"The Admiral must have been furious, about the reward," I said. "He'll
hunt us harder than ever."
That old reckless grin lit the Earthman's face.
"He was," he whispered happily. "And he will." Then his gray eyes
became very sober. "I was sorry to do it, Barihorn. For it put us back
in danger. And makes the quest for Verel and the Stone more difficult."
His yellow head shook gravely.
"But I could not let men believe that we were dead--for we are their
only champions against the robots. And I wanted more of them to know of
your miraculous return, Barihorn. We must keep hope alive, at whatever
cost. Or men will yield to slavery and death, and our cause will be
lost."
"I see," I told him, "And now what?"
His jaw set grimly.
"Still," he said, "we must search for Verel and the Stone. Malgarth
fears you and the Stone, Barihorn--else he would be less anxious for
our death. And we know that all the rebellion of mankind will be
crushed, as surely as steel is stronger than flesh--unless we have the
aid of the Stone."
"But how can we continue the search," I demanded somewhat
apprehensively, "--now?"
Kel Aran grinned.
"We have a plan," he told me.
And the _Barihorn_, I discovered had been rechristened the _Chimerian
Bird_. Rogo Nug was already painting on the new name along with
certain gaudy advertising legends and enough spots of rust to make
the hull appear as if it had been in service almost as long as my old
_Astronaut_. Jeron Roc showed me a luridly lettered poster:
SEE! Naralek's SEE!
Supreme! Colossal! Unrivaled!
INTERSTELLAR SHOWS
SEE
The Weird Mermaid of Procyon II
THE LIQUID MAN OF MOG!
The Man-Eating Flowers of Koron
And SETSI the SANDBAT
ONLY EXISTING SILICIC BEING!
Her Food is Flint!
SHE READS YOUR MIND!
and
1,000,000 Wonders! 1,000,000
Most of the exhibits, I suspected, were pretty bald frauds--but that
was in an excellent tradition that another Earthman named Barnum had
established well over a million years before. The cunning handiwork of
Rogo Nug was evident in the pickled mermaid, which looked remarkably
like certain creations that I had seen of fish-tails and seaweed and
coconut husk. I doubted that the flower, a stunted, rubbery-looking
bush, had actually caught many men. The "liquid man of Mog" looked
weird enough--a trembling mass of luminescent purple jelly; but I
had seen Jeron Roc busy in the galley, shaping it out of chemical
precipitates, a few wires, and a pocket torch.
In their years of stellar roving, however, the four had collected a
good many genuine oddities. Setsi, the "sandbat," was one of these--and
perhaps the most remarkable being I had ever seen. Her bodily chemistry
was in fact based upon silicon instead of carbon; she really ate quartz.
In shape, she was something like a six-pointed starfish, some eight or
nine inches across. Her flat body had a gorgeous crystalline glitter of
a thousand yellows, purples, reds, and greens. In the center, where the
six slender arms joined, was a single huge eye, dark and sorrowful.
"Once," Kel Aran told me, "after a raid on a particularly rich agency
of the Corporation, when Malgarth's iron police and the Galactic Guard
were both hot on the trail, I was hiding out in a cavern on a cold dead
planet that was lost from whatever sun once had warmed it.
"A regularity struck me, in the passages of the cave. I found fallen
stones that once had been squared. And suddenly I knew that I was in
the corridors of a colossal building whose upper stories must have
crumbled down before the Earth was born. Groping about in the darkness,
I saw a feeble gleam, and found--Setsi!"
I watched him dig the silicic being out of his locker. She looked frail
and brittle as something blown out of bright-colored glass. I touched
it, wonderingly, and pricked my finger on one of the needle-tipped arms.
"But it isn't--" I protested, "alive!"
"She is," Kel Aran assured me. "She's older than the Earth was. The
silicic beings didn't reproduce. Only three of them appeared, when life
was born on their planet. But they were immortal--practically.
"The three of them lived together, for billions of years. They
dominated the far more numerous carbon-life, and came to rule the
planet. But then there was some kind of triangular quarrel. I don't
know the details--Setsi never mentions it, unless she is very drunk.
But there was jealousy. One killed another. And Setsi killed the
survivor, out of revenge. And she has been alone for a long, long time."
