Star Bridge (2 page)

Horn waited patiently. The man levered himself up on an elbow and raised his head. Red-rimmed eyes, swollen almost shut, peered hopelessly at Horn, blinked, and widened a little. Surprise and relief were in them.

A-roo!
The hounds were close.

The man's mouth opened and shut silently. His tongue was black and swollen. His throat tightened and relaxed and tightened again as he tried to speak. At last he forced out a thin thread of sound.

“Water! For mercy's sake, water!”

Horn dropped off the pony and unhooked the canteen from the saddlehorn. He walked to the edge of the rock and held it out to the man in the dust. He shook it. The water tinkled.

The man whimpered. He dragged himself forward on his elbows. Horn shook the canteen again. The man moved faster, but the few meters to the rock diminished with painful slowness.

“Come on, man,” Horn said impatiently. He looked over the man's head, back across the desert. The dust cloud was rising higher. “Here's water. Hurry!”

The man hurried. Grunting, grimacing, he crawled toward the canteen, his half-blind eyes fixed on it unmoving. He crawled up on the rock, one hand reaching.

Horn stooped instantly, lifted him, tilted the canteen to his lips. The man's throat worked convulsively. Water spilled over his chin and ran down his chest.

“That's enough,” Horn said, taking the canteen away. “Not too much all at once. Better?”

The man nodded with dumb gratitude.

A-Roo!

Horn glanced up. “They're getting closer,” he said. “You can't walk, and I can't leave you here for the hounds. We'll have to ride double. Think you can hang on?”

The man nodded eagerly. “Shouldn't—let you—do this,” he panted. “Go on. Leave me. Thanks—for drink.”

“Forget it!” Horn snapped. He helped the man stand, steadied him by the pony, and lifted the man's left foot into the stirrup. He shoved. Although the body was light, it was all dead weight. Getting it balanced in the saddle was an act of skill.

AROO!
Horn could distinguish the different voices blended into the call. He wrapped the man's hands around the saddlehorn. “Hang on!” he said. The hands clenched, whitened.

The man turned his terrified eyes down toward Horn. “Don't—let them—get me,” he pleaded in a toneless whisper.

“YI-I-I-I!” Horn yelled shrilly.

SPLAT-T-T! His palm exploded against the pony's rump. The pony jumped forward. The man reeled drunkenly in the saddle. He turned his head and stared back with eyes that were suddenly, bitterly wise. Horn watched the swaying rider. His jaw muscles tightened.

The pony ran down the stone ramp into the dust; the man clung desperately. Horn turned then and reached the rock edge to the left in four giant strides. He dived, lit in the dust doubled up, rolled once, and was still.

A-ROO!
A last time, and then no more. They were too close now, too intent upon the prey to break the silence of the kill.

Horn heard the swift, soft padding of dust-muffled paws. He huddled close to the rock, watching the red dust lift over the edge, higher, thicker, nearer. As the hounds reached the rock, the sound became sharper. Nails clicked. Horn closed his eyes and listened.

The rhythm was broken. One hound had slowed. Horn reached toward the pistol.

And then a sharp command. The slowing paws picked up the pace. Dust and distance muffled them again.

Horn risked a quick glimpse over the meter-high ledge. They were gone, their attention all for the fleeing rider ahead.

Horn shivered. There they were, the terrible hunting dogs of Eron. Mutated to the size of horses, they could carry a man for loping hours; their giant jaws could drag down anything that moved. Four-footed terror.

And on their backs, shouting them in to the kill, the golden-skinned merchant princes of Eron, reddish-gold hair gleaming in the dusk. Mutants, also, it was said. More dreadful, certainly, than their mounts.

They closed in. The fleeing man turned in the saddle and clawed at his waist.

The pack was only a hundred meters behind when Horn saw something glint dully. Instinct drew his head down. A muffled sound of impact was followed by a screaming shriek of metal on stone. The bullet whistled far into the desert, propelled by the pistol's miniature unitronic field.

A pistol
, Horn thought.
Where did that stick man get a pistol?

Horn peered over the edge again. One dog was down, a leg crumpled under it, but its mouth was snarling with thwarted desire. Its rider lay stunned in the dust. The rest closed in, undeterred. Their prey, his last strength thrown into the one effort, clung hopelessly to the saddlehorn with both hands, his face turned back to look at death.

