More Adventures On Other Planets Page 3

  But his soul shivered in ecstasy at the thing that was in it

  The Sun-child said silkily, "Why should I do all this?"

  "For amusement," whispered Falken. "The most colossal game you have ever had."

  Brilliant colors flared. "Tell me, human!"

  "I must make a bargain first."

  "Why should I bargain? You're mine, to do with as I will."

  "Quite. But we couldn't last very long. Why waste your imagination on the three of us when you might have thousands?"

  Avery's amber eyes opened wide. A shocked incredulity slackened Sheila's rigid muscles. The voice cried:

  "Thousands of humans to play with?"

  The eager greed sickened Falken. Like a child wanting a bright toy—only the toys were human souls.

  "Not until the bargain is made," he said.

  "Well? What is the bargain? Quick!"

  "Let us go, in return for the game which I shall tell you."

  "I might lose you, and then have nothing."

  "You can trust us," Falken insisted. He was shaking, and his nerves ached. "Listen. There are thousands of my people, living like hunted beasts in the deserts of the Solar System. They need a world, to survive at all. If you'll build them one in the heart of this planet, I'll bring them here.

  "You wouldn't kill them. You'd let them live, to admire and praise you for saving them. It would amuse you just to watch them for some time. Then you could take one, once in a while, for a special game.

  "I don't want to do this. But it's better that they should live that way than be destroyed."

  "And better for you, too, eh?" The Sun-child swirled reflectively. "Breed men like cattle, always have a supply. It's a wonderful idea. . . ."

  "Then you'll do it?" Sweat dampened Falken's brow.

  "Perhaps. . . . YesI Tell me, quickly, what you want!"

  Falken swung to his stunned and unbelieving companions. He gripped an arm of each, painfully hard.

  "Trust me. Trust me, for God's sake!" he whispered. Then, aloud, "Help me to tell it what we need."

  There was a little laughing ripple of golden notes in the Sun-child's light, but Falken was watching Sheila's eyes. A flash of understanding crossed them, a glint of savage hope.

  "Oxygen," she said. "Nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon diox-

  ide____ "

  "And soil," said Falken. "Lime, iron, aluminum, silicon.. . ."

  They came to on a slope of raw, red earth, still wet from the rain. A range of low hills lifted in the distance against a strange black sky. Small tattered clouds drifted close above in the rainbow's light.

  Falken got to his feet. As far as he could see there were rolling stretches of naked earth, flecked with brassy pools and little ruddy streams. He opened his helmet and breathed the warm wet air. He let the rich soil trickle through his fingers and thought of the Unregenerates in their frozen burrows.

  He smiled, because there were tears in his hard blue eyes.

  Sheila gave a little sobbing laugh and cried, "Eric, it's done!" Paul Avery lifted dark golden eyes to the hills and was silent.

  There was a laughing tremble of color in the air where the Sun-child floated. Small wicked flames drowned the sad, soft mauves. The Sun-child said:

  "Look, Eric Falken. There behind you."

  Falken turned—and looked into his own face.

  It stood there, his own lean body in the worn vac suit, his own gypsy face and the tangle of frosted curls. Only the eyes were different. The chill, distant blue was right, but there were spiteful flecks of gold, a malicious sparkle that was like. . . .

  "Yes," purred the Sun-child. "Myself, a tiny particle, to activate the shell. A perfect likeness, no?"

  A slow, creeping chill touched Falken's heart. "Why?" he asked.

  "Long ago I learned the art of lying from men. I lied about reading minds. Your plan to trick me into building this world and then destroy me was plain on the instant of conception."

  Laughing wicked colors coiled and spun.

  "Oh, but I'm enjoying this! Not since I built my shell have I had such a game! Can you guess why "I made your double?"

  Falken's lips were tight with pain, his eyes savage with remorse at his own stupidity.

  "It—he will go in my ship to bring my people here."

  He knew that the Sun-child had picked his unwitting brain as cleanly as any Hiltonist psycho-search.

  In sudden desperation he drew his blaster and shot at the mocking likeness. Before he tripped the trigger-stud a wall of ebon glass was raised between them. The blast-ray slid away in harmless fire and died, burned out.