"Drunk?" I stared at the lean Earthman and the thing like a glass toy
in his hand. Kel Aran nodded.
"Yes, Setsi shares a weakness of Zerek Oom. Her metabolism is
stimulated vastly, but rather erratically, by the assimilation of any
carbon compound. Gasoline would do, or sugar, but her favorite is
alcohol--Watch!"
* * * * *
He laid the bright rigid form on a table in the galley, and poured a
few drops of rum into the palm of his hand, from Zerek Oom's hoarded
bottle.
"Setsi, old girl!" he called. "Want your grog?"
A brighter lustre lit the great dark eye. I saw a quick vibration of a
thin transparent membrane that stretched between the crystalline arms.
And a whirring voice answered him, softly melodious as the cooing of a
dove:
"Oh, she does, Kel! Setsi dies for grog!"
He stretched out his hand, and the brilliant thing came to surprising
life. The fluttering membranes extended. The creature leaped into the
air. A dancing shimmer of color, it flew to Kel Aran, alighted on his
hand, and sucked greedily at the rum with a mouth on its under side.
The few drops of alcohol affected it remarkably. It flew from Kel's
hand to the bottle, and clung there. Gently, the Earthman pulled the
flask away.
"Setsi," he reproved, "you mustn't rob poor Zerek." And he told me,
"She's one being who could make good on the old boast about drinking
the contents and then eating the bottle."
The bright entity fluttered to me, and clung with hard light little
claws to my arm. The Cyclopean eye looked solemnly up into my face.
"So you are Barihorn?" The whirring voice brought me the first
disconcerting revelation of that uncanny intuition. "We are very old
together, you and I and the robot--but you fear that you are not
Barihorn, but only Barry Horn!" There was a queer liquid sound, oddly
mirthlike. "Don't you worry, Barry. Setsi'll never tell!"
Unsteadily, then, she flew back to Kel Aran.
"Poor Kel!" she whirred. "He fears that Verel's dead. That Verel's
dead, and we'll never find the Stone. That Verel's dead, and he's the
last Earthman, all alone. That Verel's dead, and he has only Setsi to
console him."
There was a melodious sob.
"And poor old Setsi! She's the last sandbat. She has nothing but her
age and her memories. Her age is a prison and her memories bitterest
poison. Now she's all alone, for she killed the one who loved
her.--Please give her just one more drop of rum, Kel, so she can
forget. Just one more drop. Please, oh, please!"
Kel Aran clutched her shimmering body in his hand.
"Hold on," he muttered, "you old reprobate. We've got a job to do,
Setsi. You've got to help us find Verel Erin."
"Oh, Setsi'll help you find her," throbbed the melodious reply.
"Setsi'll surely find her. But you must be free with the rum, Kel.
Setsi can't live without rum."
"Took you a cosmic time to find that out." Turning from his stove,
big Zerek Oom rather anxiously snatched the bottle and locked it in a
cabinet. "But neither can I."
The plan went ahead. Kel Aran became Naralek, the limping old showman
from Alula Australis IX. His leathern space togs were bright with
the shells and the plumes of foreign planets. He walked with a
shuffling swagger, and blustered in the jargon of space. He chewed the
_goona-roon_ until it stained his lips and his unkempt yellow beard,
and spat the purple juice with a reckless dexterity.
The little _Chimerian Bird_--her yellowed papers skillfully forged by
Jeron Roc from a set Rogo Nug had stolen from a freighter--carried
us from planet to planet. We always landed near some great city, and
pitched a ragged tent. The voice of Zerek Oom, oiled with a little rum,
could always draw a crowd of curious countrymen to see the wonders of
space.
Rogo Nug, the wizened little space-rat, went about among the throngs,
or sometimes slipped away on mysterious errands into city or barracks
or space port. Usually he returned with valuable information about the
plans of the Corporation and the Empire to crush mankind's rebellion.
And often the pockets of his battered harness were stuffed with money
and jewels.
* * * * *
Carefully unwashed, draped in a bit of spotted fur and armed with a
crude stone axe, I was billed as "the ferocious last caveman, the
Atavar of Mars." My part, as I sat glowering and jangling my chain, was
to listen for any chance mention of Mars' murdered sister, Earth.
Jeron Roc listened, as he sold the tickets. Kel did, as he limped
about to display the mermaid of Procyon and the liquid man and the
anthropophagous flower and the Atavar.
