The cave, the violet fire were suddenly gone. There was a queer
darkness, a small electric shiver across Campbell's skin. He started,
and the girl whispered:
"Telekinesis. They've built a wall of force around us. On the outside
it seems to be rock like the cave wall."
Marah moved, the bosses on his kilt clinking slightly. "When the swine
are gone, there's a trap in this hulk leading down to the pipe where
your ship is. Now tell us your plan."
Campbell made a short, bitter laugh. "Plan, hell. It's a gamble on a
fixed wheel, and you're fools if you play it."
"And if we don't?"
"I'm going anyway. The Kraylens--well, I owe them something."
"Tell us the plan."
He did, in rapid nervous sentences, crouched behind the shielding wall
of thought from those alien brains. Marah laughed softly.
"By the gods, little man, you should have been a Keshi!"
"I can think of a lot of things I should have been," said Campbell
dourly. "Hey, there goes our wall."
It hadn't been more than four minutes. Long enough for them to look and
go away again. There might still be time, before the Spaceguard came.
There was, just. The getaway couldn't have been more perfectly timed.
Campbell grinned, feeding power into his jets with exquisite skill.
He didn't have a Chinaman's chance. He thought probably the gypsies had
less than that of coming through. But the Kraylens weren't going to rot
in the slave-pens of Lhi because of Roy Campbell.
Not while Roy Campbell was alive to think about it. And that, of
course, might not be long.
He sent the Fitts-Sothern shooting toward the night side of Venus, in
full view and still throttled down. The Spaceguard ships, nine fast
patrol boats, took out after him, giving Romany the go-by. No use
stopping there. No mistaking that lean, black ship, or whose hands were
on the controls.
Campbell stroked the firing keys, and the Fitts-Sothern purred under
him like a cat. Just for a second he couldn't see clearly.
"I'm sorry, old girl," he said. "But that's how it has to be."
* * * * *
It was a beautiful chase. The Guard ships pulled every trick they knew,
and they knew plenty. Campbell hunched over the keys, sweating, his
dark face set in a grin that held no mirth. Only his hands moved, with
nervous, delicate speed.
It was the ship that did it. They slapped tractors on her, and she
broke them. They tried to encircle her, and she walked away from them.
That slight edge of power, that narrow margin of speed, pulled Roy
Campbell away from what looked like instant, easy capture.
He got into the shadow, and then the Spaceguard began to get scared
as well as angry. They stopped trying to capture him. They unlimbered
their blasters and went to work.
Campbell was breathing hard now, through his teeth. His dark skin was
oiled with sweat, pulled tight over the bones and the ridges of muscle
and the knotted veins. Deliberately, he slowed a little.
A bolt flamed past the starboard ports. He slowed still more, and
veered the slightest bit. The Fitts-Sothern was alive under his hands.
He didn't speak when the next bolt struck her. Not even to curse. He
didn't know he was crying until he tasted the salt on his lips. He got
up out of the pilot's seat, and then he said one word:
"_Judas!_"
The follow-up of the first shot blasted the control panel. It knocked
him back across the cockpit, seared and scorched from the fusing metal.
He got up, somehow, and down the passage to the lock compartment. There
was a lot of blood running from his cheek, but he didn't care.
He could feel the ship dying under him. The timers were shot. She was
running away in a crazy, blind spiral, racking her plates apart.
He climbed into his vac-suit. It was a special one, black even to the
helmet, with a super-powerful harness-rocket with a jet illegally
baffled. He hoped his hands weren't too badly burned.
The ship checked brutally, flinging him hard into the bulkhead.
Tractors! He clawed toward the lock, an animal whimper in his throat.
He hoped he wasn't going to be sick inside the helmet.
The panel opened. Air blasted him out, into jet-black space. The tiny
spearing flame of the harness-rocket flickered briefly and died,
unnoticed among the trailing fires of the derelict.
Campbell lay quite still in the blackened suit. The Spaceguard ships
flared by, playing the Fitts-Sothern like a tarpon on the lines of
their tractor beams. Campbell closed his eyes and cursed them, slowly
and without expression, until the tightness in his throat choked him
off.
He let them get a long way off. Then he pressed the plunger of the
rocket, heading down for the night-shrouded swamps of Tehara Province.
He retained no very clear memory of the trip. Once, when he was quite
low, a spaceship blazed by over him, heading toward Lhi. There were
still about eight hours' darkness over the swamps.
He landed, eventually, in a clearing he was pretty sure only he knew
about. He'd used it before when he'd had stuff to fence in Lhi and
wasn't sure who owned the town at the time. He'd learned to be careful
about those things.
There was a ship there now, a smallish trader of the inter-lunar type.
He stared at it, not really believing it was there. Then, just in time,
he got the helmet off.
When the world stopped turning over, he was lying with his head in
Stella Moore's lap. She had changed her tunic for plain spaceman's
black, and it made her face look whiter and lovelier in its frame of
black hair. Her lips were still sullen, and still red.
