"Yes."
"I wish there were something different we could do tonight."
"They won't let us do anything." A weak, whining note of rebellion
entered her voice. "They have everything--powers like magic--they can
fly--they live in the clouds, away from this horrible light. Oh, I
wish--"
"_Sh!_ They'll think you're a Recalcitrant. Besides, all this is
temporary--they've told us so. There'll be happiness for everyone, as
soon as the danger is over."
"I know--but why won't they tell us what the danger is?"
"There are military reasons. _Sh!_"
Someone who smiled maliciously had stolen up behind them, but Thorn
did not learn the sequence to this interlude, if it had one, for yet
another shift carried him to the other side of the avenue and put him
near two individuals, a man and a woman, whose drab clothing was of the
more soldierly cut.
"They say we may be going on maneuvers again next week. They've put a
lot of new recruits in with us. There must be millions of us. I wish I
knew what they were planning to do with us, when there's no enemy."
"Maybe things from another planet--"
"Yes, but that's just a rumor."
"Still, there's talk of marching orders coming any day now--complete
mobilization."
"Yes, but against what?" The woman's voice had a faint overtone of
hysteria. "That's what I keep asking myself at practice whenever I look
through the slit and depress the trigger of the new gun--not knowing
what it is that the gun will shoot or how it really works. I keep
asking myself, over and over, what's going to be out there instead of
the neat little target--what it is I'm going to kill. Until sometimes I
think I'm going crazy. Oh Burk, there's something I've got to tell you,
though I promised not to. I heard it yesterday--I mustn't tell who told
me. It's that there's really a way of escape to that happier world we
all dream of, if only you know how to concentrate your mind--"
"_Sh!_"
This time it was Thorn's eavesdropping that precipitated the warning.
He managed to listen in on many similar, smaller fragments of talk.
* * * * *
Gradually a change came over his mood--a complete change. His curiosity
was not satisfied, but it was quenched. Oh, he had guessed several
things from what he had heard, all right--in particular, that the
"new kind of inspection" was designed to uncover displaced minds like
his own, and that the "way of escape" was the one the other Thorn
had taken--but this knowledge no longer lured him on. The fever of
demoniac excitement had waned as swiftly as drunkenness, and left
as sickening a depression in its wake. Normal human emotions were
re-asserting themselves--a shrinking from the ominous strangeness of
this distorted world, and an aching, unreasoning, mountingly frantic
desire to get back to familiar faces and scenes.
Bitter regret began to torture him for having deserted Clawly and his
home-world because of the pressure of a purely personal moral problem.
No knowing what confusions and dangers the other Thorn might weave for
an unsuspecting Clawly. And upon Clawly alone, now that he was gone,
the safety of the home-world depended. True, if most of the displacing
minds from this world were only those of oppressed individuals seeking
escape, they would constitute no immediate unified danger. But if the
shadowy, autocratic "they" were contemplating an invasion--that would
be a very different matter.
The avenue, now skirting some sort of barren hillside, had become
hateful to him. It was like a treadmill, and the glaring lights
prevented any extended glimpse of the surrounding landscape. He would
probably have left it soon in any case, even without sight of the
jam-up ahead, where some sort of inspection of all walkers seemed to be
going on. As it was, that sight decided him. He edged over to the side,
waited for what he thought was a good opportunity, and ducked through
the hedge.
Some minutes later, panting from concentrated exertion, his clothes
muddied and grass-stained, he came out on the hilltop. The darkness and
the familiar stars were a relief. He looked around.
His first impression was reassuring. For a moment it even roused in
him the hope that, in his scramble up the hillside, the world had come
right again. There, where it should be, was the Opal Cross. There were
the Gray Twins. Concentrating on them, he could ignore the unpleasant
suggestion of darker, squatter buildings bulging like slugs or beetles
from the intervening countryside, could ignore even the meshwork of
blue-litten, crawling avenues.
But the aerial bridge connecting the Twins must be darked out. Still,
in that case the reflected light from the two towers ought to enable
him to catch the outlines of either end of it.
