by Ayn Rand
Bart took one of the paper napkins from the lunch sack and carefully wiped some of it away. His stomach turned at the deep, ugly cut, which immediately started oozing fresh blood. He pressed the edges of the cut together with the napkin, wondering helplessly how much blood Ringg could lose without danger, and if he had concussion. If he tried to go back to the ship and fetch the medic for Ringg, he’d be struck by hail himself. From where he stood, it seemed that the hailstones were getting bigger by the minute.
Ringg moaned, but when Bart knelt beside him again he did not answer. Bart could hear only the rushing of wind, the noise of the splattering hail and a sound of water somewhere—or was that a rustle of scales, a dragging of strange feet? He looked through the darkness into the depths of the cave, his hand on his shock-beam. He was afraid to turn his back on it.
This is nonsense, he told himself firmly, I’ll just walk back there and see what there is.
At his belt he had the small flashlamp, excessively bright, that was, like the energon-beam shocker, a part of regulation equipment. He took it out, shining it on the back wall of the cave; then drew a long breath of startlement and for a moment forgot Ringg and his own pain.
For the back wall of the cave was an exquisite fall of crystal! Minerals glowed there, giant crystals, like jewels, crusted with strange lichen-like growths and colors. There were pale blues and greens and, shimmering among them, a strangely colored crystalline mineral that he had never seen before. It was blue—No, Bart thought, that’s just the light, it’s more like red—no, it can’t be like both of them at once, and it isn’t really like either. In this light—
Ringg moaned, and Bart, glancing round, saw that he was struggling to sit up. He ran back to him, dropping to his knees at Ringg’s side. “It’s all right, Ringg, lie still. We’re under cover now.”
“Wha’ happened?” Ringg said blurrily. “Head hurts—all sparks—all the pretty lights—can’t see you!” He fumbled with loose, uncoordinated fingers at his head and Bart grabbed at him before he poked a claw in his eye. “Don’t do that,” Ringg complained, “can’t see—”
He must have a bad concussion then. That’s a nasty cut. Gently, he restrained the Lhari boy’s hands.
“Bartol, what happened?”
Bart explained. Ringg tried to move, but fell limply back.
“Weren’t you hurt? I thought I heard you cry out.”
“A cut or two, but nothing serious,” Bart said. “I think the hail’s stopped. Lie still, I’d better go back to the ship and get help.”
“Give me a hand and I can walk,” Ringg said, but when he tried to sit up, he flinched, and Bart said, “You’d better lie still.” He knew that head injuries should be kept very quiet; he was almost afraid to leave Ringg for fear the Lhari boy would have another delirious fit and hurt himself, but there was no help for it.
The hail had stopped, and the piled heaps were already melting, but it was bitterly cold. Bart wrapped himself in the silvery cloak, glad of its warmth, and struggled back across the slushy, ice-strewn meadow that had been so pink and flowery in the sunshine. The Swiftwing, a monstrous dark egg looming in the twilight, seemed like home. Bart felt the heavenly warmth close around him with a sigh of pure relief, but the Second Officer, coming up the hatchway, stopped in consternation:
“You’re covered with blood! The hailstorm—”
“I’m all right,” Bart said, “but Ringg’s been hurt. You’ll need a stretcher.” Quickly, he explained. “I’ll come with you and show you—”
“You’ll do no such thing,” the officer said. “You look as if you’d been caught out in a meteor shower, feathertop! We can find the place. You go and have those cuts attended to, and—what’s wrong with your wrist? Broken?”
Bart heard, like an echo, the frightening words: Don’t break any bones. You won’t pass an X-ray.
“It’s all right, sir. When I get washed up—”
“That’s an order,” snapped the officer, “do you think, on this pestilential unlucky planet, we can afford any more bad luck? Metals fatigue, Karol burned so badly the medic thinks he may never use his hand again, and now you and Ringg getting yourselves laid up and out of action? The medic will help me with Ringg; that Mentorian girl can look after you. Get moving!”
He hurried away, and Bart, his head beginning to hurt, walked slowly up the ramp. His whole arm felt numb, and he supported it with his good hand.
