Chane shrugged. "Anyway, the government of Achernar, as a last resort, has offered a two million credit reward to anyone who'll go in there and bring back the Singing Suns."
Dilullo made a harsh sound that was not quite laughter. "They'll get far with that! Who is there in the whole galaxy that's going to try to recover Starwolf loot?"
"I thought some of us might," said Chane.
Dilullo stared at him. He seemed completely serious, but with Chane you never knew.
"Go to Varna? Take something away from the Starwolves? There are easier methods of suicide!"
"The Suns aren't at Varna, John," said Chane. "Do you think the Varnans would just keep them and admire their beauty? I know the Starwolves, and I can tell you they don't care a tinker's damn about art, no matter how great. No, they'd break up the Suns, sell the jewels separately in the thieves' market worlds of Argo Spur."
"Break them up?" exclaimed Dilullo. "Of all the vandalistic, blasphemous things ever heard of. ..."
Chane shrugged again. "That's what they'd do, John. A thousand to one, the Suns are right now on certain worlds of the Spur. We figure we could get hold of them and claim that two million."
"Who are 'we'?" demanded Dilullo.
"Why, Bollard and Janssen and some of the others have agreed to give it a try," said Chane.
"How did you convince them where the Suns are?" said Dilullo. "You couldn't tell them about your Starwolf past."
"I just lied to them," Chane said shamelessly. "I told them I grew up in the Spur and knew a lot about its worlds." He added, grinning, "And so I do, too ... but from going with the Varnans to barter our loot."
Dilullo was too used to Chane's lack of conventional morality to be surprised. He said, "That Spur is murder. There are more nonhuman- than human-peopled worlds in it, and on nearly all of them you can get killed just for the clothes you're wearing. Supposing that you can locate the Singing Suns there—"
"I can locate them," Chane said. "I know just where loot like that would be sold."
"So you locate them," Dilullo finished, "then how do you figure to get hold of them?"
"Take them," said Chane.
"Just like that? Good old-fashioned Starwolf stealing?"
Chane smiled. "This wouldn't be stealing, John. You forget that the Singing Suns rightfully and legally belong to Achernar, and whoever has them knows it. If we get hold of them, by cunning or force, we're only recovering stolen property for the owners. All legal and honest."
Dilullo shook his head. "Legally, you're right. Even ethically, you're right. But I don't want to hear a Starwolf talking about honesty!"
He added, "Anyway, how do you and Bollard and the rest figure even to get to the Spur? It takes money for an expedition like that, and nobody would advance you a nickel on a venture into that hellhole."
"We all have some money from our Arkuu job," said Chane. "And that's where you come in, John."
"I do, do I? In what way?"
Chane explained brightly, "You got a hundred thousand for your share of that last job. You could help finance this one and take a leader's share if we make it."
Dilullo looked at him across the table for a long time before he spoke.
"Chane," he said, "you're a marvel in one way. You have the most brass of anyone in the universe. You know bloody well that hundred thousand is for my house."
"I didn't figure you would ever build that house," said Chane.
"Why did you figure that way?" asked Dilullo, his voice dangerously soft.
"Because," said Chane, "you don't really want a house. Why have you sat around here for weeks without starting one?
Because you know that when the first nail goes into the house it's going to nail you down here and you'll never see the stars again. That's why you've put it off and put it off. I knew you would."
There was a long silence, and Dilullo looked at Chane with a look that Chane had never seen before. Chane tensed himself, ready to spring back out of the way if Dilullo struck at him.
Nothing happened. Nothing except that Dilullo's face became slowly bleaker and that a haggardness came into it. He picked up his glass and drained it and set it down.
"That's a bad thing for you to say to me, Chane," he said. "And the reason it's so bad is that it's true."
He stared down into the empty glass. "I thought it would all be the same here, but it hasn't been. Not at all."
He sat staring into the glass and the lines in his hard face were deep. Finally he stood up.
"Come along," he said.
