ryzk, were meant to be only temporary, and had been made with difficulty—though it was true that a Free Trader had training in repairs and extempore rigging which the average spacer never learned.
Suppose the linkage with the parent ship was faulty? We could be lost in space. Yet it was true we were holding to a course.
“Certainly,” Eet broke into my ominous chain of thought. “But not, I believe, to the moon. And if they go into hyper—”
“You mean—they have taken off? Not waiting for us?” Perhaps that fear, too, had ever lain in the depths of my mind. Our visit to Waystar had been so rash an undertaking that Ryzk and the Zacathan could well have written us off almost as soon as we left for the pirate station. Or Zilwrich might have begun to fail and the pilot, realizing the Zacathan was too far spent to object, and wanting to get him to some aid—There were many reasons I could count for myself for the Wendwind to have taken off. But we were still on course for something—a course which would hold only until the ship went into hyper for a system jump. If that happened, our guide line would snap and we would be adrift—with only a return to Waystar or a landing on one of the dead worlds for our future.
“If they left for out-system they would hyper—”
“If they do not know the system they must reach its outermost planet before they do,” Eet reminded me.
“The stone—if we use that to step up energy to join them—”
“Such a journey must be made with great care. To maneuver the LB and the ship together during flight—” But it was apparent that Eet was thinking for himself as well as for my enlightenment. He studied the control board and now he shook his head. “It is a matter of great risk. These are not true controls, only improvised, and so might not serve us at a moment of pressing need.”
“A choice between two evils,” I pointed out. “We stay here and die, or we take the chance of meeting with the ship. As long as we remain on course we are linked with her. Why doesn’t”—I was suddenly struck by a new thought—“Ryzk know we are following? The fact that we are should have registered—”
“The indicator in the ship may have failed. Or perhaps he does not choose to wait.”
If the pilot did not want to wait—he had the Wendwind, he had the Zacathan, and he had an excellent excuse for our disappearance. He might return to the nearest port with the rescued archaeologist, the coordinates of Waystar to deliver to the Patrol, a ship he could claim for back wages. All in all, the master stars lay in his hand in this game and we had no comets to cut across the playing board to bring him down—except the zero stone.
“Into the hammock,” Eet warned now. “I shall cut in the stone power. And hope that the ship does not hyper before we can catch up.”
I lay down again. But Eet remained by the controls. Could the alien body he had wished upon himself stand the strain of not using such protection as the LB afforded? If Eet blacked out, I could not take his place, and we could well strike the Wendwind with projectile speed.
In the past I had been through the strain of take-offs in ships built for speed. But the LB was not such. I could only remember that the original purpose of the craft was to flee a stricken ship, and that it must thus be fit to take the strain of a leap away from danger. To sustain such energy, however, was another matter. Now I lay in the hammock and endured, though I did not quite black out. It seemed as if the very material of the walls about us, protested against the force. And the bowl, which I still held, had a fiery spot of light on its surface where the infinitely smaller stone answered the burst of power from the larger, which Eet had concealed.
I endured and I watched through a haze the furred body of Eet, his arms flung out, his fingers crooked to hold in position at the controls. Then I heard the loud rasp of painful breathing which was not mine alone. And every second I expected a break in the link tying us to the ship, the signal that the Wendwind has gone into hyper, vanished out of the space we knew.
Either my sight was affected by the strain or else Eet was so pinned by our speed that he could not function well, but I saw mistily his one hand creep at a painfully slow rate to thumb a single lever. Then we were free of that punishing pressure. I clawed my way out of the hammock, swung across to elbow Eet aide, and took his place, facing the small battery of winking lights and warnings I did understand and which Ryzk had patiently drilled me to respond to.
We had reached match distance of the Wendwind and must now join her. Automatics had been set up to deal with much of this, but there were certain alarms I must be ready to answer if they were triggered. And if Ryzk had ignored our following signal, he could not, short of winking instantly into hyper, avoid our present homing.