  The other Falken turned and strode away across the new land. Falken watched him out of sight, not moving nor speaking, because there was nothing to do, nothing to say.

  The lovely wicked fire of the Sun-child faded suddenly.

  "I am tired," it said. "I shall suckle the Sun, and rest."

  It floated away. For all his agony, Falken felt the heart-stab of its sad, dim colors. It faded like a wisp of lonely smoke into the splintered light.

  Presently there was a blinding flash and a sharp surge of air as a fissure was opened. Falken saw the creature, far away, pressed to the roof of the vault and pulsing as it drank the raw blaze of the Sun.

  "Oh, God," whispered Falken. "Oh, God what have I done?"

  Falken laughed, one harsh wild cry. Then he stood quite still, his hands at his sides, his face a mask cut deep in dark stone.

  "Eric," whispered Sheila. "Please. I can't be brave for you all the time."

  He was ashamed of himself then. He shook the black despair away with cynical fatalism.

  "All right, Sheila. We'll be heroes to the bitter end. You, Avery. Get your great brain working. How can we save our people, and, incidentally, our own skins?"

  Avery flinched as though some swift fear had stabbed him. "Don't ask me, Falken. Don't!"

  "Why not? What the devil's the matter. . . " Falken broke off sharply. Something cold and fierce and terrifying came into his face. "Just a minute, Avery," he said gently. "Does that mean you think you know a way?"

  "I . . . For God's sake, let me alone!"

  "You do know a way," said Falken inexorably. "Why shouldn't I ask you, Paul Avery? Why shouldn't you try to save your people?"

  Golden eyes met his, desperate, defiant, bewildered, and pitiful all at once.

  "They're not my people," whispered Avery.

  They were caught, then, in a strange silence. Soundless wheeling rainbows brushed the new earth, glimmered in the brassy pools. Far up on the black crystal of the vault the Sun-child pulsed and breathed. And there was stillness, like the morning of creation.

  Eric Falken took one slow, taut step, and said, "Who are you?"

  The answer whispered across the raw red earth. "Miner Hilton, the son of Gantry."

  Falken raised the blaster, forgotten in his hand. Miner Hilton, who had been Paul Avery, looked at it and then at Falken's face, a shield of dark iron over cold, terrible flame.

  He shivered, but he didn't move, nor speak.

  "You know a way to fight that thing," said Falken, very softly, in his throat. "I want to kill you. But you know a way."

  "I-I don't know. I can't . . ." Golden tortured eyes went to Sheila Moore and stayed there, with a dreadful lost intensity.

  Falken's white teeth showed. "You want to tell, Miner Hilton. You want to help us, don't you? Because of Sheila!"

  Young Hilton's face flamed red, and then went white. Sheila cried sharply,

  "Eric, don't! Can't you see he's suffering?"

  But Falken remembered Kitty, and the babies who were born and died on freezing rock, without sun or shelter. He said,

  "She'd never have you, Hilton. And I'll tell you this. Perhaps I can't force out of you what you know. But if I can't, I swear to God I'll kill you with my own hands."

  He threw back his head and laughed suddenly. "Gantry Hilton's son—in love with an Unregenerate!"

  "Wait, Eric." Sh
eila Moore put a hand on his arm to stop him, and went forward. She took Miner Hilton by the shoulders and looked up at him, and said,

  "It isn't so impossible, Miner Hilton. Not if what I think is true."

  Falken stared at her in stunned amazement, beyond speech or movement. Then his heart was torn with sudden pain, and he knew, with the clarity of utter truth, that he loved Sheila Moore.

  She said to Miner Hilton, "Why did you do this? And how?"

  Young Hilton's voice was flat and strained. He made a move as though to take her hands from his shoulders, but he didn't. He stared across her red-gold head, at Falken.

  "Something had to be done to stamp out the Unregenerates. They're a barrier to complete peace, a constant trouble. Eric Falken is their god, as—as Sheila said. If we could trap him, the rest would be easy. We could cure his people.

  "My father couldn't do it himself. He's old, and too well-known. He sent me, because mine is the only other brain that could stand what I had to do. My father has trained me well.

