It had come, then, thought Aram heavily. The cosmic wheels were
beginning to turn. A provincial governor rebelled and across
light years of space forces of mind-defying magnitude began to gather.
Thousands of mighty battleships, millions of men! Planet-smashing
weapons! Far away, on Terminus, government bureaus shifted ponderously
from peaceful administration to War. Clerks and department heads,
councilmen and executives--all shifting their attentions from peacetime
routines to wartime expedients. And within hours, those wartime
expedients would become routine. Fixed, immutable. Routines impossible
to change without painful, _time-consuming_, effort.
Jerrold spun the radio dials, searching for the government station on
Kaidor V. He needed information. He needed to know what Santane was
telling his population.
"... _the Thirty Suns merchant vessel, Star Cluster, has fallen into
our hands. The passengers and crew, sabotage agents of the Tetrarchy,
have been imprisoned and will be executed_ ..."
The voice of the Kaidor announcer echoed menacingly through the still
control room of the Serpent.
"Aram! They've got Kant Mikal and the others!" cried Deve.
"Sabotage agents!" Aram spat.
"... _it is expected that the worker population will conduct itself
with courage and resourcefulness under the threatened attack_,"
continued the announcer smoothly. "_Our newly organized armed forces
are even now taking measures against the tyrants' home worlds_ ..."
Aram shuddered, thinking about the "measures" Santane had devised for
use against the Tetrarchy. The brutalizing virus....
"... _it is not to be expected that the war will be of long duration.
Our scientists have developed a weapon that will make active resistance
on the part of the tyrants impossible. They will not dare to attack
us_ ..."
Confirmation, thought Aram bleakly, of Santane's dream of winning power
by threats. A savage, terrible blunder!
"_Generalissimo Santane has struck the shackles of the Tetrarchy from
the people of Kaidor! Work and fight for victory!_" The announcement
was followed by the playing of martial music.
Jerrold snapped the radio off with a curse. Kant Mikal a prisoner--very
likely dead already. The Fleet converging on Kaidor. Santane, drunk
with power, brandishing his awful weapon over the heads of the mute
billions of the Thirty Suns!
"What now, Aram?" asked Deve quietly.
"We must go to Kaidor V ... now!" he replied.
In space again, Aram tried to shake off his forebodings and failed
miserably. They were speeding into a tempest of stellar magnitude, and
they were but two--a man and a woman--against a war-mad galaxy.
The tiny Serpent pointed for the fifth planet of the Kaidor Sun and
drew its mantle of invisibility around itself, as though to hide from
the fiery stars.
* * * * *
Far beneath the starship, Kaidor V lay like a bright scimitar. With the
energy shield momentarily off, they approached the planet's night side,
deep in the global penumbra. No lights marked the populous factory
cities--the world rested dark, poised to lash out against the stars,
falsely confident in its possession of frightful weapons.
Carefully, Jerrold lowered the Serpent toward the spot he had marked
on the planetary chart--a deep valley near Santane's capital city of
Astrel. Once course and rate of descent were computed, he reactivated
the energy shield and groped his way downward through the sullen night
of Kaidor V.
After what seemed an eternity of waiting, Deve and Jerrold felt their
ship's keel touch the ground. Aram stood by the jets, alert for the
sudden tipping that would warn them that the Serpent had landed on a
steep slope or crag. The deck assumed a slight angle--no more. Aram cut
the power and listened to the descending whine of the gyroscopes as
they coasted to a halt. Then there was silence. Only the faint hum of
the energy shield broke the stillness.
Jerrold and Deve studied the chart of Kaidor V carefully. Aram had no
desire to have the Serpent meet with the same fate as the ill-starred
Star Cluster. Concealment and secrecy were paramount.
On the gridded chart of the planet, the dark city of Astrel lay like a
blot of ink. "There is a conveyor running near here, Deve," Aram said.
"It must carry ores from the mines here--" he pointed out the shafts on
the map, "--to the foundries in the city. They won't be able to guard
the conveyor all along its length. We can get into Astrel that way, I
think."
"And what then?" asked the girl.
Jerrold shrugged. "I'm a space officer--not a spy. I know that we must
try to reach Santane and help Mikal and the others if we can--"
"We had some agents still in the city," said Deve thoughtfully.
"Perhaps they haven't been discovered. We can try and reach them ...
they might be able to help us."
"It will be risky, Deve, now that the fight is in the open."
