Being expelled from an air lock into deep space was the legal method of execution. But it was also The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Legion of Lazarus, by Edmond Hamilton This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Legion of Lazarus Author: Edmond Hamilton Release Date: May 23, 2010 [EBook #32486] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEGION OF LAZARUS *** Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net The Legion Of Lazarus By Edmond Hamilton [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination April 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] CONTENTS CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X It isn't the dying itself. It's what comes before. The waiting, alone in a room without windows, trying to think. The opening of the door, the voices of the men who are going with you but not all the way, the walk down the corridor to the airlock room, the faces of the men, closed and impersonal. They do not enjoy this. Neither do they the only way a man could qualify for—The Legion Of Lazarus shrink from it. It's their job. This is the room. It is small and it has a window. Outside there is no friendly sky, no clouds. There is space, and there is the huge red circle of Mars filling the sky, looking down like an enormous eye upon this tiny moon. But you do not look up. You look out. There are men out there. They are quite naked. They sleep upon the barren plain, drowsing in a timeless ocean. Their bodies are white as ivory and their hair is loose across their faces. Some of them seem to smile. They lie, and sleep, and the great red eye looks at them forever as they are borne around it. "It isn't so bad," says one of the men who are with you inside this ultimate room. "Fifty years from now, the rest of us will all be old, or dead." It is small comfort. The one garment you have worn is taken from you and the lock door opens, and the fear that cannot possibly become greater does become greater, and then suddenly that terrible crescendo is past. There is no longer any hope, and you learn that without hope there is little to be afraid of. You want now only to get it over with. You step forward into the lock. The door behind you shuts. You sense that the one before you is opening, but there is not much time. The burst of air carries you forward. Perhaps you scream, but you are now beyond sound, beyond sight, beyond everything. You do not even feel that it is cold. CHAPTER I There is a time for sleep, and a time for waking. But Hyrst had slept heavily, and the waking was hard. He had slept long, and the waking was slow. Fifty years, said the dim voice of remembrance. But another part of his mind said, No, it is only tomorrow morning. Another part of his mind. That was strange. There seemed to be more parts to his mind than he remembered having had before, but they were all confused and hidden behind a veil of mist. Perhaps they were not really there at all. Perhaps— Fifty years. I have been dead, he thought, and now I live again. Half a century. Strange. Hyrst lay on a narrow bed, in a place of subdued light and antiseptic-smelling air. There was no one else in the room. There was no sound. Fifty years, he thought. What is it like now, the house where I lived once, the country, the planet? Where are my children, where are my friends, my enemies, the people I loved, the people I hated? Where is Elena? Where is my wife? A whisper out of nowhere, sad, remote. Your wife is dead and your children are old. Forget them. Forget the friends and the enemies. But I can't forget! cried Hyrst silently in the spaces of his own mind. It was only yesterday— Fifty years, said the whisper. And you must forget. MacDonald, said Hyrst suddenly. I didn't kill him. I was innocent. I can't forget that. Careful, said the whisper. Watch out. I didn't kill MacDonald. Somebody did. Somebody let me pay for it. Who? Was it Landers? Was it Saul? We four were together out there on Titan, when he died. Careful, Hyrst. They're coming. Listen to me. You think this is your own mind speaking, question-and-answer. But it isn't. Hyrst sprang upright on the narrow bed, his heart pounding, the sweat running cold on his skin. Who are you? Where are you? How— They're here, said the whisper calmly. Be quiet. Two men came into the ward. "I am Dr. Merridew," said the one in the white coverall, smiling at Hyrst with a brisk professional smile. "This is Warden Meister. We didn't mean to startle you. There are a few questions, before we release you—" Merridew, said the whisper in Hyrst's mind, is a psychiatrist. Let me handle this. Hyrst sat still, his hands lax between his knees, his eyes wide and fixed in astonishment. He heard the psychiatrist's questions, and he heard the answers he gave to them, but he was merely an instrument, with no conscious volition, it was the whisperer in his mind who was answering. Then the warden shuffled some papers he held in his hand and asked questions of his own. "You underwent the Humane Penalty without admitting your guilt. For the record, now that the penalty has been paid, do you wish to change your final statements?" The voice in Hyrst's mind, the secret voice, said swiftly to him. Don't argue with them, don't get angry, or they'll keep you on and on here. "But—" thought Hyrst. I know you're innocent, but they'll never believe it. They'll keep you on for further psychiatric tests. They might get near the truth, Hyrst—the truth about us. Suddenly Hyrst began to understand, not all and not clearly, something of what had happened to him. The obscuring mists began to lift from the borders of his mind. "What is the truth," he asked in that inner quiet, "about us?" You've spent fifty years in the Valley of the Shadow. You're changed, Hyrst. You're not quite human any more. No one is, who goes through the freeze. But they don't know that. "Then you too—" Yes. And I too changed. And that is why our minds can speak, even though I am on Mars and you are on its moon. But they must not know that. So don't argue, don't show emotion! The warden was waiting. Hyrst said aloud to him, slowly. "I have