The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales (94 page)

Straw looked up at him with a mirthless smile on his round face. “Your little plan is working just fine, Vance. See back there?”

Evers looked at the right-hand edge of the tank. Three blips, widely separated from each other, were crawling through the wilderness of suns. Their courses converged toward the
Phoenix
.

“GC’s big radar station on Tinno must have picked us up, right away.” said Straw. “We can’t use the inter-galactic drive in here. They’ll soon catch up to us.”

Evers calculated mentally. “It’s cutting things’close, but we should reach Arkar at least twelve hours before them. I’ll take over.”

Straw got up, stretching his towering young figure and tenderly feeling his bandaged arm, as Evers took the pilot-chair.

Lindeman woke up, and looked at them with eyes still red-rimmed from fatigue and sleep. He studied the tank.

Then he shook his head. “We’ll have to move fast on Arkar. And how can we, without Schuyler’s toughs grabbing us the first move we make?”

“Only one thing to do,” Evers said. “Arkar’s a forested world now—remember those stories of the giant vegetation Schuyler grew there? Land the
Phoenix
in the forest, sneak in to his spaceport there, find his galactic-drive ships and his loot from Andromeda, and then show them to the GC men when they arrive there looking for us.”

Lindeman said gloomily, “But Schuyler’s radar-station will spot us when we come in.”

“Sure they will. And they’ll track where we land, and will come looking for our ship. But while they’re finding it,
we
will be on foot making for their spaceport.”

“Harebrained, but the only thing we can try,” muttered Lindeman. He glanced at Sharr, standing beside the pilot-chair. “What about that Valloan wench? She’ll give the show away first chance she gets.”

“I will not!” said Sharr. “I did not know the thing that Schuyler is doing, before!”

“Oh, sure, now you’re noble-minded and everything,” said Lindeman. “My eye!”

Evers interrupted, before Sharr could retort to that. “She’ll be all right. If nothing else, she knows by now that she’s in as much danger from Schuyler as we are.”

Straw, grinning, took the furious girl by the arm. “Forget them, honey. Come on back and help me break out some ration-capsules.”

They went aft, but within a few minutes Straw returned, ruefully rubbing his cheek. “Some right arm that baby’s got!”

Evers told him, “You’re lucky you haven’t a broken neck. The Valloans have a kind of judo that’s murder, and she knows it. Better let her alone.”

They took the ration capsules and the
Phoenix
droned on through the formless grayness of hyper-space. And in the great chart in the tank, the three blips that were GC cruisers crept on their trail.

Evers watched the chart, and thought. He thought their chances were no better than Lindeman’s estimate. He thought that he might just have been too clever entirely in thrusting themselves right into the stronghold of their enemy. But what else could they do? A black and evil work was going on there away on the fringes of Andromeda galaxy. It would go on for years if it wasn’t exposed. It was up to them to expose it, in any way, at any risk.

Evers’ face hardened and he told himself, “If we can’t do it any other way, I’ll kill Schuyler.”

He looked again and again at the tank as the hours went by. Arkar was drawing closer, and the three GC cruisers were still far back.

Lindeman and Straw hung over his chair now, studying the chart anxiously. Sharr watched the light-streaked evil grayness outside the windows with a horrified fascination. Time went by.

“We’re close enough to switch out of overdrive,” said Lindeman, finally.

Evers shook his head. “Not yet. I want to get in as close as we can, first.”

“It’s dangerous to come out of overdrive too near a planet!”

Evers did not turn but he heard Straw answer Lindeman. “Dangerous? Do you think we’re good insurance risks, no matter how we do this?”

Now very fast, in the chart, the dot that was the sun of Arkar and the smaller dot that was the planet closed toward the blip of the
Phoenix
.

“Strap in,” said Evers, still without turning.

He waited, his hands sweating on the switches. He hoped their instruments had not gone erratic after all they had been through. If they were only a shade off, three men and a girl would go to glory in a spectacular way.

He switched out of overdrive.

The brilliant glare of sunlight hammered through the windows, replacing the evil grayness, and the throb of the generators rose to a shriek beyond hearing, and the atoms of Evers’ body shivered again from nauseating shock as they fell back through dimensions.

And the
Phoenix
was in normal space, black space with the dull-red sun blazing big ahead of them, and the greenish globe of Arkar rolling toward them on its orbit, looking up big…

“That tears it!” yelled Straw suddenly. “Look down there!”

Two small hornets of metal, catching the ruddy light on their sides, had swung up out of the shadow of the planet and were curving up toward them.

“I
knew
Schuyler’s radar here would spot us!” Lindeman cried.

Evers ignored that, and hit the blast-switches hard. The
Phoenix
jumped at full power, heading toward the northern hemisphere of the half-shadowed planet as the two little spacers came up from under it.

“We’ve got a chance yet,” he said rapidly. “Give me the coordinates of the spaceport here, quick!”

Lindeman punched buttons, and as the microfile of standard interstellar navigational data flashed the information, he read it off. As he heard it, Evers fed the information into the computer.

The landing-pattern he wanted sprang out before him as a graph of light on a small screen. He read it and then hit the blasts again, altering course, aiming to swing low around the northern pole of Arkar.

The planet spun under them, half in bright light, half in shadow. Their goal was on the shadowed half, and that was good if they could make it. He thought they could beat those two metal hornets in by a few seconds.

He thought wrong. Blinding flares exploded silently in space right around them. The instrument-panel went
Click!
and Sharr cried out and put her hand to her dazzled eyes.

Lindeman said, in a tone of wonder, “They’re firing energy-shells. No private ship in the galaxy is allowed to carry weapons that size.”