"I don't see how we can possibly reach Santane alone," she said.
Deve was right, of course, Aram realized. Without help they would never
be able to penetrate the barriers of security the Provincial Governor
must have erected between himself and the population of his planet.
Cutting the shield, Aram searched the dark landscape beyond the ports.
The night was black and still. The stars made an unfamiliar pattern
across the sky. A thin band of nebulosity showed the edge of the
Galactic Lens in a peculiarly distorted perspective. Here, in the heart
of the Thirtieth Decant, they were far from the populous worlds of the
galaxy's center--farther even than they had been in Atmion Province.
But this barren, cold world would be for the next few hours the center
of the Thirty Suns. Here, on the metallic soil of Kaidor V, the fate of
an interstellar civilization would be decided....
There were many deadly weapons in the lockers, but Jerrold decided to
take only two plastic energy pistols. Such weapons would be less likely
to be found by the weapons alarms that were standard street fixtures on
all the planets of the Thirty Suns.
With a sigh, the valve slid open and Aram and the girl dropped to the
frozen volcanic soil. The air smelled bitter, and the cold was intense.
Kaidor V was more than twenty-four light-minutes from its primary, and
warmth was slight. It had been chosen for the center of Kaidor Province
rather than a more hospitable world because of the richness of its
radioactive ores and immense nitrogen yielding deposits.
* * * * *
The starship had landed in a small ravine, and there, Aram decided,
it could stay relatively safe from discovery. Aram marked the spot on
his chart and etched it into his brain. It was hard to leave the tiny
Serpent. It represented all the security they could expect on this
unfriendly world.
They climbed to the crest of the ridge and dropped down onto a flat
plateau, striking out across it toward the spot where Jerrold estimated
they would intercept the line of the conveyor.
They walked along in silence under a canopy of oddly unfriendly stars.
Presently the faint sound of machinery warned that the conveyor was
near. In the darkness, they almost ran headlong into it. The light of
Deve's small pocket torch revealed two belts. One bounced along empty,
speeding back toward the mines in the hills; the other groaned under
a heavy loading of metallic ores bound for the smelters and steel
converters of Astrel.
"It's moving fast, but we'll have to jump it anyway," Aram said softly.
"Don't worry about me," replied Deve stoutly. "Just give me a hand."
Aram grinned in spite of himself. Deve's courage and resolution were a
boon on this quixotic mission.
He picked her up and began to run along the uneven soil parallel to the
racing conveyor. With an effort he heaved her up on to the pile of ore.
He heard her give a little cry of pain as she landed among the sharp
shards, and then she was gone into the blackness. Without pause, he
leaped onto the belt himself, skinning his hands and legs on the rocky
cargo.
* * * * *
For a moment he stopped to catch his breath, and then began to crawl
forward toward Deve Jennet. It took him a long while to reach her, and
when he did, they found that she had dropped her gun in the scramble to
board the conveyor.
The thought of facing a hostile city with one small pistol did not
please; but Aram realized that under no circumstances could he have
hoped to out-gun the combined forces of the Thirtieth Decant, so the
loss of a gun really made little difference. The whole of the Serpent's
armory would do them no good if concealment failed.
"We'll have to get clear of this thing before it reaches its
destination, Deve," Jerrold shouted above the roar of the belt.
"I only hope the marshalling yards and ore stockpiles aren't too well
guarded!" Deve replied--and Aram silently echoed her hope.
In the near distance, coming ever nearer, were the periodic flares
of the great steel converters of Astrel. The city itself seemed
blacked-out, but apparently Santane--the "Generalissimo," thought
Jerrold wryly--was keeping his workers busy on weapons production
right up until the last moment of danger ... another proof to Aram's
mind that Santane did not believe the Tetrarchy would dare to actually
attack. He must already have warned the Thirty Suns Government, perhaps
sending specimens of his handiwork to impress the Supreme Council of
the power of his virus weapons. Yet the Fleet would attack--Jerrold
felt sure of it. The very nature of the Thirty Suns Government made
any other course unthinkable. Bureaucracies, Aram knew, reacted like
headless beasts to the things that threatened them, unable to make fine
distinctions or true evaluations. Defiance brought reprisal. It was as
simple as that.
It was difficult to see anything in the darkness, and Jerrold began to
fear that they might be catapulted into the furnaces themselves. The
flares in the sky seemed very close now.