no statement to make." The warden did not seem surprised. He went on, "According to your papers here you also denied knowing the location of the Titanite for which MacDonald was presumably murdered. Do you still deny that?" Hyrst was honestly surprised. "But surely, by now—" The warden shrugged. "According to this data, it never came to light." "I never knew," said Hyrst, "where it was." "Well," said the warden, "I've asked the question and that's as far as my responsibility goes. But there's a visitor who has permission to see you." He and the doctor went out. Hyrst watched them go. He thought, So I'm not quite human. Not quite human any more. Does that make me more, or less, than a man? Both, said the secret voice. Their minds are still closed to you. Only our minds—we who have changed too—are open. "Who are you?" asked Hyrst. My name is Shearing. Now listen. When you are released, they'll bring you down here to Mars. I'll be waiting for you. I'll help you. "Why? What do you care about me, or a murder fifty years old?" I'll tell you why later, said the whisper of Shearing. But you must follow my guidance. There's danger for you, Hyrst, from the moment you're released! There are those who have been waiting for you. "Danger? But—" The door opened, and Hyrst's visitor came in. He was a man something over sixty but the deep lines in his face made him look older. His face was gray and drawn and twitching, but it became perfectly rigid and white when he came to the foot of the bed and looked at Hyrst. There was rage in his eyes, a rage so old and weary that it brought tears to them. "You should have stayed dead," he said to Hyrst. "Why couldn't they let you stay dead?" Hyrst was shocked and startled. "Who are you? And why—" The other man was not even listening. His eyelids had closed, and when they opened again they looked on naked agony. "It isn't right," he said. "A murderer should die, and stay dead. Not come back." "I didn't murder MacDonald," Hyrst said, with the beginnings of anger. "And I don't know why you—" He stopped. The white, aging face, the tear-filled, furious eyes, he did not quite know what there was about them but it was there, like an old remembered face peeping up through a blur of water for a moment, and then withdrawing again. After a moment, Hyrst said hoarsely, "What's your name?" "You wouldn't know it," said the other. "I changed it, long ago." Hyrst felt a cold, and it seemed that he could not breathe. He said, "But you were only eleven—" He could not go on. There was a terrible silence between them. He must break it, he could not let it go on. He must speak. But all he could say was to whisper, "I'm not a murderer. You must believe it. I'm going to prove it—" "You murdered MacDonald. And you murdered my mother. I watched her age and die, spending every penny, spending every drop of her blood and ours, to get you back again. I pretended for fifty years that I too believed you were innocent, when all the time I knew." Hyrst said, "I'm innocent." He tried to say a name, too, but he could not speak the word. "No. You're lying, as you lied then. We found out. Mother hired detectives, experts. Over and over, for decades—and always they found the same thing. Landers and Saul could not possibly have killed MacDonald, and you were the only other human being there. Proof? I can show you barrels of it. And all of it proof that my father was a murderer." He leaned a little toward Hyrst, and the tears ran down his lined, careworn face. He said, "All right, you've come back. Alive, still young. But I'm warning you. If you try again to get that Titanite, if you shame us all again after all this time, if you even come near us, I'll kill you." He went out. Hyrst sat, looking after him, and he thought that no man before him had ever felt what tore him now. Inside his mind came Shearing's whisper, with a totally unexpected note of compassion. But some of us have, Hyrst. Welcome to the brotherhood. Welcome to the Legion of Lazarus. CHAPTER II Mars roared and glittered tonight. And how was a man to stand the faces and lights and sounds, when he had come back from the silence of eternity? Hyrst walked through the flaring streets of Syrtis City with slow and dragging steps. It was like being back on Earth. For this city was not really part of the old dead planet, of the dark barrens that rolled away beneath the night. This was the place of the rocket-men, the miners, the schemers, the workers, who had come from another, younger world. Their bars and entertainment houses flung a sun-like brilliance. Their ships, lifting majestically skyward from the distant spaceport, wrote their flaming sign on the sky. Only here and there moved one of the hooded, robed humanoids who had once owned this world. The next corner, said the whisper in Hyrst's mind. Turn there. No, not toward the spaceport. The other way. Hyrst thought suddenly, "Shearing." Yes? "I am being followed." His physical ears heard nothing but the voices and music. His physical eyes saw only the street crowd. Yet he knew. He knew it by a picture that kept coming into his mind, of a blurred shape moving always behind him. Of course you're being followed, came Shearing's thought. I told you they've been waiting for you. This is the corner. Turn. Hyrst turned. It was a darker street, running away from the lights through black warehouses and on the labyrinthine monolithic houses of the humanoids. Now look back, Shearing commanded. No, not with your eyes! With your mind. Learn to use your talents. Hyrst tried. The blurred image in his mind came clearer, and clearer still, and it was a young man with a vicious mouth and flat uncaring eyes. Hyrst shivered. "Who is he?" He works for the men who have been waiting for you, Hyrst. Bring him this way. "This—way?" Look ahead. With your mind. Can't you learn? Stung to sudden anger, Hyrst flung out a mental probe with a power he hadn't known he possessed. In a place of total darkness between two warehouses ahead, he saw a tall man lounging at his ease. Shearing laughed. Yes, it's me. Just walk past me. Don't hurry. Hyrst glanced backward, mentally at the