TWENTY

Quorn had set the skiff down on the ledge. They had scrambled

into pressure suits. They had forgotten that they were already

three-quarters dead. Awkward in the clumsy armor, stumbling on the

jagged rock, slipping on the patches of frozen air, they clawed their

way toward the goal they had crossed a Galaxy and gambled their

lives to find. Above them the ghastly cliff leaned outward against

nothingness, below them the abyss plunged down into the dead heart of a

world. Beyond them was a spreading desolation, and in the black sky the

awful rim of the Galaxy lay like a blazing sword of light.

Trehearne was aware of the silence. He had never been on an airless

world before. He felt the impact as his metal boot struck against a

shard of rock, but it made no sound. All he could hear was the harsh

breathing of Quorn and Edri, transmitted to him by the helmet audio.

The ship of Orthis loomed before them, lightless, lifeless, cradled in

the ashes of destruction. It had a look of patience. It had lain here

for a thousand years, untouched by time or rust, entombed in silence

and the endless night, eternal as the dead suns that rove forever in

uncorrupting space. It seemed that it could wait until the end of the

universe, cherishing its trust. Awe came upon Trehearne, and with it a

kind of fear.

They found the lock port. It stood wide open, the valves still clean

and shining. There could be no corrosion here, with every atom of air

and moisture frozen in the purifying cold. The light of Trehearne's

belt-lamp showed him, on the floor of the lock chamber, the scored

marks of a man's boot. They might have been made only yesterday.

The three men paused outside that open port. They looked at each other

through the glassite plates of their helmets, and their faces were

strange. Then Trehearne stepped aside, and Quorn also. Edri bent his

head. He moved forward to the port. Slowly, without sound, he clambered

into the ship of Orthis.

The others were close behind him. Their belt lamps cut hard slashes of

light across the airless dark. They passed through the lock chamber

and came into a corridor running fore and aft. It was utterly still.

The heavy drag of their boots on the metal deck made not the slightest

sound. It was like walking in a fever-dream, and the deadness of the

ship, the black, inert, unstirring deadness, was more oppressive than

the desolation in which it lay. The rocks and cliffs had never moved,

they had never been built by the hands of men, no thought or hope had

ever entered into them. Trehearne's skin crept in little waves of

cold. He could hear the beating of his own blood in his ears, the dull

throbbing of his own heart. He moved with the others, lonely figures in

a tomb, and he started like a child at every shape the light picked out.

The whole after section of the ship was a laboratory. Much of the

delicate equipment was shattered, either by speed-vibration or a hard

landing. Trehearne could make nothing of the tortured mass of metal

and splintered crystal, but Quorn said, very softly, "He was studying

interstellar radiation. Most of that stuff is beyond me, but I can see

that much."

One section of the laboratory contained a complicated mass of coils

and prisms and intricate banks of reflectors arranged around what must

have been a great central tube. There was a small platform at the

focal point of the mechanism, fitted with straps. Along one bulkhead

was a stack of metal cages for experimental animals. Several of the

little creatures were still there. They had died, the quick death of

airlessness and cold, but their bodies were still perfect. They had,

then, survived the voyage. The ultra-speeds of interstellar flight had

not harmed them.

The men searched for a time among the wreckage, and then Edri said,

"There's nothing for us here. No good trying to figure out the

apparatus. They couldn't do that in all the years they had the ship

impounded, when it was all in shape. Most of it Orthis designed and

built himself."

Trehearne looked again at the small furry bodies in the cages, lying

as though in sleep. Somehow they made the betrayal of Orthis doubly

cruel--that even beasts could be given the freedom of the stars, that

so many generations of the races of so many worlds had been denied.

They went into the corridor, retracing their steps, and passed

on forward. They found the living quarters, small and spare and

monastically neat. The coverings of the bunk were rumpled and the

pillow still retained the hollow where a man's head had lain. Trehearne

shivered. Presently they went on, to the bridge.

Trehearne realized then what an act of heroism it had been to push this

antique ship to the limits of the Galaxy and beyond. The instruments

were so few and rudimentary, the system of controls so crude. There was

a locking device, a primitive Iron Mike that could keep the ship on its

course without human attention, and he thought that only that had made

Orthis' lonely flight possible. But the science of star-craft had come

a long way since then.

Quorn's voice, held to a whisper as one speaks in a church, reached him

on the helmet phone. "It's incredible. This ship wasn't even built for

voyaging, it was a spatial laboratory. It's a wonder it survived at

all."