A tiny blue light flashed by that Aram thought must mark the entrance
to the stockpiling yards. He scrambled to his feet and pulled Deve up
beside him.
"Get ready to jump clear!" he shouted in her ear.
Wind snatched at his words, and the swaying conveyor made standing
difficult--almost impossible. Deve clutched at him, trying to keep her
balance. And then, without warning, the belt slammed abruptly into a
flat right-angle turn, pitching them off into darkness filled with
hurtling chunks of ore.
Aram clung to the girl as they spilled off the belt and banged hard
into a great pile of ore. More of the stuff continued to flood down on
them from the conveyor above, burying them under an oppressive weight.
Desperately, Jerrold clawed his way out into the open, and still
clinging to Deve, rolled precipitously down the steep slope of the
stockpile. They struck the bottom with bone-jarring force and lay there
gasping.
A brilliant beam of light sliced through the dusty darkness, pinning
them to the ore pile. Motes danced wildly in the gleaming cone. And in
one awful flash of insight Aram knew what had happened ... understood
the meaning of that tiny blue light he had seen. A dark-light scanner!
Floodlights came on, and the intruders found themselves blinking into
a semi-circle of energy rifle muzzles in the hands of grim-faced,
black-clad guards.
Aram Jerrold felt his heart sink. They were captured....
* * * * *
Between two files of guards, Deve and Jerrold walked into the city they
had hoped to strip of its weapons. The bitterness of their failure rode
hard on Jerrold's shoulders. He kept hearing again and again the phrase
that Kant Mikal had used: "To save something from the wreckage...." It
seemed impossible now. The giants and the furies were gathering. The
might of the Thirty Suns would descend like a rain of fire on Kaidor V,
and the mindless death nurtured here would sweep the inhabited worlds
like a plague. The forces Jerrold had hoped to chain were free now, and
threatening, like some ghastly cosmic storm. The teeming cities would
crumble, the spaceways would be deserted. Night would fall on man's
imperfect, but highest achievement, and he would return to the primeval
muck.
Aram searched the faces of the streams of workers they passed. They
were sullen, whipped men. From the tyranny of the Tetrarchy they had
slipped into the clutches of Santane. For them, there was no hope, no
dignity, and only the release of death could change their lot.
The black guards herded Deve and Jerrold onto a small air-sled, and the
tiny craft nosed upward and into the streams of aerial traffic above
the darkened city. Ahead lay the black bulk of a towering skylon.
This, Aram realized, must be Santane's citadel.
The air-sled was sinking slowly to a landing on one of the many landing
platforms that marred the flanks of the mighty skylon when the first
alarm sirens began to wail. Aram turned his eyes to the night sky
automatically. He could not hope to see the Fleet, for they must still
be beyond the orbit of Kaidor X, but he did see the red streaks of the
first interceptor rockets taking off. The sky in the east was greying;
the attack would come by day.
The air-sled touched the landing stage, and the guards hurried Jerrold
and Deve Jennet into the citadel. Through a maze of halls thronging
with white-faced officers in new and unfamiliar uniforms they went,
past guards and armored doorways. At last they stood in a vaulted,
oblong room that hummed with activity.
It was a Combat Center. In the center of the room lay a huge,
three-dimensional chart of the Thirtieth Decant and the Kaidor system.
Jerrold recognized the red blips that indicated the approaching
Fleet, fully ten thousand strong ... and he recognized something else
too. He had felt this kind of tension in ships of the Navy. It was
fear--universal, jittery fear. These people, Aram knew suddenly, were
terribly, desperately afraid of that advancing armada. Their leader had
told them that it would not dare attack, yet it came on inexorably and
they were afraid.
Yellow streaks in the chart showed the track of interceptors, already
fanning out from Kaidor V, seeking targets in the huge, onrushing
formation of mighty battleships that spread across light-minutes of
space. The tiny weapons had already taken a small toll of the slower
Fleet vessels, but the rest continued sunward, their losses unfelt.
This was what Aram feared Santane would not or could not realize ...
that no matter how dreadful his virus weapon, forces of such magnitude
could not be halted by threats once they were put in motion.
Now Santane's secretly built fleet was blasting into space.
Jerrold estimated that it consisted of perhaps five hundred large
starships--torpedo launchers mainly, built for defense.
Near Kaidor VII, the ringed giant, the two Fleets made first contact.