man following him through the shadows. He was closer now, and quite silent. His face was tight and secret. Hyrst thought, How do I know this Shearing isn't in it with him, taking me into a place where they can both get at me— He went past the two warehouses and he did not turn his head but his mind saw Shearing waiting in the darkness. Then there was a soft, shapeless sound, and he turned and saw Shearing bending over a huddled form. "That was unkind of you," said Shearing, speaking aloud but not loudly. Hyrst, still shaking, said, "But not exactly strange. I've never seen you before. And I still don't know what this is all about." Shearing smiled, as he knelt beside the prone, unmoving body. Even here in the shadows, Hyrst could see him with these new eyes of the mind. Shearing was a big man. His hair was grizzled along the sides of his head, and his eyes were dark and very keen. He reached out one hand and turned the head of the prone young man, and they looked at the lax, loose face. "He's not dead?" said Hyrst. "Of course not. But it will be a while before he wakes." "But who is he?" Shearing stood up. "I never saw him before. But I know who he's working for." Hyrst flung a sudden question at Shearing, and almost without thinking he followed it to surprise the answer in Shearing's mind. The question was, Who are you working for? And the answer was a woman, a tall and handsome woman with angry eyes, standing against a drift of stars. There was a ship, all lonely on a dark plain, and she was pointing to it, and somehow Hyrst knew that it was vitally important to her, and to Shearing, and perhaps even to himself. But before he could do more than register this fleeting vision on his own consciousness, Shearing's mind slammed shut with exactly the same violent effect as a door slammed in his face. He reeled back, throwing up his arms in a futile but instinctive gesture, and Shearing said angrily, "You're getting too good. I'll give you a social hint—it's customary to knock before you enter." Hyrst said, still holding the pieces of his head together, "All right—sorry. So who is she?" "She's one of us. She wants what we want." "I want only to find out who murdered MacDonald!" "You want more than that, Hyrst, though you don't know it yet. But MacDonald's murderer is part of what we're after." He took Hyrst's arm. "We don't have long. Thanks to my guidance, you slipped them all except this one. But they'll be hounding after our trail very quickly." They went on along the shadowed street. The glare of the lights died back behind them, and they moved in darkness with only the keen stars to watch them, and the cold, gritty wind blowing in from the barrens, and the dark door-ways of the mastaba-like monolithic houses of the humanoids staring at them like sightless eyes. Hyrst looked up at the bright, tiny moon that crept amid the stars, and a deep shaking took him as he thought of men lying up there in the deathly sleep, of himself lying there year after year.... "In here," said Shearing. It was one of the frigid, musty tombs that the humanoids called home. It was dark and there was nothing in it at all. "We can't risk a light. We don't need it, anyway." They sat down. Hyrst said desperately, "Listen, I want to know some things. Exactly what are we doing here?" Shearing answered deliberately, "We are hiding from those who want you, and we are waiting for a chance to go to our friends." "Our friends? Your friends, maybe. That woman—I don't know her, and—" "Now you listen, Hyrst. I'll tell you this much about us now. We're Lazarites, like you, with the same powers as you. But all Lazarites are not on our side." Hyrst thought about that. "Then those others who are hunting us—" "There are Lazarites among them, too. Not many, but a few. You don't know us, you don't know them. Do you want to leave me and go back out and let them have you?" Hyrst remembered the adder-like face of the young man who had come after him through the shadows. After a long moment he said, "Well. But what are you after?" "The thing that MacDonald was killed for, fifty years ago." Hyrst said, "The Titanite? They said it hadn't ever been found. But how it could have remained hidden so long—" "I want you," Shearing said, "to tell me all about how MacDonald died. Everything you can remember." Hyrst asked eagerly, "You think we can find out who killed him? After all this time? God, if we could—my son—" "Quiet, Hyrst. Go ahead and tell me. Not in words. Just remember what happened, and I'll get it." Yet, by sheer lifetime habit, Hyrst could not remember without first putting it into words in his own mind, as they two sat in the cold, whispering darkness. "There were four of us out there on Titan, you must already know that. And only four—" Four men. And one was named MacDonald, an engineer, a secretive, selfish and enormously greedy man. MacDonald was the man who found a fortune, and kept it secret, and died. Landers was one. A lean, brown, lively man, an excellent physicist with a friendly manner and no obvious ambitions. Saul was one, and he was big and blond and quiet, a good drinking companion, a good geologist, a lover of good music. If he had any darker passions, he kept them hidden. Hyrst was the fourth man, and the only one of the four still living.... He remembered now. He saw the black and bitter crags of Titan stark against the glory of the Rings, and he saw two figures moving across a plain of methane snow, their helmets gleaming in the Saturn-light. Behind them in the plain were the flat, half-buried concrete structures of the little refinery, and all around them were the spidery roads where the big half-tracs dragged their loads of uranium ore from the enchaining mountains. The two men were quarrelling. "You're angry," MacDonald was saying, "because it was I who found it." "Listen," Hyrst said. "We're sick, all three of us, of hearing you brag about it." "I'll bet you are," said MacDonald smugly. "The first find of a Titanite pocket for years. The rarest, costliest stuff in the System. If you know the way they've been bidding to buy it from me—" "I do know," Hyrst said. "You've