The Legion of Lazarus Read online

  There was a hill, or at least a higher eminence, crowned with what might have been the cyclopean image of a man stretched out on a noble catafalque, with hooded giants standing by in attitudes of mourning. It seemed like the best place to stop that Hyrst had seen, with plenty of cover and a view of the surrounding area. With luck, you might stay hidden there a long time. He jogged Shearing's elbow and pointed, and Shearing nodded. There was a wide, almost circular sweep of open rock around the base of the hill. Hyrst looked carefully for the tug. There was no sign of it. He tore out across the open, with Shearing at his heels.

  The tug swooped over, going fast this time. It could not possibly have missed them. Shearing dropped the cloak with a grunt. "No use for that any more," he said. They bounded up the hillside and in among the mourning figures. The tug whipped around in a tight spiral and hung over the hill. Hyrst shook the sweat out of his eyes. His mind was clear again. The tug's skipper was babbling into his communicator, and in another place on the asteroid Hyrst could mentally see a thin skirmish line spread out, and in still another four men in a bunch. They all picked up and began to move, toward the hill.

  Shearing said, nodding spaceward, "Our friends are on the way. If we can hold out—"

  "Fat chance," said Hyrst. "They're armed, and all we've got is flare-pistols." But he looked around. His eyes detected nothing but rock, hard sunlight, and deep shadow, but his mind saw that one of the black blots at the base of the main block, the catafalque, was more than a shadow. He slid into a crack that resembled a passage, being rounded rather than ragged. Shearing was right behind him. "I don't like this," he said, "but I suppose there's no help for it."

  The crack led down into a cave, or chamber, too irregularly shaped to be artificial, too smoothly surfaced and floored to be natural. There was nothing in it but a block of stone, nine feet or so long and about four feet wide by five feet high. It seemed to be a natural part of the floor, but Hyrst avoided it. On the opposite, the sunward side, there was a small windowlike aperture that admitted a ray of blinding radiance, sharply defined and doing nothing to illumine the dark on either side of it.

  Vernon's thought came to them, hard, triumphant, peremptory. "Mr. Bellaver says you have ten minutes to come out. After that, no mercy."

  CHAPTER V

  The minutes slid past, sections of eternity arbitrarily measured by the standards of another planet and having no relevance at all on this tiny whirling rock. The beam of light from the small aperture moved visibly across the opposite wall. Hyrst watched it, blinking. Outside, Bellaver's men were drawn up in a wide crescent across the hill in front of the catafalque. They waited.

  "No mercy," said Hyrst softly. "No mercy, is it?" He bent over and began to loosen the clamps that held the lead weights to the soles of his boots.

  "It isn't mercy we need," said Shearing. "It's time."

  "How much?"

  "Look for yourself."

  Hyrst shifted his attention to space. There was a ship in it, heading toward the asteroid, and coming fast. Hyrst frowned, doing in his head without thinking about it a calculation that would have required a computer in his former life.

  "Twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds," he said, "inclusive of the four remaining."

  He finished getting the weights off his boots. He handed one to Shearing. Then he half-climbed, half-floated up the wall and settled himself above the entrance, where there was a slight concavity in the rock to give him hold.

  "Shearing," he said.

  "What?" He was settling himself beside the mouth of the crack, where a man would have to come clear inside to get a shot at him.

  "A starship implies the intention to go to the stars. Why haven't you?"

  "For the simplest reason in the world," said Shearing bitterly. "The damn thing can't fly."

  "But—" said Hyrst, in astonishment.

  "It isn't finished. It's been building for over seventy years now, and a long and painful process that's been, too, Hyrst—doing it bit by bit in secret, and every bit having to be dreamed up out of whole cloth, and often discarded and dreamed up again, because the principle of a workable star-drive has never been formulated before. And it still isn't finished. It can't be finished, unless—"

  He stopped, and both men turned their attention to the outside.

  "Bellaver's looking at his chrono," said Hyrst. "Go ahead, we've got a minute."

