Instantly everyone in the cave fell silent. They watched the places
in the cave wall where the sunlight came in, the little cracks in the
cliff face. Trevor thought of the hawk-creatures, and how they would be
wheeling and slipping along the ravine, searching.
Outside, the rough rock looked all alike. He thought that in that
immensity of erosions and crevices they would have a hard time finding
the few tiny chinks that led into the cave. But he watched, too, tense
with a feeling of danger.
No sound at all came now from the ravine. In that utter stillness,
the frightened whimper of a child came with the sudden loudness of a
scream. It was instantly hushed. The shafts of sunlight crept slowly up
the walls. Jen seemed not to breathe. Her eyes shone, like an animal's.
A black shadow flickered across one of the sunlight bars--flickered,
and then was gone. Trevor's heart turned over. He waited for it to
come back, to occlude that shaft of light, to slip in along it and
become a wide-winged demon with a sun-stone in its brow. For a whole
eternity he waited, but it didn't come back, and then a man crept in
through the entry hole and said, "They're gone."
Jen put her head down on her knees. She had begun to tremble all over,
very quietly, but with spasmodic violence. Before Trevor could reach
her, Hugh had her in his arms, talking to her, soothing her. She began
to sob then, and Hugh glanced at Trevor across her shoulders.
"She's had a little too much."
"Yes." Trevor looked at the shafts of sunlight. "Do the hawks come very
often?"
"They send them every once in a while hoping to catch us off guard. If
they could find the cave they could hunt us out of it, drive us back
into the valley. So far they haven't found it."
Jen was quiet now. Hugh stroked her with big awkward hands. "She told
you, I guess. About yourself, I mean. You've got to be careful."
"Yes," said Trevor. "She told me." He leaned forward. "Listen, I still
don't know how you people got here or what it's all about. After we got
away from the Korins, Jen said something about a landing, three hundred
years ago. Three hundred Earth years?"
"About that. Some of us have remembered enough to keep track."
"The first Earth colonies were being started on Mercury about then, in
two or three of the bigger valleys. Mining colonies. Was this one of
them?"
Hugh shook his head. "No. The story is that there was a big ship loaded
with people from Earth. That's true, of course, because the ship is
still here, what's left of it. And so are we. Some of the people on the
ship were settlers and some were convicts."
He pronounced the word with the same hatred and scorn that always
accompanied the name "Korin." Trevor said eagerly,
"They used to do that in the early days. Use convict labor in the
mines. It made so much trouble they had to stop it. Were the Korins...?"
"They were the convicts. The big ship crashed in the valley but most of
the people weren't killed. After the crash the convicts killed the men
who were in charge of the ship, and made the settlers obey them. That's
how it all started. And that's why we're proud we're slaves--because
we're descended from the settlers."
Trevor could see the picture quite clearly now, the more so because it
had happened before in one way or another. The emigrant ship bound for
one of the colonies, driven off its course by the tremendous magnetic
disturbances that still made Mercury a spaceman's nightmare.
They couldn't even have called for help or given their position. The
terrible nearness of the Sun made any form of radio communication
impossible. And then the convicts had broken free and killed the
officers, finding themselves unexpectedly in command of a sort of
paradise, with the settlers to serve them.
A fairly safe paradise, too. Mercury has an infinite number of these
Twilight valleys, all looking more or less alike from space, half
hidden under their shallow blankets of air, and only the few that are
both accessible and unmistakable because of their size have permanent
colonies. Straight up and down, by spaceship, is the only way in or
out of most of them, and unless a ship should land directly on them by
sheer chance, the erstwhile prisoners would be safe from discovery.
"But the sun-stones?" asked Trevor, touching his forehead. "What about
the sun-stones and the hawks? They didn't have the use of them when
they landed."
"No, they came later." Hugh looked around uneasily. "Look, Trevor, it's
a thing we don't talk about much. You can see why, when you think what
it's done to us. And it's a thing you shouldn't talk about at all."
"But how did they get them in their heads? And why? Especially, why do
they waste them on the hawks?"
* * * * *
Jen glanced at him somberly from the circle of Hugh's arm. "We don't
know, exactly. But the hawks are the eyes and ears of the Korins.
And from the time they used the first sun-stone we've had no hope of
getting free from them."
The thing that had been buried in Trevor's subconscious since last
night's questioning came suddenly to the surface.
"Thought-waves, that's it! Sure!" He leaned forward excitedly, and Jen
told him frantically to lower his voice. "I'll be damned. They've been
experimenting with sun-stones for years on Earth--ever since they were
discovered, but the scientists never thought of...."
"Do they have the stones on Earth, too?" asked Jen, with loathing.
"No, no, only the ones that are brought from Mercury. Something about
Mercury being so close to the Sun, overdose of solar radiation and the
extremes of heat, cold, and pressure while the planet was being made,
that formed that particular kind of crystal here. I guess that's why
they're called sun-stones."
He shook his head. "So that's how they work it--direct mental
communication between the Korins and the hawks, by means of the stones.
