Corridor of the Suns

“Everybody okay?” he asked. Their voices answered shakenly in the dark, one by one. “Wait till I get down and I’ll help you down, Straw,” he said.

They presently stood on the slippery curved wall that had become the floor. A big rent had been torn open in the hull aft, and a faint ray of starlight came through it to show them the splintered beams, the torn and crumpled walls, and each other’s white faces.

He saw a glimmer of wetness in Lindeman’s eyes as he stared woefully around. “She’ll never fly again,” said Lindeman.

Evers didn’t blame him for being near to tears. It was hard on a man to cherish a dream for half a lifetime, and then have it end like this. To dream of being the Columbus of a new galaxy, to put everything you had into it, to dare all risks — and then to find you were not and never would be the first discoverer, and to come back and end your voyaging like this…

“The devil with that now,” said Evers, purposefully harsh. “We won’t go anywhere again either, unless we get out of here fast.”

As though to emphasize his words, there came from somewhere overhead the muffled, ripping B-R-ROOM — BOOM! of a ship going fast.

“They’re landing!” exclaimed Straw.

“No, not in this tangle of trees,” Evers said. “But they’ll keep buzzing the spot where we crashed, while they call Schuyler. We’ll have men here fast. Step on it!”

He shoved Lindeman and then Sharr and Straw out through the rent in the hull. He paused himself to snatch up a trio of energy-pistols, pawing for them in a buckled locker till he found them.

He squeezed out of the opening in the hull and dropped three feet to the ground, and stared around the warm, humid darkness.

Arkar had no moon and only a little starlight filtered down through the mighty branches overhead. For the Phoenix, in its rolling, had fetched up against a cluster of trunks like those of a mighty banyan, the immense branches and foliage a hundred feet over their heads. The ship had broken its back against those massive trunks.

“Smells like lilacs, somehow,” murmured Straw, and Evers instantly recognized the hauntingly sweet fragrance in the air.

“That’s what it is,” said Lindeman, nodding toward the colossal tree.

“Lilacs? You’crazy? Why—” Lindeman said, “Schuyler planted Arkar with Earth-plants, that in this chemically different soil went into giantism. The telenews had a lot about it at the time. The big man had to have the biggest flowers — damn him.”

“Will you stop chattering and move!” Evers said frantically. He grabbed Sharr’s wrist and started with her away from the wrecked ship. Lindeman and Straw followed.

The roar of the unseen hornet-ship as it went over above the lofty branches quickened them. When they were out of the shade of the giant lilac. Evers swiftly studied the stars. He remembered their bearings before the crash, and he thought he knew the direction in which Schuyler’s private spaceport lay.

He passed out the guns he had grabbed up, to Sharr and Lindeman and Straw. The guns, he thought poignantly, that they had taken with them to guard against the dangers of Andromeda.

“We haven’t got much time,” he said. “Those pilots would call the minute we crashed — there’ll be men on their way here from Schuyler’s base right now.”

“But then if we go toward the base, we’ll run right into them!” Sharr objected, and Straw said, “She’s right, Vance.”

Evers said furiously, “Do you suppose I don’t know that? It’s why we’ve got to hurry if we’re to have any chance.”

He pressed forward, leading the way. Almost at once they were in a thicket of ten-foot canes, growing so closely together that they sometimes had to squeeze between them. With a shock, Evers suddenly realized that the tall canes were in fact ordinary Earth grass. Everything here was Earth vegetation, gone into giantism. Arkar’s own native vegetation had long ago died for lack of water, and it had been Schuyler’s whim, when he had the planet seeded after giving it water, to bring all the seeds from Earth.

Evers searched the obscurity ahead for more trees. He didn’t think they had very much time. He did not know how far ahead Schuyler’s mansion and spaceport were, but it could not be very far.

A heavy perfume drifted to him on the moist air, from the right. He altered course in that direction. A grove of sixty-foot trees, stiff and angular with trunks thickly studded with foot-long spikes, loomed up before him.

Straw sniffed the air and whispered, “I’ll be damned, they’re roses.”

“We’re climbing this one,” Evers said rapidly. “If we’re lucky, they’ll go under us. You and Sharr first, Eric. I’ll help Straw get up.”

The climb should have been easy. The spikes were fairly close together and formed a good ladder all around the great trunk. Lindeman disappeared up in the darkness, and Sharr followed him up like a cat. But Straw had heavy going with one arm half-useless, and Evers had to climb beside him to steady him.

They reached a crotch, twenty feet from the ground. It was big enough to hold them if they squeezed together. Not daring now to speak, Evers made a gesture, and they crouched down.

He could feel Sharr warm beside him. She was not trembling, but the rapid pounding of her heart was right against him. He was afraid of her losing her nerve and patted her hand encouragingly. She made a small sound like a sniff of resentment.

The drowsing, heavy tide of perfume flowed down on them from above and he could glimpse the outline of the giant blooms up there, against the starry sky.

Sharr stiffened against him. Her ears had been quicker than his. It was moments later before he heard the sound of men coming.

Evers peered down. The men were not trying to be utterly silent, but neither were they making any unnecessary noise. They were strung in a line, ten feet apart, and advanced in the direction where the wreck lay, turning their porta-lights this way and that.

They moved fast, and went past the clump of giant rose-trees in a minute. Evers waited till their lights were out of sight, and then whispered,

“When they find the wreck and us not in it, they’ll spread out fast. Hurry!”

They pressed forward, and came to a clearing in the giant vegetation. Lindeman tripped on a loose stone, and then Evers saw that around them were low, ancient, crumbling walls of dark stone, eaten down by time so that only broken bits of them remained. He knew these were some of the remnants of the long-perished people of ancient Arkar, pathetic shards of a folk gone ages ago. But he had no time to feel that pathos, he felt too naked and exposed in this clear place, and pushed the others forward.

Ten minutes later the four of them crouched in the deep shadow of big, bushy, fronded trees that Evers thought might be peonies, and looked out into an open space.

Here was the real nerve-center of a vast industrial empire. Far across the galaxy stretched the great mines and smelters and spaceports of Schuyler Metals. But here, on this privately owned planet, was the home of the man who was Schuyler Metals. The fabulous mansion itself was not in sight. But this was the spaceport that served it.

It was too big, this spaceport. Far too big for a few private yachts. It had docks for a score of ships, with aprons and cranes and work-pits. In five of the docks, star-ships loomed up into the night, and they too were far too big for mere private use. Between the docks and the four fugitives, large metal warehouses glinted dully in the light of suspended krypton-arcs.

Sounds of activity came to them from the far side of the docks. Some of them were the ordinary sounds of men working with tools and machines around ships. But there were other, heavier, clanking sounds that Evers didn’t like. He hoped Schuyler had no Workers here. Men they might be able to face, but Workers were another matter.

“You were right, Evers,” whispered Lindeman. “He’s running the Andromeda operation from here. Those warehouses—”

Evers looked at his watch and calculated swiftly. “It’ll be at least twelve hours before those GC cruisers