There was no sound now. There was only the silent pantomime of death being acted before Horn's eyes. The closest hound tilted its head, jaws gaping. The jaws closed. Within them was the pony's hind quarter.

The pony reared, feet pawing the sky in frantic terror and sudden pain, tossing the rider high into the air. As it reared, its feet were drawn out from under it. As it fell, it was torn apart.

The man never hit the ground. Savage jaws were waiting for him as he came down flailing the air with arms that no amount of fear-spurred desire could turn into wings.

Poor buckskin
, Horn thought, and burrowed deeper into the red dust.

 

THE HISTORY

Toll bridge.…

Consider the man who invents a new method of transportation, whose toil shortens the way. Surely he deserves the gratitude and reward of his fellow men.

For centuries the speed of light was an absolute limit for space travel, and even at that speed the stars were years between. Then the Eron Tubeways Power, Transport, and Communications Company introduced the Tube. As soon as a conventional ship carried terminal equipment to a distant world, it could be linked to Eron. The stars drew close.

Three hours to Eron.

Inside the mysterious, golden tubes of energy, space was somehow foreshortened. It was a different kind of energy, and it created a different kind of space.

The Tubes, moreover, transmitted power and messages at the same speed. For the first time, interstellar civilization was possible. There is no doubt—the Company deserved a great reward.

But every bridge led to Eron, and the toll was high.…

 

 

2

BLOOD MONEY

The night was thick; clouds veiled the stars. Even if there had been a break in the sheer cliff face, Horn might easily have missed it. So, when he first saw the dim, reflected glow against the mesa wall, he shrugged it away as the rebellion of strained eyes against an impossible task.

The darkness had been a comfortable blanket as he had crept from the ledge toward the mesa. Since then it had become a curtain through which he couldn't find his way, a barrier he couldn't climb, an opponent he couldn't fight. It was an enemy, like the three hundred light years, like the arid desert, like the hunters, like the mesa wall.

The darkness would pass, as the others had passed, but the unscalable wall would still be there, tall, straight, bleak—impassable.

Now time was an enemy too, this an enemy escaping, slipping away hour by hour, fleeing minute by minute. The Earth turned, the night whispered by him, and the sun would find him—where? Still searching for a place to scale the unscalable? Or lying in wait for an unsuspecting victim at the scene of Eron's greatest moment? The bullet in his pistol was paid for; the money hung heavy at his waist.

Horn's jaw tightened for a moment—and relaxed. He had conquered the others; he would conquer these. Destiny had shadowed him from the first, stepping in his tracks as his foot left them. Soon he would hold the moment, fixed on a sharp point of time like a butterfly wriggling upon a pin—just as he held his victim within a telescopic sight, a solitary player upon a fatal stage, and his finger would squeeze, slowly, slowly.…

The glow reddened, flickered, became certain.

It came from a depression backed against the sheer wall. Fire painted scarlet figures and dancing shadows on gray granite.

Horn crawled around the depression, silently, just beyond the fire-tinged rim of dust. The voices stopped him. One was a man's voice, mumbling, indistinct. The other was high-pitched, shrill, and vaguely feminine. A woman? Here? Horn shook his head and listened.

“Come, now,” she said. “A little food. A tiny morsel? A forgotten grain? Shake out that old tin box. Surely you'll find a bite for starving Lil.”

The man mumbled something.

“Search, old man. Look hard! I'm not asking for diamonds, you know, even a little one no bigger than a seed. Please? For Lil? A bit of coal? A speck of dust? You're an ungrateful old man. Day and night, sleepless, Lil works to feed you, to keep you alive when you should have been dead long, long ago, and you won't give poor Lil the smallest crumb to keep her from starving.…” The words faded into soft sobs.

Horn stared at the shadows leaping against the rock face. One, darker and more distinct than the others, slowly became solid and real, a projection of fantasy against the gray solidity of fact. It looked like a squat, black demon with two heads, one round and featureless, the other hook-nosed and fiercely dominant.

Horn looked away and crawled on. Every few meters he stopped to listen. The desert sent no warning. When he completed the half-circle, against the mesa wall once more, he knew that there was no one near except an old man and a weeping woman.

