_For unremembered eons the Thing had slept. For
a million years it had quested through the star
worlds of its dreams, until it lived only as a
faint legend in the race memories of mankind. But
now the time had come for man to recall its name,
and to worship it once again. Noorlythin arose
and went out into the world of men and robots._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The McCanahan came awake in the pearl mists of a Senn dawn, staring
upward into the round blue muzzle of a Thorn blaster. The handgun
hung in the air without visible support, its trigger moving slowly
back. In an instant, it would lash out at him with a thousand tares of
destruction.
He whipped the bedclothes into a geyser of silk and moonylon, and dove
naked over the edge of the bed to roll on the floor and turn over and
over. He brought up against the chair where his uniform belt hung, and
fumbled blindly for his service holster.
The blaster spoke in a soft whooosh of yellow flame, and the bedclothes
puffed once, billowing into a thick, reddish smoke. _That would have
been me, instead of the blankets, if the Little People had not come in
my dreams to whisper in my ears of Flaith's loveliness_, the McCanahan
thought, and tore loose his addy-gun.
His wrist steadied, and he touched the stud. The blaster, hung on a
tensor beam, went red, then white, and began to melt in droplets all
over the thick Morrvan carpet of his officer's quarters. The tensor
beam, held by a minute mechanism inbuilt within the handgun's butt, let
loose, and the blistered, melting thing thudded to the floor.
"It was a close thing," Kael McCanahan told himself, sitting there
naked on the floor.
It had been the sfarri who had sent the gun. The sfarri, who hated the
men of Terra with a hate like a fierce, blazing flame, who would not
scruple at assassination to gain their aims.
They were a cold, efficient breed of men, these sfarri. The farflung
Galactic fleet ships of Mother Terra, stretched in a thin line between
the stars, had crossed addy beams and searirays with their slim vessels
a thousand times. Almost always, Terra lost her ships. Almost always,
those far-ranging sfarran ships smashed the eagle-blazoned Terran
cruisers, and fled like laughing ghosts into the black infinity of
space.
No Terran ship had ever captured a living sfarran. Somehow, with the
barbaric philosophy of hara-kari, they committed suicide. It never
failed.
And slowly, but remorselessly, the ships of Terra and the Solar Combine
were pushed back and back, away from the Rim planets and the close
vastness of the Sack worlds that were so rich in every mineral, jewel
and foodstuff known to man, and even in some that Terran man had never
known.
The Solar Command had ordered Kael's father, Sire Patric McCanahan,
Fleet Admiral, with Captain Raoul Edmunds and Commodore Kael McCanahan,
to Senorech, there to make at last parlay with the High Mor who ruled
the Senn. They were to offer alliances and trade agreements.
Too many times, at the foot of the great ruboid throne of the Senn
ruler, had young Kael McCanahan seen the thin, hard lips of the High
Mor twist cruelly as he lashed out at the gray-haired Admiral. Too many
times had the red flush of fury crept up past his tight white uniform
collar with its crimson Commodore braid encrusted thick on its rich
surface, as he listened to the High Mor explaining to his father the
fact that the men of the Solar Command were no match for the relentless
fury of the sfarri.
The High Mor, it was plain, was eager to ally himself with the sfarri.
In return, the sfarri would rid him of these annoying Terrans.
* * * * *
The Thorn blaster that lay melting on the thick pile of his officer's
quarters was the opening shot in the extermination program.
The McCanahan let the breath from his lungs in a sudden relief. He sat
with his back propped against the leg of the chair, and the hand that
held his own Thorn shook so that he put his wrist on his naked knee. He
was a tall man, a man grown hard and fit with the mechanical fitness
that was the hallmark of all officers of the Solar Intergalactic
Command. Blond hair was cropped close to the conformations of his head,
giving his face a hard, carven look.
The mark of deep space was in Kael McCanahan's eyes, and in the catlike
walk and movements of his big body. He had been processed as only
Spacefleet officers were processed, in these days of the Empire, with a
cold precision to his mind and a careful hardness to his body.
