Star Bridge Read online

  Why am I here? The answer this time was a little different. Because someone wants this man killed.

  It had nothing to do with Horn. He was just an instrument. Suddenly he resented that, resented the necessity of doing something he had no interest in doing. The getting here was something different. This thing was easy and distasteful.

  But the necessity was there. He had taken the money to do a job. The job was not yet done.

  The crosshairs steadied. They centered themselves on the dying man.

  Horn gave the thumbscrew another half-twist, estimated the air velocity, and peered through the sight once more. The gun, resting on the wall, didn’t waver. The General Manager of Eron seemed only a few meters away. The symbol of Empire waited for the executioner.

  Slowly Horn’s finger squeezed the trigger. The pistol jumped, just a little. For a second Kohlnar looked surprised, and then his face sagged, blankly, and his body folded gently to the platform.

  THE HISTORY

  Star-wandering.…

  That strange, wonderful period after the breakdown of the first interplanetary civilization. That irresistible bursting-forth which scattered man’s seed hundreds of light years across the stars. That time of struggle and adventure, villainy and heroism.

  There were heroes in those days, men larger than reality and magnified in the retelling. Men like Roy Kellon, they became the demi-gods of a new mythology.

  Man didn’t emerge from the star-wandering quite the same. The engines of the first interstellar ships were poorly shielded; that changed him. The worlds he settled changed him. Isolation changed him. And he traced his ancestry from heroes and demi-gods.

  From such origins should come the superman. But the changes were insignificant. Men were still men, even the three-meter Denebolan giants who formed Eron’s elite guard.

  Even the Golden Folk of Eron, who lived, loved, and died like other men.

  Still, it is unwise to underestimate the psychological importance of a slight variation in pigmentation.

  How do you define the superman? The Golden Folk knew.…

  6

  FLIGHT

  The scene was frozen under an afternoon sun. All eternity seemed concentrated into a moment, unchanging, unchangeable. And then—

  Chaos.…

  The Directors scattered. Only Wendre remained, kneeling beside the crumpled thing that had been her father, then rising, straight and unafraid, to search the edge of the field.

  Horn held her face in the gun sight. It was a caress. His finger was far from the trigger.

  The charging guards reached the platform. Their ranks became a living shield, three meters high. The last thing Horn saw was the black hulk of Duchane’s hunter. It was dead against the monument. The bullet had passed through Kohlnar and struck down another killer.

  The amplifier shouted orders in a sure, powerful voice. Duchane, Horn thought.

  The voice was quick and accurate. No one would move except the guards. They would assemble under their officers at this side of the monument.

  Scoutships climbed into the sky, were launched by battleships, circled with misleading laziness around the field. Companies of guards moved outward from the monument. They carved a pie-shaped sector. Its point was Kohlnar’s body; its base enclosed, unerringly, Horn’s hiding place in the hollow behind the wall.

  “The General Manager is dead,” Duchane said softly. It was a voice used to announce sacrilege and desecration.

  For the first time, Horn realized what he had done. To Eron, it was sacrilege, it was desecration. Horn had shattered the symbol of empire, and Eron could not rest until he was caught and punished. All the resources of Eron would be thrown into the search.

  Psychological factors are almost as important to empires as the fleets they can muster or the firepower they can assemble. Revolt would be futile, true; Eron could crush any world in a few hours. But let rebellion spring up here and there, continually, let the flow of trade falter, let the mercenaries themselves grow restless—and Eron would tremble.

  Eron’s rule rested upon a pedestal of omnipotence. No distance was too great for her fleet to go; no slight was too small for her dignity to overlook. Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them.

  Omnipotence. How else could the Empire control a conquered population exceeding that of the Golden Folk by a million times? But let the slave worlds suspect that the pedestal is cracked—!

  If not in outrage, then in calculated policy, Eron had to capture the assassin. Had to! No effort could be too great. And, once captured, his punishment must be salutory. Long, excruciating, and public.

  Horn licked his lips. An empire against one man. It was like a death sentence. His chest heaved, sucked air deep into his lungs. The air smelled sweet to the dead man. The sun felt warm.

  Horn shook himself. He was still alive. They must catch him first. He would give them a chase yet.