In the small infirmary, Karol lay groaning in a bunk, his arm bound in bandages, his head moving from side to side. The Mentorian girl Meta turned, charging a hypo. She looked pale and drawn. She went to Karol, uncovering his other arm, and made the injection; almost immediately the moaning stopped and Karol lay still. Meta sighed and drew a hand over her brow, brushing away feathery wisps that escaped from the cap tied over her hair.
“Bartol? You’re hurt? Not more burns, I hope?”
She looks just like a fluffy little kitten, Bart thought incongruously. Fatigue was beginning to blur his reactions.
“Only a few cuts,” he said, in Universal, though Meta had spoken Lhari. In his weariness and pain he was homesick for the sound of a familiar word. “Ringg and I were both caught in the hailstorm. He’s badly hurt.”
“Sit down here.”
Bart sat. Meta’s hands were skillful and cool as she sponged the blood away from his forehead and sprayed it with some pleasantly cold, mint-smelling antiseptic. Bart leaned back, tireder than he knew, half-closing his eyes.
“That hail must have been enormous; we heard it through the hull. Whatever possessed you to go out into it?”
“It wasn’t hailing when we left,” Bart said wearily. “The sun was as nice and green as it could be.” He bit the words off, realizing he had made a slip, but the girl seemed not to hear, fastening a strip of plastic over a cut. She picked up his wrist. Bart flinched in spite of himself, and Meta nodded. “I was afraid of that; it may be broken. Better let me X-ray it.”
“No!” Bart said harshly. “It’s all right, I just twisted it. Nothing’s broken. Just strap it up.”
“It’s pretty badly swollen,” the girl said, moving it gently. “Does that hurt? I thought so.”
Bart set his teeth against a cry. “It’s all right, I tell you. Just because it’s black and blue—”
He heard her breath jolt out, her fingers clenched painfully on his wounded wrist. She did not hear his cry this time. “And the sun was nice and green,” she whispered. “What are you?”
Bart felt himself slip sidewise; he thought for a moment that he would faint where he sat. Terrified, he looked up at Meta. Their eyes met, and she said, hardly moving her pale lips, “Your eyes—they’re like mine. Your eyelashes—dark, not white. You’re not a Lhari!“
The pain in his wrist suddenly blurred everything else, but Meta suddenly realized she was gripping it; she gave a little, gentle cry, and cradled the abused wrist in her palm.
“No wonder you didn’t want it X-rayed,” she whispered. Biting her lip, she glanced, terrified, at Karol, unconscious in the bunk. “No, he can’t hear us; I gave him a heavy shot of hypnin, poor fellow.”
“Go ahead,” Bart said bitterly, “yell for your keepers.”
Her gray eyes blazed at him for a moment; then, gently, she laid his wrist on the table, went to the infirmary door and locked it on the inside. She turned around, her face white; even her lips had lost their color. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“Does it matter now?”
Shocked comprehension swept over her face. “You don’t think I’d tell them,” she whispered. “I heard talk, in the Procyon port, of a spy that had managed to get through on a Lhari ship.” Her face twisted. “You—you must know about the man on theMultiphase, you know they’ll—make sure I can’t—hide anything dangerous to the Lhari at the end of the voyage.”
“Meta—” concern for her swept over him—"what will they do to you when they find out that you know and—didn’t tell?”
Her gray eyes
were wide as a kitten’s. “Why, nothing. The Lhari would never hurt anyone, would they?”
Brainwashed? He set his mouth grimly. “I hope you never find out different.”
“Why would they need to?” she asked, reasonably. “They could just erase the memory. I never heard of a Lhari actually hurting anyone. But something like this—” She wavered, looking at him. “You look so much like a Lhari! How was it done? How could they do it? Poor fellow, you must be the—the loneliest man in the Universe!”
Her voice was compassionate. Bart felt his throat tighten, and had the awful feeling that he was going to cry. He reached with his good hand for hers, seeking the comfort of a human touch, but she flinched instinctively away.
He was a monster to this pretty girl....