He came off the floor and began to dress, sliding into the white
uniform with its crimson facings, pushing feet into highly polished jet
boots. His mind went to his father, the Sire Patric McCanahan, who was
Earth representative at the court of the High Mor, overlord of Senorech.
"If they've made their try for me, they've already made it for him," he
told the room.
He buttoned his white jacket that had the golden eagles at collar
and cuffs. He whipped the leather service belt around his middle. He
fastened the black blaster holster to its pivot.
The door opened to a fingerpress, and he was out in the long, metaloid
hall, moving with long strides. A woman came out of the shadows to meet
him, running.
"Kael! Kael--wait!"
It was Cassy Garson, in her white nursing uniform that was always a
little too tight for her curved body. Like many other Earth officers on
the distant planets of the empire, the McCanahan had fond memories of
the Nursing Auxiliary of the Fleet. Cassy Garson had been a lot of fun,
on a dance floor or under the curved canopy of a canalboat, or on the
silken cushions of a reflexifloor.
Her soft hands caught his, and he could feel her body's tremblings
as she came against him. "Kael, you've heard! Oh, Kael, I'm scared!
What'll they do to us?"
"Talk sense, Cassy!" he snapped, knowing his nerves frayed and jumpy
because of the metal thing he had melted in his room. He softened his
voice, and told her of it.
Her dark eyes were frightened things. "They killed your father tonight!
The same way, probably. A Thorn blaster was found a foot from his
gloved hand. It looks like suicide. The High Mor has sent word that
we're to leave. All of us. No more Earthers on Senorech!"
Cassy whispered in the stillness of the corridor, "We've orders to be
aboard the _Eclipse_ by noon. To chart our course for Antares. To get
out of the Rim planets and stay out."
The McCanahan drew a deep breath. His tight collar choked him, and a
vein swelled and throbbed in his hard face. "He's afraid of the sfarri.
Sfar is close to the High Mor's home galaxy. May the gods curse a man
so driven by fear he'd murder a man who wished him nothing but good!"
Cassy shook against him. "Kael, let's rouse the others! We've got to be
on the _Eclipse_ by noon!"
* * * * *
There was nothing he could do now, nothing except swallow the bitter
truth that he was running from a fight, that he was leaving his dead
father on an alien planet with not even a shamrock to blow in the
breeze above his grave. His father, one of the Bloody McCanahans, who
had scratched their names on graves from Mars to Makron, who had been
born to the service of the golden eagles, and now lay with no man to
whisper a prayer over his dead body.
McCanahan shook himself like a cat stretching after a sleep. The anger
boiled within him, locked inside his guts by his tight lips. "I'm going
to get his body, Cassy. I'll take it back with us for decent burial."
Her hands tightened until the red nails cut into his flesh. "You're
a fool, Kael McCanahan! A stubborn fool that's walking to his death!
Don't you understand? That's just what the High Mor wants you to do!
He'll have his dragon killers waiting for you, like cats standing at a
mouse-hole in the kitchen flooring!"
"Let them wait," he growled, but her hand dragged him along the
corridor, to door after door of the fleet barracks. They roused the
honor guard, eighty men in all, the most allowed on Senorech by the
High Mor. Men tumbled from their bunks with sleep glazing their eyes,
but they wakened fast enough, with Cassy and the McCanahan to whip them
into action.
They found Captain Edmunds of the _Eclipse_ half dressed. A small,
chunky man, he showed the years of his service in the crowsfeet at the
corners of his eyes and the faint silver that threaded his curly black
hair.
"I'm sorry, Kael. You're The McCanahan now, but that doesn't mean a
thing, not after what's happened. Get aboard the ship. I'll bring the
men, and whatever they want to take along."
Cassy said, "I've alerted the nurses. They'll be ready at blast-off
time."
Within an hour, it was done. Sober men in white uniforms were filing
out of their quarters by twos and threes, with their warbags slung
over shoulders or hanging by leather thongs from their wrists. They
moved across the city in a body, nurses in their center, their hands
wrapped on the walnut butts of their service blasters.
McCanahan lost himself five minutes before Captain Edmunds took
them out of barracks, toward the silver bullet that was the S.I.C.
