Escape Across the Cosmos

by Gardner Fox

  The voice from the corner of his mind faded out. He knew those rich tones. They had been those of Hannes Stryker before he died. And yet—Stryker had never spoken of such things to him! He was sure of it. He would have remembered it.

  The flat temple roof and a segment of its dome could be made out from the old paints. The altar stood as Mai Valoris had made it, of black onyx and with tiny tripods burning incense. Ah, and the white mist rising lazily upward over that altar, curling, writhing—

  With alien life? Alien life that feasted on—human life!

  He knew it as surely as he knew that his heart was hammering in his ribcage, that his breath had come shorter, that his eyes had narrowed in a sullen, inexplicable rage. He did not understand the source of his knowledge, but he had been told about this thing, about this misty shape of horror. Sometime, somewhere, he had been told.

  “Carrick,” said a frightened voice.

  —known as Ylth’yl. It devours the life forces of…

  “Carrick!”

  He said from the depths of memory that was no memory but an implanting of suggestion, “The sacrifices stand between the tripods waiting to be—taken. No one can save them. They are given drugs to lessen the horror of what is going to happen. Ylth’yl will…”

  Pain laid a fire on his wrist. Carrick shook himself, found Mai standing close to him, staring up into his face with terrified eyes.

  “Who are you, Carrick?” she whimpered. “How did you know about the sacrifices? They aren’t on any shard I’ve found so far. You couldn’t have known about them.”

  He tried to smile but her face told him it was a failure, if it was meant to reassure her. He freed his hand and put it over his eyes, pressing into them. “I felt as if—as if I were the cat and—and that white thing were the dog. Or I the mongoose and the mist, the snake. Ancient enemies. Foes from long ago. But—that’s nonsense. I’ve never seen this thing in my life.”

  She whispered. “It’s evil, isn’t it? Somehow, I knew.”

  He shook his head helplessly. “I suppose so. Something inside me seems to understand. It’s like a recollection buried under layers of forgetfulness. Racial memory, maybe. Or it could be that Stryker told me about this thing, though how he knew I can’t say, and I don’t remember his doing so.”

  “What could Stryker tell you about it? Had he ever been on Dakkan planet? No, that couldn’t be. The smugglers found the shard. It was buried fairly deep.” Troubled, she turned to look at the golden city. “It’s gone now, thank heaven. Gone and—almost forgotten, except for us.”

  “I have the feeling it’s still alive and—waiting.”

  “Nobody’s ever come across it, and the Empire’s been opening up new star planets ever since Heikennen invented overwarp drive.”

  He shrugged and tried to make it light between them. “At least you know more than you knew before. You can put in two men and two women, as sacrifices.”

  “Why two of each?” she asked quickly.

  “It just slipped out. No special reason.”

  Her faintly slanted eyes that gave her an elfin look, brooded at him. She was a badly scared girl; he supposed it was because her artistic sense made her more perceptive, more imaginative than most others, as if in her mind she could see herself standing as one of those sacrifices before an altar where some mad being swirled in unconquerable strength. Imagination, no more. Or—prophecy?

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE WAS accepted into the camaraderie of the thieves’ kitchen without question. To the hardened criminals who had been abandoned on Dakkan planet, he was just another face. Than Lear had a need for him, and that was all any of them cared to know.

  Carrick tried to resign himself to his lot, but a part of him itched to go back, to fling a challenge into the teeth of the Empire, to rub faces in the hard facts of his own innocence. He knew he could do nothing of the kind; he was fortunate to be alive, to eat the wholesome but monotonously similar canned foods which were his meals, to sleep on a bunk covered with warm blankets. His hope was only a dream, a Grail that shimmered in the mists of impossibility.

  He had plenty of time to dream. Every mother’s son of them had time. They were rich with it, but it was all their wealth. A man could lie all day between meals on his bunk and stare at the stone ceiling overhead, if he wanted; but that way led to madness and a quick death before the blast of an implositron-gun in the hand of Than Lear. A man who was a whole man wanted something more than time, some little thing with which to occupy his moments that mounted endlessly to build the hours and the days and the weeks.