done nothing for weeks but give forth mysterious hints—" "And you don't like that," MacDonald said. "Of course you don't! It's no part of our refinery deal, it's mine, I've got it and it's hidden where nobody can find it till I sell it. Naturally, you don't like that." "All right," said Hyrst. "So the Titanite find is all yours. You're still a partner in the refinery, remember. And you've still got an obligation to the rest of us, so you can damn well get in and do your job." "Don't worry. I've always done my job." "More or less," said Hyrst. "For your information, I've seen better engineers in grade-school. There's Number Three hoist. It's been busted for a week. Now let's get in there and fix it." The two figures in Hyrst's memory toiled on, out of the area of roads to the edge of the landing field, where the ships come to take away the refined uranium. Number Three hoist rose in a stiff, ugly column from the ground. It was supposed to fetch the uranium up from the underground storage bins and load it into a specially-built hot-tank ship in position at the dock. But Number Three had balked and refused to perform its task. In this completely automated plant, men were only important when something went wrong. Now something was wrong, and it was up to MacDonald, the mechanical engineer, and Hyrst, the electronics man, to set it right. Hyrst opened the hatch, and they climbed the metal stairs to the upper chamber. Number Three's brain was here, its scanners, its tabulating and recording apparatus, its signal system. A red light pulsated on a panel, alone in a string of white ones. "Trouble's in the hoist-mechanism," said Hyrst. "That's your department." He smiled and sat down on a metal bench in the center of the room, with his back to the stair. "D Level." MacDonald grumbled, and went to a skeletal cage built over a round segment of the floor. Various tools were clipped to the ribs of the cage. MacDonald pulled an extra rayproof protectall over his vac-suit and stepped inside the cage, pressing a button. The cage dropped, into a circular shaft that paralleled the hoist right down to the feeder mechanism. Hyrst waited. Inside his helmet he could hear MacDonald breathing and grumbling as he worked away, repairing a break in the belt. He did not hear anything else. Then something happened, so swiftly that he had never had any memory of it, and some time later he came to and looked for MacDonald. The cage was way down at the bottom of the shaft and MacDonald was in it, with a very massive pedestal-block on top of him. The block had been unbolted from the floor and dragged to the edge of the shaft, and it could not possibly have been an accident that it tumbled in, between the wide-apart ribs of the cage. And that's how MacDonald died, Hyrst thought—and so I died. They said I forced the secret of his Titanite find out of him, and then killed him. Shearing asked swiftly, "MacDonald never gave you any hint of where he'd hidden the Titanite?" "No," said Hyrst. He paused, and then said, "It's the Titanite you're after?" Shearing answered carefully. "In a way, yes. But we didn't kill MacDonald for it. Those who did kill him are the men who are after you now. They're afraid you might lead us to the stuff." Hyrst swore, shaking with sudden anger. "Damn it, I won't be treated like a child. Not by you, by anyone. I want—" "You want the men who killed MacDonald," said Shearing. "I know. I remember what was in your mind when you met your son." A weakness took Hyrst and he leaned his forehead against the cold stone wall. "I'm sorry," said Shearing. "But we want what you want—and more. So much more that you can't dream it. You must trust us." "Us? That woman?" Once again in Shearing's mind Hyrst saw the woman with her head against the stars, and the ship looming darkly. He saw the woman much more clearly, and she was like a fire, burning with anger, burning with a single-minded, dedicated purpose. She was beautiful, and frightening. "She, and others," said Shearing. "Listen. We must go soon. We're to be picked up, secretly. Will you trust us—or would you rather trust yourself to those who are hunting you?" Hyrst was silent. Shearing said, "Well?" "I'll go with you," said Hyrst. They went out into the cold darkness, and Hyrst heard Shearing say in his mind, "I wouldn't try to run—" But it wasn't Shearing speaking in his mind now, it was a third man. "I wouldn't try to run—" Frantically startled, Hyrst threw out his mental vision and saw the men who stood around them in the darkness, four men, three of them holding the wicked little weapons called bee-guns in their hands. The fourth man came closer, a dark slender man with a face like a fox, high-boned, narrow-eyed, smiling. It came to Hyrst that the three with weapons were only ordinary men, and that it was this fourth man whose mind had spoken. He was speaking aloud now. "I want you alive, believe me—but there are endless gradations between alive and dead. My men are very accurate." Shearing's face was suddenly drawn and exhausted. "Don't try anything," he warned Hyrst wearily. "He means it." The dark man shook his head at Shearing. "This wasn't nice of you. You knew we had a particular interest in Mr. Hyrst." He turned to Hyrst and smiled. His teeth were small and very neat and white. "Did you know that Shearing has been keeping a shield over your mind as well as his? A little too large a task for him. When you jarred his mind open for an instant, it was all we needed to lead us here." He went on. "Mr. Hyrst, my name is Vernon. We'd like you to come with us." Vernon nodded to the three accurate men, and the whole little group began to walk in the direction of the spaceport. Shearing seemed almost asleep on his feet now. It was as though he had expended all his energy on a task, and failed at it, and was now quiescent, like an empty well waiting to fill again. "Where are we going?" Hyrst asked, and Vernon answered: "To see a gentleman you've never heard of, in a place you've never been." He added, with easy friendliness, "Don't worry, Mr. Hyrst, we have nothing against you. You're new to this—ah—state of life. You