The murmuring voice was still louder, and now he could hear strange, irregular rhythms in it.
Someone, or something, singing?
Of a sudden, Chane realized his peril. If there was an alarm-device here triggered by sound, it could be activated by this.
He grabbed for the cone, to search for some control on it. But before his hand quite touched it, the swirling stars around him vanished and the whispering singing ceased.
He stood, a little shaken by the experience, but understanding now. This seemingly-solid cone was an instrument that reproduced audio-visual records, and was turned on or off by the mere proximity of a hand.
But who, or what, had made such a record as this?
Chane, after a moment, cautiously examined the other gold-colored objects, the fluted spiral and the congery of spheres. But no wave of the hand produced in them any reaction.
He stood, thinking. It seemed evident that the Vhollans, who had brought these things here, had not made them. Then who had?
A people inside the nebula? One that had mastered unknown technologies? But if so ...
He heard a slight clicking sound from the door.
Instantly, Chane stiffened. There had been a sonic-triggered alarm in here. Guards had come, and were softly unlocking the combination of the door.
Chane thought swiftly. He ran to the golden cone. He passed his hand over it, and the whispering sound began and the tendril of light grew up from it. Chane thrust the analyzer and the camera into his pouch, already moving away.
The door clicked softly again. Chane sprang to one of the corners of the room, and crouched behind cases of stores.
In the darkness, the wreath of light above the cone exploded again into tiny stars, and the whispering swelled.
The door opened.
There were two helmeted Vhollan guards and they had lethal lasers in their hands, and they were ready to fire at once. But for just a second, their eyes were riveted by that amazing cataract of stars.
Chane's stun-gun buzzed and dropped them.
He had, he thought, only a few minutes before the guards were missed. His plans for getting out of the port required much more time than that.
A grin crossed his face and he thought, The hell with clever plans. Do it the Starwolf way.
The small skimmer the guards had come in stood outside the warehouse. Chane reached down and took the helmet off one of the unconscious men, and put it on his head. It would conceal the fact that his hair was not the albino white of Vhol, and it would help to hide' his face. The guard's jacket concealed his non-Vhollan clothing.
He jumped into the driver's seat of the skimmer, turned it on, and went racing and screaming toward the main gateway of the military port.
The searchlights on the tower came on and locked onto him. He waved his free arm wildly as he drove up to the gateway, and shouted to the guards there. He hardly knew a word of Vhollan so he kept his shout a wordless one, relying on the screaming of the siren to make it unintelligible anyway. He pointed excitedly ahead and goosed the skimmer to its highest speed.
The guards fell away, startled and excited, and Chane drove on into the darkness, laughing. It was the old Varnan way: be as clever and tricky as you can but when cleverness won't work, smash right through before people wake up. He and Ssander had done it many times.
For a fleeting moment, he was sorry that Ssander was dead.
XI
"They didn't see me," Chane said. "Not to recognize me as a non-Vhollan. I can vouch for that. They didn't see me at all."
Dilullo's face was very hard in the lamplight, the lines cut deep like knife-slashes in dark wood.
"What did you do with the skimmer?"
"Found a lonely beach, drove it out onto the water a way, and sank it." Chane looked at Dilullo and was astonished to find himself making excuses. "It was that damned cone, that recorder thing. I had no way of knowing what it was, and it went on all by itself when my hand got near it." He saw Dilullo looking at him very oddly, and he hurried on. "Don't worry about it. I came in over the roofs. Nobody saw me. Why would they suspect us? Obviously some of their own people must be overly prying or they wouldn't have all that tight security. If there are no thieves on Vhol it'll be the rarest planet in the galaxy."
He tossed the belt pouch on Dilullo's lap. "I got what you wanted, anyway. It's all there." He sat down and helped himself to a drink from Dilullo's brandy bottle. The bottle, he noticed, had taken a severe beating, but Dilullo was cold and stony sober as a rock.