The battle of the Thirtieth Decant had begun.
The guards shoved at Jerrold, and he was led away from the chart
and its fascinating picture of battle. He and Deve were taken up a
spiralling staircase to the balcony that overlooked the Combat Center
and through a heavily guarded door.
The chamber in which they now found themselves was strangely quiet
after the fear-tinged confusion of the Combat Center. All but one of
their guards withdrew, and Aram faced a tall, powerfully built man who
stood engrossed in a bank of scanner-views of the battle.
Presently the man looked up to scowl at his prisoners. Aram Jerrold
knew at once that it was--at last--Santane.
* * * * *
Aram studied the man with interest. Here was the man whose rebellion
had catapulted the galaxy into war. Because of Santane, billions faced
degradation or extinction. It seemed impossible that one man could
cause such a cataclysmic upheaval in a star-spanning culture. But there
was more to it than that, of course. Santane--as a man--was simply
one more bit of protoplasm in the vast mystery of the cosmos. But
Santane--as a symbol--was real and important. He was a living monument
to the immutable face that tyranny begets more tyranny, and that
the very existence of absolute power results in the two awful
corollaries ... ambition and strife.
The Tetrarchy had spawned Santane just as surely as night follows day.
Santane was the cancer in the body of the despotism of the Thirty Suns
that was destined to destroy it ... and, thought Aram grimly, himself
with it.
Aram Jerrold studied the craggy face and the deep-set, glowing eyes
as Santane stood there before the simulacrum of Armageddon in the
scanners, and knew there was madness in the man.
Santane spoke, and the sound rasped across the senses.
"You are Aram Jerrold and Deve Jennet--agents of the Tetrarchy.
Spies ... high ranking spies!" His icy gaze searched the faces of the
man and woman before him. "Do you deny it?"
"We are who you say," replied Jerrold evenly, "but we are not spies.
The Tetrarchy has undoubtedly set a price on our heads by now."
"You lie! The Tetrarchy sent you here because they are afraid of me."
Santane laughed scornfully, "They have seen what I can do."
"Don't be a fool, Santane," Jerrold said softly. "The Tetrarchy is
not afraid of you. It can't be. It hasn't the ability to fear you or
anything else. Can't you see that?" He indicated the scanners. The
Fleet was bearing ever closer to Kaidor V, slashing through the cordons
of defensive craft doggedly, impervious to losses and dying ships and
men.
Fear touched Santane's face ... but for just an instant. Aram knew with
sinking heart that the man's madness would not let him believe the
truth.
"No," said Santane tensely. "They are afraid of me--or you wouldn't
have been sent here."
Aram was struck with a sudden, grotesque pity for the man. All the
weeks he had spent in danger and in preparation for this mission that
had failed, he had thought of Santane as the living incarnation of
crafty evil. What he saw before him now was a insane man--frightened
by the mighty forces he had unleashed and could not now turn or
control. In that moment, Aram felt that Kant Mikal's injunction to save
something from the ruins was truly impossible, for nothing could come
right when a single madman could smash in days the work of millennia.
Santane's face was again rigid and cold. "Perhaps you have not seen
what my biological weapons can do.... Guard! Bring in the others!"
Aram felt an icy hand closing about his heart. The others....
_Kant Mikal ... the men and women of the Star Cluster...._
"Santane ... you haven't...!" Jerrold broke off in horror as the guard
returned, leading a line of five shambling beasts. The creatures fought
the chains that bound them, howling with outrage.
"How," demanded Santane, "can Terminus attack me if they face _that_?"
His eyes lit, kindled with some obscene pleasure at the spectacle.
"First there are pains in the neck and head. Blinding--agonizing pains!
Then comes unconsciousness, and memory goes ... then the glands alter,
and men become ... beasts...."
Deve Jennet moaned. Her friends and comrades were in that line of
disfigured subhuman things. She clutched at Aram for support.
Jerrold felt red fury explode within him. He wanted to feel his bare
hands on Santane's throat ... his teeth in his flesh. With an oath
he launched himself bodily at the smiling madman, hands groping for
the throat under the twisted grin. He saw Santane back away in sudden
fright, and the black flash of the guard interposing himself between
them. The guard raised his rifle and brought the muzzle down in a
chopping arc. Aram felt a searing pain above his eyes and pitched into
a reddish blur of oblivion....