shouldn't be asked to make decisions or agreements until you know both sides of the question. Mr. Shearing was taking an unfair advantage." Remembering the dark hard purpose Shearing had let him see in his mind, Hyrst could not readily dispute that. But he put out an exploring probe in the direction of Vernon's mind. It was shut tight. They walked on, toward the spaceport gates. CHAPTER III All space was before him, hung with the many-colored lights of the stars, intensely brilliant in the black nothing. It was incredibly splendid, but it was too much like what he had looked at with his cold unseeing eyes for fifty years. He looked down—down being relative to where he was standing in the blister-window—and saw the whole Belt swarming by under him like a drift of fireflies. He quivered inwardly with a chill vertigo, and turned away. Vernon was talking aloud. He had been talking for some time. He was stretched out on a soft, deep lounge, smoking, pretending to sip from a tall glass. "So you see, Mr. Hyrst, we can help you a lot. It's not easy for a Lazarite—for one of us—to get a job. I know. People have a—well, a feeling. Now Mr. Bellaver—" "Where is Shearing?" asked Hyrst. He came and stood in the center of the room, with the soft lights in his eyes and the soft carpets under his feet. His mind reached out, uneasy and restless, but it seemed to be surrounded by a zone of fog that tangled and confused and deflected it. He could not find Shearing. "We've been here for hours," he said. "Where is he?" "Probably talking a deal with Mr. Bellaver. I wouldn't worry. As I was saying, Bellaver Incorporated is interested in men like you. We're the largest builders of spacecraft in the System, and we can afford—" "I know all about it," said Hyrst impatiently. "Old Quentin Bellaver was busy swallowing up his rivals when I went through the door." "Then," said Vernon imperturbably, "you should realize how much we can do for you. Electronics is a vital branch—" Hyrst moved erratically around the room, looking at things and not really seeing them, hearing Vernon's voice but not understanding what it said. He was growing more and more uneasy. It was as though someone was calling to him, urgently, but just out of earshot. He kept straining, with his ears and his mind, and Vernon's voice babbled on, and the barrier was like a wall around his thoughts. They had been aboard this ship for a long time now, and he had not seen Shearing since they came through the hatch. It was not really a ship, of course. It had no power of its own, depending on powerful tugs to tow it. It was Walter Bellaver's floating pleasure-palace, and the damnedest thing Hyrst had ever seen. Vernon said it could and often did accommodate three or four hundred guests in the utmost luxury. There was nobody aboard it now but Bellaver, Vernon, Hyrst and Shearing, the three very accurate men, and perhaps a dozen others including stewards and the crews of the tugs and Bellaver's yacht. It was named the Happy Dream, and it was presently drifting in an excessively lonely orbit high above the ecliptic, between nothing and nowhere. Vernon had been with him almost constantly. He was getting tired of Vernon. Vernon talked too much. "Listen," he said. "You can stop selling Bellaver. I'm not looking for a job. Where's Shearing?" "Oh, forget Shearing," said Vernon, impatient in his turn. "You never heard of him until a few days ago." "He helped me." "For reasons of his own." "What's your reason? And Bellaver's?" "Mr. Bellaver is interested in all social problems. And I'm a Lazarite myself, so naturally I have a sympathy for others like me." Vernon sat up, putting his glass aside on a low table. He had drunk hardly any of the contents. "Shearing," he said, "is a member of a gang who some time ago stole a particular property of Bellaver Incorporated. You're not involved in the quarrel, Mr. Hyrst. I'd advise you, as a friend, to stay not involved." Hyrst's mind and his ears were stretched and quivering, straining to hear a cry for help just a little too far away. "What kind of a property?" asked Hyrst. Vernon shrugged. "The Bellavers have never said what kind, for fairly obvious reasons." "Something to do with ships?" "I suppose so. It isn't important to me. Nor to you, Mr. Hyrst." "Will you pour me a drink?" said Hyrst, pointing to the cellaret close beside Vernon. "Yes, that's fine. How long ago?" "What?" asked Vernon, measuring whisky into a glass. "The theft," said Hyrst, and threw his mind suddenly against the barrier. For one fleeting second he forced a crack in it. "Something over fifty—", said Vernon, and let the glass fall. He spun around from the cellaret and was halfway to his feet when Hyrst hit him. He hit him three or four times before he would stay down, and three or four more before he would lie quiet. Hyrst straightened up, breathing hard. His lip was bleeding and he wiped it with the back of his hand. "That was a little too big a job for you, Mr. Vernon," he said viciously. "Trying to keep my mind blanked and under control for hours." He stuffed a handkerchief into Vernon's mouth, and tied him up with his own cummerbund, and shoved him out of sight behind an enormous bed. Then he opened the door carefully, and went out. There was nobody in the corridor. This was wide and ornate, with doors opening off it, and nothing to show what was behind them or which way to go. Hyrst stood still a minute, getting control of himself. The barrier no longer obscured his mind. He let it rove, finding that every time he did that it was easier, and the images clearer. He heard Shearing again, as he had heard him in that one second when Vernon's guard had faltered. His face became set and ugly. He began to move toward the stern of the Happy Dream. Heavy metal-cloth curtains closed this end of the corridor. Beyond them was a ballroom in which only one dim light now burned, a vastness of black polished floors and crystal windows looking upon space. Hyrst's footsteps were hushed and swallowed up in whispering echoes. He made his way across to another set of curtains, edged between them with infinite caution, and found