three hundred credits.'
The face laughed out loud. “Really, for a sum as small as that, it is naive to expect.'
'There's more,” said Horne, and reached into his pocket and brought out the stunner. “There's this. A splitting headache for a week. Or would you rather take the credits?'
Ten days later, looking not very much like himself, Horne was deep in the bowels of a dumpy Fringe trading- ship as it lifted off for Skereth.
Horne had time to think on the long, slow voyage back out through the Fringe. He had time to turn over and over in his mind everything he knew about Ardric. There wasn't very much, and the main part of it was that Ardric had said his home was at Rillah, which was the old ruling city of Skereth and lay across a small landlocked sea from the new spaceport town. Of course, Ardric might have lied about that as he had lied about everything else…
When he thought too long about Ardric, his hands would tremble a little. He had begun to fear that if he ever did find Ardric he would kill him outright instead of making him tell the truth. Then the black depression would come back on him and whisper to him that Ardric was really dead, that he could never have made it away from the wreck in time, and that he was an idiot to go hunting a dead man, a phantom…
Skereth finally rolled toward the freighter, a tawny globe. When the ship went down through the eternal cloud-layer to the busy spaceport at Skambar, Horne felt a pang, thinking of how short a time ago he had left here as the Chief Pilot of a good ship without a worry in the world.
When the freighter docked, Horne did not leave it with the rest of the crew. He deliberately scamped on a job, and had timed it so that a cursing Second Officer swore that he would have no planet-liberty until he did his task over. Horne sulked and went to work, using every opportunity to keep an eye on the docks outside the ship.
There was a little group of Skereth men outside the dockgate. They were not officials, but they stood there talking among themselves and watching every man who came out of the ship. From time to time one or two of them went away and then came back in cone-fliers.
Were they police?
Maybe. Horne had known quite well that his escape would be broadcast, and that officials on Skereth would receive the warning.
But what if they weren't police? Unless he was dead wrong in all his deductions, there was a big, deep conspiracy on Skereth… one that had used Ardric to kill Morivenn so that Skereth would stay out of the Federation. He, Horne, had implied as much in the testimony he had given at his hearing, and nobody had believed him.
'No, not police,” thought Horne. “The men who sent Ardric on his errand…'
They would guess that Jim Horne, escaped prisoner, might come back to Skereth looking for Ardric. He had shouted his charges against Ardric loudly enough. And if Jim Horne came back to Skereth they were, quite apparently ready for him.
Horne revised his plans. He was not going to be able to walk out and take the first public flier across the landlocked sea to Rillah. He would have to go some other way.
He made his work last until night, was profanely forbidden liberty that night, and went to his bunk. In the small hours of the morning, in the forever starless darkness, Horne slipped out of the ship. The watchers were still out there, though there were only three of them now. He could use the stunner, but he had a pretty sound idea that there would be others close by, and he did not think he would get very far that way.
There was an electrical barrier around the ship, not lethally charged but highly unpleasant if you touched it. Horne touched down in the dark on the other side of the ship from the gate, and began work with the insulated tools he had filched out of the ship.
Twice he had to stop and crouch like a motionless shadow while cone-fliers went by overhead with a lazy, whistling sound. He was pretty sure that these were other watchers. They were, it seemed to Horne, awfully thorough about this.
Too thorough, too ruthless. There must be more to all this than just a political bias against Skereth joining the Federation. But what could it be?
Horne made his opening and slipped through it, and bumped head-on into two figures coming along so quietly he hadn't heard them.
He jumped back, and then he saw that they were Nightbirds. They raised no alarm, they did not even glance twice at him, but minced along on their ridiculous avian feet, soundless as shadows. He saw them go on around the dock and pass the little group at the gate without stopping, and he remembered how Mica had said that they worked in the spaceport area by night and had little to do with humans and nothing to do with human police.
He had been sorry for that, the night that he and Vinson were attacked. He was glad of it, now.
Within an hour, Horne stood in the heavy darkness on the fishermen's wharf of Skambar. The light metal powerboats lay along the narrow wharves chuckling sloppily among themselves as they rose and fell. There was no watchman on the wharf. The landlocked sea of Skereth was so famously full of hideous forms of life, that only the hardiest of men fished it by day and no one in their eight mind would take a boat out on it at night.
'So I'm not in my right mind,” Horne muttered, and picked out the likeliest boat for his purpose, a metalloy two-man skiff with good power.
It occurred to him, as he took it out, that he was taking some fisherman's wealth and livelihood. The old Jim Horne would have felt pangs of conscience about that. The new Horne dismissed the thought. All that mattered now was that he was on his way to Rillah… and Ardric.
CHAPTER VI
A great sinuous shining arm reached out of the black water directly ahead of the skiff. Horne slammed the steering lever hard over with one hand and reached for his stunner with the other. The little bullet-shaped craft shot off on a frantic tangent drawing swirls of cold phosphorescent fire from the water under its metalloy hull. The arm continued its lazy motion without any sign of disturbance. Horne began to laugh. It was only a long, thick coil of weed, given a semblance of life by the rolling of the whole bed in some hidden undercurrent.
His laughter became rather too loud, ringing with a shocking loneliness across the empty sea. Horne stopped it. He couldn't let himself get edgy now. He had come a long way and a brutal hard one, but he had a longer and harder way yet to go to the city of Rillah in quest of a ghost.
'Maybe,” he muttered to himself, “I better get some sleep.'
He was sweating and shaking in a way that alarmed him.
He pulled back the speed lever until the skiff was moving at a safe rate of speed. Its radar beam would take it around rocks or islands of floating weed too thick for passage, bringing it back to the course he had set. The night would go on for a long time yet, for nights here endured almost as long as three Earth days.
He lay down in the narrow well and slid the plastic canopy over him in case it rained. Rain on Skereth was not merely a matter of getting wet. A shower could swamp the skiff before he even had time to wake up.
He lay still, feeling the quiet lift and fall of the black water like the breathing of a slumbering giant. He was exhausted, burned out inside by the intensity that life had taken on for him in these last weeks.
Lying there, he thought suddenly of Denman. He remembered how sorry he had felt for the little Federation man when they had dropped him on that barbaric planet to live with humanoids in order to try and trace” the slavers who were oppressing them. He had felt almost guilty to be leaving Denman there.
'I should have saved my pity for myself,” Horne thought.
He lay staring up at the sky through the transparent canopy, waiting for sleep, and he noticed what he thought was a dim star, low and far off in the west.
'The clouds must have broken,” he thought, and closed his eyes. The skiff moved gently over the breathing sea.
Broken clouds, a star… that meant tomorrow the sun would shine.
Horne started up, flinging back the canopy. He had been half asleep or he would have remembered that not once in a generation did the clouds break on Skereth.
Whatever the light was in the sky, it was not a star.
It was still there, but brighter, and as he watched it now he could see that it moved back and forth as well as
