In all the hours that followed--while the women of the slaves worked
with soft tanned skins and resinous gums, while Trevor labored over the
clumsy helmets they must have--in all that time, Shannach was silent.
Silent, but not gone. Trevor felt that shadow on his mind, he knew that
Shannach was watching. Yet the Last One made no attempt upon him.
The slaves watched him, too. He saw the fear and hatred still in their
eyes as they looked at the sun-stone between his brows.
And Jen watched him, and said nothing, and he could read nothing at all
in her face. Was she thinking of Hugh and how the hawks had come?
By mid-afternoon they were ready. They started climbing slowly, toward
the passes that went up beyond the sky. He and Saul and Jen were three
grotesque and shapeless figures, in the three-layered garments of skin
that were crudely sealed with gum, and the clumsy helmets that were
padded out with cloth because there was no collar-rest to hold them.
Their faces were wrapped close, and they held the ends of the oxygen
tubes in their mouths because no amount of ingenuity could make the
helmets space-tight.
The evening shadow flowed upward from the valley floor as they climbed,
and the men who had come to help them dropped back. These three went
on, with Saul leading the way and Trevor last.
And still Shannach had not spoken.
The atmosphere slipped behind them. They were climbing into space now,
tiny creatures clambering up an infinity of virgin rock, in the utter
black between the blazing peaks above and the flaring lightnings of the
evening storm below.
Up and up toward the pass, toiling forward painfully with each other's
help where no man could have made it alone, through a numbing and awful
cold and silence. Three clumsy, dragging figures, up here above the sky
itself, walking in the awfulness of infinity, where the rocks their
feet dislodged rushed away as noiseless as a dream, where there was no
sound, no light, no time.
Trevor knew they must have reached the pass, for on both sides now
there rose up slopes that had never been touched by wind or rain or
living root. He staggered on, and presently the ground began to drop
and the way was easier. They had passed the crest. And the oxygen was
almost gone.
Downward now, stumbling, slipping, sliding, yearning toward the air
below. And they were on the other side of the mountain, above the plain
of rock that led to....
And then, at last, Shannach--laughed.
"Clever," he said. "Oh, very clever, to escape without a ship! But you
will come back, with a ship, and you will take me to the outside world.
And I will reward you greatly."
"No," said Trevor, in his mind. "No, Shannach. If we make it, the
sun-stone comes out, and we'll come back for the slaves, not for you!"
"No, Trevor." The gentle finality of that denial was coldly
frightening. "You are mine now. You surprised and tricked me once,
but I know the trick now. Your whole mind is open to me. You cannot
withstand me ever again."
It was cold, cold in the darkness below the pass, and the chill went
deep into Trevor's soul and froze it.
Saul and Jen were below him now, stumbling down along the rock-strewn
lip of a chasm, into the thin high reaches of the air, into sound and
life again. He saw them tear away their helmets. He followed them,
pulling off his own, gasping the frigid breath into his starved lungs.
Shannach said softly,
"We do not need them any longer. They would be a danger when you reach
other men. Dispose of them, Trevor."
Trevor started a raging refusal, and then his mind was gripped as by
a great hand, shaken and turned and changed. And his fury flowed away
into blankness.
"_But of course_," he thought. "_There are many boulders, and I can
topple them into the chasm so easily...._"
He started toward a jagged stone mass, one that would quite neatly
brush the two clumsy figures below him into the abyss.
"That is the way, Trevor! But quickly--!"
Trevor knew that Shannach had spoken truth, and that this time he was
conquered.
"No, I won't!" he cried to himself, but it was only a weak echo from a
fading will-power, a dying self.
"You will, Trevor! And now! They suspect."
Saul and Jen had turned. Trevor's face, open now to the numbing cold
which he could scarcely feel, must have told them everything. They
started scrambling back up toward him. Only a short distance, but they
would be too late.