Simple, too. Set them right in the skull, almost in contact with the
brain, and you don't need all the complicated machines and senders and
receivers they've been monkeying with in the labs for so long." He
shivered. "I'll admit I don't like the idea, though. There's something
repulsive about it."
Hugh said bitterly, "When they were only men, and convicts, we might
have beaten them some day, even though they had all the weapons. But
when they became the Korins--" He indicated the darkling alcoves of the
cave. "This is the only freedom we can ever have now."
Looking at Hugh and Jen, Trevor felt a great welling-up of pity, for
them, and for all these far-removed children of Earth who were now only
hunted slaves to whom this burrow in the rock meant freedom. He thought
with pure hatred of the Korins who hunted them, with the uncanny hawks
that were their far-ranging eyes and ears and weapons. He wished he
could hit them with....
He caught himself up sharply. Letting his sympathies run away with him
wasn't going to do anybody any good. The only thing that concerned him
was to get hold of that sun-stone again and get out of this devil's
pocket. He'd spent half a life hunting for a stone, and he wasn't going
to let concern over perfect strangers sidetrack him now.
The first step would be getting away from the cave.
It would have to be at night. No watch was kept then on the ledges, for
the hawks did not fly in darkness, and the Korins never moved without
the hawks. Most of the people were busy in those brief hours of safety.
The women searched for edible moss and lichens. Some of the men brought
water from the stream at the canyon fork, and others, with stone clubs
and crude spears, hunted the great rock-lizards that slept in the
crevices, made sluggish by the cold.
Trevor waited until the fourth night, and then when Saul's water party
left, he started casually out of the cave after them.
"I think I'll go down with them," he told Jen and Hugh. "I haven't been
down that far since I got here."
There seemed to be no suspicion in them of his purpose. Jen said, "Stay
close to the others. It's easy to get lost in the rocks."
He turned and went into the darkness after the water party. He followed
them down to the fork, and it was quite easy then to slip aside among
the tumbled rock and leave them, working his way slowly and silently
downstream.
After several days in the dimness of the cave, he found that the
star-shine gave him light enough to move by. It was hard going, even
so, and by the time he reached the approximate place where Saul had
tried to kill him he was bruised and cut and considerably shaken. But
he picked his spot carefully, crossed the stream, and began to search.
The chill deepened. The rocks that had been hot under his hands turned
cold, and the frost-rime settled lightly on them, and Trevor shivered
and swore and scrambled, fighting the numbness out of his body, praying
that none of the loose rubble would fall on him and crush him. He had
prospected on Mercury for a long time. Otherwise he would not have
lived.
* * * * *
He found it more easily than he could have done by day, without a
detector. He saw the cold pale light of it gleaming, down among the
dark broken rock where Saul had thrown it.
He picked it up.
He dandled the thing in his palm, touching it with loving finger
tips. It had a certain cold repellent beauty, glimmering in the
darkness--a freakish by-product of Mercury's birth-pangs, unique in
the Solar System. Its radioactivity was a type and potency harmless
to living tissue, and its wonderful sensitivity had made it possible
for physicists to explore at least a little into those unknown regions
above the first octave.
In a gesture motivated by pure curiosity he lifted the stone and
pressed it tight against the flesh between his brows. Probably it
wouldn't work this way. Probably it had to be set deep into the bone....
_It worked, oh God, it worked, and something had him, something caught
him by the naked brain and would not let him go._
Trevor screamed. The thin small sound was lost in the empty dark, and
he tried again, but no sound would come. Something had forbidden him
to scream. Something was in there, opening out the leaves of his brain
like the pages of a child's book, and it wasn't a hawk, or a Korin. It
wasn't anything human or animal that he had ever known before. It was
something still and lonely and remote, as alien as the mountain peaks
that towered upward to the stars, and as strong, and as utterly without
mercy.
Trevor's body became convulsed. Every physical instinct was driving
him to run, to escape, and he could not. In his throat now there
was a queer wailing whimper. He tried to drop the sun-stone. He was
forbidden. Rage began to come on the heels of horror, a blind protest
against the indecent invasion of his most private mind. The whimpering
rose to a sort of catlike squall, an eerie and quite insane sound in
the narrow gorge, and he clawed with his free hand at the one that held
the sun-stone, tight against his brows.
He tore it loose.
A wrench that almost cracked his brain in two. A flicker of surprise,
just before the contact broke, and then a fading flash of anger, and
then nothing.
Trevor fell down. He did not quite lose consciousness, but there was an
ugly sickness in him and all his bones had turned to water. It seemed
a long time before he could get to his feet again. Then he stood there
shaking.
There was something in this accursed valley. There was something or
someone who could reach out through the sun-stones and take hold of a
man's mind. It did that to the Korins and the hawks, and it had done it
for a moment to him, and the horror of that alien grasp upon his brain
was still screaming inside him.
