You could not drop the “I” of the last ten years, in a moment. He thought of himself as Neil Banning, still.
'Kyle!” It was Rolf's hoarse anxious voice. “Kyle?'
Banning opened his eyes. The helmet had been removed. Rolf's massive face, drawn with anxiety was close to his. From a little distance, Jommor watched with an expressionless stare.
'Kyle, you remember — the Hammer?” Rolf was crying. ‘Where it is — how to reach it — what it is?'
Banning felt the horror sweep back over him. Yes, he remembered, only too terribly well. He remembered his father, the Valkar of years ago, teaching him from a great star-chart on the wall of the ruined palace.
'— the yellow sun that neighbors the triple-star just beyond the last rim of the Darkness only to be approached from zenith or the drift will riddle you—'
Yes, he remembered that. And more. He wished he could forget the more, the secret of the Hammer's power that only he in the galaxy knew.
The part of him that was still Neil Banning recoiled in freezing terror from what the part of him that was Kyle Valkar remembered. No, do men could have planned such a thing, a thing to rend the very foundations of the galaxy; to destroy—
He would not think about it, be must not think about it now or his already overburdened mind would snap beneath the strain! It could not be true, anyway. Not even the Valkars of old, who had strode the galaxy like demigods, could have wielded or planned to wield such a power as that.
Rolf was shaking him by the shoulders. “Kyle come out of it! We're going to hit the Cluster, we've only minutes and it all depends on you — do you remember?'
Banning forced himself to speak, through stiff lips. “Yes — I remember — enough to get us through the Cluster — I think—'
Rolf lifted him bodily to his feet. “Then come on! You're needed on the bridge!'
Banning stumbled along beside Rolf, like a man in a daze. But when they entered the bridge, the sight now mirrored by the forward port shocked him into an awareness of danger, and the imminent necessity for action.
During that interval when his mind was lost in the dark whirlpool of time, Sunfire had been speeding at top- velocity toward the Cygnus Cluster, and now Banning saw that they were almost in it — had in fact already penetrated its out-flung edges. It was no longer a splendid distant entity, self-contained and definite. It had grown monstrously until it filled the universe, above, below, and on either side. A million suns engulfed the ship, as a grain of dust is caught up in the swarming of a million bees, and all the heavens were aburst with light.
Except in that quadrant where the Darkness lay. The Darkness, beyond whose last rim hung a triple star with a yellow sun beside it, and on the world of that yellow sun a Thing so terrible that—
No. No time for that now, no time to shiver and crumble in the grip of dread. Later, if you live. Later you can face the unthinkable.
But can you? And what will you do when you can no longer evade and postpone, when you must take the Hammer in your hand, and—
Behrent was looking at him. Rolf was looking at him, and so were the technicians, their faces bright and strange in the flooding glare, the raw star-blaze of the Cluster.
Behrent said quietly, “The ship is yours.'
Banning nodded. For a moment the Banning part of him flinched away in ignorance and terror, but the newly-awakened Valkar part looked out at the multitude of suns, and then inward at the ground-glass screen where the flight data was correlated. The man who sat at the control bank stared up at him, his forehead beaded with an icy sweat. Banning said, “Get up.'
He sat down in the man's place, with the control keys under his hands. And — memory flowed back, old skills and forgotten powers, and his fingers were alive and sentient on the bars, feeling the pulse and heartbeat of the ship.
He knew what to do. He was The Valkar. He was young again, hurling a speeding ship between the wild suns of Hercules, shooting the Orion Nebula, learning the hair-trigger responses and the cold mental calculation that would some day carry him in through Cygnus to — No! Keep your mind off that. Fly the ship. Get through. You've got to now, dying is not enough. Dying might take care of the present, but not the future. The Valkars did this, and it's up to you.
Besides, there is Tharanya. You brought her. Her life, too, is your responsibility.
Fly the ship! Get through!
Sunfire fled, a tiny mote, into the furnace heart of the Cluster. Outside, beyond the fringing stars, the Imperial task force slowed its speed and hung motionless in space. On a hundred bridges, a hundred captains watched a pin-point fleck go off their radar screens, lost in the overwhelming roar of solar force.
Inside Sunfire, there was silence. A thousand men and one woman crouched inside an iron vault and waited, for life, for death, for annihilation.
Under Banning's hands — The Valkar's hands — the force field that drove the cruiser ebbed and flowed, shifting focus constantly to compensate for the terrible drag of the stars that went reeling and spinning past the shuttered ports, monsters of green and red and golden fire. Silence, and the pounding throb of generators, and the tiny beating of a thousand human-hearts, and Sunfire rode the gravity-tides that raced between the suns, as a leaf will ride a mill-race between great shattering rocks.
And the swarming star-field slipped gradually aside, and the Darkness, the black nebula that cuts deep into the Cluster's flank, was set sharp on edge before them.
The Valkar remembered. The coordinates, projected on three dimensional space, with the four-dimensional correction for the passage of ninety thousand years. Turning, twisting, going back, weaving ever deeper into the Cluster along a circuitous route, every complex component of which was indelible in his brain.
He heard Rolf say, “No wonder no one else ever got in here! Even to enter the Cluster is suicide, but to twist into it this far—'
The rim of the Darkness heeled and tilted, and the stars along it swam into a new alignment. And there was a triple star, a red giant with two components, one emerald green, the other a burning sapphire. And beyond the triple star there was a yellow sun.
'— only to be approached from zenith, or the drift will riddle you—'
A Type G sun, in the normal course of events, will have at least one Earth-type world. Such a world circled the yellow star, and Banning sent the ship plunging toward it, thinking that it was a cruel and ironic coincidence that this lost star deep in a wild cluster should remind him so much of Sol, and that the green planet swinging round it should be so much like Earth.
Down through the atmosphere, sinking like a stone. The planet rolling underneath, heaving up its western curve, showing the upthrust peaks of a mountain range.
The mountain range was new. But half around the world beyond it was a place of very old formation, as stable as anything can be in an unstable universe. The place was flat and bare, and in the center of it was a structure.
Banning set Sunfire down. He felt as old as time, and as tired. A mounting excitement ran through the ship, men's voices raised in the hysterical joy of having survived. Behrent, Rolf, the technicians, other men crowded around Banning. He got up, shaking his head, and pushed them off. Rolf started to cry out some word of triumph, and Banning looked at him, and be fell silent.
'Get Jommor and Tharanya,” Banning told him. “They have a right to see the end of this. They've come a long way to see it.'
Banning turned and went alone down the corridor toward the airlock — alone except for the two Arraki, who were like his own twin shadows. He ordered the lock opened, and stepped out into the sweet untainted air of a world that had never been used by men.
Except once.
Banning began to walk across the barren plain. The sun was high in a sky of clear blue flecked with little clouds — just such a sky, he thought, was over Greenville that day on Earth. He shuddered, and the air seemed cold, and ahead of him the structure that had been raised millennia ago by men stood gaunt and mighty against the drifting clouds.
'Of course, by men,” murmured Sohmsei, echoing Banning's thought, “What other creature could imagine such a glorious blasphemy?'
