He wanted to threaten, that was all. I feel sure he wouldn't have fired—I bet Walter Hamilton had never fired anything in the whole of his life. But I saw the look on the face of Sean Wilgus as Hamilton's hand closed around the pistol butt. It was a moment of surprise, followed by an expression of anger and pure, vicious hatred. And his own weapon began to lift.
"Dr. Hamilton!" I cried. "Let go of it."
I was too late. Wilgus aimed his own weapon and fired three times, so quickly it all sounded like one shot. Walter Hamilton, his hand still on his gun, fell backward into the bushes.
For a moment Sean Wilgus and I both stared at Hamilton's body, as blood spouted from great wounds in its chest and neck. Then we turned to look at each other.
I could hear Wilgus's panting breath. I fancied that I could hear his mind working, too. He was in deep trouble. He could tell Danny Shaker that the murder was self-defense from Walter Hamilton's armed attack, and the pistol in the other man's hand would support his statement.
But not with Jay Hara as a witness to the whole thing.
Wilgus's gun started to lift again—toward me. I cried out in fear, and threw myself sideways into the bushes. The gun fired again before I had gone half a dozen steps. But already the dense vegetation hid me from view. I heard a strange hissing, as bullets swept through tough leaves, but I was left untouched. I ran blindly on—and almost went smack into the grasp of Joe Munroe.
Like all the crewmen, he must have been heading for Sean Wilgus to find out what was happening. I couldn't expect any help from him. He had been a big supporter of the idea of throwing me into space without a suit. I ducked, wriggled away from his grabbing hand, and plunged deeper into the jungle of plants.
The first two minutes were pure panic, when all I wanted was to put distance between me and the crewmen. After that came more rational worry. I could run, but I couldn't hide. Every step that I took left its mark, in the form of flattened or broken plants. The others were a lot slower than me, but all they had to do was follow. They had plenty of time, and they outnumbered me. They could work as a team, following me one after another until I was forced to stop for rest and sleep.
I moved as gently as possible, trying to repair damage by lifting twigs and blades back into position after I passed through. It didn't work. There were still signs, and it would surely be days before they faded. Even if the plants did not show where I had been, I was leaving footsteps in the soft earth.
I crouched down, head bowed and ready to cry. Paddy's Fortune had seemed like a big enough place when I was walking around it with Walter Hamilton. Now it had become tiny, offering no possible hiding place.
The shadow of my own head on the floor in front of me finally told me what I had to do. As I sat despairing, it had crept slowly across the ground. The world was rotating, and Maveen moved across the sky. In another half hour it would be dark. Tracking me through the plants would be impossible. But less than an hour after that, the sun would rise again. I would again be in danger.
Unless . . .
I stood up, took my bearings, and started north. That was a move with its own dangers, because it took me back toward Walter Hamilton and possibly to my pursuers.
I stared in all directions at every step and crept along as quietly as possible. The only time that I stopped was to lean down and drink from one of the deep little ponds. The water tasted fine, cool and clear as Lake Sheelin. I would have drunk anyway, even if it had been warm and muddy. I was parched.
I was also absolutely starving. How long since my last meal? Only eight hours or so, but it felt like days.
I crept on. There was a terrible moment when I heard a nearby shout that sounded like Joe Munroe, and an answering call from the other side. It sent chills through me, and I froze. But there was no safety in that. I started moving again, through growing twilight. I was following my own tracks but I could hardly see them. Then came another awful moment, when I almost tripped over the body of Walter Hamilton.
He was dead and lying face-up, eyes open and staring. I huddled down at his side. I could hardly bear to touch him, but I had to. I wanted his gun.
It was gone. Either he had dropped it, or one of the others had already taken it. I groped around on the floor in increasing gloom, until my fingers located something hard. Not the gun. The electronic notebook that he had been holding. I took that and put it in my own pocket, along with Paddy Enderton's tiny computer and display unit. I felt again for the gun, all around the body. Maybe it was there, somewhere among the flattened plants, but I could not find it.