They went out of the tavern. It was dark, but the moon was bright on the streets of old white buildings. Dilullo led the way, along a street that went twisting out of town, with the whisper of the sea vaguely audible on their left. Dilullo walked with his shoulders sagging like those of an old man, and he neither looked at Chane nor spoke to him. He finally stopped and stood staring at nothing ... nothing but a vacant lot between two old stucco houses. He stared silently for a long time.
"This is where my first house was," he said.
Chane said nothing. There was nothing to say. He knew all about that house and how, long ago, Dilullo's wife and children had perished in its burning.
Dilullo suddenly turned and grasped Chane by the arm, so fiercely that even Chane's iron Starwolf muscles felt it.
"I'll tell you something, Chane," he said. "Don't eVer go back and try to live things over again. Don't ever do it!"
Then he dropped Chane's arm and turned away. "Ah, let's get the hell out of this place," he said. "Let's go to the Argo Spur."
II
The galaxy wheeled through infinity, a vast, spinning, lens-shaped storm of stars. Out from its central mass trailed mighty spirals, and one of these spirals was isolated, sweeping far out into space. It had a dim, tarnished look compared to the other vast arms of the galaxy, for beside its myriad suns this spiral contained many dark nebulae and an unusual number of dead stars. It was often called the Dark Spiral, but its other name was the Argo Spur.
Beauty and horror, riches and danger, worlds of men and many more worlds of not-men, were in the Dark Spiral. None knew that better than Morgan Chane, as he sat in the bridge of the little speeding ship and looked and looked, his face dark and brooding. What he looked at in the viewscreen was not an actuality but an accurate simulacrum, for they were in overdrive and in non-space direct vision is impossible.
The fabric of the ship was shuddering and shaking around him. It was an old ship and its overdrive was not very good. It did what it was supposed to do, it hurled them across extra-dimensional space toward the spiral at its highest speed, but it trembled and creaked ominously all the time it did so.
Chane disregarded that. He looked at the spiral in the simulacrum and his eyes were fixed on a tawny yellow star blazing deep in the wilderness of the Argo Spur.
And how often I've come this way, he thought.
The superb tawny-gold sun was the primary of the planet Varna, the most hated world in the galaxy.
And this vast, far-flung spiral of stars ahead was the old road of the Starwolves. Through it they had come and gone on their way to raid the systems of the main part of the galaxy. And through it Chane had come and gone with them, so that there was little about the tangle of suns and dead stars and dark nebulae that he did not know at least something about.
The little ship hurtled on, still trembling and whispering uneasily. There was nothing for a pilot to do when a ship was in overdrive. All that was needed was a man in the bridge to keep watch on the telltales of the overdrive units. Chane was the man now, and he did not at all like the way the telltales quivered.
After a time, Bollard came into the bridge. He looked at the instruments and shook his head.
"This ship is a dog," he said. "A worn-out old dog."
Chane shrugged. "It's the best we could lease for the kind of money we had."
Bollard grunted. He was a fat man, so fat that his paunch bulged out his coverall, and he had a mo
onlike face with crinkles around his eyes. He looked slobbish, but Chane, who had been out twice with him, knew that Bollard was strong and fast and tough, and that in a fight he was about as slobbish as a swordblade.
Bollard touched a switch, and a simplified star-chart was projected into being. He looked at the blip of their ship, now well into the base of the spiral.
"You said you had an idea about where we'd drop out of overdrive," he said to Chane. "Where?"
Chane indicated with his finger a small area marked in red.
"There."
Bollard stared. "That's a Zone 3 danger area. Do we have to go into it?"
"Look," said Chane, "we've been all over that. We'll be scanned from the time we enter the Spur and we've got to look like the drift-miners we're supposed to be, which means that we have to go where drift-miners would go."
"We could skirt around the area and make like we are mining without going into it," said Bollard.
Chane smiled. "That's a real clever idea. Only, when we get to Mruun, we've got to show some reason for coming there, and some valuable ores to sell would be a good reason."