himself in the upper aisle of an amphitheater. It was pitch dark where he was, and he stood perfectly still, exploring with his mind. He could not see any guards. The rows of empty seats were arranged in circles around a central pit, large enough for any entertainment Mr. Bellaver might decide to give. The pit was brilliantly lighted, and from somewhere lower down came the intermittent sound of voices. Also from the pit came Shearing's cries. Hyrst began to tremble with outrage and anger, and his still-uncertain mental control faltered dangerously. Then from out of nowhere, a voice spoke in his mind, and he saw the face of the woman he had seen twice before, the woman Shearing served. "Careful," she said. "There is a Lazarite with Bellaver. His attention is all on Shearing, but you must keep your mind shielded. I'll help you." Hyrst whispered. "Thanks." He felt calm now, alert and capable. He crept along the dark aisle, toward the pit. Mr. Bellaver's theater lacked nothing. The large circular stage area was fitted with upper and lower electro-magnets for the use of acrobats and dancers with null-grav specialties. They could perform without disturbing the regular grav-field of the Happy Dream, thus keeping the guests comfortable, and by skillful manipulation of the magnetic fields more spectacular stunts were possible than in ordinary no-gravity. Shearing was in the pit, between the upper and lower magnets. He wore an acrobat's metal attraction-harness, strapped on over his clothes. When Hyrst looked over the rail he was hanging at the central point of weightlessness, where everything in a man floats free and his senses are lost in a dreadful vertigo unless he has been conditioned over a long period of time to get used to it. Shearing had not been conditioned. "Careful," said the woman's warning voice in his mind. "His life depends on you. No, don't try to make contact with him! The Lazarite would sense you—" Shearing began a slow ascension toward the upper magnet as the current was increased, from some unseen control board. He moved convulsively turning horizontally around the axis of his own middle like a toy spun on a string. His back was uppermost, and Hyrst could not see his face. "Bellaver and the Lazarite," said the woman quietly, "are trying to learn from Shearing where our ship is. He has been able so far to keep his mind shielded. He is—a very brave man. But you'll have to hurry. He's near the breaking point." Shearing was now almost level with Hyrst, suspended over that open pit, looking down, a long way. "You'll have to be quick, Hyrst. Please. Please get him out of there before we have to kill him." The current in the magnet was cut and Shearing fell, with a long neighing scream. Hyrst looked down. The repelling force of the lower magnet cushioned the fall, and the upper magnet took hold, hard. Shearing stopped about three feet above the stage floor and started slowly to rise again. He seemed to be crying. Hyrst turned and ran back to the top of the aisle. Halfway around the circle he found steps and went tearing down them. On the next level—there were three—he saw two men leaning over the broad rail, watching Shearing. "Yes, there they are. You must find a weapon—" Hyrst looked around, blinking like a mole in the dark. Seats, nothing but seats. Ornamentation, but all solid. Small metal cylinder, set in a wall niche. Chemical extinguisher. Yes. Compact and heavy. He took it. "Hurry. He's almost through—" The two men were tense and hungry, eager as wolves. One was the Lazarite, a grey man, old and seamed with living and none of it good. The other was Bellaver, and he was young. He was tall and fresh-faced, impeccably shaven, impeccably dressed, the keen, clean, public-spirited executive. "I can give you more if you want it, Shearing," Bellaver said, his fingers ready on a control-plate set into the broad rail. "How about it?" "Shut up, Bellaver," whispered the Lazarite aloud. "I've almost got it. Almost—" His face was agonized with concentration. "Now!" The woman's voiceless cry in his mind sent Hyrst forward. His hand swung up and then down in a crashing arc, elongated by the heavy cylinder. The Lazarite fell without a sound. He fell across Bellaver, pushing him back from the control-plate, and lay over his feet, bleeding gently into the thick pile of the carpet. Bellaver's mouth and eyes opened wide. He looked at the Lazarite and then at Hyrst. He leaped backward, away from the encumbrance at his ankles, making the first hoarse effort at a shout for help. Hyrst did not give him time to finish it. The first row of seats caught Bellaver and threw him, and Hyrst swung the cylinder again. Bellaver collapsed. "Was I in time?" Hyrst asked of the woman, in his mind. He thought she was crying when she answered, "Yes." He smiled. He stepped over the Lazarite and went to the control-plate and began to work with it until he had Shearing safely on the floor of the stage. Then he cut the power and ran down another flight of steps to the bottom level. His mind was able to range free now. He could not sense anyone close at hand. Bellaver seemed to have sent underlings elsewhere in the Happy Dream while he worked on Shearing. It was nothing for which a man would seek witnesses. Hyrst vaulted the rail onto the stage and dragged Shearing away from the magnet. He felt uncomfortable in all that glare of light. He hauled and grunted until he got Shearing over the rail into the dark. Then he wrestled the harness off him. Shearing sobbed feebly, and retched. "Can you stand up?" said Hyrst. "Hey. Shearing." He shook him, hard. "Stand up." He got Shearing up, a one-hundred-and-ninety pound rag doll draped over his shoulders. He began to walk him out of the theater. "Are you still there?" he asked of the woman. The answer came into his mind swiftly. "Yes. I'll help you watch. Do you see where the skiff is?" It was in a pod under the belly of the Happy Dream. "I see it," said Hyrst. "Take that. Bellaver's yacht is faster, but you'd need the crew. The skiff you can handle yourself." He walked Shearing into a fore-and-aft corridor. Shearing's feet were beginning