Joris laughed, a pallid ghost of his old loud roar. "I will. Right now,
I'm too tired to die." He glanced again at the instruments. "Time to
go."
They looked at each other, these fatigue-drunken red-eyed men whom a
dream had dragged to the edge of the universe, and could find nothing
to say in this moment of their parting.
"Good luck," muttered Edri then and turned away.
"You're the ones who're going to need it," Joris called after them.
Trehearne went through after Quorn and Edri into the skiff. They
sealed off and then Quorn took the controls and waited, watching his
chronometer. His hand grasped loosely about a red switch marked RELEASE.
He closed the switch.
There was a squeal and grind of machinery, a sense of super-swift
forces at work as the complicated releasing-gear did its work, an
instant of extreme pressure, and the skiff had left the _Mirzim_.
They could see nothing but they knew that skiff and ship had already
diverged far apart at their unthinkable speeds.
Quorn watched his instruments while Trehearne and Edri sat looking at
nothing, afraid to sleep lest they should not be able to wake again.
They sat, and swayed, and waited, until presently Quorn started his
forward generator and began deceleration.
Trehearne lost track of things. Part of the following time he was
unconscious, or nearly so. The rest of it he observed as in a confused
dream. He thought of how he had once been wildly eager for starflight.
But he managed to do the things that Quorn required of him.
The port cleared. It had no adapter and functioned as a port only at
visual speeds. Now, ahead of them, Trehearne could see a huge bulk of
darkness against the outer dark, illumined only faintly by the galactic
light.
"There it is," said Edri. "The dark star." His voice shook a little.
They swept closer, still slowing down. "It has a planet," said Quorn.
"There, catching the starshine--"
"Two," said Trehearne. "I see two."
Two dimly gleaming bodies, dead worlds clinging to a long dead sun
out here at Galaxy edge. The glow of the Milky Way touched them, the
ghostly glow of candles at a wake, and only emphasized their drear
darksomeness and lonesomeness.
Edri whispered, "Well try the outer planet first. Give me a hand,
Trehearne."
They crawled aft between the crowded banks of equipment to a detector
that had come from the _Mirzim's_ hold. Edri fumbled at it.
"In Orthis' day they used radioactive fuel, of course," Edri mumbled.
"We calculated its half-life. Even supposing his bunkers were nearly
empty there should be enough left to register on this counter. A
teacupful would do it."
Trehearne helped Edri adjust the shielding apparatus on the mechanism
until the needle was still.
"What about natural radioactive deposits on the planets themselves?" he
asked.
"We get a break there. Too old. The last radioactive element will have
practically died out millions of years ago." He raised his voice. "Keep
the skiff as low as you dare, Quorn. The counter has a wide sweep. Take
it slow."
He crouched over the telltale needle. Trehearne moved forward again.
The planet was small, less than two thousand miles in diameter. Between
the intense gloom and the motion of the skiff he could see nothing but
a black featureless desolation, rifted here and there with white that
he took to be the frozen remains of an atmosphere. He thought what it
would be like to land there and shivered.
They quartered and swept the planet carefully. The telltale needle of
the counter remained motionless. Edri said, heavily, "We'll go on. Pray
we find it on the other planet. Pray Orthis didn't come down on the
dark star. It would take forever to find him there."
Quorn fed in power and cleared away. The port dimmed again, and Edri
moaned.
"He's about out," Quorn said. "Looks like whatever is done, we'll have
to do the most of it."
The second world was larger than the first by three times or more. It
was not content to be featureless. It thrust up gnawed and shattered
ranges, stripped bones of mountains sheathed in frozen gases. It showed
forth dreary plains coated white with congealed air, glistening faintly
in the light of the great galactic wheel. It turned toward the watchers
the naked beds of its vanished oceans, sucked dry to the deepest gulf.
It displayed the scars of its long dying, the brutal wounds of internal
explosion, the riven gashes of a shrinking crust. A hideous world that
seemed to remember beauty still and to resent the cruelty of death.
Edri whispered, "Pray--pray that the damned thing moves." Instead of
doing so, he cursed the needle that it did not stir.
"Keep going," said Trehearne.
They kept going.
The needle quivered.
Edri let out a hoarse cry. "Easy! _Easy!_" Tears began to run down his
cheeks. He sobbed. The needle was still again.
"Circle!" Trehearne shouted to Quorn. "Circle till we get it centered."
He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted salt, and wondered how it
got there.
Quorn swung the skiff around in a tightening spiral until Edri said,
"Now! Let her down."
He scrambled forward, thrusting his face against the port, trying to
see. Quorn switched on a landing-light. The blue-white blaze lit up a
circular area below, the light intensely bright, the shadows intensely
black. Its beam went sharply down.
They followed it. It was as though the skiff were poised on that pillar
of light, sinking downward. They were above a planetary surface racked
and tortured by final diastrophism. Towering miles high, loomed a
mighty cliff of riven rock. In front of it a chasm yawned, and beyond
the chasm a drear and tumbled landscape stretched dim under the great
sword of the Galaxy.
They started down along the face of the titanic cliff. Looking at the
chasm at its base Trehearne began to get uneasy.
"There's no ship here," he said. "The counter must have picked up some
last radiation from deep down in that chasm."
Quorn agreed with him. But Edri said, "No, keep going." Trehearne could
feel him tremble.
They went on down the face of the giant, looming wall. Trehearne
pointed suddenly. "Isn't that a ledge?"
The hard bright edge of the beam cut across a shelf of rock that jutted
out halfway down the cliff. Quorn swung the skiff in closer. Something
on the ledge glistened dully under the light. Quorn let the skiff drop
with a sickening rush. Detail sprang clear--shattered rock, ancient
magma, puddles of frozen air in the hollows. And among them an ovoid
shape, symmetrical, smooth, giving back a metallic glint.
Edri said the name of Orthis, as though it were a prayer.