Bollard seemed unconvinced, and Chane added, "You don't know the Spur. I do, for, as I told you, my parents were Earth missionaries who moved from one of the Spur systems to another when I was growing up ..."
He thought that the first part of his statement was true, even though the rest was not. His parents had indeed been dedicated missionaries, but Varna alone had been the scene of their mission, and they had lived and worked and failed and finally died on Varna.
"... and I can tell you," Chane finished, "that on some of the Spur worlds, just one whisper, one breath, of suspicion will get you killed quick."
"I still don't like this idea," grumbled Bollard. "It's all very well for you; you were a drift-miner before you joined the Mercs. But I've never been a rock-hopper."
Chane said nothing. He had told them he was a drift-miner to cover up his Starwolf past, but he had never been one and he thought he had a tricky time ahead of him.
He thought it even more when, finally, the blip of their creaking ship had moved quite near to the red patch of the danger area. Dilullo, sitting in the co-pilot chair beside Chane, studied the chart.
"We'd better drop out of overdrive here," he said.
"We can go a little closer," Chane said.
They went closer, and Dilullo began to fidget. Presently he said decisively, "That's close enough. Drop out."
Chane shrugged, but obeyed. He pressed a button that gave the alert signal throughout the ship, and set up the controls.
Chane moved a switch, and they dropped out. And Chane, who had done this hundreds of times, thought again that it was something like dying and then being born again. From the extra-dimensional space in which they had been traveling, he seemed to fall through vertiginous abysses. Every atom in Chane's body felt shock, his senses whirled, and then they came out of it.
And now the viewscreens no longer presented a simulacrum. The glory of the Argo Spur was revealed and there smashed in upon them the light of ten thousand suns.
A series of ear-piercing shrieks came from the drift indicators. At the same instant, Chane saw great and small bulks hurtling by the ship.
"Knew we were getting too close!" yelled Dilullo.
Chane saw death looking him in the eye. Their little ship had dropped into space right inside a colossal stream of stone and metal. And they couldn't go back into overdrive until the unit recycled.
"This damned drift has changed since I last saw it!" he exclaimed. "Sound the hooter!"
Dilullo pulled a lever and the hooter alarm yelled stridently through the ship.
An odd-shaped mass of stone was bearing down on them. Chane hit the controls and stood the ship on its tail. There was a rattling of tiny particles on the hull and he hoped they weren't holed. Dilullo was shouting something, but between the hooter and the constant shrieking of the drift-alarms he couldn't hear what it was.
Radar and sight both informed him of another weird-shaped mass coming at them, tumbling over and over. He hit the controls again.
Then the Starwolf surged up in Chane. They were trapped in this bloody cataract of drift and they probably weren't going to get out of it alive, and all the careful maneuvering in the world wouldn't do them any good now. He took the Varnan way, the way he and his old comrades would have taken had they been in a bind like this. He held steady on the steering and smashed his free hand down on the power and sent the ship hurtling blindly ahead at full normal speed.
Gamble your ship and your life. It was better than trying useless dodgings and turnings and getting killed anyway.
Chane's teeth showed in a mirthless smile. He had had a good life as long as it lasted, and if it had to end he was not going to claw like a frightened old woman against the inevitable. No.
Dilullo was still yelling at him, but he paid no attention. John was a good man but he wasn't a Starwolf, and he was getting a mite old.
A monstrous face of stone whirled past them. A face with bunches of tentacles instead of eyes, and a protuberant trunk-like mouth, and nothing human about it.
The ship slammed through particle-drift again, and past another face that had no relation to humanity, and then past a mighty tumbling statue of a thing with the same tentacle-eyed face and too many arms and legs.
Faces, figures, a phantasmagoria of nightmare shapes ... and of a sudden the scream of the drift-alarms shut off. They were out of the cataract of meteoric drive and into clear space.
Chane took a long breath. The gamble did pay off, sometimes. He turned around and looked at Dilullo with a bright smile.