  Shearing continued, "unless we can get hold of enough Titanite to build the hyper-shift relays. Nothing else has a fast enough reaction time, and the necessary load-capacity. We must have burned out a thousand different test-boards, trying."

  "Can't you buy it?" asked Hyrst. The question sounded reasonable, but he knew as he said it that it was a foolish one. "I mean, I know the stuff is scarcer than virtue and worth astronomical sums—that's what MacDonald was so happy about—but—"

  "The Bellaver Corporation had a corner on the stuff before our ship was even thought of. That's what brought this whole damned mess about. Some of our people—not saying why they wanted it, of course—tried to buy some from Bellaver in the usual way, and one of them must have been incautious about his shield. Because a Lazarite working for Bellaver caught a mental hint of the starship, and the reason for the Titanite, and that was it. Three generations of Bellavers have been after us for the star-drive, and it's developed into a secret war as bitter as any ever fought on the battlefield. They hold all the Titanite, we hold the ship, and perhaps now you're beginning to see why MacDonald was killed, and why you're so important to both sides."

  "Beginning to," said Hyrst. "But only beginning."

  "MacDonald found a Titanite pocket. And as you know, a Titanite pocket isn't very big. One man can break the crude stuff, fill a sack with it, and tote it on his own back if he doesn't have a power-sled."

  "MacDonald had a sled."

  "And he used it. He cleaned out his pocket, afraid somebody else would track him to it, and he hid the wretched ore somewhere. Then he began to dicker. He approached the Bellaver Corporation, and we heard of it and approached him. He tried playing us off against Bellaver to boost the price, and suddenly he was dead and you were accused of his murder. We thought you really had done it, because no Titanite turned up, and we knew Bellaver hadn't gotten it from him. We'd watched too closely. It wasn't until some years later that one of our people learned that MacDonald had threatened a little too loudly to sell to us unless Bellaver practically tripled his offer—and of course Bellaver didn't dare do that. A price so much out of line even for Titanite would have stirred all the rival shipbuilders to unwelcome curiosity. So, we figured, Bellaver had had him killed."

  "But what happened to the Titanite?"

  "That," said Shearing, "is what nobody knows. Bellaver must have figured that if his tame Lazarites couldn't find where MacDonald had put it, we couldn't either. He was right. With all our combined mental probes and conventional detectors we haven't been able to track it down. And we haven't been able to find any more pockets, either. Bellaver Corporation got exclusive mineral rights to the whole damned moon. They even own the refinery now."

  Hyrst shook his head. "Latent impressions or not, I don't see how I can help on that. If MacDonald had given the killer any clue—"

  A beam of bright blue light no thicker than a pencil struck in through the mouth of the passage. It touched the side of the large stone block. The stone turned molten and ran, and then the beam flicked off, leaving a place that glowed briefly red. Shearing said, "I guess our ten minutes are up."

  They were. For a second or two nothing more happened and then Hyrst saw something come sailing in through the crack. His mind told him what it was just barely in time to shut his eyes. There was a flash that dazzled him even through his closed lids, and the flash became a glare that did not lessen. Bellaver's men had tossed in a long-term flare, and almost at once someone followed it, in the hope of catching Hyrst and Shearing blinded and off guard. The eyes of Hyrst's mind, unaffected by light, clearly showed h
im the suited figure just below him, with its bubble helmet covered by a glare-shield. They directed him with perfect accuracy in the downward sweep of the lead weight he had taken from his boot, and which he still held in his hand. The bubble helmet was very strong, and the gravity very light, but the concussion was enough to drop the man unconscious. Just about thought Hyrst, what happened to me there in the hoist tower, when MacDonald died. Shearing, who had by now adjusted his own glare-shield stooped quickly and took the man's gun.

  He said aloud, over the helmet communicator, "The next one that steps through here gets it. Do you hear that, Bellaver?"

  Bellaver's voice answered. "Listen, Shearing, I was wrong. I admit it. Let's calm down and start over again. I—"

  "Ten minutes ago it was no mercy."

