The Three Suns of Amara

There could be no appeal and no defense.

The sightless eyes stared at nothing. The mouth hung open like a dead man’s. The teeth were huge. There were spots of blood on them!

The hands, with fingers spread like claws, were the hands of a strangler. This thing had been born in his mind when he was born. It had been created out of the stark fear of strangulation. Always it had lived within him, imprisoned, suppressed, seeking the opportunity to break out into a form of its own. And then—to stifle that other which had stifled it for so long. Now, in the land of the Three-people, it had escaped at last. Now, here, somewhere, that tyrant was at its mercy.

The sightless eyes turned this way and that.

Then they became still, seeming to stare straight into Sherret’s eyes. And then, shockingly, they became sighted.

Sherrot’s mind was swimming as, blurrily, he was transformed into a three-fold personality. He was his fear- stricken, petrified self. He was also the drained out Canato in the chair, keeping his head turned away, trying to see nothing, abysmally unhappy, lonely, despairing.

And he was also—it.

It was just a pair of hands reaching for a throat to throttle to the accompaniment of an hysterical scream. Kill! Kill!

An insensate repetition.

The manifold viewpoint coalesced back to just one —the viewpoint of the hunted Sherret. The thing had used his vision to locate him. And now it was advancing to the attack, its eager hands outstretched.

Sherret reeled back against the wall. The hysterical scream still seemed to be going on, but now it was incoherent, wordless. It was Sherret himself screaming, as Lee had screamed before him.

He was grabbing wildly for security, anything to cling to, as he had grabbed at the grass tufts at the edge of the mud swamp. He clawed uselessly at the smooth wall. Then his fingers encountered Lee’s shield still leaning there. Like a hunted animal, seeking any sanctuary, however inadequate, he squirmed behind it. Dimly, he was aware he was crouching beside his rucksack on the floor. Then fear-sharpened memory flung up a wild hope. He scrabbled at the rucksack, found the little grenades, slid one from its band. His thumb nail tore off the capsule’s nipple.

He flung the grenade awkwardly, numbing his forearm against the shield’s hard edge.

The explosion wasn’t so much a sound as a sudden and agonizing increase of pressure against his eardrums. The blast-driven shield rammed him hard against the wall.

Then the pressure dropped. The shield fell away, clanged on the floor. It had served its purpose, and for the second time saved his life; not a single splinter had penetrated it.

Not that Sherret noted that for some time. It was a long time before he moved his trembling hands from his face and dared to look at the room. It had vanished. But the air was still thick with bitter smoke. The murals were full of ragged holes and cracks, and half the furniture was just so much smashed wood. Lee lay in the lake of his own blood.

Canato still sat in his big hide chair, but looked smaller. Plastoid splinters were embedded all over the leather. At least one had passed through his heart.

CHAPTER SEVEN

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SHERBET never did remember leaving the house or the valley. The next thing he was really aware of was the dirt- grimed face of a savage staring at him with wild eyes from a tangle of red hair.

Slowly, he became oriented. The face was looking up at him from a pool of still water, and was his own.

He washed the grime from it in the same water, plastered down the shock of hair, combed the beard with his fingers. He noticed that his hands had become rather thin. He felt very tired, hungry, and confused.

He squatted by the pool, looking around. The first thing that struck him was the peculiarity of the light. The sky was a rich yellow, yet he was seeing things in fairly natural colors—natural to Earth, that was. He shifted to look behind him, and had to shield his eyes from the glare of what seemed to be a white-hot cable stretched taut along the ground some distance off.

It either began or ended at a point maybe a hundred yards from him, and ran off across flat grass-land for as far as the eye could follow. In that direction the horizon bore what seemed to be a long, low ridge, until Sherret recognized the V-shaped nick in it—the pass.