"Just the same," Dilullo said, "I think the time has come to say goodbye to Vhol." He set the pouch aside. "Have to wait on these till we have the ship's techlab."
He leaned forward, looking at Chane. "What was so strange about these things?"
"The metal they were made of. The fact that they were unclassifiable as to function. Above all, the fact that they came from an area—the nebula—that doesn't have any inhabited world with a technology above Class Two level."
Dilullo nodded. "I wondered if you remembered that. We studied all the microfile charts on our way here from Kharal.''
"Either the microfile charts are wrong, or something else is. Because those things are not only from a very high technology, but a very alien one."
Dilullo grunted. He got up and lifted a corner of the curtain across the window. Itwas already dawn. Chane turned off the lamp and apearl-pink light flooded into the little room of the inn on Star Street.
"Could they have been weapons, Chane? Or components of weapons?"
Chane shook his head. "The recorder thing certainly wasn't. I couldn't swear to the other two, of course, but they didn't feel like it." He meant an inner feeling, the instinctive recognition by a practiced fighter for any deadly instrument.
"That's interesting," Dilullo said. "Did I tell you, by the way, that Thrandirin wants to inspect our wares tomorrow, with a view to buying? Go get some sleep, Chane. And when I call you, wake up fast."
It was not Dilullo who waked him, though. It was Bollard, looking as though he had just waked up himself, or was perhaps just on the verge of going to sleep.
"If you have any possession here that you can't bear to leave behind you, bring it... just so long as it'll fit into your pocket." Bollard scratched his chest and yawned. "Otherwise forget it."
"I travel light." Chane pulled his boots on. They were all he had taken off before he slept. "Where's Dilullo?"
" 'Board ship, with Thrandirin and some top brass. He wants us to join him."
Chane paused in his boot-pulling and met Bollard's gaze. The small eyes behind those fat pink lids were anything but sleepy.
"I see," said Chane, and stamped his heel down and stood up. He grinned at Bollard. "Let's not keep him waiting."
"You want to go down and explain that to the guards?" He smiled back at Chane, a fat lazy man without a care in the' world. "They're posted front and back, ever since last night. Confined to quarters, Thrandirin said, for our own protection during a period of emergency. Something happened last night that upset them. He didn't say what. He only allowed Machris, the weapons expert, and one other man to go with Dilullo to the ship. So we have almost a full crew. But the guards have lasers. So it's going to be a little bit of a problem...." Bollard seemed to ponder a moment. "John said something about you coming in over the roofs. Could that be done by others, say, fat slobs like me?"
"I can't vouch for the construction," Chane said, "but if you don't fall through you shouldn't have any trouble. It'll have to be done quietly, though. These buildings aren't very high, and if they hear us we'll be in worse trouble than if we'd just butted them head on."
"Let's try," said Bollard, and went away, leaving Chane wishing it were night.
But it was not night. It was high noon, and the sun of Vhol shone white and bright overhead, driving a shaft of brilliance down through the trapdoor when Chane pushed it carefully open.
There was no one to be seen. Chane stepped out and waved the others a
fter him. They came quietly up the ladder one at a time, and at intervals they went quietly across the roof, not running, in the direction Chane had pointed out.
Meanwhile, Chane and Bollard kept watch of the streets below in front of and behind the inn. Chane drew the alley because Bollard was in command and therefore got the most important post. Motionless as one of the carved stone gargoyles of Kharal, he peered down into the alley from behind a kitchen chimney. The Vhol-lan guards were a tough-looking lot, standing patiently in good order, not minding the sun nor the chatter of small urchins gathered to stare at them, nor the invitations of several young ladies who seemed to be telling them they could go and have a cooling drink and be back before they were missed. Chane disliked the Vhollan guards intensely. He preferred men who would loosen their tunics and sit in the shade and chaffer with the ladies.
The Mercs were not as good as Varnans, nobody was, but they were good enough, and they got off without attracting any attention from below. Bollard signaled that all was clear on his side. Chane joined him and they went on their way toward the spaceport.