“It looks so real,” she said helplessly. “Yes, now I can see, you have tiny moons at the base of the nail, and the Lhari don’t.” Her face worked. “It’s—it’s horrifying! How could you—”
There was a noise in the corridor. Meta gasped and ran to unlock the door, stood back as the medic and the Second Officer came in, staggering under Ringg’s weight. Carefully, they put him into a bunk. The medic straightened, shaking his crest.
“Did you get that wrist taken care of, Bartol?”
Meta stepped between Bart and the officer, reaching for a roll of bandage. “I’m working on it now, rieko mori,” she said. “It only wants strapping up.” But her fingers trembled as she wound the gauze, pulling each fold tight.
“How’s—Ringg?”
“Needs quiet,” grunted the medic, “and a few sutures. Lucky you got him under cover when you did.”
Ringg said weakly from his bunk, “Bartol saved my life. I can think of plenty who’d have run for cover, instead of staying out in that stuff long enough to drag me inside. Thanks, shipmate.”
Meta’s hand, with a swift hard pressure, lingered on Bart’s shoulder as she cut the bandage and fastened the end. “I don’t think that will bother you much now,” she whispered, fleetingly. “I didn’t dare say it was broken or they’d insist on X-rays. If it hurts I’ll get you something later for the pain. If you keep it strapped up tight—”
“It will do,” Bart said aloud. The tight bandage made it feel a little better, but he felt sick and dizzy, and when the medic turned and saw him, the officer said brusquely “Watch off for you, Bartol. I’ll fix the sign-out sheet, but you go to your cabin and get yourself at least four hours of sleep. That’s an order.“
Bart stumbled out of the cabin with relief. Safe in his own quarters, he flung himself down on his bunk, shaking all over. He’d come safely through one more nightmare, one more terror—for the moment! Had he put Meta in danger, too? Was there no end to this ceaseless fear? Not only for himself, but for others, the innocent bystanders who stumbled into plots they did not understand?
You’re doing this for the stars. It’s bigger than your fear. It’s bigger than you are, or any of the others....
He was beginning to think it was a lot too big for him.
CHAPTER TEN
The green-sun Meristem lay far behind them. Karol’s burns had healed; only a faint pattern on Ringg’s forehead showed where six stitches had closed the ugly wound in his skull. Bart’s wrist, after a few days of nightmarish pain when he tried to pick up anything heavy, had healed. Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken the Swiftwing far, far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal of Antares burned in their viewports.
Antares had twelve planets, the outermost of which—far away now, at the furthest point in its orbit from the point of the Swiftwing‘s entry into the system—was a small captive sun. No larger than the planet Earth, it revolved every ninety years around its huge primary.
Small as it was, it was blazingly blue-white brilliant, and had a tiny planet of its own. After their stop on Antares Seven—the largest of the inhabited planets in this system, where the Lhari spaceport was located—they would make a careful orbit around the great red primary, and land on the tiny worldlet of the blue-white secondary before leaving the Antares system.
As Bart watched Antares growing in the viewports, he felt a variety of emotions. On the one hand, he was relieved that as his voyage in secrecy neared its official destination, he had as yet not incurred unmasking.
But he felt uncertain about his father’s co-conspirators. Would they return him to human form and send him back to Vega, his part ended? Or would they, unthinkably, demand that he go on into the Lhari Galaxy? What would he do, if they did?
At one moment he entertained fantasies of going on into the Lhari worlds, returning victorious with the secret of their fueling location, or of the star-drive itself. At another, he could not wait to be free of it all. He longed for the society of his own people, yet ached to think that this voyage between the stars must end so soon.
They made planetfall at the largest Lhari spaceport Bart had seen; as always, the Second Officer was the first to go through Decontam and ashore, returning with exchanged mail and messages for the Swiftwing‘s crew. He laughed when he gave Bartol a sealed packet. “So you’re not quite the orphan we’ve always thought!”
Bart took it, his heart suddenly pounding, and walked away through the groups of officers and crew eagerly debating how they would spend their port leave. He knew what it would be.
It was on the letterhead of Eight Colors, and it contained no message. Only an address—and a time.
