My dry lungs gasped for breath. For all the air, in the ages that I
slept, had leaked out of the control room of the rocket. I struggled to
reach the rusted oxygen valves.
Movement was sheer agony. Every joint of my body was painfully
stiffened. My skin was hard, shrunken from age-long desiccation. It
felt brittle as time-dried leather. My eyes were dim and blurred.
But I found the valve. It resisted. I struggled with it. Spots danced
before my dulled eyes. My lungs screamed. But at last the precious
oxygen hissed out, and I could breathe.
But the pressure was low, I discovered. Nearly all the vital gas had
escaped, by diffusion through the solid metal. There was enough,
perhaps, for a few hours.
Wolfish hunger came to me, and a parching thirst. But all the food
aboard had gone to dust. The water tanks, through slow evaporation,
were empty.
I rubbed a film of ancient dust from the ports, and found the Earth.
Yes, it had to be the Earth--but how it was changed! The continents
were larger, their familiar outlines altered; the seas had dwindled.
What ages had I slept!
I knew that I must reach the aging planet before those few remaining
pounds of oxygen were gone, or perish. I wound the chronometer--it
was strange to hear its racing tick again, after those millennia of
stillness. Gingerly, then, I tried the rocket-firing keys.
There was no response.
Stiffly, awkwardly, I climbed down among the tanks. Any movement, I
felt, might tear my brittle skin like paper. I stumbled.
But I found the trouble. The fuel pumps were clogged and rusted with
a dried gum, stuck. But there was good fuel remaining in the sealed
tanks. I found a can of oil, got the pumps to working, and cleaned the
sponge-platinum detonators.
Wearily, I clambered back, tried again. A moment of agonizing silence.
Then a shattering explosion hurled the rocket sidewise. Only one tube
had fired. But presently I got another started, and the third, and
steered the _Astronaut_ toward the Earth.
It was then that I first noticed a very queer thing.
Against the black of space, beside the bright sunlit globe of the
time-changed planet, I saw hundreds of little red stars. A crimson
swarm, in regular lines and files, they swept about the Earth in a
curiously, an ominously, purposeful order.
What could they be? My blurred, aching eyes, so far inferior to that
perception that had come as I slept, could tell me nothing. But they
saw something stranger still.
Something was wrong with the Earth itself! It had seemed very near
me in the void, with its greenish, shrunken seas and its greater
continents widely patched with the yellow-red of unfamiliar deserts--so
near that I almost felt that I could reach out and take it in my hand,
like a ball.
But suddenly it flickered.
An unaccountable haze, of red light and darkness, wrapped it briefly.
Its surface shimmered queerly, as if seen through a veil of strange
energy.
In a moment it was clear again, and I thought the trouble must have
been in my throbbing eyes. But still I could see the ordered swarm of
crimson stars. And I discovered that I would have to change the course
of the rocket--as if the flight of Earth had been checked!
My numb hands touched the levers--and there was an abrupt, shattering
explosion! The rocket began spinning giddily. I clung to the controls,
and shut off the remaining motors--for one had ceased to fire. In the
silence I heard a deadly sound--the hiss of escaping gas.
One of the motors, clearly, had exploded--its metal crystallized,
perhaps, by untold time. The remaining two would not hold the rocket to
a straight course. And, final disaster, the shock had opened some seam.
The remaining oxygen was leaking swiftly out.
* * * * *
The agonies of asphyxiation were upon me again. I first thought it only
some trick of tortured senses, when, faintly in the thinning air, I
heard something clatter against the hull. I peered out, however--and
saw a ship!
The tiniest midge compared to those mile-long interstellar cruisers of
the Emperor and the Corporation that I had perceived as I slept, it
was drifting close beside me. A graceful torpedo of silver, not eighty
feet long, with a thick crystal needle projecting from a low turret
amidships. Painted on its argent side was the green outline of a hawk,
and, below a row of strange green symbols.
Strange? No! It was a queer experience. I looked at those symbols, and
suddenly realized that they were letters, and that I knew how to read
them! It was as if they had been in some language that I had learned
long ago, and forgotten with all save the subconscious mind--and still
I knew that language had not been invented when I left the Earth. They
spelled an odd name: _Barihorn_.
Odd, I thought--and then knew it for a contracted form of my own name!
A thin line ran from a port in the strange ship's deck, just forward of
the crystal needle. It was a magnetic anchor on its end, I realized,
that had clanged against the rocket. Now a slender figure leapt out of
the port.
A man, wearing silver-polished space armor that was close-fitting and
graceful. Letting the line run through his gloves, he came flying
through the airless void, across to the rocket. I saw his face, beyond
the oval vision-panel of his helmet, looking at me curiously.
It might have been the face of some athlete of my own day. It was
craggedly handsome, tanned and lean. It was stiff with wonderment. But
a quick sympathy warmed the ice-gray eyes of the stranger. He seemed
to understand my plight. A silver-clad arm beckoned me to unfasten the
valve.
To open the rocket to the frozen emptiness of space! That seemed deadly
folly. But death was already inside. My lungs were gasping in vain. My
throbbing eyes felt as if bursting out of my head.
With stiff fingers I struggled with the screws that held the
long-sealed valve. Billows of darkness rolled down upon me. An agony
of fatigue slowed my efforts. But at last the plate slid aside and the
last breath of air whispered out.
I collapsed across the rim of the port, fighting black oblivion. I knew
that death, after that long, long race, at last had overtaken me. But
suddenly something was being pushed down over my head. Fresh clean air
was rushing into my face. I could breathe again!
My clearing eyes, through a crystal face-plate, saw what had happened.
The silver-armored stranger was beside me--bareheaded! He had given me
his own helmet!
