On the bridge of his yacht, Bellaver turned to Hyrst and said,
"I've done what you wanted. Now find me that starship."
Hyrst nodded. "Take off."
The rockets roared and thundered, and the swift yacht leaped quivering
into the sky.
Hyrst sat quietly in his recoil chair. He felt a different man, changed
entirely in the last few days. Much had happened in those days.
Bellaver had got busy on the radio even before his yacht left Titan, and
the story of the Lazarites had burst like a nova upon the Solar System.
Already there were instances of suspected Lazarites being mobbed by
their neighbors, and Government was frantically concerning itself with
all the new, far-reaching implications of the Humane Penalty.
Close on the heels of this bomb-shell had come Vernon's angry
accusations against Bellaver, delivered as soon as he was given to the
authorities on Mars. During the twenty Martian hours necessary for
formal charge and the taking of depositions, and while Bellaver's yacht
was being refueled, Vernon's story of the starship went out on all the
interworld circuits. And it had been as Christina had said. The whole
Solar System was frantic to have the Lazarites caught and stopped, and
every man in space became a self-appointed searcher for the hidden
starship. Bellaver, letting his lawyers worry about Vernon's
accusations, had already laid formal claim to that ship, based on the
value of the stolen Titanite.
"Where?" demanded Bellaver now, in a fury of impatience. "Where?"
"Wait," said Hyrst. "There are too many watching, ready to follow you.
They know what you're after. Wait till we're clear of Mars."
He sat in his chair, looking into space. His drive was all gone, and the
anger that had fed it. Somewhere his son and his two daughters were
drawing their first free breaths relieved of a burden they should never
have had to carry. They knew now that he was innocent, and they could
think of him now without bitterness, speak his name without hate. He had
done what he had set out to do, and he was finished. He knew what was
ahead of him, but he was too tired to care.
The yacht went fast, away from the old red weary planet. Hyrst thought
of Shearing and Christina and the others, laboring over their ship on
the dark plain. He felt safe in doing this, because Vernon was gone and
the gray evil man who had helped to torture Shearing aboard the _Happy
Dream_ was still in an Earth hospital recovering from the blow Hyrst had
given him. They were out of reach, and Hyrst was the only Lazarite
Bellaver had.
He did not try to get through to Shearing because he knew that was
impossible, and there was no reason for it anyway. He let his mind
stretch out and rove through the nighted spaces beyond Saturn, beyond
Uranus and Neptune, beyond the black and frigid bulk of Pluto. He did
not see the ship nor touch a Lazarite mind, and so he knew that they
were still holding the cloak, still hiding from possible betrayal. He
withdrew his mind, and wished them luck.
"We're clear of Mars," said Bellaver. "Which way?"
"That way," said Hyrst, and pointed. "Toward the Sun."
The yacht swerved and steadied on a new course, toward the distant glare
of Sol. And Bellaver said,
"What's the exact location?"
"Can you trust every man in this crew?" asked Hyrst. "Can you be sure
not one of them would give it away, when we stop to refuel? You're not
the only one that knows about the starship now, remember."
"You could tell _me_."
"You're too impatient, Bellaver. You'd want to head straight there, and
it won't be that easy. They have defenses. We have to be careful, or
they'll destroy the ship before we reach it."
"Or finish their relays and go." Bellaver gave Hyrst a long look. "I'll
trust you because I have to. But I wasn't making an empty threat. And
I'll do it so there won't be any thought of murder. You'd better find me
that ship, Hyrst."
From then on, Bellaver hardly slept. He paced the corridors and haunted
the control room and watched Hyrst with a gnawing, agonizing doubt.
Hyrst began to feel for him a distant sort of pity, as he might have
felt for a man afflicted by some disease brought on by his own excesses.
* * * * *
The yacht passed the orbit of Earth, refueled at an obscure space
station, and sped on. Hyrst continued to stall Bellaver, ordering a
change of course from time to time to keep him happy. At intervals he
let his mind rove through those dark spaces they were leaving farther
behind with every passing second. Each time it was a greater effort, but
still there was no sign of the starship or its base, and so he knew that
the labor still went on.