The roofs of Star Street were utilitarian, ugly, and mercifully flat. The Mercs moved across them in a long irregular line, going as quickly as they could without making any running noises for people to come up and investigate. The line of buildings ended at the spaceport fence, separated from it by a perimeter road that served the warehouse area. The gate was no more than thirty yards away, and the Merc ship sat unconcernedly on its pad a quarter mile beyond.
It looked a long, long way.
Chane took a deep breath and Bollard said quietly to the Mercs, all bunched together on that ultimate roof, "All right; once we start moving, don't stop."
Chane opened the trapdoor and they went down through the building, not worrying now about making noise, not worrying about anything but getting where they wanted to go. There were three floors in the building. The air was stale and heavy in the corridors, sweet with too much perfume. There were a lot of doors, mostly closed. The sound of music came up from below.
They hit the ground floor running, passed through a series of ornate rooms that were chipped and worn and moth-eaten in the daylight that leaked in through the curtained windows. There were people in the rooms, of various sizes, shapes, and colors, some of them quite strange, but Chane did not have time to see exactly what they were doing. He only saw their startled eyes turned on him in the half-gloom. A towering woman in green charged at them, screeching angrily like a gigantic parrot. Then the front door slammed open with a jingling of sinful bells, and they were out in the clean hot street.
They headed for the gate. And Chane was astonished at how rapidly Bollard could make his fat legs go when he really wanted to.
There was a watchman's box beside the gate. The man inside it saw them coming. Chane could see him staring at them for what seemed like minutes as they rushed closer, and he smiled at the man, a contemptuous smile that mocked the slow reactions of the lesser breeds. He himself, or any other Starwolf, would have had the gate closed and half the onrushing Mercs shot down before the watchman's synapses finally clicked and set his hand in motion toward the switch. Actually the time lapse from initial stimulus to reaction was only a matter of seconds. But it was enough to bring Chane in stunner range. The watchman fell down. The Mercs pounded through the gate. Bollard was the last of them and Chane saw Bollard staring at him with a very peculiar expression as he passed, and only then did he realize that in the necessity of the moment he had forgotten all about being careful and had raced ahead of the others, covering the thirty yards at a speed well-nigh impossible for a normal Earthman.
He swore silently. He was going to give himself away for sure if he wasn't more careful, perhaps had already done so.
Somebody shouted, "Here they come!"
The Vhollan guards had finally been alerted. They were coming down Star Street at the double, and in a minute, Chane knew, those needle-like laser beams would begin to flicker. He heard Bollard's almost unconcerned order to spread out. He punched the switch and jumped through as the gate began to swing. Bollard was fishing something out of his belt-pouch, a bit of plastic with a magnetic fuse-and-coupler plate. He slapped it onto the end of the gate as it swung past, just above the lock assembly. Then Chane and Bollard ran on together toward the ship.
Behind them there was a pop and an intense flash of light as the gate clanked shut. Bollard smiled. "That fused the gate and the post together. They can cut through, of course, but it'll take 'em a couple minutes. Where did you learn to run?"
"Rock-jumping in the drift mines," said Chane innocently. "Does wonders for the coordination. You should try it sometime."
Bollard grunted and saved his breath. The Merc ship still seemed a million miles away. Chane fumed at having to rein himself in to the Mercs' pace, but he did it. Finally Bollard panted, "Why don't you go on ahead like you did before?"
"Hell," said Chane, pretending to pant also, "I can only do that in spurts. I blew myself."
He panted harder, looking back over his shoulder. The guards were approaching the gate now. One of them went into the watchman's box. Chane assumed that he tried the switch, but nothing happened. The gate remained closed. Some of the guards fired through the mesh. The whipcrack and flash of the lasers scarred the air behind the Mercs but the range was too long for the small power-packs in the hand weapons. Chane thanked the luck of the Starwolves that the guards had not thought they might need heavier weapons.