  The guards had almost reached the base of the battleship towering close to Horn. The buzzards circling blackly overhead were wingless. It was time to leave.

  Horn faded back through the branches of the juniper into the hidden mouth of the tunnel. As he turned his back to the light, he clipped the pistol to the cord around his shoulder and let the cord pull the gun tight to his chest. A few hundred paces into the darkness, a searching hand retrieved the torch. A moment later it was flaming.

  The fugitive’s walk was swift but unhurried. When legs are matched against ships, hurry is pointless. The pursuers would think of the desert long before the fugitive got there.

  But how soon would they find the tunnel mouth? The hunted man broke into a trot. The trot became a headlong run. Panic ran with him.

  Down the long ramps into vast blacknesses. Running through them wildly, the torch flame dancing and leaping into the darkness and swallowed up immediately. Running … running … lost.…

  The tunnel went down too fast. It ended in a black pool. The hunted man stared at it with wide, dazed eyes. His gasping lungs began to ease. His mind cleared a little. Somewhere he had turned the wrong way.

  He retraced his steps. In the echoing chambers, he tried to reconstruct the location of the right tunnel. Where it should have been was rubble. The hunted man fought his way through it, tossing the stones behind him with growing haste. The torch brushed out against a wall, and he worked in night, complete, impenetrable.

  At last he felt a breath of air against his sweaty face. There was space in front of him. He scrambled upright and began to run again. One hand clung desperately to a useless stick of tar-soaked wood.

  A subtle warning told him to slow down: a distant tinkling? A change in the echoes of his frantic footsteps? He stopped. He began to breathe again. Once more he started to think. He lit the torch again.

  He raised the torch in front of him. A meter away was the pit, gaping blackly, hungrily. He walked toward it, his legs trembling wearily. He put one foot on the girder and stopped. He remembered Wu tottering, falling.…

  He had crossed this bridge so easily a few hours ago. What stopped him now? The hunted man knew. This morning he hadn’t known the shape of fear. He knew it now, and everything was tinged with it. His heart beat swiftly. His chest drew in greedy gasps of air. His hands trembled.

  But behind him was certain death. Ahead was uncertainty. He edged out on the girder, carefully, thinking about the long way there was to fall, and the thinking made him weak and dizzy. He swayed, caught himself, and crossed the last meter in a clumsy run.

  Panic caught him again, jumping the pit effortlessly, and shot adrenaline through his veins and spurred his feet, and he ran again and crawled where he couldn’t run, and slithered where he couldn’t crawl. And at last the light came, ghostly at first but growing, and it was like a promise of resurrection from the night of death. The hunted man threw down the torch and ran toward the light.

  He stopped at the mouth of the tunnel, high above the little valley, and the sight
calmed him. The panic was gone, suddenly, and he couldn’t understand why it had ever driven him, and the long flight through the tunnel was like something that had happened to someone else. He was sane again.

  More than half the valley was in shadows. Soon the cliffs would rise up in front of the sun, and the valley would be dark, and after that the sky would begin to deepen and the night would come. By that time he must be out on the desert. Night would be his chance. Once it had been an enemy; now it would be a friend.

  Before dark he would have to be rested and sure of himself. His stomach complained. It must be fed. After getting away from the hunters, his body must take him far across the red-dust desert.

  Horn picked his way carefully down the uncertain, rocky slope. He pressed through the bushes to the little stream. His hands worked quickly. They fashioned snares out of vines and branches and notched twigs. He glanced occasionally at the slowly darkening sky, but it was empty. So far, the hunters hadn’t discovered this oasis.

  With a bundle of leaves, he brushed away the human traces around the snares and backed away up the icy stream. He stopped when he reached a pool, dammed behind a fallen tree trunk, packed leaves, and pebbles. Horn knelt and drank deeply and refilled his half-empty canteen.

  He stripped off his soaked boots and ragged clothes and plunged into the water. It bit into the cuts and bruises that scarred and mottled his chest and back, and it set his teeth to chattering in spite of a grim jaw. In a moment the shivers stopped, and his body began to glow as he splashed vigorously. Again and again he ducked his head under the water and came up shaking it from his hair in a flying spray.