At last I gave up the search. I moved on, always north. Half an hour later I was easing forward into noiseless twilight.
If I had my directions right, in front of me lay not the short-lived darkness of nighttime on Paddy's Fortune; I was approaching the months-long night of the region around the worldlet's north pole.
Ten minutes more, and I could barely see where I was going. I sank to the ground and stretched out on soft, damp earth. For the first time in hours, I was free to relax. If I could not see where I was, no one else would be able to track me here without hand-held lights. Even then it would be difficult.
I said I was free to relax, but of course I couldn't. I was too wired up. There's a big difference between seeing a dead man, like Paddy Enderton, and seeing a man die. The image of Walter Hamilton's throat and chest kept coming into my mind, the bright blood gouting out. I had never realized before that blood could run like water. I hadn't liked Hamilton much. Now I felt guilty about that.
The ground beneath me was unnaturally warm, but I was shivering. I told myself, over and over, that I was safe, except that a part of my mind kept asking if that word included a situation where a person was without food, drink, light, or shelter, and had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.
* * *
What actually happened next was ridiculous. Although I would have sworn that it could never happen, I fell asleep.
When I opened my eyes, it was raining. That was impossible. How could a tiny world like Paddy's Fortune support a layer of cloud? But certainly those were cool raindrops falling on my face.
I realized then what ought to have been obvious from the time I first set eyes on that artificial shell around Paddy's Fortune. If the planetoid could have an atmosphere, it could have anything. It was not a natural world. Something controlled conditions on the surface, and a shower of rain was probably no more difficult to arrange than breathable air.
My next thought was that the rain itself had awakened me. Then a bright light shone in my eyes, only a few feet off to one side, and I heard the rustling of leaves in the darkness.
I did not wait to see who it was. In one movement I was on my feet, running doubled-over through the clutching plant life. It was a dangerous thing to do, because I couldn't see an inch in front of my face. If a wall of rock had been in my path I would have run headlong into it.
It wasn't quite that bad, but what happened next was even more unnerving. The ground vanished from beneath my feet and left me running in midair. I had encountered one of the deep fissures that Walter Hamilton had talked about. In the low gravity of Paddy's Fortune, the long fall down the crack in the surface should have been more frightening than dangerous. Actually it was both. While I was still falling and moving rapidly forward, my hands hit a hard surface in front of me, skinning my knuckles. My body turned and dropped. In three more seconds I landed, rolling over on one hip and elbow.
Every bit of breath was knocked out of me. I lay flat on my back, struggling to bring air into my lungs and staring straight up at a light that was steadily approaching.
Sean Wilgus? Patrick O'Rourke? Or even Danny Shaker himself?
It made no difference. I couldn't stand up and run to save my life.
The white light brightened, moved down to within a foot of my face, then lifted higher. It was being held in someone's hand. As the arm was raised I had a first look at the person himself.
It was
not Sean Wilgus, or anyone else of the Cuchulain's crew. Nor was it Doctor Eileen, or a member of our party. It was a stranger, a thin, short-haired boy maybe two years younger than me, with ragged pants and jacket of light grey and a face and limbs smudged all over with mud and earth. He was holding a little backpack made of brown leather in one hand, and a bizarre-looking pink ring that threw off a bright beam from its center in the other.
Sean Wilgus had been right. The learned Walter Hamilton, with all his degrees, had been wrong.
There were people on Paddy's Fortune.
CHAPTER 18
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
The kid had helped me to sit up, but he didn't wait for me to get my wind back.
"I'm—I'm—" I started, but then I was too breathless to do more than parrot his question. "Who are you?" I croaked. "And what are you doing here?"
He sniffed and picked up the pink flashlight from where he had placed it on the ground.
"I live here, that's what I'm doing." His voice was high-pitched and a little bit foreign, like somebody from over on the other side of Erin. "And I know what I'm doing. That's more than you can say, dashing around in the dark. You could have killed yourself. But I'll answer you. My name is Mel Fury."
"I'm Jay Hara."
I thought, You sound like a smart ass.