Edri drew a long breath, with a quiver in it like a sob. "We still

haven't found what we're looking for. Do you suppose it isn't here? Do

you suppose that after all...." He didn't finish.

They began to search again. It was Trehearne who found the door in the

after bulkhead of the bridge. He pushed it open and looked through into

the cabin beyond. The beam of his belt-lamp speared brightly into the

immemorial dark.

Involuntarily, he screamed.

Quorn and Edri ran to him. He was clinging to the bulkhead. Cold sweat

poured down his face, and his eyes were wide and wild. They looked past

him, over his shoulder.

The cabin was small. It was fitted as a library, crammed with metal

cases of books, some of them micro-tape volumes of an ancient type,

some of them thick ragged notebooks. The knife-sharp light-beams picked

them out, in brilliant highlight and black shadow. There was a great

table, bolted down, and on the table was a metal box. A man's hand

rested there, the fingers open, curled slightly over the edge of the

box, protectively, possessively, as though it were something loved and

precious.

"Oh God," whispered Quorn, "look at him...."

He sat in a metal chair behind the table. His head was lifted, looking

toward the port in the outer wall that showed the black sky slashed

across with the mighty fires of the Galaxy. The hard light showed him

clearly. He was an old man. The years of his life had been many and

unkind. They had shaped his face as though from iron, gouging the

lines deep, hammering the ridges hard, driving out all traces of youth

and hope and whatever laughter there might have been to forge a mask

of bitter anger, and reproach, and in the end, despair. It seemed to

Trehearne that he could read a whole life history in that face, caught

forever in the moment of death, when surely the man was crying out upon

whatever gods he worshipped, demanding _Why?_

Edri began suddenly to laugh. "Orthis. It's Orthis. He's been here

waiting for us to come in...."

Quorn raised a hand in its heavy gauntlet and struck Edri's helmet so

that Trehearne could hear the ringing in his own audio. "Shut up. Damn

you, Edri. Shut up." Edri stopped laughing. After a moment he said,

"For a moment I thought...."

Trehearne muttered, "So did I." Here in the airless utter cold, death

held no decay, no change. But there was more to it than the lack of

physical corruption. The fire in this man had burned so deep that even

death could not erase its scars. Where the lamp-beams caught them, his

open eyes seemed still to glow with the unforgotten embers.

For a long time the three men stood, not moving, grouped in the

doorway. Trehearne said once, "I think he wanted whoever found him to

look inside that box, there under his hand." Orthis' life-work, the

future of the Galaxy, held in a little box. They knew it. But still

they were not quite ready to go in and take away from Orthis the thing

that he had kept so long. And it was strange, Trehearne thought, that

in this moment when their emotions ought to be at the highest pitch,

when they should be feeling most poignantly the weight of all the

centuries of sacrifice and struggle that had led them here, and what

it was all going to mean, they were too tired to feel anything very

much, only the edges of awe and an instinctive reluctance to approach

the dead. He wanted to get away from this funeral ship. Finally he

wanted it so much that he went in and tried to move Orthis' hand from

off the box. The arm was frozen rigid as a steel bar, and he gave it

up, working the box carefully out from under the icy fingers, in horror

lest they break.

The others had come slowly in beside him. The box was not locked. He

lifted up the lid, and the lamplight showed a notebook bound in cloth.

On top of it lay a loose sheet of paper with a few angular lines of

writing. Edri picked it up, very clumsily in his armored hands, and

held it to the light, reading aloud in a queer flat voice. "I have

clung to life this much longer...."

Edri stopped, and coughed, and started over, and Trehearne thought that

Orthis listened.

"I have clung to life this much longer to write down for the first time

all my formulae, complete and simplified so that they can be understood

and used. In them lies the freedom of the stars. I, the first of the

star-born, was rejected by the greed and fear of the planet-born. But

it will not always be so.

"I shall not see what comes. My ship has already flown too far, I have

little fuel, and I am old. Therefore I have set the airlock control and

in a few minutes it will open. A swift death, and better than a slow

one as the air-pumps fail. After that, I shall wait. What I dreamed

will never be forgotten. Some day there will come others who believe as

I have always believed, that the stars are for all men."

Edri fell silent. And Quorn said, "He watched the Galaxy for a thousand

years, and waited."

Trehearne forced himself to move, to break the spell. "Unless we hurry,

it will not have done him any good." He reached out and took the box

and shut it, and thrust it into Edri's hands. "Come on. Edri, do you

hear me? Come on! We haven't got much time."