"What do you know?" he said. "We made it."
Dilullo started to curse deeply. Then he shut it off. "All right, Chane," he said. "I thought we had taken some of that Varnan out of you. I see we didn't. I'll remember that."
Chane shrugged. "You've got to admit, it was no place to hang around in."
Dilullo said, "Those faces ... those figures. What the devil is this place?"
"Some sort of nonhuman cemetery, I think," said Chane. "Long before there were ever men in the Spur, there were other races. They made meteors into memorials."
"Nobody's ever mined this drift," Chane explained. "At least I don't think so. You see, everybody's superstitious about it. I figured this would be the best place to pick up some precious ores, before we head for Mruun."
Dilullo shook his head. "I might have known it, Robbing a galactic graveyard. Only a Starwolf would think of that!"
III
Chane, in his spacesuit, cuddled up against the gigantic, unhuman stone face and prepared to commit mayhem upon it. His analyzer had told him there was a rich palladium ore-pocket in this sculptured shard of stone. He thought, from his readings, that if he cut out the ear of the thing he could easily reach it.
Stars above, around, and below him, the bright pitiless face of infinity. The great river of stones, some of them sculptured in awesomely alien busts, others stark and untouched, flowed serenely on through the void. These meteors and broken asteroids moved at the same pace but they did change position in regard to each other, so that one had to be wary of a bulk of stone slowly and majestically approaching and grinding one to powder.
Clinging like a fly to the monstrous face, Chane hauled around the ato-torch that hung from a sling hooked to his suit. It fouled with the sling of the analyzer and he tugged at it impatiently.
"Chane!"
The voice came from the receiver in his helmet, and it was the voice of Van Fossan.
"Chane, you're not going to cut into one of the heads? Remember John's orders."
Chane muttered a curse under his breath as he turned and saw the spacesuited figure angling toward him, using an impeller to drive himself forward. Van Fossan was a young and eager-beaver Merc, and he would show up just at this time.
Chane remembered very well what Dilullo's orders were. Before they left the ship, which was now cruising
outside the meteor stream and keeping pace with it, Dilullo had said, "The people or not-people who carved those heads have been gone a long time. But a memorial is a memorial. I wouldn't want strangers prospecting for ore in my tombstone, and neither would you. Leave them alone."
Chane had made no objection to what he considered Dilullo's sentimentality. But he had never meant to be bound by it. It was his bad luck that Van Fossan had come up on him.
"I just stopped to untangle my slings," Chane said. "You go on ahead."
He waited until Van Fossan had gone, a small figure against the backdrop of an infinity of suns, angling away across the majestically flowing river of stones.
When he was out of sight, Chane unshipped his cutting laser and began to slice into the edge of the monstrous ear.
"Stranger ..."
Chane stiffened, his head swiveling, his eyes glaring around him for the one who had spoken.
"Stranger, spare us our pitiful immortality. ..." Chane suddenly realized that the words were reaching his mind, not his ears, and that they were not words at all but thoughts. Telepathic speech. "If you are here at all, you are a lord of the starways. We were lords of the starways ... and of all our might and magnificence only these stone faces are left. Leave us this much. ..."
Chane rebounded with a galvanic kick of his feet from the huge stone head. He floated near it, and then he laughed.
So that's why these heads have never been mined, he thought; a telepathic record set in each one.
He told himself that both superstition and sentimental appeals were lost on him; but if the telepathic bit still worked, there might well be other and nastier things about the monuments that still worked.
Chane switched on his impellers and went away from there. He angled through a shoal of fine drift, feeling it rattle like hail against his tough suit and helmet. The light of the Argo suns glanced down on him, and by it he saw other Mercs in the distance, swimming like dark men-fish amid the drift, searching and going on and pausing to search again.
He too swam and stopped and searched and searched again, using the analyzer. It told him nothing. He began to get irritated by his failure. It seemed to him that the eyeless stone faces sneered at him as they went by.
Starwolf (Omnibus) Page 28