We stared at each other.
"Why did you run away from me?" he said.
"I thought you were somebody else. I was being chased."
Then I had to explain everything, about coming from Erin and our arrival on Paddy's Fortune and Walter Hamilton's murder, but before I was fairly begun on that I started to worry about the light that Mel Fury was holding. Sean Wilgus and the others could use it to home in on me. "Turn that off." I said.
"If you insist." He sounded cool and superior.
The light vanished. After a few seconds I realized that I could still see a little. Although we were close to the pole this was a tiny world, and some sunlight was being scattered in by the translucent shield of Paddy's Fortune. There would never be around-the-clock total darkness, even at the bottom of a narrow crevice. So much for my idea that I could be free from pursuit.
"They may still be after me," I said. "We have to find somewhere safer than this."
"No problem." He stood up and hitched his backpack into position. "Let's go. I'm getting hungry anyway."
The crack in the surface that I had fallen into was only the width of my outstretched arms. I followed Mel Fury along the uneven floor of it, testing a sore ankle and rubbing my skinned knuckles as we slanted upward. As we went I thought about his last comment. He might be hungry, but I was starving.
We emerged onto the surface, and I stared all around me.
"I haven't seen anything you can eat anywhere." I kept my voice to a whisper—there was no knowing where the crew members of the Cuchulain might be. "Do you catch the animals and eat them?"
Fury gave a condescending snigger. "What a disgusting idea! Of course I don't. I eat regular food. You'll see, if you'll just be patient. And walk quietly, for heaven's sake. No wonder you worry about being followed."
It was a mystery. He seemed to glide through the vegetation without disturbing it at all. I tried to imitate his way of walking, and at the same time explained to him in a tense whisper where we had come from, and what we were doing on Paddy's Fortune.
"Where?" he said. And, when I told him how we came to call the worldlet that, "Paddy's Fortune? That's ridiculous. This place doesn't need a name. It already has one."
"What is it called?"
"Home."
Home? Well, that struck me as one of the dumbest names I had heard in a long time. But I didn't have a chance to say so, because we were emerging into full daylight and Mel Fury had turned to face me. His thin, dirty face wore a superior, skeptical expression.
"If there are people chasing you," he said, "which I'm inclined to doubt, and if they are really as dangerous as you say—which I'm inclined to doubt even more—then we'd better be careful. We're going to be in sunlight for the next few minutes. So no more talking until we get there."
"Get where?"
"To the access point. And I said, no more talking—until we're inside."
It was obvious that Mel Fury didn't believe we were in danger. He was just using that as an excuse to boss me around. His attitude would change a few minutes later, though not in a way that could give me any pleasure.
We had been heading steadily toward the equator, with Maveen higher and higher in the sky. I was itching to talk, full of a thousand questions, but I managed to hold my tongue. Until suddenly Mel Fury stopped and inclined his head to the left. "Someone. Voices. Over that way."
I couldn't hear a thing. And if I had, the last thing I would have done is head toward trouble. But that's what he did, snaking silently through a dense ferny growth with spiky leaves and blue flowers at the top. I had no choice but to follow.
Soon I could hear voices, too. Or at least one voice. It was Sean Wilgus, loud and high-pitched. I wanted to back away, but Mel Fury went on moving forward on his hands and knees. I slowly crawled after him, until at last he halted.
We had come to a roughly oval area where the ferny plants diminished from head-high to knee-high. Fury and I, lying flat on our bellies and out of sight, had a worm's-eye view of the whole clearing. Sean Wilgus stood at one side, a gun in his hand—the same gun, I was sure, that had killed Walter Hamilton. On the other side, arms folded and massaging his biceps, stood Danny Shaker. His knees and elbows were crusted with mud and his hair hung damp over his forehead, but he had a half-smile on his face. And now I could hear his voice, too.
"I'm accused of many things, Sean," he was saying. "And some of them are even true. But not what you've been saying."