Edri looked at the box, and then at Orthis, who had had a thousand

years of time. Then he turned and went out, and Quorn went after him,

and Trehearne, down the dark corridor and out of the silent ship.

Trehearne looked up at the flaming river of stars in the sky and

thought what a mighty dream the first of the star-born men had carried

with him into the long night.

A sudden panic of haste came over him. Orthis had given them this trust

literally with his own hand. If they failed now because they were too

slow, too worn out now, at the last, to do what needed to be done....

He began to run toward the skiff, shouting at the others, urging them

on, harrying them until they ran too, staggering over the blasted rock.

He pushed them inside, a little crazy now himself, talking incessantly

about the need for haste. Quorn took off from the ledge. They did not

want to be near the ship of Orthis when they did what they were going

to do. He sent the light craft racing across the dead world, searching

for a place to land.

"Hurry," said Trehearne. "Got to hurry!"

Quorn cursed him savagely. "I'm doing all I can. Shut up and listen.

Both of you. Keep your pressure suits on and your helmets ready."

Trehearne stopped talking. He sat, holding his hands tight between his

knees, shaking all over. Edri was bent over the notebook from the metal

box, reading.

"It's all here," he said. His voice was hoarse with weariness, with

emotion he was too numb to feel. "The equations, the formulae, the

instructions for constructing the equipment, the instructions for using

it. I don't understand them, but others will." He looked at Trehearne

with red-rimmed eyes. "Orthis has a foreword here. He was the first

of the star-born. The mutation began spontaneously on that first long

voyage. The constant vibration of speed, not speed as we know it

now but more than the human body was used to, speed approaching the

velocity of light, and the impact of interstellar radiation on the

living cell. That's what did it. Orthis was the end-product of four

generations of breeding under those conditions. He was nature's first

attempt to create Galactic Man, to readjust the human body to meet

new needs. And the thing he labored on so long was the reduction of

that long natural process to a workable formula that could accomplish

the change in one generation instead of four. God, I'm so tired I'm

repeating this stuff like a parrot from Orthis' own words. What you do,

of course, is alter the germ plasm of both parents before conception

takes place, and ... anyway, it's all here."

Quorn said suddenly, "This place looks as good as any. At least it'll

give us a little more cover."

He took the skiff down carefully toward the flat bed of an ancient

watercourse. The channel was filled now with frozen air, but in bygone

ages it had gouged a deep canyon in the rock, leaving eroded holes and

overhangs. Quorn worked the skiff into one of these washed-out places,

under the canyon wall.

Edri was going over his book again, making sure, dazed with the

hypnosis of exhaustion and the need to be right. He did not dare to

fumble or read a single figure wrong. There wouldn't be any time for

corrections or recheckings. The weight of the responsibility was so

heavy on him that he seemed to be physically shrinking under it. His

lips moved constantly. Trehearne did not envy him his job.

Quorn grunted at him and they went aft together to struggle with the

ultra-wave equipment. Trehearne was possessed by a demon of urgency,

and he had not the slightest idea what he was doing. Quorn gave orders

and he obeyed them blindly, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Nerve and

temper were worn to the last frayed edge and beyond, and before they

were through they were snarling at each other like dogs. Hooking the

power leads to the skiff's generators was the hardest task of all, but

somehow they finished. They lifted Edri to his feet and sat him down

again, still clutching his book, in front of the transmitter. Quorn

bent over the control switches. The generators hummed, feeding in the

power. Edri was still staring at the book. Trehearne shook him. "Go

on," he said. "Talk."

Edri blinked and frowned, looking up at them as though he had forgotten

entirely what he had to do. Quorn took Edri's face between his hands

and spoke to him, slapping his cheeks gently one after the other as

he talked. "Listen, I've got it on the emergency band, covering all

channels. Every ultra-wave receiver within its range will pick it up,

including non-Vardda communication centers. Edri, do you understand me?

The minute Kerrel picks it up he'll be able to center us and come in on

our beam. So you've got to make it fast. Fast!"

Edri blinked again, and shivered. "All right. I'll try." He glanced

nervously at Trehearne. Quorn made the last dial setting, and then he

spoke into the transmitter.

"G-One! G-One! Emergency. Request clearance all channels. Use your

recorders! Use your recorders! G-One, clear all channels...."

He motioned violently, and Edri leaned forward. "I may not have time to

repeat. We have found the ship of Orthis. Here follow the formulae for

the Vardda mutation."