_Eclipse_. He stepped from Cassy Garson's side, into an intersecting
corridor, and moved down a flight of steps to the basement. It was
easy, down here among the great heating tubes and dynamos, to stand and
wait until the bootfalls faded. Cassy came once to a ramp, and called,
but her voice echoed hollowly in the cellar unanswered.
Twenty minutes after they were gone across the city, McCanahan was
sliding through the shadows cast by the monolithic buildings, and
moving along the broad avenue flanking the Jaddarak canal. Ahead of him
were the white bulks of the government buildings. Somewhere in those
towering multi-windowed edifices, his father lay dead, with a Thorn
blaster close to his hand.
He reached the high stone wall of the gardens and was hoisting himself
over the red and stone walltop when a dark-faced Senn caught sight
of his Earther uniform and screeched the alarm. The McCanahan cursed
in his throat and dropped to the ground inside the garden, his jet
boots printing their soles deep in the soft loam of a bed of Thallan
sunflowers.
He made for the arched doorway at the near end of the gardens. At a
run he came into the darkness of the groined arches. He knew his way
through these labyrinthine tunnels. With his father, he liked to walk
in the cool corridors where the manacled takkaprots screeched their
birdlike songs and the colored waters of the fountains made a rainbow
of moving brilliance.
The hoarse, brazen pitch of the bry-horns were startling in the
Senorech morning. _They'll be roaming these halls with their blasters
cutting at every shadow_, he thought. _Sooner or later one of the
shadows they shoot at will be mine!_ He had to reach his father's
suite, had to kneel there and do what must be done for Patric
McCanahan, as Patric had done to his own father before him.
They might expect him to come as he was, expect him to fight his way to
his father's side and kneel to whisper a prayer for him over his dead
body. On Earth it would be expected. Expected and guarded against. But
Senorech was not Earth, and on Senorech things were rarely done for
emotional reasons. The McCanahan yanked his Thorn from its sheath as he
slid into a telepetor and twirled a dial. If they were expecting him he
was ready.
Curiously, the suite of rooms was empty, save for the crumpled man
who lay in a white uniform with gold and platinum aigrettes on the
shoulders, and red tykkan braid looped under a crumpled arm. McCanahan
went to his knees, and his lips moved. In the custom of spacemen
everywhere, from the domed tunnels of the Moon to the hellcraters of
humid Brinth, he put his hand to his father's wrist and whispered, "I
swear by the blood that bonds us, you will not have died in vain. I
will make the report, and investigate the reason for your dying."
It was a simple thing, that oath. Many men had spoken it, until it
had become a part of the creed of those who roamed the star world. It
prevented tragedies, and saved lives, for once the reason for a man's
death was known, preventive precautions were taken, so that many men
who otherwise would have died, lived to walk the palm terraces of Mars
and sail the tossing seas of Achernar. The histories of space featured
and explained it, and glamorized its usefulness.
But as the McCanahan let the words trail from his lips, he cursed and
looked down at his palm, where part of his father's wrist had come off,
to stick to it.
He grimaced, and then reason came into his head. His father was
recently dead, no rotting corpse. "Plastiskin," he breathed, and leaned
down, ripping with strong fingers at that wrist, carefully built up to
hide something.
Around his father's wrist was wrapped a length of silvery wire, thin
and fine. The McCanahan leaned forward and untwisted it.
It came away and danced in his fingers, reflecting the blue glow of
the wall mercuri-lamps.
"A harpstring!"
He sat on his ankles and forgot that a mile away the _Eclipse_ was
warming its take-off tubes. "Now why in the name of Brian Born did
father hide such a thing on his wrist? He played no harp, nor anything
else that ever made music!"
* * * * *
But this was no time to solve puzzles. With a snap of his fingers, he
rolled up the silvery wire and bound it tight about an ankle, then
thrust his foot back into his service boot. He went to the window and
stared down at the splashing fountains and the sunflower gardens half a
mile below him. The walls were lined with Senn guards, inside and out,
and men with the High Mor's red dragon insignia on their cloaks moved
here and there in the shrubbery, slashing at ferns and jungle vines
with their swords.
"They'll tire of that soon enough," he decided. "Then they'll come
through the palace itself, a floor at a time, working the place over
with the point of a dagger and the muzzle of a Thorn."