Evers said harshly, “A lot that would worry a man who’s robbing whole worlds. Their men on Valloa must have sent them word about us. Better hold on.”

He didn’t look to see if they obeyed. There would be another burst of energy-shells in a moment, and he had plenty to do.

He hit the blast-buttons like a man gone insane, sending the
Phoenix
down in a corkscrew, crazy course toward the shadowed forests on the night side of Arkar. Evers was an astronautical engineer and a good pilot. But the men in those metal hornets were not just good, they were expert. They hung right after him and they fired again.

Evers, leveling out and suddenly changing course, saw blinding light and heard the crash of severed metal and smelled super-hot air.

“Grazed our tail!” Straw yelled. “Set her down!”

It was that or nothing, for the
Phoenix
was falling out of control. Evers set her down, fast and hard. They crashed down through boughs and leaves and smacked solid ground, and then the wounded ship rolled over and over through the forest.

CHAPTER V

Strapped in their chairs, they went round and round with the rolling ship, feeling the impact each time it crashed over one of the smaller trees. Then it hit something entirely too big to crush, something that stopped it with an authoritative
whack
, and for a moment Evers saw stars.

He shook his head to clear it. Everything was quiet and still now. He hung in the chair-straps at a sixty-degree angle, the floor of the ship being now its upper wall.

“Everybody okay?” he asked. Their voices answered shakenly in the dark, one by one. “Wait till I get down and I’ll help you down, Straw,” he said.

They presently stood on the slippery curved wall that had become the floor. A big rent had been torn open in the hull aft, and a faint ray of starlight came through it to show them the splintered beams, the torn and crumpled walls, and each other’s white faces.

He saw a glimmer of wetness in Lindeman’s eyes as he stared woefully around. “She’ll never fly again,” said Lindeman.

Evers didn’t blame him for being near to tears. It was hard on a man to cherish a dream for half a lifetime, and then have it end like this. To dream of being the Columbus of a new galaxy, to put everything you had into it, to dare all risks—and then to find you were not and never would be the first discoverer, and to come back and end your voyaging like this…

“The devil with that now,” said Evers, purposefully harsh. “
We
won’t go anywhere again either, unless we get out of here fast.”

As though to emphasize his words, there came from somewhere overhead the muffled, ripping
B-R-ROOM—BOOM!
of a ship going fast.

“They’re landing!” exclaimed Straw.

“No, not in this tangle of trees,” Evers said. “But they’ll keep buzzing the spot where we crashed, while they call Schuyler. We’ll have men here fast. Step on it!”

He shoved Lindeman and then Sharr and Straw out through the rent in the hull. He paused himself to snatch up a trio of energy-pistols, pawing for them in a buckled locker till he found them.

He squeezed out of the opening in the hull and dropped three feet to the ground, and stared around the warm, humid darkness.

Arkar had no moon and only a little starlight filtered down through the mighty branches overhead. For the
Phoenix
, in its rolling, had fetched up against a cluster of trunks like those of a mighty banyan, the immense branches and foliage a hundred feet over their heads. The ship had broken its back against those massive trunks.

“Smells like lilacs, somehow,” murmured Straw, and Evers instantly recognized the hauntingly sweet fragrance in the air.

“That’s what it is,” said Lindeman, nodding toward the colossal tree.

“Lilacs? You’crazy? Why—” Lindeman said, “Schuyler planted Arkar with Earth-plants, that in this chemically different soil went into giantism. The telenews had a lot about it at the time. The big man had to have the biggest flowers—damn him.”

“Will you stop chattering and move!” Evers said frantically. He grabbed Sharr’s wrist and started with her away from the wrecked ship. Lindeman and Straw followed.

The roar of the unseen hornet-ship as it went over above the lofty branches quickened them. When they were out of the shade of the giant lilac. Evers swiftly studied the stars. He remembered their bearings before the crash, and he thought he knew the direction in which Schuyler’s private spaceport lay.

He passed out the guns he had grabbed up, to Sharr and Lindeman and Straw. The guns, he thought poignantly, that they had taken with them to guard against the dangers of Andromeda.

“We haven’t got much time,” he said. “Those pilots would call the minute we crashed—there’ll be men on their way here from Schuyler’s base right now.”

“But then if we go toward the base, we’ll run right into them!” Sharr objected, and Straw said, “She’s right, Vance.”

Evers said furiously, “Do you suppose I don’t know that? It’s why we’ve got to hurry if we’re to have any chance.”

HE PRESSED forward, leading the way. Almost at once they were in a thicket of ten-foot canes, growing so closely together that they sometimes had to squeeze between them. With a shock, Evers suddenly realized that the tall canes were in fact ordinary Earth grass. Everything here was Earth vegetation, gone into giantism. Arkar’s own native vegetation had long ago died for lack of water, and it had been Schuyler’s whim, when he had the planet seeded after giving it water, to bring all the seeds from Earth.

Evers searched the obscurity ahead for more trees. He didn’t think they had very much time. He did not know how far ahead Schuyler’s mansion and spaceport were, but it could not be very far.

A heavy perfume drifted to him on the moist air, from the right. He altered course in that direction. A grove of sixty-foot trees, stiff and angular with trunks thickly studded with foot-long spikes, loomed up before him.

Straw sniffed the air and whispered, “I’ll be damned, they’re roses.”

“We’re climbing this one,” Evers said rapidly. “If we’re lucky, they’ll go under us. You and Sharr first, Eric. I’ll help Straw get up.”

The climb should have been easy. The spikes were fairly close together and formed a good ladder all around the great trunk. Lindeman disappeared up in the darkness, and Sharr followed him up like a cat. But Straw had heavy going with one arm half-useless, and Evers had to climb beside him to steady him.