The sobs broke into a scream. “All right, you old sot. If you won't give me anything to eat, at least don't keep all the liquor to yourself. Give me a slug, you depraved old man, you befuddled rum-pot, you.…” The description that followed was fantastically scurrilous and inventive.

Horn raised his head cautiously above the dusty rim. And froze, stunned.

Below, between the campfire and the mesa wall, an old man leaned against a rounded boulder. Below a tight, scarlet skullcap was a wrinkled, yellow face. Slanted eyes were half-closed. A dirty yellow handkerchief knotted around a short neck was the color of the skin that peeked through a torn shirt of bright, green synsilk. A single suspender held up a baggy pair of space breeches.

Behind him, perched on the boulder, was a gaudy, red-and-green bird; it balanced itself precariously on one leg as the other tilted a half-liter bottle into a preposterously big bill. She was bedraggled and disreputable. One tail-feather was broken and several were obviously missing. She had only one eye; it blinked in the firelight.

A small pot hung over the fire. From it drifted an odor that brought a jet of saliva into Horn's mouth. The only other thing in the hollow was a battered metal suitcase close beside the old man.

Horn took a deep breath and launched himself into the camp, his pistol in his hand. One foot kicked dust over the fire as he passed. It died, smoking. Horn stopped with his back against the rock wall.

The bird strangled. She dropped the bottle and fluttered into the air on battered wings. The old man sprang to his feet, black eyes wild and staring, fat quivering on his round face and short, stout body.

“Pirates!” the bird croaked. “Stand by to repel boarders!”

The color of the man's wrinkled, ageless face had faded to a pale yellow. “No killee!” he said in an archaic dialect. His voice quavered nasally. “Please no killee poor China boy.” He hiccoughed. Horn caught a faint whiff of synthetic alcohol. “Poor li'l China laundly boy no makee bother noblody!”

It sounded phony to Horn. Phonier, even, than the ridiculous pair being here below the ruins of Sunport.

Horn glanced at the suitcase beside the man's feet. There was lettering on the side; it was scratched, faded, and archaic, like the old man's speech. It said:
Mr. Oliver Wu, Proprietor, New Canton Sanitary Laundry
. Horn took four quick strides to the right. On the other side, he read:
Lily. The Mathematical Parrot. Can Do Sums
.

“Poor China boy will get himself killed quick with a fire on the Forbidden Ground,” Horn said deliberately. “A hunting party of the Golden Folk trailed me to within half a kilometer of this spot.”

Wu's face got paler. His legs gave way under him. He sank down in front of the boulder. The parrot settled on his shoulder, staring at Horn with her one good eye.

“Poor li'l China boy,” Wu said shakily. “No gottee nothing. One stupid bird.” He cringed as the bird bit his ear. “One dirty clothes.” His patched, outsize boot kicked the battered suitcase. “No makee tlouble noblody.”

“The hunters will kill you just as quick,” Horn said casually. “They're gone now, but they'll be back. If we're still here.…” He let it hang in the air, unfinished.

“No one talks well,” the parrot said, “with gun in face.”

Horn laughed, mirthlessly, and dropped the gun. The cord pulled it up tightly to his chest, ready to the slap of his hand. “Smart bird,” he said. “Very smart. Smart enough to talk better than his master.”

Slowly the color returned to Wu's face. “They aren't close then?” he panted. “The hunters?”

“You can speak the lingua! Maybe you can speak it well enough to tell me what you're doing here.”

Wu sighed and breathed easier. “Even miserable creatures like us must live—or think we must,” he said sorrowfully. “When the rich feast, crumbs fall under the table. Hunger is a fearful goad. It drove us a weary distance across the dreadful desert to reach the Victory Dedication. Tormented by thirst, chased by the hunters.” Wu shuddered. “We saw three men die for their sport.”

Lil waggled her head, her eyes gleaming in the darkness. “The bloody, bloody hunters. And the dead men all had guns like yours, stranger.”

“Odd,” Wu mused, “that they should have unitron pistols. Eron guards them jealously.” He glanced slantingly at Horn. Horn stared back, his arms folded across his chest, his lips a straight, immobile line. “Many died,” Wu went on, “but we got through the desert and the hunters, and tomorrow we will be at the ruins. And there we will find means to continue life a little longer, eh, Lil?”