to move of their own accord, and he had stopped retching. But his eyes were still blank and he staggered aimlessly. Hyrst's nerves were prickling with a mixture of fierce satisfaction and fear. Far above in the lush suite he felt Vernon stir and come to. There were men somewhere closer, quite close. He forced his mind to see. Two of the very accurate men who had been with Vernon were playing cards with two others who were apparently stewards. The third one lolled in a chair, smoking. All five were in a lounge just around the corner of a transverse corridor. The door was open. Without realizing that he had done so, Hyrst took control of Shearing's mind. "Steady, now. We're going past that corner without a sound. You hear me, Shearing? Not a sound." Shearing's eyes flickered vaguely. He frowned, and his step became steadier. The floor of the corridor was covered in a tough resilient plastic that deadened footsteps. They passed the corner. The men continued to play cards. Hyrst sent up a derisive insult to Vernon and told Shearing to hurry a little. The stair leading down into the pod was just ahead, ten yards, five— A man appeared in the corridor ahead, coming from some storeroom with a rack of plastic bottles in his hand. "You'll have to run now," came the woman's thought, coolly. "Don't panic. You can still make it." The man with the bottles yelled. He began to run toward Hyrst and Shearing, dropping the rack to leave his hands free. In the loungeroom behind them the card-party broke up. Hyrst took Shearing by the arm and clamped down even tighter on his mind, giving him a single command. They ran together, fast. The men from the lounge poured out into the main corridor. Their voices were confused and very loud. Ahead, the man who had been bringing the bottles was now between Hyrst and the stair. He was a brown, hard man who looked like a pilot. He said, "You better stop," and then he grappled with Hyrst and Shearing. The three of them spun around in a clumsy dance, Shearing moving like an automaton. Hyrst and the pilot flailing away with their fists, and then the pilot fell back hard on the seat of his pants, with the blood bursting out of his nose and his eyes glazing. Hyrst raced for the stair, propelling Shearing. They tumbled down it with a shot from a bee-gun buzzing over their heads. It was a short stair with a double-hatch door at the bottom. They fell through it, and Hyrst slammed it shut almost on the toes of a man coming down the stair behind them. The automatic lock took hold. Hyrst told Shearing, "You can stop now." A few minutes later, from the great swag belly of the Happy Dream, a small space-skiff shot away and was quickly lost in the star-shot immensity above the Belt. CHAPTER IV It did not stay lost for long. Shearing was at the controls. The chronometer showed fourteen hours and twenty-seven minutes since they left the Happy Dream. Shearing had spent eight of those hours in a species of comatose slumber, from which he had roused out practically normal. Now Hyrst was heavily asleep in the pneumo-chair beside him. Shearing punched him. "Wake up." After several more punches Hyrst groaned and opened his eyes. He mumbled a question, and Shearing pointed out the wide curved port that gave full vision forward and on both sides. "It was a good try," he said, "but I don't think we're going to make it. Look there. No, farther back. See it? Now the other side. And there's one astern." Still sleepy, but alarmed, Hyrst swung his mental vision around. It was easier than looking. Two fast, powerful tugs from the Happy Dream, and Bellaver's yacht. He frowned in heavy concentration. "Bellaver's aboard. He's got a mighty goose-egg on his head. Vernon too, with his shields up tight. The three accurate men and the pilot—his nose is a thing of beauty—plus crew. Nine in all. Two men each to the tugs. The other Lazarite, the one I laid out—he's not along." Shearing nodded approvingly. "You're getting good. Now take a glance at our fuel-tanks and tell me what you see." Hyrst sat up straight, fully awake. "Practically," he said, "nothing." "This skiff was meant for short hops only. We've got enough for perhaps another forty-five minutes, less if we get too involved. They're faster than we are, so they'll catch up to us—oh, say in about half an hour. We have friends coming —" "Friends?" "Certainly. You don't think we let each other down, do you? Not the brotherhood. But they had to come from a long way off. We can't possibly rendezvous under an hour and a half, maybe more if—" "I know," said Hyrst. "If we all get involved." He looked out the port. In the beginning, following directions from the young woman—whose name he had never thought to ask—he had set a course that plunged him deep into one of the wildest sectors of the Belt. He was not a pilot. He could, like most men of his time, handle a simple craft under simple conditions, but these conditions were not simple. The skiff's radar was short-range and it had no automatic deflection reflexes. Hyrst had had to fly on ESP, spotting meteor swarms, asteroids, debris of all sorts in this poetically named hell-hole, the Path of Minor Worlds, and then figuring out how to get by, through, or over them without a crash. Shearing had relieved him just in time. He glowered at the whirling, glittering mess outside, the dust, the shards and fragments of a shattered world. It merged into mist and his mind was roving again. Shearing jockeyed the controls. He was flying esper too. The tugs and Bellaver's fast yacht were closing up the gap. The level in the tanks went down, used up not in free fall but in the constant maneuvering. Hyrst swung mentally inboard to check vac-suits and equipment in the locker, and then out again. His vision was strong and free. He could look at the Sun, and see the splendid fires of the corona. He could look at Mars, old and cold and dried-up, and at Jupiter, massive and sullen and totally useless except as an anchor for its family of crazy moons. He could look farther than that. He could look at the stars. In a little while, he thought, he could look at whole galaxies. His heart