* * * * *
Jerrold awoke in a small, glassed-in chamber. His head ached dully,
and he could feel the stiffness of dried blood on his brow. He rolled
over and staggered to his feet, realizing that he must be at the very
pinnacle of the mighty skylon that housed Santane's headquarters.
The same black guard who had struck him down stood impassive in the
corner, and Aram could see Santane standing with Deve on a small
landing stage beyond the glass. He saw something else, too, and his
breath came faster. There was a small air-sled on the landing stage,
bright with new paint and Santane's own insigne of the Trident and
Flame.
There was a subspace radio installation in the corner of the aerie, and
Aram Jerrold knew instantly that he had been brought up to the skylon's
top to establish contact with the invading Fleet, to warn the forces of
the Thirty Suns to surrender.
Santane returned with Deve held at his side. The sight of the man's
hand possessively on Deve's wrist brought a return of Aram's fury.
"You see," Santane said with a thin smile, "the Fleet _does_ fear
me. They have broken off their attack and are circling beyond the
stratosphere."
That meant, Aram knew, that the ships of the Thirty Suns were
preparing for bombardment of Kaidor V. Knowing the richness of the
nitrogen-bearing surface soil of the planet, the Task Force commander
would undoubtedly be readying his vessels to rain down nitrogen
fission bombs, trying to exceed critical mass in the air and ground
of the planet and setting off chain reactions to rip it apart by the
expenditure of the energy contained in the globe itself. Santane, not
being a space officer, could not know that.
Kant Mikal's wish to have something saved from the wreckage now could
be accomplished in only two ways--both impossible to Aram's mind.
He and Deve could escape, and save themselves ... or he could prevent
Santane from launching his interstellar missiles when the bombs began
to fall.
"Call the Fleet commander," Santane ordered brusquely. "Tell him he
must land and place himself at my orders."
Such a call would be ignored. Aram knew that....
"Hurry!" Santane demanded pettishly.
Still Aram could bring himself to no decision.
Santane turned, took a stoppered vial from a cabinet and faced Aram
again with a scowl. "One drop of this on the skin, and a human being
becomes ... what you saw below. Shall I use it on the woman to convince
you where your duty lies?"
Aram felt his heart skip a beat. Santane was not bluffing. Pressed, he
would carry out his threat from sheer perverted malice. Aram looked
hungrily toward the small air-sled on the landing....
He took a step toward the radio. Very probably his voice, recognized,
would brings the bombs even quicker--but there was no way to convince
Santane of that. He was beyond reason.
A high pitched sound broke the stillness. Aram pitched instinctively to
the floor as a bomb struck the ground far below and near the base of
the skylon! The whole structure shook with the force of the concussion,
the glass of the aerie fogging into a maze of tiny cracks. Fragments of
the ceiling came powdering down. Santane staggered against the wall,
the vial still in his hand, a look of terrified disbelief on his face.
"_No!_" he gasped. "_They wouldn't dare...._"
Aram tried to reach Deve's side, but Santane was quicker.
"Tell them to call off the attack!" he screamed, "or I infect the
woman! Quickly! Quickly!"
* * * * *
Aram spun on his knee and dived for Santane. The vial flew across the
room and shattered against the wall. Jerrold smashed his fist into
Santane's distorted face--he felt the splintering of teeth in the
shattered mouth. A sizzling beam of fire flashed past Aram's eyes.
He straightened and struck Santane again, sending the man staggering
across the room.
[Illustration: _Jerrold smashed his fist into Santane's distorted
face...._]
Instead of attacking or trying to escape, Santane leaped for a wall
communicator. His battered face was a mask of maniacal rage. Jerrold
caught him but ... too late to prevent four words from screeching into
the microphone....
"_Fire the virus missiles!_"
Aram sobbed with frustrated rage and swung his clenched fists again
and again into Santane's bloody face. He rolled on the littered floor,
trying to strangle the life from the wildly struggling madman who had
spawned disaster.
Another bomb fell, rocking the skylon. Beams clattered down from the
towering superstructure, caving in sections of the aerie's roof. The
guard, who had been circling for a safe shot at Aram, shrieked in agony
as a metal section took him across the shoulders and snapped his back
like a twig.
Suddenly Aram felt a wetness on his clothes and a bitterness on his
tongue. The two wrestling men had rolled into the pool of liquid from
the broken-vial.
Santane screamed with terror, and in a frantic burst of energy, broke
away and stumbled out onto the landing stage and the air-sled.
