were certainly none here. Perhaps he could find some in the ruins of the Foundation building. With this thought he had the sudden desire to see the wreckage up close. There might be other survivors. He had to find out. If he could talk to the men he had seen working there…
Ulv was still crouched against the wall in the outer room. He looked up angrily when Brion came over, but said nothing.
“Will you help me again?” Brion asked. “Stay and watch the girl while I go out. “I’ll be back at noon.” Ulv didn’t answer. I am still looking for the way to save Dis,” Brion added.
“Go—I’ll watch the girl!” Ulv spat words in impotent fury. “I do not know what to do. You may be right. Go. She will be safe with me.”
Brion slipped out into the deserted street and, half running, half walking, made his way towards the rubble that had been the Cultural Relationships Foundation. He used a different course from the one they had come by, striking first towards the outer edge of the city. Once there, he could swing and approach from the other side, so there would be no indication where he had come from. The magter might be watching and he didn’t want to lead them to Lea and the stolen body.
Turning a corner, he saw a sand car stopped in the street ahead. There was something familiar about the lines of it. It could be the one he and Telt had used, but he wasn’t sure. He looked around, but the dusty, packed- dirt street was white and empty, shimmering in silence under the sun. Staying close to the wall and watching carefully, Brion slipped towards the car. When he came close behind it he was positive it was the one he had been in the night before. What was it doing here?
Silence and heat filled the street. Windows and doors were empty, and there was no motion in their shadows. Putting his foot on a bogey wheel, he reached up and grabbed the searing metal rim of the open window. He pulled himself up and stared at Telt’s smiling face.
Smiling in death. The lips pulled back to reveal the grinning teeth, the eyes bursting from the head, the features swollen and contorted from the deadly poison. A tiny, tufted dart of wood stuck in the brown flesh on the side of his neck.
XV
Brion hurled himself backward and sprawled flat in the dust and filth of the road. No poison dart sought him out; the empty silence still reigned. Telt’s murderers had come and gone. Moving quickly, using the bulk of the car as a shield, he opened the door and slipped inside.
They had done a thorough job of destruction. All of the controls had been battered into uselessness, the floor was a junk heap of crushed equipment, intertwined with loops of recording tape bulging like mechanical intestines. A gutted machine, destroyed like its driver.
It was easy enough to reconstruct what had happened. The car had been seen when they entered the city— probably by some of the magter who had destroyed the Foundation building. They had not seen where it had gone, or Brion would surely be dead by now. But they must have spotted it when Telt tried to leave the city—and stopped it in the most effective way possible, a dart through the open window into the unsuspecting driver’s neck.
Telt dead! The brutal impact of the man’s death had driven all thought of its consequences from Brion’s mind. Now he began to realize. Telt had never sent word of his discovery of the radioactive trace to the Nyjord army. He had been afraid to use the radio, and had wanted to tell Hys in person, and to show him the tape. Only now the tape was torn and mixed with all the others, the brain that could have analyzed it dead.
Brion looked at the dangling entrails of the radio and spun for the door. Running swiftly and erratically, he fled from the sand car. His own survival and the possible survival of Dis depended on his not being seen near it. He must contact Hys and pass on the information. Until he did that, he was the only off-worlder on Dis who knew which magter tower might contain the world-destroying bombs.
Once out of sight of the sand car he went more slowly, wiping the sweat from his streaming face. He hadn’t been seen leaving the car, and he wasn’t being followed. The streets here weren’t familiar, but he checked his direction by the sun and walked at a steady fast pace towards the destroyed building. More of the native Disans were in the streets now. They all noticed him, some even stopped and scowled fiercely at him. With his emphatic awareness he felt their anger and hatred. A knot of men radiated death, and he put his hand on his gun as he passed them. Two of them had their blowguns ready, but didn’t use them. By the time he had turned the next corner he was soaked with nervous perspiration.
Ahead was the rubble of the destroyed building. Grounded next to it was the tapered form of a spacer’s pinnace. Two men had come from the open lock and were standing at the edge of the burnt area.
Brion’s boots grated loudly on the broken wreckage. The men turned quickly towards him, guns raised. Both of them carried ion rifles. They relaxed when they saw his offworld clothes.
“Bloody damned savages!” one of them growled. He was a heavy-planet man, a squashed-down column of muscle and gristle, whose head barely reached Brion’s chest. A pushed-back cap had the crossed slide-rule symbol of ship’s computer man.
“Can’t blame them, I guess,” the second man said. He wore purser’s insignia. His features were different, but with the same compacted body the two men were as physically alike as twins. Probably from the same home planet. “They’re gonna get their whole world blown out from under them at midnight. Looks as if the poor slob in the streets finally realized what is happening. Hope we’re in jump-space by then. I saw Estrada’s World get it, and I don’t want to see that again, not twice in one lifetime!”
The computer man was looking closely at Brion, head tilted sideways to see his face. “You need transportation offworld?” he asked. “We’re the last ship at the port, and we’re going to boil out of here as soon as the rest of our cargo is aboard. We’ll give you a lift if you need it.”
Only by a tremendous effort at control did Brion conceal the destroying sorrow that overwhelmed him when he looked at that shattered wasteland, the graveyard of so many. “No,” he said. “That won’t be necessary. I’m in touch with the blockading fleet and they’ll pick me up before midnight.”
“You from Nyjord?” the purser growled.
“No,” Brion said, still only half aware of the men. “But there is trouble with my own ship.” He realized that they were looking intently at him, that he owed them some kind of explanation. “I thought I could find a way to stop the war. Now… I’m not so sure.” He hadn’t intended to be so frank with the spacemen, but the words had been uppermost in his thoughts and had simply slipped out.
The computer man started to say something, but his shipmate speared him in the side with his elbow. “We blast soon—and I don’t like the way these Disans are looking at us. The captain said to find out what caused the fire, then get the hell back. So let’s go.”
“Don’t miss your ship,” the computer man said to Brion, and he started for the pinnace. Then he hesitated and turned. “Sure there’s nothing we can do for you?”
Sorrow would accomplish nothing. Brion fought to sweep the dregs of emotion from his mind and to think clearly. “You can help me,” he said. “I could use a scalpel or any other surgical instrument you might have.” Lea would need those. Then he remembered Telt’s undelivered message. “Do you have a portable radio transceiver? I can pay you for it.”
The computer man vanished inside the rocket and reappeared a minute later with a small package. “There’s a scalpel and a magnetized tweezers in here—all I could find in the med kit. Hope they’ll do.” He reached inside and swung out the metal case of a self-contained transceiver. “Take this, it’s got plenty of range, even on the longer frequencies.”
He raised his hand at Brion’s offer to pay. “My donation,” he said. “If you can save this planet I’ll give you the whole pinnace as well. We’ll tell the captain we lost the radio in some trouble with the natives. Isn’t that right, Moneybags?” He prodded the purser in the chest with a finger that would have punched a hole through a weaker man.
“I read you loud and clear,” the purser said. “I’ll make out an invoice so stating, back in the ship.” They were both in the pinnace then, and Brion had to move fast to get clear of the takeoff blast.
A sense of obligation—the spacemen had felt it too. The realization of this raised Brion’s spirits a bit as he searched through the rubble for anything useful. He recognized part of a wall still standing as a corner of the