By the time the yacht reached the orbit of Venus a fan-shaped cordon of
other ships had collected around and behind her drawn by the word that
Bellaver was on his way to find the starship. Government patrols were in
constant touch.
"They can't interfere," said Bellaver. "I've got a lien on that ship, a
formal claim."
"Sure," said Hyrst. "But you'd better be the first to find it.
Possession, you know. Bear off a bit. Mislead them. They're sure now
they know where you're going."
"Don't they?" said Bellaver, looking ahead at the glittering spark that
was Mercury. "There isn't anyplace else to go."
"Isn't there?"
Bellaver stared at him, narrow-eyed. "The legend of the Vulcan was
exploded by the first explorers. There is no intra-Mercurial world."
Hyrst shot a swift stabbing mental glance toward Pluto. Still nothing.
He sighed and said easily,
"There wasn't then. There is now."
He brazened out the look of incredulity on Bellaver's face.
"These are Lazarites, remember, not men. They built a place for
themselves where nobody would ever think to look. Not a planet, of
course, just a floating workshop. A satellite. And now you know. So you
can let them beat you to Mercury."
"All right," said Bellaver softly. "All right."
They passed Mercury, lost in the blaze of the Sun, and only a few ships
followed them, far behind. The rest stopped to search the craggy valleys
of the Twilight Belt, and the bleak icefields of the Dark Side.
And now Hyrst had run his string out, and he knew it. When no
intra-Mercurial satellite showed up, physically or on detector-screens,
there was no further lie to tell. He drove his mind out and away, to the
cold planets wheeling on the fringes of Sol's light, and he sweated, and
prayed, and hoped that nothing had gone wrong. And suddenly the cloak
was dropped, and he saw a lonesome chip of rock beyond Pluto, all
hollowed out for shops and living quarters, and the great ship standing
in the mile-long plain, with the stars all drifted overhead. And the
ship lifted from the plain, circled upward, and suddenly was not.
Hyrst was bitterly sorry that he was not aboard. But he told Bellaver,
"You can stop looking now. They've got away."
He watched Bellaver die, standing erect on his feet, still breathing,
but dying inside with the last outgoing of hope.
"I thought you were lying," he said, "but it was the only chance I had."
He nodded, looking toward the shuttered port with the insufferable blaze
outside. He said, in a flat, dead voice, "If you were put out here,
bound, in a lifeboat, headed toward the Sun--Yes. I could make up a
story to fit that."
In the same toneless voice, he called his men. And suddenly the yacht
lurched over shuddering in the backwash of some tremendous energy. Hyrst
and the others were flung scattering against the bulk-heads, and the
lights went out, and the instruments went dead.
Beyond the port, on the unshuttered side away from the Sun, a vast dark
shape had materialized out of nothing, to hang close in space beside the
yacht.
Hyrst heard in his mind, strong and clear, the voice of Shearing saying,
"Didn't I tell you the brotherhood stands by its own? Besides, we
couldn't make a liar out of you, now could we?"
Hyrst began to laugh, just a little bit hysterically. He told Bellaver,
"There's your starship. And Shearing says if I'm not alive when he comes
aboard to get me, that they won't be as careful about warping space when
they go away as they were when they came."
Bellaver did not say anything. He sat on the deck where the shock had
thrown him, not speaking. He was still sitting there when Hyrst passed
through the airlock into the starship's boat, and he did not move even
when the great ship vanished silently into whatever mysterious
ultra-space the minds of the Lazarites had unlocked, outbound for the
limitless freedom of the universe, where the wheeling galaxies thunder
on forever across infinity and the stars burn bright, and there is
nothing to stop the march of the Legion of Lazarus. And who knew, who
could tell, where that march would end?
Aboard the starship, already a million miles away, Hyrst said to
Christina. "When they brought me back from beyond the door, that was
re-awakening. But this--this is being born again."
She did not answer that. But she took his hand and smiled.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Legion of Lazarus, by Edmond Hamilton