  Carrick became an assistant to Mai Valoris. Though he had no skill by which to create the miniature masterpieces she fashioned behind the viewing windows, he had an imagination and a knowledge of architecture. He had been on many planets and knew a little about each of them; he could make suggestions by which she might make more realistic a bit of background setting or marshlands in the distance or a stretch of desert or the green fringe of underbrush that marked the limits of faraway foothills.

  The days passed into weeks.

  From the storehouse Carrick brought all the broken shards and remnants he could find, those priceless artifacts which the smugglers had dug up from the sands when they made their hidden storehouse. Poring over them, he sought to visualize the sort of civilization that had lived and died on Dakkan planet. It had been a retarded world, of that he was confident.

  Third phase, late Classical, on a par with the old Roman Empire of Earth if there had been no barbarian inroads, if it had reached a level and maintained it, unable to progress, too civilized to retrogress. He guessed that the thing in the Temple—Ylth’yl—had been the anchor holding them to the past. Helpless to throw off its yoke, drained of vitality by its demands, these people had resigned themselves to a living death.

  Carrick knew the bite of pity.

  When restlessness and the need for action moved in him he took a digging spade and went out of the underground chambers in among the ruins and spent days shifting the red sands around, hoping to uncover some new evidence, some forgotten artifact that might help him solve his mystery. Whatever became of Ylth’yl? How did the end come for the people of Dakkan planet? In what strange way were those rites in the Temple completed? A voice in his head held the latter answer but it was nightmare to think on, and he wanted verification of his suspicions before he would admit them.

  The men grinned when they saw him walking out with the spade or while he was spending hours in the hot sun, digging, delving under those shrouding red grains after the riddle of the Ylth’yline peoples. Sometimes Mai came along, inspired by his enthusiasm, though she was hardnose enough to believe he only wasted his time.

  “You’re just stubborn,” she would say, sitting on a mound of sand and hugging her legs with both arms, resting her chin on bent knees and brooding at him. “You think nothing can hold out against you, once you go after it. Don’t be so pig-headed.”

  “I’m not pig-headed,” he grumbled.

  He was scared, coldly terrified. Carrick would not admit it to the girl but this alien life form, this Ylth’yl, might still be alive. Somewhere in the stars—waiting. A monstrous leech hungry to fasten onto humankind, to bring men to their knees as it had brought the Dakkans.

  The spade was like a toy in his big, strong hands. The sands flew to his fevered digging, only to reveal more sand. Sometimes he seemed frantic, the way he acted, like a dog after a lost bone. A few of the men would stare at him in those times, wondering among themselves if he were coming down with star fever.

  Even Than Lear became interested after a while. The big bald man would come and stand on the rim of the pit where Carrick labored, chewing on his lip and scowling, trying to fathom the thought processes of the former space officer. He asked Mai Valoris about him. For answer, she took him to the bedroom view-window and showed him the Temple and the white mist rising from its altar. Than Lear laughed.

  “A will o’ the wisp, no more. Maybe he had a
nightmare.” The criminal turned away, satisfied.

  Then one day he found the broken statuette. It was thrusting up from the sand at a depth of five feet, black with age, with a few flakes of white paint still adhering to it and a hole where a chain might go. An amulet of the god, to be worn about the neck or at the belt of its worshipper. Carrick gave a cry and lifted it into the sunlight, feeling the hairs on his neck rise as they had before at sight of Ylth’yl, knowing an old antagonism, a hostility bred into his flesh and bone.

  Even as he elapsed the cold metal, he heard the thunder. Thunder? On a day such as this? His eyes went upward to a great silver saucer lowering through the blue vault of empty sky. Carrick gave another cry and felt his heart turn over. A spaceship coming down to him, like the thunderbolt of an ancient god in answer to a prayer! His heart slammed in his rib cage with a wild elation.

  The Grail of his dream grew clear and sharp.

