on an errand, in the darkness.”
“It will soon be daylight!” she warned. “The sky shows a little light, that way.”
Two minutes later, Evers drove the car with deliberate lack of haste away from the looming mansion and down the road of giant flowers. There was indeed a thin band of ruddy light low in the dark sky ahead, and he resisted the temptation to go fast. In the back seat, Sharr crouched down beside the unconscious Lindeman, keeping herself well away from the crouching figure of the K’harn.
Evers drove out onto the compound of the dock area. But he kept his course so as to circle around behind the docks, toward the warehouses. The men working under krypton lights around the star-ships, though they must have heard him, did not look up as he went unhurriedly by. Breathing more easily, he drew the car up in the shadow behind that warehouse in which Straw had died.
Rrulu, with a fierce impatience, bounded out of the car. Evers gave Sharr a torch he found under the dash, and then he picked up Lindeman and followed the K’harn and the Valloan girl.
The warehouse door was still unlocked as Sharr had left it. They went inside and he closed the door and set Lindeman down on the floor. Sharr’s torch came on, playing over that tangle of incomprehensible mechanisms and instruments, and Rrulu uttered a low, passionate exclamation.
“The treasures of a dozen Houses of Knowledge, riven away from my people!”
Evers asked rapidly, “What can you do with them?”
The K’harn took the torch from Sharr and ran forward, examining the great pile of loot.
Sharr was bending over Lindeman. She looked pale and crumpled, and not at all like the cocksure Valloan girl who had impudently taken him away from a GC man not too long before.
Evers was tired too, and feeling a sick foretaste of ultimate defeat. It had been a foolish thing, he felt now, to pin their last gamble on the half-mad K’harn’s obsession. As far as he could see, Rrulu was doing nothing, just poking and prying amid the mass of mechanisms.
He told Sharr, “Stay by the door and watch through the crack. Call if anyone comes.”
She said, “And if they do?”
“I’m afraid it’s not ‘if’ but ‘when’,” he said. “Cheer up, Sharr. It may be finish for us but if Rrulu can do anything it’ll wind up Schuyler too.”
He left her at the door and went to where the K’harn had brought a glittering mechanism out of the mass, and was crouching beside it.
It was the big object which had formerly reminded Evers of an enormous toy. There was a two-foot crystal sphere at its center, and around that on metal tracks were mounted a dozen smaller crystal spheres of varying size. There was a complex of wiring underneath, linked to one of the black cubes that Rrulu had called power- cubes.
The K’harn, crouching beside the enigmatic mechanism like a great spider by its prey, was intently engaged in moving the small crystals from one “orbit” to another exchanging their places, revising the wiring.
“What can the thing do?” Evers asked him, but it was a minute before the busy K’harn answered.
“It is a synthesizer. As I told you, it can generate a force that converts free energy into any chosen elements. When I get through with it, it will reverse that process.”
Evers was increasingly dubious. He was a scientist himself and he could imagine no way by which the glittering thing could accomplish such a feat.
“Then you can destroy with it — enough to call the attention of the GC men when they come?”
“Be sure of that,” said Rrulu. “But it will take a little time, to alter the circuits—”
Evers thought heavily that time was the last thing they would be allowed, and with the thought came a call from Sharr at the door.
“I think your escape is discovered,” said the girl.
Evers bounded to the door. The whole sky was turning crimson as the red sun of Arkar showed its rim above the horizon. The blood-like rays illuminated the compounds, the docks and star-ships, the tall flower-trees and their giant blooms, the arrogant dome of Schuyler’s metal mansion towering in the distance above everything.
From the direction of the mansion, two cars were racing toward the dock area. Men ran from the cars into shops and barracks. Then a warning siren began to scream.
“Yes, they’re going to start searching for us,” Evers muttered. He swung around to the K’harn, whose weird hands were now flying over the wires of crystals of the machine. “How much longer, Rrulu?”
“Several minutes, at least. I can’t do it any faster—”
Evers, coming to an icy decision, drew his gun. He thought they were all of them near the end of their rope, but till he stopped breathing he meant to hit back at Schuyler. A few minutes might do it—
He said to Sharr, “Only one way to give Rrulu time enough — and that’s to decoy them away from here. I’m going to hit for the forest. They’ll hear the alarm and follow me, and won’t bother the warehouse for a while.”
“But they’ll catch you and kill you!” she cried. “Schuyler will take no more chances—”
He paid no attention to her objections. He opened the warehouse door a little and slid out, and plunged for the neighboring forest.
He crossed the invisible detector beam, and the bells started their clangoring alarm. Evers glanced back and saw men back by the docks pointing and running forward.
He also saw Sharr, running silently right behind him on her bare feet.
“Why didn’t you stay?” he cried.
“I go with you!” she said. “I—”
“
He took her hand and scrambled up and ran on, through the underbrush beneath the lovely, looming flower- trees, with the red sunlight strong now in their faces.
“Keep in the brush,” Evers panted. “Their tracs can’t follow us in it, and the longer we keep going the more time it gives Rrulu.”
Ironically, almost as he said that, they heard a sound of crashing progress through the brush at several places behind them.
“What is it?” asked Sharr, seeing his face.
“They’re following us with Workers,” Evers said.
He needed to say no more. The Workers could go through anything, and faster than any human.
They plunged on, the thorny shrubs ripping their garments, scratching their arms and legs, and the ominous crashing strides behind them came closer each moment.
It seemed incredible to Evers that this should be the end of everything, and yet he knew it was — the cruelly anti-climactic conclusion of Lindeman’s great dream.
They burst suddenly out of the brush into the rubbly dark stones of the ancient ruins of Arkar. Sharr’s foot twisted on a loose bit of rock, and she cried out in pain and fell. Evers stooped to help her up.
She screamed, and he heard the
A Worker, its giant blue metal body towering enormous in the bloody light, was striding out of the brush after them. Its human controller was keeping back out of sight, using the robot’s radar “vision” to find the fugitives.
Evers fired at the mindless giant, and knew as he triggered that his beam could not harm the thing.
Yellow destruction-beams flashed out of the eye-like apertures in the Worker’s metal body, almost instantly.
The beams
Incredulously, Evers saw that the Worker was staggering and floundering as though out of control, its beams flashing aimlessly and blasting the dark stones nearby. He heard cries of astonishment and terror from back in the brush toward the spaceport.
Next moment, a band of pulsing, cold, white light seemed to expand from back there toward them. The light engulfed the staggering Worker.
The Worker’s metal body wavered hazily, changed, melted into blue vapor — and was gone.
The expanding white light reached Evers and Sharr. He looked down stupefiedly at his hand. The gun in it was changing to smoke, drifting away, and his fingers closed on emptiness.
