top-brass to sit in and harass worried pilots.
Hull had told them that radar showed no sign of pursuit at all. He had explained that when the counts saw them dive into the Broken Stars, they would write them off as finished. And, he had added, they were probably right.
Shorr Kan came back holding a couple of plastic flasks filled with a pale, slightly milky-looking liquor. He grinned sardonically at Gordon.
'I was pretty sure that Obd Doll would have something stored away. The counts of the Marches are a hard- drinking lot. Here, have one.'
Gordon took the flask, but stared up at Shorr Kan in amazement. 'A drink? Now? In this?' And he jerked his head toward the radar screen. 'Any minute, one stray chunk of drift...'
Shorr Kan sat down. 'Quite right. And can you think of a better time for drinking?'
Gordon shrugged. Maybe Shorr Kan made sense, at that. All Hull wanted them to do was to keep quiet and let him make his long-shot gamble for life. Very well, then. He would keep quiet. He lifted the flask and drank.
The liquor might look a little like milk and it was bland going down, but it was hellfire when it hit his insides.
'Better than anything we had in the Dark Worlds,' said Shorr Kan.
'I remember,' said Gordon, 'when Lianna and I were your prisoners at Thallarna... how long ago that seems!... you said you'd offer us a drink but you didn't keep the stuff around because it would spoil your pose as the austere patriotic leader.'
Shorr Kan smiled wryly. 'And much good it did me in the end.' He looked at Gordon with a kind of admiration. 'I had the whole galaxy in my grasp, and then you came along. By God, I have to hand it to you. You really were a spoiler.'
Gordon turned and looked, startled, toward the view-plate. Nothing there seemed to have changed but there was a new sound, a screeching and screeking along the hull.
'Relax, Gordon,' said Shorr Kan. 'Just tiny particles, probably no bigger than atoms. Nothing to get jumpy about.' He added, 'When I think about it, in spite of the remarkable things you've done, you've nearly always had the jumps.'
Gordon said between his teeth, 'It seems a natural reaction when one's life is in danger.'
'Look at me,' said Shorr Kan. 'I'm in as much danger as you. More, because if we get out of this mess there's more trouble waiting for me. I'm flying for my life... the second time... me that was lord of the Dark Worlds. But do I get upset? Not a bit. If Shorr Kan has to go, he'll go with his head high.'
He raised the flask with a theatrical gesture, but the smile on his dark face was mocking.
Gordon shook his head. There were times when Shorr Kan just reduced him to silence.
'So drink up and be of good heart,' said Shorr Kan. 'We'll get through, all will go well with you, and you'll save my neck when we get there... I hope!'
The computers were chattering even more wildly, and when Gordon glanced forward he saw that the symbols were flashing in a swift stream across the radar screen. It seemed to him that Hull Burrel, hunched over the board, had his head bent in resignation, bowing to the inevitable end. Gordon turned his own head quickly away.
He thought of Lianna. It was strange how, when everything was getting unreal to him in the slow freezing terror of approaching dissolution, she remained quite real. Even if he survived, he felt that she was lost to him. But he thought of her, and was glad.
'You know, I've had an idea for a long time,' Shorr Kan was saying, 'that you're sort of a grain of sand in the machine, Gordon. I mean, you take someone out of his own context, his own time-frame, and hurl him into the future where he's got no business to be, and you put everything out of kilter. See how your coming, from the very first, has upset things all across the galaxy.'
Gordon said dryly, 'What you mean is that I upset the private plans of one Shorr Kan, that's all.'
'Possibly,' said Shorr Kan, with a courtly wave of his hand. 'But tell me, what the devil was it like, that past time you came from? I asked you that before, but then you were lying to me and I couldn't believe a word of it.'
'To tell you the truth,' said Gordon, 'it's getting just a little vague in my own mind.' He drank and considered. 'There was a man named Keogh who told me that this future I had been in before was all a dream. I just hated the Earth as it was, he said, so I made up fantasies about star-kingdoms and great wars beyond the suns. Of course at that time we didn't have anything approaching star-flight, so it must have all seemed pretty wild to him.'
'We have a name for people like that,' said Shorr Kan. 'Planet-huggers. Hang tight to your mother-world's apron strings, because if you get away from it you might find something awfully nasty and upsetting.'
Gordon glanced forward again. 'Right at this moment,' he said, 'I'm not so sure that people who take that view are so awfully wrong.'
Seen past the dark, hunched silhouette of Hull Burrel, the scene in the viewplate had slowly changed.
The points of fire that were suns seemed to be closer together. It was as though the ship was moving toward a rampart of suns, and surely they were not going to try to go that way. Hull would surely change course soon.
But time went on and he did not. Gordon drank again. The mighty blazing rampart of suns seemed closer, and still Hull did not alter course. Gordon felt a growing impulse to go and pound on Hull's arm, to make him veer off, but he fought it down. He didn't know a bloody thing about piloting a starship, and they had put the ship and themselves into Hull's hands and there was nothing to do but wait.
Shorr Kan seemed to understand how he felt. He said, 'Less drift between the suns. Their attraction tends to gather up a good bit of debris. That's why he's going that way.'
'Thank you for reassuring the nervous novice,' said Gordon. 'It's good of you.'
Shorr Kan smiled. 'I'm an awfully sympathetic person. Have another.'
They sat, and drank, and Gordon tried not to look at the viewplate again or listen to the computers clacking. Time seemed to run on forever and it was almost a painful shock of change when the viewplate showed that they were out of the star-swarm and into the dark, clear deeps of open space.
Hull Burrel's great paw slammed down on the automatic pilot control. The big Antarian turned to them and for the first time in that flight they saw his face.
It was wild, exalted, and his voice came to them as a kind of hoarse triumphant shout.
'By God, I did it! I ran the Broken Stars!'
And then, as he looked at them, sitting with the nearly-emptied flasks in their hands, the wildness and excitement left him. He came back and stood over them, towering.
'I'll be everlastingly damned.' he said. 'While I did it, you two have been sitting here and drinking your heads off!'
Shorr Kan answered calmly, 'You asked us not to bother you. Well, have we?'
Hull's craggy face turned scarlet. His chest heaved, and then he roared with laughter.
'Now,' he said, 'now I've seen everything. Get me one of those flasks. I think I want to get a little drunk myself.'
They were out of the Marches, and the pure white fire of Fomalhaut gleamed like a beacon ahead.
It was many hours before Hull Burrel came back to the bridge, stretching and yawning. He started laughing again as he looked at Gordon and Shorr Kan.
'Through the Broken Stars with two topers,' he said and shook his head. 'Nobody will ever believe it.'
'The whole fleet of Fomalhaut is on alert,' he told them. 'We're to land at the royal port on Hathyr.'
'Any message for me?' asked Gordon.
The Antarian shook his head.
So that, Gordon thought, was that.
The radar screen showed ships far out from Fomalhaut cruising in stand-by formation.
'It's a good fleet,' muttered Hull. 'It's awfully good, and proved it in the fight off Deneb. But it's not very big, and the counts will eat it up.'
The diamond sun swept toward them, and then the growing sphere of its largest planet. Hull brought the ship down over the far-spread towers of Hathyr City, toward the vast hexagonal mass of the royal palace. They landed in the small port behind it.
It seemed very strange to Gordon to step out and breathe natural air again, and look at a sun without a filter window in between.