  Carrick still held the statuette, his fingers wrapped about it, as he came clambering up the sloping sides of his pit. From the entrance to the underground tunnels men and women were coming, laughing and calling out to one another.

  The smugglers were here, with food, with liquors. And with news.

  The criminals hungered for word of the doings on their home worlds. They would listen enthralled to the minutest shreds of gossip, or rumor, after the smugglers had eaten and were relaxing with syrupol or numbing panthalos. They were running now toward the lowering ship, staying clear of the maelstrom of flying red sand where the gravity plates were letting go and the compressair vents were taking over.

  Carrick stood behind them all, just watching. He filled his eyes with the silver bulk of the mighty spacer, understanding that it was a new model star-ship, complete with gravity plates and solar engines powerful enough to function on just a hint of star-shine; he wondered where they had stolen it. Life in a craft like that would be pleasant, its air tinted with scents of pine or balsam, cool and invigorating, its thermal units maintaining a steady temperature. Nothing at all like the old days, when man had traveled through his solar system in clumsy rocket-ships.

  The port was opening, a metallic ramp sliding out and downward to the sand. Two men came to the port and stood waving. Each of them held a tall vial of green panthalos. The gathered criminals howled at sight of the forbidden liquor and surged forward.

  “They’ll be drunk within the hour,” said Mai Valoris. She stood at his elbow, watching with him. Her eyes gleamed oddly when she looked at Carrick, as if she were holding her breath while waiting for him to make some move. Her heavy yellow hair was braided, hanging over her tight black blouse so that she seemed a Viking maiden in alien garb. As always when Mai stood close to him, Carrick felt his pulsebeat race.

  He shrugged casually, “Drunk or sober, it makes no difference to me. I won’t touch the stuff. It robs a man of his wits.”

  “Who needs wits on Dakkan planet?” she asked.

  He made no answer to that sly remark, contenting himself with watching the criminals move up the ramp and begin unloading the crates. After a while he went and helped them.

  A few of the men were already popping plasticorks and standing spraddle-legged, swallowing the green liquor. Panthalos gave a man high dreams, letting him live for a while in a land where there are no laws, where every man is his own god. It opened the gates of the subconscious, Hannes Stryker had once explained to Carrick, and what a man wanted, with its help a man had.

  If he hungered for power, he ruled a thousand planets in his dreams. If he lusted after women, the beauties of a hundred worlds begged for his attentions. The green liquor was brewed from a fruit of the panthal tree. Theoretically it was prepared only under government supervision—panthalos was administered by medical prescription to ease the pains of surgery or other hospital treatment—but there were outlaw orchards on the Border planets and any number of stills. There were no aftereffects to panthalos and no pain if a man were deprived of it, but its dream life was so vivid, its pleasures so intense, that many men lived only to drink and sleep, forgetting reality for the dream so that their bodies wasted away and they died, still dreaming.

  Carrick saw Than Lear watching him; he shouldered two crates and moved down the ramp with them, Mai at his heels. The bald man grinned at Carrick.

  “Don’t drink too much of that stuff,” he called from the port where he was lifting four crates in his mighty arms.

  “I’ll drink only what you do,” Carrick replied. At his elbow, Mai said, “It won’t be much, then. Than Lear permits himself a thimbleful, no more. Just enough to become Space Fleet Marshal of the Empire. He fights a thousand battles with panthalos in him, building star worlds, setting himself up as the mightiest spaceman in the Empire.”

  “A power complex,” Carrick muttered.

  “Or compensation for what he might have been—and wasn’t.”

  Carrick did not answer. He was too busy following the others into the tunnels, setting down his crates, going back for others. There would be food and new garments in the hold of the silver starship, tapes for tri-dimensional viewing of the latest theatrical presentations, books for those who liked to lose themselves with printed words, electronically animated miniatures that acted out do-it-yourself stage plays in response to punched cards fed into a controller.

  Men were singing in the chamber with the star ceiling as the first effects of panthalos made itself felt. Within the hour, they would be slumped limp and sleeping. Carrick heard music and guessed that some of the women on Dakkan planet might be dancing.

