"Sorry," smiled Theodi. "I didn't know it made any difference."
"I suppose it is good from a functional standpoint," said Sandra.
"Being on the stage permits them to pass before us from one side to the
other. It is the only clear place in the auditorium in which to work,
and as far as I could see, there isn't any other suitable place in
town. But being on the stage sort of makes me ... oh, come on. I'm just
tired, I guess. Where's the pills?"
"No pills on this deal," said Theodi, opening a case and removing a set
of large hypodermics. "This goes into the vein. Right in the main line.
You'll have to help."
"Me? Look, Theodi, I don't feel well enough to go shoving needles into
people."
Theodi looked up sharply. Her brash-sounding statement was made in a
hard voice in spite of its humanitarian and pleading sound. Sandrake,
to Theodi's opinion, was really feeling ill.
"It must be done," he said simply. "You fill and hand them to me."
Sandra took the first hypo, inserted it into the disinfectant, and
then filled it from an ampule. She handed it to Theodi and watched him
with fascination as he took the first Telfan in line and thrust the
needle into his arm. It went in and in, and Theodi felt around with the
needle-point until he found the vein, and then he emptied the cylinder.
"Next!" he called, and so on until the hundred had been inoculated.
"Now," said Theodi, "we'll proceed to Dorana and do likewise."
Sandra was silent all the way to the next village, and as she started
down the line of people, picking them out one by one, her face began to
whiten.
Halfway through, Sandra stopped.
"Go on," urged Theodi.
"_Go on?_" screamed Sandra. "Go on? No!"
"But--"
"Go on and on and on and on and on?" shrieked Sandra in a crescendo
that ended in a toneless, inarticulate screech. She stopped the
sentence only because her voice had no more range and she had no more
breath. "Theodi, I feel like a murderess! I go on selecting people as
I would select specimens to be speared with a mounting pin and stuck
on a cardboard. I point them out. They follow dumbly with a look of
resignation. They come and you try something new on them--every time it
is something new, and you don't know whether it'll kill 'em or not! I
can't stand it."
"But who can we have to do this?"
"Get one of your own to do your own dirty work! You need me! Bah!
Suppose--?"
"Suppose we have the right combination?"
"Suppose you have? You haven't--and you know it."
"I wouldn't say that."
"I would. You're just experimenting." Sandra's lip curled over her
perfect teeth in a perfect sneer. "Experimenting on your own kind. And
I'm no better. You should hate me--and I'm beginning to hate you and
every one of you."
"This must go on--"
"It'll go on without me."
"Come on, Sandrake. Buck up. Here, I'll give you a sedative and you
sleep for an hour. You're over-tired. Then--"
"Then nothing. I can't go on murdering your people any more."
"It's not murder. It's--"
"It's worse than murder. You go on filling them with colored water and
telling them that you think that this is the works--and you know it
is just another blind try! Go away!" Sandra whirled and ran blindly.
Across the field she ran, out and away from the village. On and on she
ran, until she fell breathless beside a small brook.
Thankfully, she dabbled in the brook with her tired feet, and laved the
cool water on her wrists and forehead. She drank sparingly, and then
stretched on her back to relieve the strained muscles that seemed to
make her back arch almost to the breaking point.
Unknowing, Sandra relaxed as the ground supported her back, and with
the suddenness of falling night, Sandra slept.
Her dreams were less restful than the sleep. They were filled with a
whirling panorama of lights, disembodied faces, grinning, leering faces
who watched long, brutal needles find the vitals of mute sufferers
whose only visible admission of unbearable pain was the tortured look
on their mobile faces. And through the dream, McBride and Hammond
fought against a huge metal barrier against which their mightiest
efforts were futile.
* * * * *
The day wore on as Sandra slept, and night came, and in all that time
Sandra had hardly moved. As the darkness fell, she aroused enough to
drink from the brook and settle herself in a more comfortable position.
Afterward she did not recall awakening at all but she did select a
thick thatch of soft moss the second time and she wondered about it
later. And it was about midnight when Sandra awoke.
She was slept out, rested. But the self-hatred was still vivid. The
dream had kept it there, and though her body was rested, her mind was
still tired from the furious mental action that went on even as she
slept.
She stretched, rolled over on her back, and considered her actions
of before with distaste. That had been a spectacle, and she hated
spectacles except when they made her appear in a better light. She
searched the sky wearily, picking out Garna, which was Telfu's sister
planet, and Ordana, the behemoth of the Sirian system, both of which
were shining close to the bright Geggenschein of Sirius. Above her,
she spotted the place where all Telfans watched--the spot where Soaky
should be according to their calculations. It was not a spot, but an
area, and Sandra scanned it in a futile manner.
Nothing yet.
A minute change in the sky along the horizon made her turn quickly,
hopefully. She scanned the sky carefully, and yet she knew that looking
at the starry curtain was futile unless the scene became so evident
that it could not be missed. She could see nothing, and besides, Soaky
was supposed to be above, not on the horizon.
She looked above again, but there was nothing to see. Puzzled at
that--that _something_ that had caught her attention along the horizon.
She shrugged, and in trying to rationalize she admitted that it might
have been a meteorite; and she knew that she was overanxious.
It was the same, she knew.
But was it? Was it?
_Was it?_
No, but what in the name of--?