Campbell sat up and kissed them. He felt much better. Not good, but he
thought he'd live. Stella laughed and said, "Well! You're recovering."
He said, "Sister, you're good medicine for anything." A hand which he
recognized as Marah's materialized out of the indigo gloom. It had a
flask in it. Campbell accepted it gladly. Presently the icy deadness
around his stomach thawed out and he could see things better.
He got up, rather unsteadily, and fumbled for a cigarette. His shirt
had been mostly blown and charred off of him and his hands hurt like
hell. Stella gave him a smoke and a light. He sucked it in gratefully
and said:
"Okay, kids. Are we all ready?"
They were.
* * * * *
Campbell led off. He drained the flask and was pleased to find himself
firing on all jets again. He felt empty and relaxed and ready for
anything. He hoped the liquor wouldn't wear off too soon.
There was a path threaded through the hammocks, the bogs and potholes
and reeds and _liha_-trees. Only Campbell, who had made it, could have
followed it. Remembering his blind stumbling in the mazes of Romany, he
felt pleased about that. He said, rather smugly:
"Be careful not to slip. How'd you fix the getaway?"
Marah made a grim little laugh. "Romany was a madhouse, hunting for
you. Some of the hot-headed boys started minor wars over policy on top
of that. Tredrick had to use most of his men to keep order. Besides, of
course, he thought we were beaten on the Kraylen question."
"There were only four men guarding the locks," said Stella. "Marah and
a couple of the Paniki boys took care of them."
Campbell remembered the spaceship flashing toward Lhi. He told them
about it. "Could be Tredrick, coming to supervise our defeat in
person." Defeat! It was because he was a little tight, of course, but
he didn't think anyone could defeat him this night. He laughed.
Something rippled out of the indigo night to answer his laughter.
Something so infinitely sweet and soft that it made him want to cry,
and then shocked him with the deep and iron power in it. Campbell
looked back over his shoulder. He thought:
"Me, hell. These are the guys who'll do it, if it's done."
Stella was behind him. Beyond her was a thin, small man with four arms.
He wore no clothing but his own white fur and his head was crowned with
feathery antennae. Even in the blue night the antennae and the man's
eyes burned living scarlet.
He came from Callisto and he carried in his four hands a thing vaguely
like a harp, only the strings were double banked. It was the harp that
had spoken. Campbell hoped it would never speak against him.
Marah brought up the rear, swinging along with no regard for the burden
he bore. Over his naked shoulder, Campbell could see the still white
face of the Baraki from Titan, the Little Father who had saved them
from the hunters. There were tentacles around Marah's big body like
white ropes.
Four gypsies and a Public Enemy. Five little people against the
Terro-Venusian Coalition. It didn't make sense.
A hot, slow wind stirred the _liha_-trees. Campbell breathed it in,
and grinned. "What does?" he wondered, and stooped to part a tangle of
branches. There was a stone-lined tunnel beyond.
"Here we go, children. Join hands and make like little mousies." He
took Stella's hand in his left. Because it was Stella's he didn't mind
the way it hurt. In his right, he held his gun.
V
He led them, quickly and quietly, along the disused branch of an old
drainage system that he had used so often as a private entrance.
Presently they dropped to a lower level and the conduit system proper.
When the rains were on, the drains would be running full. Now they were
only pumping seepage. They waded in pitch darkness, by-passed a pumping
station through a side tunnel once used for cold storage by one of
Lhi's cautious business men, and then found steep, slippery steps going
up.
"Careful," whispered Campbell. He stopped them on a narrow ledge and
stood listening. The Callistan murmured, with faint amusement:
"There is no one beyond."
Antennae over ears. Campbell grinned and found a hidden spring. "Lhi
is full of these things," he said. "The boys used to keep their little
wars going just for fun, and every smart guy had several bolt holes.
Maps used to sell high."
They emerged in a very deep, very dark cellar. It was utterly still.
Campbell felt a little sad. He could remember when Martian Mak's was
the busiest thieves' market in Lhi, and a man could hear the fighting
even here. He smiled bitterly and led the way upstairs.
Presently they looked down on the main gate, the main square, and the
slave pens of Lhi. The surrounding streets were empty, the buildings
mostly dark. The Coalition had certainly cleaned up when it took over
the town. It was horribly depressing.
Campbell pointed. "Reception committee. Tredrick radioed, anyway.
One'll get you twenty he followed it up in person."
The gate was floodlighted over a wide area and there were a lot
of tough-looking men with heavy-duty needle guns. In this day of
anaesthetic charges you could do a lot of effective shooting without
doing permanent damage. There were more lights and more men by the
slave pens.
Campbell couldn't see much over the high stone walls of the pens. Vague
movement, the occasional flash of a brilliant crest. He had known the
Kraylens would be there. It was the only place in Lhi where you could
imprison a lot of people and be sure of keeping them.