Deve rushed to Aram, helping him to his feet. As she touched him, he
recoiled.
"_Don't, Deve! Don't touch me!_"
But the girl's hands, too, were wet with the sticky stuff of the vial,
and Aram knew with a sick certainty that they were both infected with
the virus of bestiality.
"After _him_!" Hopeless now, sick with despair, Aram wanted only to
kill Santane.
But Santane had not launched the air-sled. Instead he knelt on its
deck, a medical kit in his hands. He was trying with trembling fingers
to fill a syringe from a narrow capsule. Jerrold knocked the instrument
from his hands and dragged him from the machine. The madman fought back
with desperate strength, but Aram smashed him again and again against
the stones of the landing. In a last spasmodic effort, Santane caught
Aram by the throat and forced him toward the edge. Far below, the
glowing, radioactive smoke of death roiled against the sides of the
weakened skylon. Aram could see flames eating ravenously at the lower
levels. Santane shrieked with triumph as Aram hung momentarily over the
abyss. Aram twisted....
And then Santane was gone, vanishing in a long wailing fall, twisting
and turning like a rag-doll until his scream of terror blended with the
cry of another falling bomb.
* * * * *
Without pausing to catch his breath, Jerrold returned to the air-sled
and picked up the syringe. It was only partly full, and the capsule
that Santane had used to load it had been smashed. It was the
antidote ... it had to be the antidote!
"Deve, here!" With shaking hands he caught her arm and sank the needle
into her flesh, squeezing the plunger down. As the fluid in the
cylinder reached the half-way point, Deve pulled away.
"That's enough! The rest is for you," she breathed.
"No, Deve! I don't know if it's enough for both of us. Santane was
going to take the full measure for himself, and he should know...."
Deve Jennet shook her head. "I don't care," she said. "I wouldn't want
to go on ... without you."
Aram pleaded but Deve would not be convinced. She had no wish to
survive alone. Finally, Aram took the syringe and emptied it into his
forearm.
"Now, we'll see," he muttered.
The howl of bombs was a steady, increasing cacophony now, and,
though ships of Santane's fleet still fought, the Thirty Suns naval
force bombed almost at will. The skylon shook and buckled under the
bombardment and the radiation count on the counters in the wrecked
aerie showed an increasingly dangerous concentration. Still the virus
missiles took the air, streaking the radioactive clouds with their
tail-flares, and Aram watched with sick horror as the awful spawn of
the Kaidor Sun rose to spread bestiality while he stood helplessly by.
"Aram," Deve spoke to him gently amid the rising symphony of
destruction. "We have to get clear, Aram. Remember what Kant Mikal
said ... and we are all that's left now."
"The Fleet...."
"The Fleet will return to Terminus. We can't stop them," Deve said with
finality.
Aram knew it was true. Mindless to the last, the bureaucracy would
stick to its directives and general orders. The Fleet would return ...
to oblivion.
* * * * *
They mounted the air-sled and slanted up into the tortured air of the
dying planet. A huge starship with the golden Spaceship and Sun blazon
came hurtling down out of the sky like a fiery brand, a smaller ship
bearing Santane's Trident and Flame imbedded in its flank. The two
ships dissolved into a ball of greasy fire as they smashed into the
crowded buildings of shattered Astrel.
More and more nitrogen fission bombs were falling now as the air-sled
streaked across the flaming sky toward the ravine that hid the
Serpent. The very soil of the planet seemed to dance in a hellish
carnival of destruction. Glancing back, Aram saw the towering skylon
come plunging down in torrents of rubble and human flesh. He knew with
finality that he was witnessing the end of everything he had known--the
chaotic collapse of a culture that had spawned its own nemesis.
Man--diving from the pinnacle of stellar dominion to the depths of
nothingness ... because he had tolerated tyranny.
Jerrold shook his head to clear away the sudden pain that stabbed
across his temples. One thought grew in his mind with increasing
clarity. He and Deve must somehow survive. Perhaps other men and
women would come through the end in remote worlds, but there was no
way of being certain. He had to be sure ... he had to know that the
end would not come for all the race. He, a man, and Deve, a woman,
could still carry out the mercifully dead Kant Mikal's injunction. In
those fleeting moments above the writhing, doomed surface of Kaidor V,
survival became an obsession with Aram Jerrold.