They would be expecting him to hide. They would be expecting him to
keep retreating ahead of them until they trapped him high above, in a
cloud-room or on a rooftop. A Senn or a sfarran would act like that.
They would do the smart, the sensible thing.
"Faith, my belly tells me it's the smart thing for myself as well," the
McCanahan muttered. "But my head tells me something else again."
He wandered the rooms of the palace until he found the wallgrille of
an atmosphere tube. With the edge of his service knife, he worked at
the screws until the plate came loose from the wall. He crawled into
the tube and replaced the grate as best he could. Then, sliding and
levering himself from curve to curve of the tube, he began moving
downwards.
When he came to gentle loops in the tubes, he let go and slid. It took
him three hours to get down, but when he came into the cold metal coils
that could duplicate the atmosphere of fifty planets, he was below the
search level, and as good as a free man walking the streets.
"Except for the uniform," he told himself, glancing down ruefully at
the white and gold resplendence of his fleet garb.
In ten minutes he was crawling up through a street grille, and heading
for the space docks.
He was moving up the Avenue of Emblems, with the gleaming bullet that
was the S.I.C. _Eclipse_ towering above the buildings, nosing its point
skyward, still half a mile ahead of him, when he heard the announcers.
The words were just sounds, at first, like the pennons flapping above
his head from the tall poles, each a gift of the United Worlds.
His mind was torn cleanly with a thin, hard grief, for he was
remembering his father, and the way of his smiling and his gentle
voice, and the fun they had shared together on the Klisskahaenay Rapids
in a boat, or in the crisp darkness of space, with the stars beckoning
and his father pointing them out to him. And his handclasp when he left
for the Academy, his letters, his visits at holidays when the needs of
the Empire were relaxed enough to free the Admiral from his cruiser. It
was a good companionship, that of his father and himself, born of their
mutual need when his mother died on Aldebaran.
And now it was over. No more would he see that smile or listen to that
voice or wonder how it was that his father knew so much more than he
about so many things. They would never hook a lyskansa-fish or blast
a Martian boar with needleguns. They would never find new foods in
restaurants that--
"--under penalty of the red dragon! Repeating! Space Commodore
McCanahan--Kael McCanahan, Earther--is to die on sight. All guards are
hereby warned. McCanahan must not leave Akkalan. He is to be shot on
sight, under penalty of the red dragon! Repeating...."
It sank in after a while. He drew back into the shadows, and the
harpstring tied to his ankle pained him, as if it whispered with his
father's voice. _They're afraid of me and what I can do to them_,
his mind told him. _They don't even dare let me get close to a
spacommunicator panel!_ But why? Why? The McCanahan shook his head
and looked down at himself, neat and trim in the gold and white space
uniform.
"_It's a card with my name on it asking that they shoot me_," he
told the shadows. "_I've got to be rid of it or swallow a dozen
blaster-beams._"
They would be searching the space docks just about now, minutes before
take-off time. They would almost dismantle the ship to find him. And
there would be others, blasters in their hands, stretched all around
the field. They would shoot on sight, to kill, or they would suffer
the fate of the red dragon; and no one in his right mind cared even to
think about that punishment, that took a man a month of agony to die.
McCanahan stripped naked in the shadows and bundled his uniform into
a ball and weighed it with his boots. He made a compact bundle and
threw it up, through the lengthening shadows, onto a low, sloping roof.
Let them find that when they could! Then he turned and ran on the
sun-warmed bricks, away from the field, toward the dirty alleyways that
were the Akkalan slums.
"Now where in the name of the family leprechaun could a man who is
stripped to his buff hope to find a shelter in this unholy town?" he
asked the wind as he ran.
McCanahan thought of Ars Maasen, a little dark man with a colossal
thirst for the pale yellow fire that was Senn wine. His lips twitched
as his memory ran on the nights they had spent together in the low-land
taverns, sampling every liquid that the skills and arts of men could
brew. Ars Maasen traded in lyss furs, and spent his profits faster than
the fierce little desert tycats could breed and run to his traps.
With Ars Maasen he would find Flaith.