  "To get me by the psycho-search, my father gave me a temporary brain pattern. After I was accepted as a refugee, I established mental contact with him, . . ."

  "Mental contact," breathed Falken. "That was it. That's why you were always so tired, why I couldn't shake pursuit."

  "Go on," said Sheila, with a queer gentleness.

  Hilton stared into space, without seeing.

  "I almost had you in Losangles, Falken, but you were too quick for the Guards. Then, when we were trapped at Mercury, I tried to make you sleep. I was leading those ships, too.

  "But I was tired, and you fought too well, you and Sheila. After that we were too close to the Sun. My thought waves wouldn't carry back to the ships."

  He looked at Falken, and then down at Sheila's thin face.

  *T didn't know there were people like you," he whispered. "I didn't know men could feel things, and fight for them like that. In my world, no one wants anything, no one fights, or tries. . . . And I have no strength. I'm afraid."

  Sheila's green eyes caught his, compelled them.

  "Leave that world/' she said. "You see it's wrong. Help us to make it right again."

  In that second, Falken saw what she was doing. He was filled with admiration, and joy that she didn't really care for Hilton—and then doubt, that perhaps she did.

  Miner Hilton closed his eyes. He struck her hands suddenly away and stepped back, and his blaster came ready into his hand.

  "I can't," he whispered. His lips were white. "My father has taught me. He trusts me. And I believe in him. I mustl"

  Hilton looked where the glow of the Sun-child pulsed against ebon rock. "The Unregenerates won't trouble us any more."

  He raised the muzzle of his blaster to his head.

  It was then that Falken remembered his was empty. He dropped it and sprang. He shocked hard against Hilton's middle, struck him down, clawing for his gun arm. But Hilton was heavy, and strong.

  He rolled away and brought his barrel lashing down across Falken's temple. Falken crouched, dazed and bleeding, in the mud.

  He laughed, and said, "Why don't you kill me, Hilton?"

  Hilton looked from Falken's uncowed, snarling face to Sheila. The blaster slipped suddenly from his fingers. He covered his face with his hands and was silent, shivering.

  Falken said, with curious gentleness, "That proves it. You've got to have faith in a thing, to kill or die for it."

  Hilton whispered, "Sheila!" She smiled and kissed him, and Falken looked steadfastly away, wiping the blood out of his eyes.

  Hilton grasped suddenly at the helmet of his vac-suit. He talked, rapidly, as he worked.

  "The Sun-child creates with the force of its mind. It understands telekinesis, the control of the basic electrical force of the universe by thought, just as the wise men of our earth understood it. The men who walked on the water, and moved mountains, and healed the sick,

  "We can only attack it through its mind. We'll try to weaken its thought-force, destroy anything it sends against us."

  His fingers flashed between the helmet radio and the repair kit which is a part of every vac suit, using wires, spare parts, tools.

  "There," said Hilton, after a long time. "Now yours."

  Falken gave him his helmet. "Won't the Sun-child know what we're doing?" he asked, rather harshly.

  Hilton shook his fair head. "It's weak now. It won't think about us until it has fed. Perhaps two hours more."

  "Can you read its thoughts?" demanded Falken sourly.

  "A very little," said Hilton, and Sheila laughed, quietly.

  Hilton worked feverishly. Falken watched his deft fingers weaving a bewildering web of wires between the three helmets, watched him shift and change, tune and adjust. He watched the sun-child throb and sparkle as the strength of the Sun sank into it. He watched Sheila Moore, staring at Hilton with eyes of brilliant green.

  He never knew how much time passed. Only that the Sun-child gave a little rippling sigh of light and floated down. The fissure closed above it. Sheila caught her breath, sharp between her teeth.

  Hilton rose. He said rapidly.

  "I've done the best I can. It's crude, but the batteries are strong. The helmets will pick up and amplify the energy-impulses of our brains. We'll broadcast a single negative impulse, opposed to every desire the Sun-thing has.

  "Stay close together, because if the wires are broken between the helmets we lose power, and it's going to take all the strength we have to beat that creature."

