"It's as much my fault as yours. I was too quick to lose my temper. I
should have stopped to think that the Vardda world was so new to you
that you had little to judge it by."
She was not now the mocking Shairn of old. Her voice was full of a
sombre passion, a pleading for him to understand.
"Michael, your motives were good--loyalty to a friend, reaction against
what seemed to you injustice. But surely now you must see how hopeless
this all is. I know you're hunting Orthis' ship. You'll never reach it.
Kerrel will run you down. It'll all have been for nothing."
It seemed to Trehearne that what she said was very likely true. But he
only answered, "It's too late to think about that now."
"No, Michael! You can still save yourself!" She caught him by the
shoulders, her hands urgent on his flesh. "Leave the ship with me! Let
Kerrel pick us both up!"
Trehearne smiled mirthlessly. "Kerrel would like that--taking me back
to a prison."
"It doesn't have to be prison!" Shairn exclaimed. "You can say you
pretended to join Joris and Edri only to save me. I'll back you up and
not Kerrel nor anyone else can disprove it. You'll walk out free on
Llyrdis."
It crossed his mind that he could do that. It would all fit. It was an
out.
"You won't be letting your friends down, either," Shairn insisted.
"They'll go on without you. You've done all you can for them."
She clung to him. Her mouth begged him with a silent language of its
own. He took her arms slowly from around him and thrust her back and
she caught her breath at the pain of his grip.
"No," he said. And again, "No, Shairn."
She stood back and looked at him steadily. "You could go back to the
Silver Tower with me but you won't--and for what? So that peoples
you've never met on worlds you'll never see can someday fly the stars?"
"There was a man named Trehearne on the world Earth who got his chance
to fly the stars," he said. "I thought that others should have their
chance too. I have to play it out now."
She was silent and then the dropping speed of the ship told them that
it was almost over. Trehearne took her down to the airlock chamber.
They stood there together, not finding anything more to say, and all
that had been between them came silently and mocked them with the pain
of vanished days.
The _Mirzim_ scraped her keel softly on a yielding surface and was
still. Trehearne opened the port, looking out on the dark windy desert.
Shairn spoke then. "A strange beginning for us, Michael, and now an
even stranger ending."
He held out his hand to help her down and the pressure of her fingers
was like something tearing at his heart. She looked up at him, a small
lonely figure in the vast dark. He thought her lips moved but the wind
came between them and took the words away and he had none of his own
for answer.
The warning bell jarred harshly in his ears. He closed the port and she
was gone.
Joris' voice roared from the bridge, through the intercom. "Flatten
out, all! This is the only start we'll get on Kerrel and I've got to
pile it on!"
The cruel hand of acceleration crushed Trehearne down. He lay on the
scored plates of the deck and that last vision of Shairn's white face
remained with him to remind him of all that he had had and lost.
He said her name over and over in the silence of the empty lock and his
mouth was filled with the bitter taste of dust. The _Mirzim_ leaped
through space like a wild thing, driving toward the sector that was the
goal of a thousand-year hope and quest, toward the Galaxy edge and the
shores of outer night.