The lurid glow of death was shining all around us. Death rode down upon
us on gigantic ragged boulders. Death shrieked at us from hurricanes
of greenly incandescent gas, and tugged and battered at the ship. Death
bathed us in rains of molten metal, and knocked upon the hull with a
hail of meteoric fragments.
And Kel Aran met death, and mocked it, with the same lilting song that
he had sung the Admiral. He had taken the big Saturnian's place at
the controls. His lean hands moved with a quickness I had never seen.
And the twisting, spinning ship seemed to respond to the life and the
rhythm of his song.
As for my own life, I could not feel it at all eternal. The freaks of
chance might have kept me alive a million years--but no chance, I felt,
could pick a safe path through this insane chaos.
"I think," the Earthman interrupted his song, "that the Admiral will
not care to follow us here--not even for Malgarth's star!"
Jeron Roc stood rigidly by, clinging to a hand rail against the wild
lurching of the ship. I saw Zerek Oom, the fat, tattooed cook, standing
startled and petrified at the end of the corridor. I saw him again,
after Kel Aran had earned another trick from death, and now all his
tattooing had a background of sickly green. I looked again, and he was
swaying aft at an unsteady run, toward the lavatory.
Some iron fragment must have struck the hull, despite all the
well-tried skill of Kel Aran, for it rang like a great bell and the
little ship began to spin end over end. I clung with both sweating
hands to the rail, and felt as ill as Zerek Oom.
When the ship was steadier again, I tried to go back to my bunk, and
stumbled headlong in the corridor. Jeron came to help me, and then made
me take another dose of his bitter, nauseating medicine.
"I've lived a million years," I gasped, "without you to doctor m--"
The walls about me rang to another fearful crash, and the ship began
to spin again. A blistering heat was creeping through the insulated
hull. The air was stifling. I felt the faint, deadly sting of some
penetrating radiation. And then a great hand of darkness extinguished
all my spinning, tortured world.
The next I knew, the _Barihorn_ was humming smoothly again through
the dark vault of stars. The coiling nightmare cloud was already lost
behind. We had emerged from one of its spiral arms, Kel Aran informed
me, at right angles from the direction of our entrance.
"Old Gugon Kul tried to patrol all the borders of the cloud. But that
would have spread a hundred fleets too wide. Anyhow, he wasn't looking
for us to come out alive."
"So he thinks we're dead?" Relieved, I sat up on the bunk. "He won't be
hunting us any more?"
But big Zerek Oom came waddling out of his galley, wiping his fat
tattooed hands on a white apron, to rid me of that comforting illusion.
"Worse luck, Barihorn," he sighed, with a sad look at Kel Aran,
"Indeed the Admiral believed us lost. He called the offices of the
Corporation--we picked up the message on the telescreen--and reported
that we had perished in the cloud. And the reply was relayed from black
Mystoon--from the unknown lair of Malgarth himself--that the reward of
a stellar system would be duly paid for the death of the Falcon."
"Well?" I said. "What's wrong with that?"
* * * * *
The round pale eyes of Zerek Oom looked reproachfully at the Earthman.
"Kel tapped his communicator again," he told me. "Boasted that we had
got away. And that you, Barihorn, the man who made Malgarth a million
years ago, were with him. And sang that song of the last Earthman
again, until the Admiral was blue in the face!"