A red light blinked on the panel. Ellen's signal to cut the rockets.
They were at escape velocity.
Wearily, his hand shaking, Alonzo threw the master switch. The sudden
silence was like a thunderclap.
And Janazik screeched the old Krakenaui danger call from his fullest
lungs.
Carse turned around with a curse, awkward in the sickening zero-gravity
of free fall. "It won't do you any good," he yelled thickly. "I'll kill
him too--"
Alonzo threw the master switch up! With a coughing roar, the rockets
burst back into life. No longer holding the stanchion, Carse was hurled
to the floor.
Janazik clawed at his webbing to get free. Carse leveled his blaster on
Alonzo. The engineer threw another switch at random, and the direction
of acceleration shifted with sudden violence, slamming Carse against
the farther wall.
His blaster raved, and Alonzo had no time to scream before the flame
licked about him.
[Illustration: _His blaster raved, and Alonzo had no time to scream
before the flame licked about him...._]
And in the control room, Anse heard Janazik's high ululating yell. The
reflexes of the wandering years came back to galvanize him. His sword
seemed to leap into his hand, he flung himself out of his chair webbing
with a shout....
"Anse!" Ellen's voice came dimly to his ears, hardly noticed.
"Anse--what is it--"
He drifted weightless in midair, cursing, trying to swim. And then the
rockets woke up again and threw him against the floor. He twisted with
Khazaki agility, landed crouched, and bounded for the stern.
Ellen looked after him, gasping, for an instant yet unaware of the
catastrophe, thinking how little she knew that yellow-maned savage
after all, and how she would like to learn, and--
The rocket veered, crazily. Anse caught himself as he fell, adjusted to
the new direction of gravity, and continued his plunging run. The crash
of a blaster came from ahead of him.
He burst into the control room and saw it in one blinding instant.
Alonzo's charred body sagging in its harness, Janazik half out of his,
Carse staggering to his feet--the blaster turned on Janazik, Janazik,
the finger tightening--
* * * * *
Tiger-like, Anse sprang. Carse glimpsed him, turned, the blaster half
swung about ... and the murderous fighting machine which was Dougald
Anson had reached him. Carse saw the sword shrieking against his face;
it was the last thing he ever saw....
Anse lurched back against the control panel. "Turn it off!" yelled
Janazik. "Throw that big switch there!"
Mechanically, the human obeyed, and there was silence again, a deep
ringing silence in which they floated free. It felt like an endless
falling.
Falling, falling--Anse looked numbly down at his bloody sword. Falling,
falling, falling--but that couldn't be right, he thought dully. He had
already fallen. He had killed Ellen's brother.
"And I love her," he whispered.
Janazik drifted over, slowly in the silent room. His eyes were a deep
gold, searching now. _If Ellen won't have him, he and I will go out
together, out to the stars and the great new frontier. But if she will,
I'll have to go alone, I'll always be alone--_
_Unless she would come too. She's a good kid.... I'd like to have her
along. Maybe take a mate of my own too.... But that can never be, now.
She won't come near her brother's slayer._
"You might not have had to kill him," said Janazik. "Maybe you could
have disarmed him."
"Not before he got one of us--probably you," said Anse tonelessly.
"Anyway, he needed killing. He shot Alonzo."