  Mai said, “It gets a little rough after a while. Everybody lets off steam when the smugglers vane down. You could have fun in there with the others. That redheaded girl—Sakkya—has a thing for you.”

  Her eyes were impish and Carrick laughed.

  “I want to ask the smugglers what they know about that white thing in your window Temple. They get to a lot of worlds. They may have heard something about it.”

  “You never give up, do you?”

  He ignored her, moving through the star chamber where two of the women were already beginning to divest themselves of clothes. One was dancing on a tabletop being fed panthalos by a man whose eyes were glazed and bloodshot. A broken bottle—emptied of its contents—rolled against his foot as he and Mai threaded a path between the loungichairs. The red-headed Sakkya leered at him but Carrick only winked and slid past her reaching hand.

  “Why isn’t Than Lear in there?” he asked the girl as they moved through the tunnel away from the bar chamber.

  “Than Lear never drinks anything but water while the smugglers’ ship is grounded. Sometimes a man tries to sneak aboard, to hide himself in the hold, to get back planetside. A lot of us are homesick, Carrick. Not you, maybe—but the others. The ones—”

  She hesitated and he chuckled. “Go on, say it. The ones who are normal. Me, I’m not normal—not with this body Stryker gave me. Is that it?”

  Mai scowled at him. “Sakkya didn’t appeal to you?”

  “Sure she did. So do you. But I have other things on my mind.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like finding out about Ylth’yl.”

  She made a sound in her throat that mocked him, but she came after him up onto the red sands where two of the smugglers were standing, savoring the air. An artificial atmosphere, no matter how perfectly controlled, is never the same as the air of a planet. Carrick remembered his own savorings of planets in the past.

  The smugglers heard him out on the subject of Ylth’yl but could offer no suggestions. One of them, a hairy Capellan, had been to more than a hundred worlds in his time, he claimed; no such god existed anywhere. Of that he was positive. He would have heard of it.

  As they talked, Carrick appeared to stroll aimlessly, but Mai noted that his every turn and twist of direction seemed always to point at the big silver starship. She came after him like a hound trained to heel, anxious not to put distance between them. Mai Valoris had an idea about Kael Carrick
.

  He showed the smugglers the little statuette he had found. They stared at it but shook their heads. No, nothing even approximating such a god was known anywhere in space. Mai Valoris had come forward at sight of the statuette. She reached for it, examining it closely.

  She was about to speak when Carrick stiffened.

  Than Lear was standing in the spaceship port, staring down at them. Mai was surprised to see how near the ship they had come. They were less than thirty feet away. In her mind she marveled at Carrick; she had been suspicious of what he meant to do, yet she herself had not realized how well he had succeeded in his plan. Or—did he have a plan? Was she giving him more credit than was his due? He might not—

  “You there, Carrick,” called Than Lear. “Chart a different course. You’re too close to the ship.”

  Carrick squinted up at the big bald man. His voice was oddly gentle. “Why, chief—what are you doing aboard? I thought you were back in the bar chamber, guzzling panthalos.”

  Than Lear scowled blackly. “My post is here when this ship’s vaned down. To make sure no mother’s son tries to steal aboard her.”

  Carrick grinned, “If I had a mind to take passage, nobody’d stop me.”

  “I would,” the bald man snapped.

  Mai felt the hostility between them, like a charge of ionized air. Carrick was looking up, moving forward slowly. Than Lear was glaring at him, big hands opening and closing. He wanted Kael Carrick alive and unharmed but the man seemed to have a devil in him; he could read the challenge in his eyes as he put a foot on the ramp and lifted up onto it.

  “Veer off,” Than Lear growled. “I’ve no wish to hurt you.”

  “You talk a lot,” Carrick smiled.

  The two smugglers were looking from one man to the other. The Capellan said, “We should get the captain. He ought to stop this.” The other man only nodded, watching, waiting. By mutual agreement—unspoken—they decided that neither would leave just yet; each had always nurtured a secret wish to see Than Lear fight.