Garna and Ordana and Geggenschein were gone from the Telfan sky. What
was this? Why should planets disappear?
Planets were about as permanent as--but they must still remain, it
was their light that was gone! Sandra shouted. McBride! The lens. In
her mind she saw the scaled layout; Sirius, Telfu, the other planets,
and Soaky, the satellite that was oh, so close to Telfu. Place two
biconvex lenses, one near Sirius and one near Telfu--and any light from
Sirius that could normally reach Telfu--and the planets in line from
Sirius--would be cut off by the lens, refracted into the energy beam
that would ultimately be focused on Soaky.
They'd started at last! Sandra looked upward into the area containing
Soaky.
And as she looked, a mite of colored pinpoint appeared in the sky
above. It did not rise into the incandescence, it leaped. It passed
upward through the red, the orange, the yellow, and the blue with
lightning-flash speed, and then settled down in color to an intolerable
white. It seared the eyes, that microscopic speck, and its brightness
made it appear huge.
Sandra shook her head and looked down. The darkness was fading, and
sharp shadows of the low bushes and herself marked the ground. The
stars beside Soaky began to fade to the eye, and as the brightness took
on solar brilliance, it was like the sudden return of daylight.
A flicker of the light caused Sandra to look into that intolerable
light again. No, Soaky was still going strong. But it was
scintillating, now, and there were streamers of incandescent vapor
leaving the coruscating nucleus that was Soaky.
Full against Soaky the Sirian beam drove, and the surface vaporized.
The streamers were the high-temperature vapors of incandescent metal,
being driven away from the tortured satellite by the radiation pressure
of that intolerable brilliance. The vapors condensed in finely divided
droplets of metal, but still floated away in lines and whorls.
The landscape around Sandra was in full light, now, and the shadows
were no longer sharp. The boiling, blue-white vapors were rushing from
the satellite at high velocity, and they spoiled the point-source of
light. They danced and flickered in the sky, and as Sandra watched, a
slight twinge of terror crossed her, and she caught her breath.
This was not right. This was--was defying God Himself. And Sandra,
never awed by the men themselves, fell in fear before the visible
evidence of their ability. It was not right, this utter destruction
of a celestial body by man. Men were supposed to be motes--bacterium
on the skin of an apple--not mighty motes capable of almost literally
eating the apple that--not eating but destroying ruthlessly--the apple
that was spoiling their barrel.
And Sandra, not even awed by the God of her people, prayed to Him
in fear. Fear, because people of her race dared to tamper with the
universe.
But then the light passed away, and no omnipotent lightning flashed
across the universe to destroy it. The night fell again, and darkness,
unspoiled, crowded the landscape leaving Sandra light-blind. She
fumbled aimlessly in the darkness that was by contrast the utter
blackness of no-light.
Sandra Drake was not alone in that. Half of the people on the planet of
Telfu were blinking in the darkness; silently groping their way into
their houses. Their tongues were stilled by the awesome sight.
Sandra brushed her tattered skirt and smiled. She was a long way from
Indilee and she wanted to be there as soon as she could. She was
beginning to feel the pinch of the months of loneliness; before, it was
futility to lie awake at night and think of the touch of a human hand
and the sound of a human voice. Yes, she even admitted to the desire
for a bit of admiration, after all, it had been her meat and drink.
But now it was a dream about to come true. There would be people of
her own kind. People who could laugh at the hardy jokes of her race,
and appreciate the casual acceptance of doing absolutely nothing for
periods of time. The verbal sparring and blocking would be there,
too; the nice trick of forcing someone into a trap of his own making
and springing it with--not double talk--but triple talk. The sound of
people who could discuss both downright earthy things and high theory
with the same words but with slightly different inflections in their
voices, and be understood by others who knew both lines of talk.
She gave a short laugh. They would never know whether she did it from
sheer altruism or because she was scared to death at the idea of being
exposed to andryorelitis.
She blinked. The sky flared briefly ahead of her in a brilliant and
colorful display of some auroral discharge. It illuminated one full
quarter of the celestial hemisphere in flowing color. Sandra thought
and remembered a man saying: "The charge on Station One is so great
that at twenty thousand feet it would arc a million miles or more." The
words and the distances were forgotten, and probably wrong due to her
faulty memory for those details, but she did remember something of that
nature.
Obviously, one of the Stations had landed with a load of
Silicon-acetyldiethyl-sulfanomid. The not-quite-perfectly neutralized
electronic charge must have ionized the upper air in a sprinkling
corona.
From another corner of the sky, a similar flare of color flashed, and
it was followed by flashes from near and far, each one creating a
streaking display of celestial fireworks.
At the sight of that auroral display, Sandra's head went up, her
shoulders went back, and there returned to her step a bit of that
lilting walk. She smiled crookedly and then broke into that saucy grin.
She set her foot on the road to Dorana, from where she could get a ride
back to Indilee.
There were Terrans here, all right. Her Terrans that nothing ever
stopped. They came--and brought the goods with them.
But--who brought them?
Sandra Drake.
Throughout the night, the flashing of the celestial fireworks told
the whole planet that Terrans were bringing the needed drug to Telfu.
And with each flash, as with each mile, a bit of the old Sandra Drake
returned.
There were a lot of miles back to the _Haywire Queen_.