Then Kel, in a cracked, aged voice, would sing his ballads of space. He
would crack jokes--some of them, to my weary knowledge, old a million
years ago. And at last, with Setsi spinning about his head like a
colored flame, he would break into a dance routine.
After the show, then, while we were loading the other exhibits and
striking the tent, Setsi read the minds of all who would pay to enter
Kel's little booth. And no thought of Earth escaped her.
In this way we searched planet after planet for any survivors of the
mother world. And we found trace, indeed, of a few, perhaps a score in
all, who had escaped when that strange agency of Malgarth's flung the
Earth into the Sun. Eagerly, patiently, we followed down each clue. And
always we found that the robot police and the Galactic Guard had been
before us. The survivor, in every case, had been tracked down--and had
died as a traitor.
But none of the dead was certainly Verel Erin. In that lay the thin and
thinning thread of hope.
That was a weary, bitter time. Those planets where actual revolt
had flamed out were closed by quarantine. Not even our unsuspected
circus ship could pass the fleets of the Galactic Guard. But, even
on the happier planets we were allowed to visit, the lot of man
was cruelly hard. The robots, everywhere, had seized all possible
advantage. Men were being ruthlessly pressed into unemployment,
starvation--annihilation.
"Malgarth is cunning," said Kel Aran. "He begins slowly. He makes a
test, to see if the Stone is still a threat. He tries to destroy all
who might know of it--all Earthmen. Then he drives men to revolt,
one planet at a time, here and there--and crushes them. He dupes the
Emperor, and sends the Galactic Guard to put down the rebels. He would
set man against man--until only two are left!"
And I knew that his hope was ebbing. Despair bit weary lines into his
lean face, until there was need of little make-up to turn him into old
Naralek. An increasing bitterness shadowed his eyes.
"There's an old proverb," he said, "about the futility of searching
for a needle in a planet of pins. But that is easier than finding one
fugitive lost in a hostile universe."
"Who is probably," put in the grave Saturnian, "already dead."
After a long circuit of the stars, we had returned, under the very eyes
of Admiral Gugon Kul, to the system of the Sun. A bitter civil war was
raging on the four great moons of Jupiter, the unemployed miners there
having attacked the robots when relief was cut off. We were unable to
penetrate the quarantine. And Mercury was now uninhabited by men,
every human being having been slaughtered when the rebellion there was
crushed. We landed upon each of the remaining planets, however. We
crossed the trails of a dozen fugitives from Earth--and found that each
trail had already ended in death.
Hope came, at last, when it had been abandoned.
The base of the Twelfth Sector Fleet in the solar system had been
established on Oberon, outermost moon of Uranus. "Naralek" got
permission to land and pitch his ragged little tent beside the
vast space port that was covered with the mile-long gray masses of
interstellar cruisers as far as the eye could follow its convexity.
* * * * *
Kel gave passes to some officer in return for permission to show. The
genuine feats of Setsi in perceiving secret thoughts drew attention.
Other officers came. And at last, escorted by a hundred trim guardsmen
in yellow-and-crimson, Gugon Kul himself.
The gigantic swart space-commander stopped the show with a bellowed
oath, and demanded an instant demonstration of the sandbat's telepathic
powers. That was forthcoming. Kel let the Admiral into his little
booth, and the soft voice of Setsi began to comment on fantastic
gambling at the court on Ledros, on misappropriated funds of the fleet,
on bribes accepted from Malgarth for a promise to turn the entire fleet
over to the Corporation.
The Admiral turned very purple, and stalked out of the booth. He
returned hastily to his flagship; and his guardsmen came back to seize
the _Chimerian Bird_ and arrest us all, on suspicion of espionage.
They were one minute too late. Their disruptor guns flamed in vain
against the departing hull of our craft. For Setsi, the instant of
Gugon Kul's departure, had warbled out a warning, and then the clue we
had sought so long.
"Danger, Kel! Oh, there's danger, and a dancer. Tedron Du has a dancer.
Kel, we're all in danger!" That liquid, throbbing chuckle. "For Setsi
told too many secrets of the Admiral. But the Emperor on Ledros has a
new dancing girl. And she's in danger, too. For her name is Verel Erin!"