"But who--?" he whispered hoarsely. And then he knew that the word was
wrong. "_What--?_"
For it was not human, it couldn't be human, whatever had held him there
wasn't man or woman, brute or human. It was something else, but what it
was he didn't want to know, he only wanted to get out--out--
Trevor found that he had begun to run, bruising his shins against
rocks. He got a grip on himself, forcing himself to stand still. His
breath was coming in great gasps.
He still had the sun-stone clenched in his sweating palm, and he had
an almost irresistible desire to fling the thing away with all his
strength. But even in the grip of alien horror a man could not throw
away the goal of half a lifetime, and he held it, and hated it.
He told himself that whatever it was that reached through the
sun-stones could not use them unless they were against the forehead,
close to the brain. The thing couldn't harm him if he kept it away from
his head.
A terrible thought renewed Trevor's horror. He thought of the Korins,
the men who wore sun-stones set forever in their brows. Were they,
always and always, in the icy, alien grip of that which had held him?
And these were the masters of Jen's people?
He forced that thought away. He had to forget everything except how to
get free of this place.
He started at once, still shaken. He couldn't go far before daylight,
and he would have to lie up in the rocks through the day and try to
make it to the valley wall the next night.
He was glad when daylight came, the first fires of sunrise kindling the
peaks that went above the sky.
* * * * *
It was at that moment that a shadow flickered, and Trevor looked up and
saw the hawks.
Many hawks. They had not seen him, they were not heeding the rocks
in which he crouched. They were flying straight up the ravine, not
circling or searching now but going with a sure purposefulness, back
the way he had come.
He watched them uneasily. There were more than he had ever seen
together before. But they flew on up the ravine without turning, and
were gone.
"They weren't looking for me," he thought. "But...."
Trevor should have felt relieved, but he didn't. His uneasiness grew
and grew, stemming from an inescapable conclusion.
The hawks were going to the cave. They were heading toward it in an
exact line, turning neither to right nor left, and this time they were
not in any doubt. They, or whoever or whatever dominated them, knew
this time exactly where to find the fugitives.
"But that's impossible," Trevor tried to tell himself. "There's no way
they could suddenly learn exactly where the cave is after all this
time."
No way?
A thing was forcing its way up into Trevor's anxious thoughts, a
realization that he did not want to look at squarely, not at all.
But it would not be put down, it would not stop tormenting him, and
suddenly he cried out to it, a cry of pain and guilt,
"No, it couldn't be! It couldn't be through me they learned!"
It fronted him relentlessly, the memory of that awful moment in the
canyon when whatever had gripped him through the sun-stone had seemed
to be turning over the leaves of his brain like the pages of a book.
The vast and alien mind that had gripped his in that dreadful contact
had read his own brain clearly, he knew. And in Trevor's brain and
memories it had found the secret of the cave.
Trevor groaned in an agony of guilt.
He crawled out of his rock-heap and began to run back up the ravine,
following the path the hawks had taken. There might still be time to
warn them.
Stumbling, running, he passed the canyon fork. And now from above him
in the canyon he heard the sounds he dreaded--the sounds of women
screaming and men shouting hoarsely in fury and despair. Farther on,
over the rocks, scrambling, slipping, gasping for breath, he came to
the cave-mouth and the sight he had dreaded.
The hawks had gone into the cave and driven out the slaves. They had
them in the canyon now, and they were trying to herd them together and
drive them down toward the lava beds. But the slaves were fighting back.
Dark wings beat and thundered in the narrow gorge between the walls of
rock. Claws struck and lashing tails cut like whips. Men struggled and
floundered and trampled each other. Some died. Some of the hawks died
too. But the people were being forced farther down the canyon under the
relentless swooping of the hawks.
Then Trevor saw Jen. She was a little way from the others. Hugh was
with her. He had shoved her into a protecting hollow and was standing
over her with a piece of rock in his hands, trying to beat off a hawk.
Hugh was hurt badly. He was not doing well.
Trevor uttered a wild cry that voiced all the futile rage in him, and
bounded over a slope toward them.
"Hugh, look out!" he yelled. The hawk had risen, and then had checked
and turned, to swoop down straight at Hugh's back.
Hugh swung partly around, but not soon enough. The hawk's claws were in
his body, deep. Hugh fell down.
Jen was screaming when Trevor reached them. He didn't stop to snatch up
a rock. He threw himself onto the hawk that had welded itself to Hugh's
back. There was a horrid slippery thrashing of wings under him, and the
scaly neck of the thing was terribly strong between Trevor's hands. But
not strong enough. He broke it.
It was too late. When his sight cleared, Jen was staring in a strange
wild way at the man and hawk lying tangled together in the dust. When
Trevor touched her she fought him a little, not as though she saw him
really, not as though she saw anything but Hugh's white ribs sticking
out.
"Jen, for God's sake, he's dead." Trevor tried to pull her away. "We've
got to get away from here."
There might be a chance. The black hawks were driving the humans down
the canyon a little below them now, and if they could make the tumbled
rocks below the cliff, there was a chance.