pounded and the breath came hot and hard into his lungs. It was a good feeling. It made all that had gone before almost worthwhile. The primal immensities drew him, the black gulfs lit with gold and crimson and peacock-colored flames. He wanted to go farther and farther, into— "You're learning too fast," said Shearing dryly. "Stick to something small and close and sordid, namely an asteroid where we can land." "I found one," said Hyrst. "There." Shearing followed his mental nudge. "Hell," he said, "couldn't you have spotted something better? These Valhallas give me the creeps." "The others within reach are too small, or there's no cover. We'll have quite a little time to wait. I take it you would like to be alive when your friends come." Vernon's thought broke in on them abruptly. "You have just one chance of that, and that's to give yourselves up, right now." "Does the socially-conscious Mr. Bellaver still want to give me that job?" asked Hyrst. "I'm warning you," said Vernon. "Your mind is full of hate," said Hyrst. "Cleanse it." He shut Vernon out as easily as hanging up a phone. Under stress, his new powers were developing rapidly. He felt a little drunk with them. Shearing said, "Don't get above yourself, boy. You're still a cub, you know." Then he grinned briefly and added, "By the way, thanks." Hyrst said, "I owed it to you. And you can thank your lady friend, too. She had a big hand in it." "Christina," said Shearing softly. "Yes." He dropped the skiff sharply in a descending curve, toward the asteroid. "Do you think," said Hyrst, "you could now tell me what the devil this is all about?" Shearing said, "We've got a starship." Hyrst stared. For a long time he didn't say anything. Then, "You've got a starship? But nobody has! People talk of someday reaching other stars, but nobody tried yet, nobody could try—" He broke off, suddenly remembering a dark, lonely ship, and a woman with angry eyes watching it. Even in his astonishment, things began to come clearer to him. "So that's it—a starship. And Bellaver wants it?" Shearing nodded. "Well," said Hyrst. "Go on." "You've already developed some amazing mental capabilities since you came back from beyond the door. You'll find that's only the beginning. The radiation, the exposure—something. The simple act of pseudo-death, perhaps. Anyway, the brain is altered, stepped up, a great deal of its normally unused potential released. You've always been a fair-to- middling technician. You'll find your rating boosted, eventually, to the genius level." The skiff veered wildly as Shearing dodged a whizzing chunk of rock the size of a skyscraper. "That's one reason," he said, "why we wanted to get you before Bellaver did. The number of technicians undergoing the Humane Penalty is quite small. We—the brotherhood—need all of them we can get." "But that wasn't the main reason you wanted me?" pressed Hyrst. Shearing looked at him. "No. We wanted you mainly because you were present when MacDonald died. Handled right —" He paused. The asteroid was rushing at them, and Bellaver's ships were close behind. Hyrst was already in a vac-suit, all but the helmet. "Take the controls," said Shearing. "As she goes. Don't worry, I'll make the landing." He pulled the vac-suit on. "Handled right," he said, "you might be the key to that murder, and to the mystery behind it that the brotherhood must solve." He took the controls again. They helped each other on with their helmets. The asteroid filled the port, a wild, weird jumble of vari-colored rock. "I don't see how," said Hyrst, into his helmet mike. "Latent impressions," answered Shearing briefly, and sent the skiff skittering in between two great black monoliths, to settle with a jar on a pan of rock as smooth and naked as a ballroom floor. "Make it fast," said Shearing. "They're right on top of us." The skiff, designed as Sheering had said for short hops, could not accommodate the extra weight and bulk of an airlock. You were supposed to land in atmosphere. If you didn't, you just pushed a release-button and hung on. The air was exhausted in one whistling swoosh that took with it everything loose. The moisture in it crystallized instantly, and before this frozen drift had even begun to settle, Hyrst and Shearing were on their way. They crossed the rock pan in great swaggering bounds. The gravity was light, the horizon only twenty or so miles away. Literally in his mind's eye Hyrst could see the three ships arrowing at them. He opened contact with Vernon, knowing Shearing had done so too. Vernon had been looking for them. "Mr. Bellaver still prefers to have you alive," he said. "If you'll wait quietly beside the skiff, we'll take you aboard." Shearing gave him a hard answer. "Very well," said Vernon. "Mr. Bellaver wants me to make it clear to you that he doesn't intend for you to get away. So you can interpret that as you please. Be seeing you." He broke contact, knowing that Hyrst and Shearing would close him out. From now on, Hyrst realized, he would keep track of them the way he and Shearing had kept track of obstructions in the path of flight, by mental "sight". The yacht was extremely close. Suddenly Hyrst had a confused glimpse of a hand on a control-lever over-lapped by a view of the black-mouthed tubes of the yacht's belly-jets. He dived, literally, into a crack between one of the monoliths and a slab that leaned against its base, dragging Shearing with him. The yacht swept over. Nothing happened. It dropped out of sight, braking for a landing. "Imagination," said Shearing. "You realize a possibility, and you think it's so. Tricky. But I don't blame you. The safe side is the best one." Hyrst looked out the crack. One of the tugs was coming in to land beside the skiff, while the other one circled. "Now what?" he said. "I suppose we can dodge them for a while, but we can't hide from Vernon." Shearing chuckled. He had got his look of tough competence back. He seemed almost to be enjoying himself. "I told you you were only a cub. How do you suppose we've kept the starship hidden all these years? Watch." In the flick of a second Hyrst went blind and deaf. Then he realiz...