Marah laughed, and the young Venusian laughed. Barbarians, going to
fight and laughing about it. Stella's grey eyes held a sultry flame,
and her lips were blood-orange and trembling.
Campbell kissed them. He laughed, too, softly, and said, "Okay, Gypsy.
Let's go."
They went, through the seven hulks of the Venusian Quarter. Because of
the Kraylens, most of the Venusians were with the rebels, but even so
there were angry voices raised, and fists, and a few weapons, and some
blood got spilled.
More tow-headed young men joined them, and squat little upland nomads
who could talk to animals, and three four-armed, serpentine crawlers
from the Lohari swamps.
They came presently to a huge dismantled Hoyt freighter on the edge of
the Venusian Quarter. There were piles of goods waiting lading through
the row of airlocks into smaller trading ships. Marah stopped, his
gorget shooting wicked jeweled sparks in the sunlight that seared in
through half-shuttered ports, and the others flowed in behind him.
They were on a narrow gallery about halfway up the inner wall. Campbell
looked down. There were people on the ladders and the two balcony
levels below. A sullen, ugly mob of people from Earth, from Venus, from
Mars and Mercury and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Men and near-men and sheer monstrosities, silent and watching in the
hot light. Here a crest of scarlet antennae burning, there the sinuous
flash of a scaled back, and beyond that the slow ominous weaving of
light-black tentacles.
A creature like a huge blue spider with a child's face let out a shrill
unearthly scream. "Traitor! Traitor!"
The whole packed mass on the ladders and the galleries stirred like a
weird tapestry caught in a gust of wind. The rushing whisper of their
movement, their breathing, and their anger sang across Campbell's
nerves in points of fire.
Anger. Anger in the Kraylen's drum and Stella's voice and Marah's
yellow eyes. Anger like the sunlight, hot and primal. The anger of
little men flogged into greatness.
A voice spoke from across the deck below, cold, clear, without the
faintest tremor.
"We want no trouble. Return to your quarters quietly."
"_The Kraylens!_"
The name came thundering out of all those angry throats, beating down
against the gaunt, erect figure standing in the forefront of a circle
of Earthmen guarding the locks with ready guns.
Tredrick's thin, red head never stirred from its poised erectness.
"The Kraylens are out of your hands, now. They harbored a dangerous
criminal, and they are now being imprisoned in Lhi to answer for it."
Roy Campbell gripped the iron railing in front of him. It seemed to him
that he could see, across all that space, the cold, bright flame of
satisfaction in Tredrick's eyes.
The thin, calm voice slid across his eardrums with the cruel
impersonality of a surgeon's knife.
"That criminal, Roy Campbell, is now on Romany. The Spaceguard is on
its way here now. For the sake of the safety of your families, for the
future of Romany, I advise no one to hide him or help him escape."