  Falken put on his helmet. Little copper discs, cut from the sheet in the repair kit and soldered to wires with Hilton's blaster, fitted to his temples. Through the vision ports he could see the web of wires that ran from the three helmets through a maze of spare grids and a condenser, and then into the slender shaft of a crude directional antenna.

  Hilton said, "Concentrate on the single negative, No," Falken looked at the lovely shimmering cloud, coming toward them.

  "It won't be easy," he said grimly, "to concentrate" Sheila's eyes were savage and feral, watching that foam of living flame. Hilton's face was hidden. He said, "Switch on your radios."

  Power hummed from the batteries. Falken felt a queer tingle in his brain.

  The Sun-child hovered over them. Its mind-voice was silent, and Falken knew that the electrical current in his helmet was blanking his own thoughts.

  They linked arms. Falken set his brain to beating out an impulse, like a radio signal, opposing the negative of his mind to the positive of the Sun-child's.

  Falken stood with the others on spongy, yielding soil. Dim plant-shapes rose on all sides as far as he could see, forming an impenetrable tangle of queer geometric shapes that made him reel with a sense of spatial distortion.

  Overhead, in a sea-green sky, three tiny suns wheeled in mad orbits about a common center. There was a smell in the air, a rotting stench that was neither animal or vegetable.

  Falken stood still, pouring all his strength into that single mental command to stop.

  The tangled geometric trees wavered momentarily. Dizzily, through the wheeling triple suns, the Sun-child showed, stabbed through with puzzled, angry scarlet.

  The landscape steadied again. And the ground began to move.

  It crawled in small hungry wavelets about Falken's feet. The musky, rotten smell was heavy as oil. Sheila and Hilton seemed distant and unreal, their faces hidden in the helmets.

  Falken gripped them together and drove his brain to its task. He knew what this was. The reproduction of another world, remembered from the Sun-child's youth. If they could only stand still, and not think about it. . . .

  He felt the earth lurch upward, and guessed that the Sun-child had raised its creation off the floor of the cavern.

  The earth began to coil away from under his feet.

  For a giddy instant Falken saw the true world far below, and the Sun-child floating in rainbow light.

  It was angry. He could tell that from its color. Then sud
denly the anger was drowned in a swirl of golden motes.

  It was laughing. The Sun-child was laughing.

  Falken fought down a sharp despair. A terrible fear of falling oppressed him. He heard Sheila scream. The world closed in again.

  Sheila Moore looked at him from between two writhing trees.

  He hadn't let her go. But she was there. Hairy branches coiled around her, tore her vac-suit. She shrieked. . . .

  Falken cried out and went forward. Something held him. He fought it off driven by the agony in Sheila's cry.

  Something snapped thinly. There was a flaring shock inside his helmet. He fell, and staggered up and on, and the hungry branches whipped away from the girl.

  She stood there, her thin white body showing through the torn vac-suit, and laughed at him.

  He saw Miner Hilton crawling dazed on the living ground, toward the thing that looked like Sheila and laughed with mocking golden motes in its eyes.

  A vast darkness settled on Falken's soul. He turned. Sheila Moore crouched where he had thrown her from him, in his struggle to help the lying shell among the trees.

  He went and picked her up. He said to Miner Hilton,

  "Can we fix these broken wires?"

  Hilton shook his head. The shock of the breaking seemed to have steadied him a little. "No," he said. "Too much burned out."

  "Then we're beaten." Falken turned a bitter, snarling face to the green sky, raised one futile fist and shook it. Then he was silent, looking at the others.

  Sheila Moore said softly, "This is the end, isn't it?"

  Falken nodded. And Miner Hilton said.

  "I'm not afraid now." He looked at the trees that hung over them, waiting, and shook his head. "I don't understand. Now that I know I'm going to die, I'm not afraid."

  Sheila's green eyes were soft and misty. She kissed Hilton, slowly and tenderly, on the lips.

  Falken turned his back and stared at the twisted ugly trees. He didn't see them. And he wasn't thinking of the Unregenerates and the world he'd won and then lost.

  Sheila's hand touched him. She whispered, "Eric . . ."

  Her eyes were deep, glorious green. Her pale starved face had the brittle beauty of wind-carved snow. She held up her arms and smiled.