  "It's hard for me to behave reasonably about this business. You know what it means to me, what it meant to my father and his father. But I'm willing to do anything, Shearing, if you'll make a deal."

  "I'll make a deal. Readily. Eagerly. Give back what your grandfather stole from us, and we'll call it square."

  "Oh no we won't," said Hyrst grimly, breaking in. "Not until I find who killed MacDonald."

  "All right," said Bellaver. "Wilson, break out the grenades."

  The entire surface of Hyrst's body burst into a flaring sweat. For one panic-stricken second he wanted to rush out the crack pleading for mercy. Then he got his feet against the wall and pushed hard, and went plunging across the chamber in a sort of floating dive. Shearing got there at the same time and helped to pull him down. They huddled together on the floor, with the coffin-shaped block between them and the crack. Hyrst sent out a frantic mental call to hurry, directed at the spaceship of the brotherhood.

  "They're all going to hurry," said Shearing. "Vernon has found the ship now. He's telling Bellaver. Here comes the grenade—"

  Small round glittering thing of death, curving light and graceful through the airless gloom. It comes so slowly, and the flesh shrinks quivering upon itself until it is nothing more than a handful of simple fear. Outside the men are running away, and the one who has thrown the grenade from the cramped, constructing vantage of the crack is running after them, and Shearing is crying with his mind Will it to fall short, will it to fall sh—

  There is a great brilliance, and the rock leaps, but there is not the slightest sound.

  CHAPTER VI

  "The Ram, the Bull,

  the Heavenly Twins,

  And next the Crab the Lion Shine.

  The Virgin and the Scales—"

  The old zodiacal rhyme was running through Hyrst's mind, and that was the only thing that was in his mind.

  The Virgin and the Scales.

  Yes. And she's very beautiful, too, thought Hyrst. But she shouldn't be holding the Scales. That's all wrong. The Scales come next, and then the Scorpion—Scorpio—and the Archer—Sagittarius—

  And anyway they aren't scales, they're a pair of big golden stars, and she's putting them down, and they're melting together. There's only one of them, and it's not a star at all, really. It's a polished metal jug, reflecting the light, and—

  The Virgin smiled. "The doctor said you were coming around. I brought you something to drink."

  Reality returned to Hyrst with a rush. "You're Christina," he said, and tried to sit up. He was dizzy, and she helped him, and he said, "I guess it did fall short."

  "What?"

  "The grenade. The last thing I remember is Shearing—Wait. Where is Shearing?"

  "Sitting up in the lounge, nursing his bruises. Yes, it fell short, but I don't think telekinetics had much to do with that. We've never been able to control matter convincingly. There. All right?"

  "Fine. How did you get us out?"

  "Of course the grenade had made the entrance impassible—we had to cut our way in through the outer wall. We had a clear field. Bellaver's men had all gone back to their ships. They thought you were dead, and to tell you the truth we thought you must be, too. But you didn't quite 'feel' dead, so we dug you out."

  "Thanks," said Hyrst. "I suppose they know different now."

  He was in a ship's sick-bay. From the erratic crash and shudder of the lateral jets, they were beating their way through the Belt, and at a high rate of speed. Hyrst sent a glance back into space. The tugs and Bellaver's yacht were following, but this time only the yacht had a chance. The tugs were dropping hopelessly behind.

  "Yes, they soon found out once we got you out, but with any luck we'll lose them," said Christina. She sat down beside the bunk, where she could see his face. "Shearing told you about the ship."

  "The starship. Yes." He looked at her. Suddenly he laughed. "You're not a goddess at all."

  "Who said I was?"

  "Shearing. Or anyway, his mind. Ten feet tall, and crowned with stars—I was afraid of you." He leaned closer. "Your eyes, though. They are angry."

  "So will yours be," she said, "when you've fought the Bellavers as long as we have."

  "There are still things I don't understand. Why you built the ship, why you've kept it secret from everyone, not just Bellaver, what you plan to do with it—how you came to be one of the Brotherhood."