Blood was already starting from his breathless nostrils. But he caught
my shoulders, dragged me through the valve, hauled us both up the line
to the port of the silver ship. We tumbled into a little metal chamber,
a valve slammed and I heard the hiss of air.
Leaning against the wall--for an artificial gravity field had gripped
us again--the stranger closed his eyes and took several long breaths.
The blue of suffocation faded from his rugged face. He grinned at me,
and wiped the blood from his mouth.
"Well, stranger," he gasped, "you gave me a surprise! Your ship was
listed in our charts as Comet AA 1497 X. We were observing it to
correct our bearings, when it began to move!" A tone of awe dulled his
whisper. "You must have been aboard a long time."
I clutched at a hand rail for support. A deadly fatigue was in me. My
body was still a stiff dried husk of pain. I could see the amazed pity
in the eyes of my rescuer, as he stared at my brittle, emaciated skin,
at hair and beard and nails that had grown grotesquely long.
"I have been," I told him.
* * * * *
And only then, when I had spoken, did I realize that I had learned
another language as I slept--a tongue unknown when I had left the
Earth. And I knew, with something deeper than memory, that my teacher
had been the shadow in the crystal, the eternal mind of Dondara Keradin.
"I know your voyage has been a long one, stranger." Wonder was still
in the voice of the stranger. "For all objects designated with an 'AA'
have been charted a million years or longer."
"A million years!" I whispered. The world reeled. "What year is this?"
"This is the year 1,200,048 of the Conquest of Space," he told me. He
ran long fingers through the thick yellow shock of his tangled hair,
and stared at me strangely. "It is that long," he said softly, "since
Barihorn left the Earth."
Barihorn! And that was the name of this space ship! I murmured the
syllables.
"My name is Barry Horn."
The blue-gray eyes of the man in silver went wide. His rugged face
lit suddenly with incredulous hope. His trembling fingers touched the
cracked yellow skin of my hand, as if he doubted my reality.
"Barihorn!" he whispered. "Then the legend is fulfilled! I can hardly
believe it. But I saw your ancient ship--so tiny and rusted that it
had never been taken for a ship. I don't know how you lived--but the
Dondara Stone had promised that you would." An eager enthusiasm was
ringing in his voice. "I salute you, Barihorn!"
I was swaying with weakness and fatigue. Thirst and desperate hunger
tortured me, and the agonizing stiffness of my body. But these riddles
were more urgent still. The Dondara Stone--was that the crystal brain
of Dondara Keradin?
I stared at the young giant in silver, and once more my dry throat
found husky speech.
"Tell me--" I gasped. "There are so many things that I must know! But
first tell me who you are, and how you know of the Dondara Stone,
and if there is still"--some instinctive dread brought my voice to a
whisper--"still a robot named Malgarth?"
A cold bright light flashed in the eyes of the stranger.
"My name," he said, "is Kel Aran. But to the Emperor's Galactic Guard,
and to the Space Police of Malgarth's Corporation, I am just the
Falcon. Or sometimes the Falcon of Earth--for I was born on your own
planet, Barihorn!"
I was reeling on my feet. He reached out a strong argent arm to steady
me.
"The Stone?" I whispered.
"The Stone is on the Earth." A reverence was in his voice, as if he had
spoken of a living god--or goddess. "I saw it once when I was a child
on Earth. For my father was a Warder of the Stone. And now--"
I wondered at the softness in his voice, the shadow of agony on his
cragged face.
"Now," he said, "Verel Erin is the Stone's Custodian. She is a
red-haired girl of Earth. I loved her when we were children in the
desert valley where the Stone is hidden. I loved her--but the Warders
chose her to be the Custodian."
His lean face was white, and his tone had the break of tragedy.
Darkness was crowding upon me. But I found the strength for one more
question.
"Malgarth--"
* * * * *
The silver shoulders of Kel Aran drew square, and his gray eyes shone
with a fighting glint.
"Malgarth still rules the Corporation," he said. "And the Corporation
has grown mightier than the Empire. Your prophesied return is in good
time, Barihorn, for the struggle is at hand! It will be the robots, or
mankind--both cannot survive."
"War?" My dry lips moved without sound. "There will be war?"
"Men have been enslaved," rang the voice of Kel Aran. "Now they fight
for freedom. We have cruised the Galaxy from Koridos to Tenephron, and
everywhere there is rebellion--brave and yet hopeless rebellion against
the iron might of the Space Police and the fleets of the Galactic
Guard! For Malgarth moves the Emperor like a puppet, to the murder of
his own wretched kind.
"We have come now to beg the aid of the Stone--for without the ancient
secret that you sealed within its crystal brain, Barihorn, there is
hope of nothing save death. The Stone, I know, is slow to act--there
was a legend that it would never strike until you returned, Barihorn.
But we had hopes that it would move when we told of all the suffering
we have seen--mankind enslaved and tortured and destroyed beneath the
iron wheels of the Corporation!
"But we found a great fleet of the Galactic Guard blockading the Earth.
Hanging here, waiting for a chance to slip through, we discovered you,
Barihorn--incredible good fortune, if you can move the Stone to strike!
But there was something more alarming--a haze of fire and darkness that
wrapped the Earth."
Weakly fighting those mounting tides of blackness, I remembered the
flying red stars I had seen, and the flicker of the Earth. I shared the
puzzled apprehension in the voice of Kel Aran:
"We cannot understand--"
He was interrupted by a sharp metallic rapping on the inward valve. It
clanged open, and I saw three anxious men in the corridor beyond. Three
blurred figures, one dark and gigantic, one pale and corpulent, the
third a mere brown wisp.
"Kel!" It was a chorus of terror. "The Earth--"
A last black billow overwhelmed me.
V