I sweated out those endless seconds at the board, my fingers poised and ready to make any correction, watching the dials whose reading could mean life or death not only to us but to the ship we fought to join. Then we were at our goal. The visa-screen winked on to show the gap of the bay for the LB and we bumped into it. The screen went dark again as the leaves of the bay closed about us. I was weak with relief. But Eet arose from where he had crouched, hanging to one end of the other hammock.
“There is trouble—”
He did not complete that thought. I cannot tell now—there are no words known to my species to describe what happened then—for we were not bedded down, prepared for the transition as was needful. We were not even warned. Seconds only had brought us in before the ship went into hyper.
There was the taste of blood in my mouth. I drooled it forth to flow stickily down my chin. When I opened my eyes I was in the dark, a dark which brought the terror of blindness with it. My whole body was one great ache which, when I tried to move, became sheer agony. But somehow I got my hand to my head, wiped it without knowing across the stickiness of blood. I could not see!
“Eet!” I think I screamed that. The sound echoed in my ears, adding to the pain in my head.
There was no answer. The dark continued. I tried to feel about me and my hand struck against solid substance as memory stirred. I was in the LB, we had returned to the ship just an instant before it had gone into hyper.
How badly I was hurt I did not know. As the LBs had originally been fashioned to take care of injured survivors of some space catastrophe, I needed only get back to the hammock and the craft would be activated into treating me.
I felt about me, seeking the touch of webbing. But though my one arm obeyed me, I could not move the other at all. And I touched nothing but wall. I tried to inch my body along, sliding my fingers against that wall, seeking some break, some change in its surface. The quarters of the LB were so confined that surely I could soon find one of the hammocks. I flung my arm up and out, rotating it through the thick darkness. It encountered nothing.
But I was in the LB and it was too small for me not to have found the hammock by now. The thought of the hammock, that it was ready to soothe my pain, to apply restoratives and healing, so filled me that I forced myself to greater efforts to find it. But my agonizing movements, so slow and limited, told me that there was no hammock.
And whatever space in which I now lay was not in the LB. My hand fell to the floor and touched a small, inert body. Eet! Not as I had seen him last, my exploring fingers reported. But Eet, the mutant, as he had been from birth.
I drew my fingers down his furred side and thought I detected a very faint fluttering there, as if his heart still beat. Then I tried to discover by touch alone whether he bore any noticeable wounds. The darkness—I would not allow myself to accept the thought that I was blind—took on a heavy, smothering quality. I was gasping as if the lack of light was also a lack of air. Then I feared that it was, and that we had been sealed in somewhere to suffocate.
Eet did not answer my thoughts, which I tried to make coherent. I felt on, beyond him, and sometime later gave up the hope we were in the LB. Instead we lay in a confined space with a door which would not yield to the small force I could exert against it. We must be on board the Wendwind—and I believed we were now imprisoned in one of those stripped lower cabins which had been altered for cargo transport. This could only mean that Ryzk had taken command. What he might have told the Zacathan I did not know. Our actions had been strange enough to give credence to some story that we operated outside the law, and Ryzk could testify truly that we had brought him on board without his knowledge. The Zacathans were esper—telepaths. Ryzk could tell the exact truth and Zilwrich would have to believe him. We could well be on our way now to being delivered to the Patrol as kidnapers and shady dealers with the pirates of Waystar. Yes, as I painfully marshaled the facts as another would see them I realized that Ryzk could make an excellent case, and Zilwrich would back him up.
That we brought back part of the treasure meant nothing. We could have done that and still planned to keep it, and the Zacathan, for ransom. Such deals were far from unknown.
If Ryzk had been black-listed, bringing us in might return him to the rolls. And if we underwent, or I underwent, deep interrogation—the whole affair of the zero stone would be known. It would be clear that we were guilty of what the Patrol might deem double-dealing. Ryzk had only to play a completely honest man at the nearest port and we would have lost our big gamble.