"You're the only one as thinks so." Sean Wilgus's voice was angry, but he also sounded nervous. "You can't deny it. Drag us to the ass-end of the universe, promise us wealth, promise us a new ship, promise us women—"
"Not me, Sean. I said no such things. It was others made up all those. I told you I hoped that we'd find something valuable on this trip, but I said there was a good chance we'd receive no more than our pay—and very good pay, as you well know."
Wilgus didn't seem to hear him. "All this way," he went on, "for nothing, in a ship that's on her last legs. You know the Cuchulain's not what it was. A few more trips, the engines will be done for. And you drag us out here."
"True enough. The Cuchulain is creaking at the joints. But that's exactly why we gambled on a trip to the Maze. We need more money than we'd get from a dozen scrounging trips for light elements, if we're to get the Cuchulain in shape." Shaker had not raised his voice. He sounded relaxed, almost soothing. "But don't change the subject on me. You've never said one word to answer my accusation, Sean. Are you going to? You can't deny you killed Walter Hamilton, others vouched for it. Aye, and for all I know you killed young Jay Hara, too, and hid his body. You say it was all done in self-defense, but I don't accept that. You have a temper, Sean. I think you killed in anger. If you didn't, then let me hear you deny it."
"I did it to protect myself. Hamilton was going to shoot me. I never touched Jay Hara."
"So you say." Shaker finally moved, but only to shift his hands from his biceps to his trouser pockets. He took one step, to lean forward balanced on the balls of his feet. "But you're a good crewman, Sean, and one that we need. So I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Hand over your gun now, and let me make sure you don't have another one hidden away somewhere. Then I'll let you go back to work as one of the crew. There'll be no more firearms for you, though, on this trip."
Wilgus hesitated. "And no punishment?"
"That's for all the crew to decide. I'll not make that decision alone."
"Bullshit! You control them, and you know it."
Danny Shaker sighed and took his left hand out of his trouser pocket. He held it palm up toward Wilgus. "The gun, Sean. Let me have it."<
br />
Sean Wilgus lifted the gun he was holding. But instead of offering it handle-first, he sighted it at Danny Shaker. I could not see his face, but his arm was trembling.
Shaker laughed. "A shoot-out?" he said. "Now, Sean, you know me better than that. You know I've never been one to carry firearms." He might have been saying that he didn't like artichokes, or wearing green shirts, for all the tension and worry in his voice. He took three more steps forward, so that he was no more than fifteen feet from Sean Wilgus. "The gun. Come on, man, be sensible. Hand it over."
"No."
Shaker took another couple of steps. "Don't do something you're going to regret, Sean. Give me that gun."
Wilgus nodded. But he wasn't going to obey Shaker's order. I could see his finger tightening on the trigger. I was tempted to leap up and shout a warning to Danny Shaker. No matter what I thought he had done, I couldn't see him shot down in cold blood.
It was too late. I heard two shots, and instinctively flinched. When I looked up again at Danny Shaker, he was still standing exactly where he had been.
I couldn't believe my eyes. Wilgus, incredibly, had missed.
And then I glanced over to Sean Wilgus, and saw him crumpling silently to the ground. His face turned my way, and I could see the two holes, one next to his nose and one in the middle of his forehead.
Danny Shaker removed his right hand from his trouser pocket and stared down at the white-handled pistol he was holding. He walked forward to stand by Sean Wilgus and shook his head.
"I told you I've never been one to carry firearms, Sean," he said quietly to the body at his feet. "And that's no more than simple truth. If I took Walter Hamilton's gun when I was trying to decide for myself how he died, well, some would say this was no more than justice."
I wondered if Wilgus was dead, or just pretending, because Danny Shaker was chatting to him as though the two of them were sitting down having a drink together. His next words ended that illusion.
"Rest in peace, Sean. You'll never know how sad it made me to press that trigger. A good worker, you were, maybe the best on the ship. But with one fatal flaw, the temper you never could control. What a waste of human talent." Shaker shook his head and glanced thoughtfully down at his own person. "Aye, and not only that. There's goes a perfectly good pair of trousers, too."
Godspeed Page 17