He slipped away unobserved to the Mentorian part of the ship to borrow a cloak from Meta. She did not ask why he wanted it, and stopped him when he would have told her. “I’d—rather not know.”
She looked very small and very scared, and Bart wished he could comfort her, but he knew she would shrink from him, repelled and horrified by his Lhari skin, hair, claws.
Yet she reached for his hand, gripping it hard in her own dainty one. “Bartol, be careful,” she whispered, then stopped. “Bartol—that’s a Lhari name. What’s your real one?”
“Bart. Bart Steele.”
“Good luck, Bart.” There were tears in her gray eyes.
With the blue cloak folded around his face, hands tucked in the slits at the side, he felt almost like himself. And as the strange crimson twilight folded down across the streets, laden with spicy smells and little, fragrant gusts of wind, he almost savored the sense of being a conspirator, of playing for high stakes in a network of intrigue between the stars. He was off on an adventure, and meant to enjoy it.
The address he had been given was a lavish estate, not far from the spaceport, across a little gleaming lake that shimmered red, indigo, violet in the crimson sunset, surrounded by a low wall of what looked like purple glass. Bart, moving slowly through the gate, felt that eyes were watching him, and forced himself to walk with slow dignity.
Up the path. Up a low flight of black-marble stairs. A door swung open and shut again, closing out the red sunset, letting him into a room that seemed dim after the months of Lhari lights. There were three men in the room, but his eyes were drawn instantly to one, standing against an old-fashioned fireplace.
He was very tall and quite thin, and his hair was snow-white, though he did not look old. Bart’s first incongruous thought was, He’d make a better Lhari than I would. His firm, commanding voice told Bart at once that this was the man in charge. “You are Bartol?” He extended his hand.
Bart took it—and found himself gripped in a judo hold. The other two men, leaping to place behind him, felt all over his body, not gently.
“No weapons, Montano.”
“Look here—”
“Save it,” Montano said. “If you’re the right person, you’ll understand. If not, you won’t have much time to resent it. A very simple test. What color is that divan?”
“Green.”
“And those curtains?”
“Darker green, with gold and red figures.”
The men released him, and the white-haired man smiled.
“So you actua
lly did it, Steele! I thought for sure the code message was a fake.” He stepped back and looked Bart over from head to foot, whistling. “Raynor Three is a genius! Claws and everything! What a deuce of a risk to take though!”
“You know my name,” Bart said, “but who are you?”
Suspicion came back into the dark eyes. “Does that Mentorian cloak mean—you’ve lost your memories, too?”
“No,” said Bart, “it’s simpler than that. I’m not Rupert Steele. I’m—” his voice caught—"I’m his son.”
The man looked startled and shocked. “I suppose that means Rupert is dead. Dead! It came a little before he expected it, then. So you’re Bart.” He sighed. “My name’s Montano. This is Hedrick, and I suppose you recognize Raynor Two.”
Bart blinked. It was the same face, but it was not grim like Raynor One’s, nor expressive and kindly like that of Raynor Three. This one just looked dangerous.
“But sit down,” Montano said with a wave of his hand, “make yourself comfortable.”
Hedrick relieved Bart of his cloak; Raynor Two put a cup of some steaming drink in his hand, passed him a tray of small hot fried things that tasted crisp and delicious. Bart relaxed, answering questions. How old? Only seventeen? And you came all alone on a Lhari ship, working your way as Astrogator? I must say you’ve got guts, kid! It was dangerously like the fantasy he had invented. But Montano interrupted at last.
“All right, this isn’t a party and we haven’t all night. I don’t suppose Bart has either. Enough time wasted. Since you walked into this, young Steele, I take it you know what our plans are, after this?”
Bart shook his head. “No. Raynor Three sent me to call off your plans, because of my father—”
“That sounds like Three,” interrupted Raynor Two. “Entirely too squeamish!”
Montano said irritably, “We couldn’t have done anything without a man on the Swiftwing, and you know it. We still can’t. Bart, I suppose you know about Lharillis.”
“Not by that name.”
