Return to the Stars

Shorr Kan was picking himself up, streaming blood from a cut on the forehead. Hull Burrel lay on the deck, limp and motionless. In a panic, Gordon pawed at him, rolled him over and felt for the pulse in his throat.

'Dead?' asked Shorr Kan. He had opened his tunic and was tearing a strip of cloth from his undergarment.

Still gasping for breath, Gordon poked up one of Hull's eyelids and shook his head. 'Unconscious. I don't think he's badly hurt.'

Shorr Kan pressed the bit of cloth over the gash on his head. It rapidly became crimson. 'Lucky,' he said. 'We could all be dead.' He glared at Gordon. 'Why in the name of hell did you crash us... ?'

He suddenly fell silent. Shorr Kan had one of the quickest minds that Gordon had ever met. He was now looking at the after part of the alien ship.

The bulkheads back there were crumpled like tin. The tail of the descending ship had taken the full force of the impact. Shorr Kan turned again to Gordon, with an arctic light in his black eyes.

He whispered, 'Do you get anything now?'

Gordon too had been listening, straining not only with his ears but with his mind.

'Nothing,' he said. 'Not the faintest flicker. I think the H'Harn must have died in the landing.'

'It would pretty well have to be dead, the way the ship is wrecked back there,' said Shorr Kan. 'Of course. That's what you were trying to do, kill the H'Harn in the landing.'

Gordon nodded. He felt horribly shaky, a reaction from the ordeal of mental battle.

'It was never going to let us walk away free,' he said. 'That was sure. I took a chance on getting it first.'

Shorr Kan refolded the sopping cloth. He nodded, and the gesture made him wince. 'I'll say for you, Gordon, you have the courage of your convictions. But I think you were right. I think it would have blasted our minds... or at least two of our minds... before it let any of us go free. To coin a phrase, we know too much.'

'Yes,' said Gordon. 'I only wish we knew more.'

Hull Burrel remained unconscious so long that Gordon was beginning to worry. Finally he came around, grumbling that every bone in his body was broken, then adding that it was worth it to be rid of the H'Harn. He looked at Gordon with narrowed, appraising eyes.

'I'm not sure I'd have had the nerve to risk it,' he said.

'You're a spaceman,' Gordon said. 'You know too well what might have happened.' He nodded to the crumpled hull plates. 'Drag your fractures over here and give us a hand.'

Hull laughed and shook his head, and came. It took them a long time to lever the plates wide enough so that they could edge through, but was no other way out... the lock was hopelessly jammed... and the impact had already done most of the work for them. They climbed out at last into warm yellow sunshine and dropped to the green- turfed ground.

Gordon looked around wonderingly. This world, or at least this portion of it, had a startling similarity to Earth. The men stood at the edge of a green forest, and not far from them the forest thinned and they had glimpses of a rolling plain. The sky was blue, the sunshine golden, the air sweet and full of the dry fragrance of leaves and grasses. It was true that the individual shrubs, trees, and plants he saw were quite unlike terrestrial ones in detail, but the overall resemblance to a scene in the temperate zone of Earth was very great.

Hull Burrel had other thoughts. He was frowning gloomily at the wreck of the ship that had brought them so far across the void.

'That one will never fly again,' he said.

'Even if it was undamaged, you couldn't handle it,' said Gordon. 'It was only through the H'Harn that you managed.'

Hull nodded. 'So here we are, without a ship, on an uninhabited world.'

Gordon knew what he meant. Stranded.

'But is it uninhabited?' said Shorr Kan. The cut had now ceased to bleed. 'I know the H'Harn said it was, but those creatures are the fathers of lies. Just before we crashed I thought I saw a distant something that might be a town.'

'Mm,' said Gordon uneasily. 'If this world is inhabited, and the H'Harn was making for it, it's extremely likely to be one of the nonhuman worlds in this part of the Marches that follow Narath Teyn... and the counts.'

Shorr Kan said, 'I've considered that. I think we had better reconnoiter, and I think we had better be blasted careful about how we show ourselves.' He pointed. 'The town was off there somewhere.'

They started along the edge of the forest, keeping a little way back within the trees for cover. The green plain out beyond them remained empty, rolling away to the horizon. There were a few odd birds and small animals in the forest, making small sounds, and the wind rustled the trees in a familiar way. But there was a quietness here that Gordon did not like. He handed the charge-chamber back to Hull.

'Put it back in the stunner,' he said. 'It isn't much, but it's something.'

'What I don't understand,' Hull said, while he did that, 'is the why of it. Why did the H'Harn direct us into his ship by mental influence and then take us back with it to the Magellanic Clouds? What use would we be to it?'

^'You and I would be no use at all,' said Short Kan. 'It dawns on me that the thing didn't just want a copilot. I think it wanted Gordon.'

'Good Lord,' said Gordon, and stared at him. In the stress of the moment he had not thought that far, but he knew what Shorr Kan was driving at. He broke out in a cold sweat. 'But how would it... of course, it's attention was aroused when we killed the other H'Harn and started to escape. It would undoubtedly have probed our minds then, even though we were not conscious of it. That's how it came to be hidden in the ship.'

'So... it probed your mind,' said Hull. 'What is there about you that would make it want you so badly?'

Shorr Kan smiled ironically. 'Tell him, Gordon.'

'Look, Hull,' Gordon said. 'You learned about me so recently, at Throon, that you haven't yet realized the implications of what you learned. The Emperor himself told you how I... that is to say, my mind... was in possession of the body of Prince Zarth Arn at the time of the star-king's great war against the League.'

Hull said irritably, 'I'm not likely to forget that. How it was really you who led the Empire fleet, and used the...'

He stopped abruptly. His mouth was still open and he forgot to close it.

'Exactly,' said Gordon. 'It was I, and not Zarth Arn, who used the Empire's secret weapon, the Disruptor.'

'The Disruptor,' said Shorr Kan, sharpening the point, 'which was used by the Empire thousands of years ago, to repel the H'Harn when they first tried to invade this galaxy.'

Hull closed his mouth and opened his eyes wider, looking at Gordon. 'Well, of course. If the H'Harn could get their hands... or whatever they use in place of them... on anyone who knows the secret of the Disruptor, which only the Empire's royal family are supposed to know, they'd be awfully happy. Yes, I see. But...'

'I suggest,' said Shorr Kan, 'that you defer further discussion and take a look out there.'

The edge of his voice cut them silent. They peered out of the trees at the great plain.

Miles out from the forest, and far away to their left, a group of specks moved across the surface of the plain. At first Gordon thought they were running game animals. But there was something wrong about their gait and pace and the way that they rose and fell a little above the ground.

The group swept along, not coming any nearer to the forest but heading in a straight line in the direction that Gordon thought of as north. As they passed by, he could see them more clearly. And he did not like what he saw.

The creatures were neither running nor flying, but doing a little of both. They were stubby-winged avian bipeds, much bigger than Korkhann's people, and lacking the civilized amenity of feathers. They had remained closer to the reptile; the equivalent, say, of the pterodactyl. Wings and body were leathery smooth, a gray or tan in color, and their heads were hideously quasi-human, with bulging skulls above long cruel beaks that seemed to have teeth in them. As with Korkhann's folk, the wings served also as arms, with powerful clawed hands.

Gordon got the impression that those hands were carrying weapons.

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