And where was the Blue Lorraine? It didn't seem a hazy enough night to
blot out that vast skylon.
Where, between him and the Twins, was the Mauve Z?
Shakingly he turned around. For a moment again his hope surged up. The
countryside seemed clearer this way, and in the distance the Myrtle Y
and the Gray H were like signposts of home.
But between him and them, rearing up from that very hillside where this
evening he had watched the Yggdrasil, as if built in a night by jinn,
was a great dark skylon, higher than any he had ever seen, higher even
than the Blue Lorraine. It had an ebon shimmer. The main elements of
its structure were five tapering wings radiating at equal intervals
from a central tower. It looked like some symbol of pride and power
conceived in the dreams of primeval kings.
A name came to him. The Black Star.
* * * * *
"Who are you up there? Come down!"
Thorn whirled around. The blue glare from the avenue silhouetted two
men halfway up the hillside. Their heads were craned upward. The
position of their arms suggested that they held weapons of some sort
trained upon him.
He stood stock-still, conscious that the blue glow extended far
enough to make him conspicuous. His senses were suddenly very keen.
The present instant seemed to widen out infinitely, as if he and his
two challengers were frozen men. It burst on him, with a dreadful
certainty, that those men shouting on the roof had been trying to kill
him. Save for the luck of overbalancing, he would this moment be a
mangled cinder. The body he was in was one which other men were trying
to kill.
"Come down at once!"
He threw himself flat. There was no needle of green, but something
hissed faintly through the grass at his heels. He wriggled desperately
for a few feet, then came up in a crouch and ran recklessly down the
hillside away from the avenue.
Luck was with him. He kept footing in his crazy, breathless plunge
through the semidark.
He entered thin forest, had to go more slowly. Leaves and fallen
branches crackled under his feet. Straggly trees half blotted the stars.
All at once he became aware of shouting ahead. He turned, following a
dry gravelly watercourse. But after a while there was shouting in that
direction, too. Then something big swooped into the sky overhead and
hung, and from it exploded blinding light, illumining the forest with a
steady white glare crueler than day's.
He dove to cover in thick underbrush.
For a long time the hunt beat around him, now receding a little, now
coming close. Once footsteps crunched in the gravel a dozen feet away.
The underbrush, shot through with the relentless white glare, seemed
a most inadequate screen. But any attempt to change position would be
very risky.
He hitched himself up a little to peer through the gaps in the leaves,
and found that his right hand was clutching the metal cylinder he had
felt in his pocket earlier. He must have snatched it out at some stage
in his flight--perhaps an automatic response of his alien muscles.
He examined the thing, wondering if it were a weapon. He noted two
controlling levers, but their function was unclear. As a last resort,
he could try pointing the thing and pushing them.
A rustle of leaves snapped his attention to one of the leafy gaps. A
figure had emerged on the opposite bank of the dried watercourse. It
was turned away, but from the first there was something breathlessly
familiar about the self-assured posture, the cock of the close-cropped,
red-haired head.
The theatric glare struck an ebon shimmer from the uniform it was
wearing, and outlined on one shoulder, of a somberer blackness than the
uniform, a black star.
Thorn leaned forward, parting with his hand the brambly wall of his
retreat.
The figure turned and the face became visible.
In a strangled voice--his first words since he had found himself on the
roof-edge--Thorn cried out, "Clawly!" and rushed forward.
For a moment there was no change in Clawly's expression. Then, with
feline agility, he sprang to one side. Thorn stumbled in the pitted
streambed, dropped the metal cylinder. Clawly whipped out something
and pointed it. Thorn started up toward him. Then--there was no sound
save a faint hissing, no sight, but agonizing pain shot through Thorn's
right shoulder.
And stayed. Lesser waves of it rippled through the rest of his body. He
was grotesquely frozen in the act of scrambling upward. It was as if an
invisible red-hot needle in Clawly's hand transfixed his shoulder and
held him helpless.
Staring up in shocked, tortured dismay, the first glimmerings of the
truth came to Thorn.
Clawly--_this_ Clawly--smiled.