There was not as yet any sign of life around the Merc ship. Presumably the Vhollans within would feel perfectly safe, believing that the ship's crew was bottled up at the inn, and Chane was sure that Dilullo would see to it that the demonstration was held where the visitors wouldn't be inconvenienced by noises from outside.
Still and all, there should be a guard. ...
There was. Two Vhollans in uniform came out of the lock to see what was going on. They saw, but they were already too late. The Mercs knocked them down neatly with their stun-guns. The skimmer in which Dilullo and the Vhollan officials had come was parked beside the boarding steps. Bollard ordered the men aboard and motioned to Chane. Together they tossed the unconscious men into the skimmer and started it, heading it back without a driver toward the fence. The guards from the inn had cut their way through the gate.
Bollard nodded. "That all worked out real nice," he said.
They scrambled up the steps and into the lock. The warning hooter was going, the CLEAR LOCK sign flashing red. Dilullo had not wasted any time. The inner lock door clapped shut and sealed itself almost on Chane's coattails.
Members of the crew with flight duty hurried to their stations. Chane went to the bridge room with Bollard.
There was quite a crowd in it, all Mercs but one, and all but one jubilant. The one was Thrandirin. Dilullo stood with him before the video pickup grid, so that there should not be any mistake when the message went out.
Dilullo was talking into the communicator.
"Hold your fire," he was saying. "We're about to take off, so clear space. And forget about your intercept procedures.
Thrandirin and the two officers will be returned to you safely if you do as I say. But if anybody fires off so much as a slingshot at us, they die."
Chane hardly heard the words. He was looking at the expression on Thrandirin's heavy, authoritative face, and it filled him with pure joy.
The drive units throbbed to life, growled, roared, screamed, and took the Merc ship skyward. And nobody fired so much as a slingshot as it went.
XII
The Merc ship hung in the edge of the nebula, lapped in radiance.
Dilullo sat in the wardroom with Bollard, studying for the hundredth time the photographs and the analyzer record on the objects in the warehouse.
"You'll wear them out with eyetracks," Bollard said. "They aren't going to tell you anything different from what they already have."
"Which is nothing," Dilullo said. "Or worse than nothing. The photo
graphs are clear and sharp. I see the things, therefore I know they exist. Then along comes the analyzer record and tells me they don't."
He tossed the little plastic disc onto the table. It was blank and innocent as the day it was made, recording zero.
"Chane didn't handle it right, John. Attached the sensors wrong, or forgot to turn it on."
"Do you believe that?"
"Knowing Chane, no. But I have to believe I something, and the fault isn't in the analyzer. That's been checked."
"And rechecked."
"So it has to be Chane."
Dilullo shrugged. "That's the most logical explanation."
"Is there another one?"
"Sure. The things are made out of some substance that the analyzer isn't programmed to identify. I.e., not on our atomic table. But we know that's ridiculous, don't we?"
"Of course we do," said Bollard slowly.
Dilullo got up and got a bottle and sat down again. "We're not doing anything else," he said. "Get Thrandirin and the two generals in here. And Chane."
"Why him?"
"Because he saw the things. Touched them. Set one off. Heard it ... singing."
Bollard snorted. "Chane's fast and he's good, but I wouldn't trust him any farther than he could throw me."
"I wouldn't either," said Dilullo. "So bring him."
Bollard went out. Dilullo put his chin in his fists and stared at the disc and the photographs. Outside the hull the pale fires of the nebula glowed across infinity ... endless parsecs of infinity in three dimensions. Up in the navigation room Bixel read micro-books from the ship's library for the third time over and drank innumerable cups of coffee, keeping vigil over the radar which remained as obstinately blank as the analyzer disc.
Bollard came back with Chane and Thrandirin and the two generals, Markolin and Tatichin. The -in suffix was important on Vhol, it seemed, identifying a certain gens which had acquired power a long time back and hung onto it with admirable determination. They figured largely in administrative, military and space-flight areas, and they were accustomed to command. Which made them less than patient prisoners.
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