The Serpent awaited them where they had left it, and they hurried
through the valve, feeling the tremblors of the fifth planet's death
agonies.
Aram drove the ship upward, seeking the safety of space and their
haven. Both knew where they were going, though neither had put it into
words.
At a distance of five diameters from the globe of Kaidor V, Aram paused
to see the death of a world.
Like a savage animal, the Fleet continued to worry the trembling planet
with a vicious hail of bombs. The pair in the Serpent could see bright
internal fires as the crust of the world split under the hideous
attack. Like a stricken thing, Kaidor V seemed to totter on its axis.
Great chunks of rock were blown clear by the pressure of expanding
inner fires.
For hours, the death agonies of the planet continued, until finally,
like a bursting bubble, the globe expanded. Huge slashes appeared from
pole to pole. The ice caps vanished into twin clouds of superheated
steam. Fragments peeled off as gravitational balances were disturbed.
Globules of molten lava fanned out, like strings of beads. Kaidor V
trembled with a cosmic delirium--great prominences of atomic fire
leaping far into space. And then, quite suddenly, it was over. With
its heart ripped out by the violent fission of its inner substance,
the hollow shell collapsed into a swirling, nebulous cloud of cosmic
rubble, rapidly spreading out into a belt of tiny planetoids spanning
the place where once a mighty world circled the parent star....
* * * * *
The Serpent settled softly into a wooded glade and grew still. Within,
Aram Jerrold fought the wracking pains in his head, screaming aloud
with the agony of it. Deve lay unconscious on the steel deck, moaning
softly.
Aram knew that the antidote he had injected into their veins was not
enough. Vaguely, he recalled that once--long ago, it seemed--he had
been told that a small amount of specific would prevent physical
damage. But the virus was claiming him, nonetheless. The pounding agony
in his head was streaked with delirious phantasms. Kant Mikal's words
echoed through his brain, though he no longer recognized them as other
than his own. His screaming madness took the shape of those words as he
lifted Deve in his arms and staggered out of the ship.
Driven by some deep seated racial memory, he stumbled toward the
sea--the mother--the giver of life. The sheer brutal agony of the virus
increased with every step, blinding him with its intensity, until at
last he could bear it no longer and sank to his knees on the white sand
of a beach and pitched forward across the still form of the woman he
carried, hands outstretched toward the shallows of a restless sea that
laved him ... laved him....
* * * * *
Deve stood nude in the glory of the morning sunlight and lifted her
arms to the sky in an ecstacy of freedom. "How lovely it is," she
murmured.
The figure at her feet stirred and she touched him playfully with a
bare foot.
Aram woke, puzzled. Something, deep in the back of his mind troubled
him. There had been something....
"Come swim with me!"
Aram looked up at the naked girl before him. She was Deve. He knew
that. He tried to remember more, but he could not. A strange shroud
seemed to have covered up everything ... language he seemed to command,
but....
He put the troublesome thoughts out of his mind and stripped off the
strange coverings on his body. Hand in hand with Deve, he waded into
the sea. They swam and played in the warm sunlight, and presently,
tiring of their sport, sought the shade of a wooded glade.
As they walked hand in hand among the flowering shrubs under the trees,
Deve stopped abruptly.
"Aram," she said, puzzled, "what is that?"
An alien shape stood among the verdure, gleaming where the sunlight
pierced the foliage. It was a long cylinder, tapered at both ends
and lined with round, blank ports. They stood there staring at the
spaceship with perplexed incomprehension. Both had a vague feeling that
it was familiar.
"What is it, Aram?" the girl asked again.
"I ... don't know," he confessed.
"I think we did know ... once," Deve said softly. "Aram, why are we
here?"
Why? The question touched off sparks of memory that brightened and as
quickly faded. Aram spoke, painfully dredging the words from beyond the
veil of forgetfulness.
"We ... must ... save ... something ... from the ruins."
"What ruins?" the girl asked impatiently. "What is it we must save?"
But memory had faded. Aram could not answer her.
Still she persisted with feminine curiosity unsatisfied.
"Aram, what is this place?"
For a long moment he stood in silence beside her in the sun-splashed
glade. He listened to the gentle sound of the wind in the trees and the
restless murmur of the sea. Presently he replied, but with a question.
"Are you happy here, Deve?"
"Oh, yes!" she breathed.
He took her in his arms, the spaceship and the past completely
forgotten.
"Then this is ... Paradise," he said.