  She smiled. "The Seitz method was originated to save wreck-victims frozen in deep space. Remember? Quite a few of us never went through the door at all, innocent or guilty. But that makes no difference, once you've come back from out there." She put her hand on his. "You've learned fast, but you're only on the threshold. There's no need for words with us. Open your mind—"

  He did so. At first it was no different from the contact he had had with Shearing's mind, or with Christina's before on the Happy Dream. Thoughts came to him clearly phrased—You want to know why we built the ship, what we plan to do with it—and it was only after some time that he realized the words had stopped and he was receiving Christina's emotions, her memories and opinions, her disappointments and her dreams, as simply and directly as though they were his own.

  You haven't had time yet, they told him without words, to realize how alone you are. You haven't tried, as most of us do at first, to be human again, to fit yourself into life as though the gap of time was not there, as though nothing had changed. You haven't watched people getting old around you while you have hardly added a gray hair. You haven't had to move from one place to another, one job, one group of friends to another, because sooner or later they sense something wrong about you. You haven't had to hide your new powers as you would hide a disease because people would fear and hate you, perhaps even kill you, if they knew. That's why there is a brotherhood. And that's why we built the ship.

  Symbol of flight. Symbol of freedom. A universe wide beyond imagining, thronging with many colored guns, with new worlds where men in a human society could build a society of their own. No boundaries beyond which the mind cannot dare to go. All space, all time, all knowledge—free!

  Once more he saw those wide dark seas between the suns. His mind raced with hers through the cold-flaming nebulae, wheeled blinded and stunned past the hiving stars of Hercules, looked in eager fascination at the splendid spiral of Andromeda—no longer, perhaps, beyond reach, for what are time and space to the intangible forces of the mind?

  Then that wild flight ceased, and instead there was a smaller vision, misty and only half realized, of houses and streets, a place where they could live and be what they were, openly and without fear.

  Can you understand now, she asked him, what they would think if they knew about the ship? Can you understand that they would be afraid to have us colonizing out there, afraid of what we might do?

  He understood. At the very least, if the truth were known, the Lazarites would never be free again. They would be taken and tested and examined and lectured about, legislated over, restricted, governed, and used. They might be fairly paid for their ship and whatever other advancements they might develop, but they would never be permitted to use them.

  With sudden savage eagerness Hyrst said, "But first of all I must
know who killed MacDonald. Shearing explained about the latent impressions. I'm ready."

  She stood up, regarding him with grave eyes. "There's no guarantee it will work. Sometimes it does. Sometimes not."

  Hyrst thought about the tired, gray-haired man who had stood at the foot of his bed. "It'll work. It's got to."

  He added, "If it doesn't, I'll tear the truth out of Bellaver with my hands."

  "It may come to that," she said grimly. "But we'll hope. Lie quiet. I'll make the arrangements."

  An hour later Hyrst lay on the padded table in the middle of the sick-bay. The ship spun and whirled and leaped in a sort of insane dance, and Hyrst was strapped to the table to prevent his being thrown off. He had known that the ship was maneuvering in the thickest swarm area of the Belt with four pilots mind-linked and flying esper, trying to out-dare Bellaver. Two others were keeping Vernon blanked, and they hoped that either Bellaver himself or his radar-deflector system would give up. Hyrst had known this, but now he was no longer interested. He was barely conscious of the lurching of the ship. They had given him some sort of a drug, and he lay relaxed and pliant in a pleasant suspension of all worries, looking vaguely up at the faces that were bent over him. Finally he closed his eyes, and even they were gone.

  He was crossing the plain of methane snow with MacDonald, under the glowing Rings. At first it was all a little blurred, but gradually the memory cleared until he was aware of each tiny detail far more clearly than he had been at the time—the texture of the material from which MacDonald's suit was made, the infinitesimal shadow underscoring every roughness of the snow, the exact sensation of walking in his leaded boots, the whisper and whistle of his oxygen system. He quarreled again with MacDonald, not missing a word. He climbed with him into the tower of Number Three hoist and examined the signal lights, and sat down on the bench, smiling, to wait.