  When he finally pulled himself out and rubbed himself dry with his ragged shirt, he felt renewed. He passed his hand reflectively over his beard, got a long pocket knife out of a pants pocket, and honed it against a smooth pebble. He hacked at the beard, honed the knife again, and in a few minutes his face was reasonably smooth. His chin and cheeks were pale against the dark tan of his face, and the unveiled mouth was surprisingly sensitive.

  Life surged powerfully through his body. With it came purpose and determination. He was clean again and young and strong and alive. He had done what he had set out to do, what he had been paid to do, what no one had thought possible. Maybe it hadn’t been a proud thing, to shoot a man from ambush, but Kohlnar hadn’t been innocent. There had been blood on his hands.

  Let all Eron come against him; he would survive, because survival is more than an instinct—it is a desire, and in him the desire was strong.

  These were the things he told himself as he strapped the heavy moneybelt around his waist, pulled on pants and boots, drew the still damp rags of the shirt around his shoulders, slipped on the cord of the pistol, lifted the canteen by its strap, and set out to inspect his snares.

  They were empty, all of them. The sun was gone, twilight was fading, and he would have to go hungry into the desert.

  He shrugged and followed the creek as it dwindled into a rivulet and almost disappeared close to the hole in the cliff wall. He crept through the small tunnel on hands and knees, annoyed by the way it seemed to whine, cautiously parted the bush at the far end, and peered into the lesser darkness. Here the whine was louder. It was not the tunnel; it was ships, many of them, in the sky above the desert.

  The lesser darkness was broken by patches of light. They moved aimlessly across the desert. Horn crawled out onto the flat rock and stood up in the night, his back pressed against the warmth of the rock face behind.

  The patches of light were almost square. They made a shifting, restless chessboard out of the desert: dark and light, light and dark, moving.…

  Horn threw himself down at the base of the cliff, huddling close to the bush, just before the searchlight passed over him. A second later the whine came down to him, and he watched the light sweep into the desert.

  Horn watched the crisscrossing lights, and there was a pattern. There was a consistency to the way the dark and light squares moved. The ships were using the sector principle. Hundreds of them swept the desert with eager, deadly fingers. Complicating the pattern were unassigned ships operating on a random-choice principle, lights on, lights off, darting here and there. There was no way of being certain exactly when a particular patch of desert would be safely dark or fatally brilliant.

  Yet there was a pattern, and the fact that Horn could find it was a commentary upon empire. Mass government is government by rule and regulation. Obedience and conformity are overriding virtues; initiative is punished more often than rewarded. There are prescribed procedures for conducting a search, and no man can be punished for choosing rules over reality.

  And yet, insofar as there is virtue in patterns, this was a good one. The sky whined with leashed desire, waiting to collapse on the hunted man. Horn crouched close to the protection of the bush, listening, studying the chessboard. He followed it on either side, far down the cliffs until it faded into distance and uncertainty. He could imagine what would happen if a sunbright beam chanced to pick him out.

  He might dodge it for a moment, running this way and that in sudden twists and turns, but the ships would converge, pool their brilliance, and lay out a huge daylit square upon the night desert. In that square would be death.

  He timed the passage of the ship in front of him, counting slowly to himself. When a random-flying ship crossed the pattern, he started to sprint, counting, choosing the safe, dark squares of the chessboard. Light and dark, light and dark. The patterns shifting, sweeping behind him. Veer this way, jump that way. Light and dark. Dark, dark. Jump!

  He had almost miscalculated the ship’s speed. It had come up behind him, and he had sailed into darkness just as the ship had turned upon another leg of its pattern. Horn picked himself up out of the dust and began studying the next pattern.

  Only after three lines of ships lay behind him did Horn grow discouraged. The chessboard still marched across the desert in front of him. There was no end to it. The sky still whined above his head. It would go on forever; the whine had become a part of him, fraying his nerves, nagging at his mind until thought was an effort.

  Then he heard the baying. A mounted party of hunters passed through a sweeping finger of light. The hunters circled there, back and forth, waiting for the man who was clever enough to pass the lights.

  A line of hunting dogs, hell-hounds, completely encircling the patterns of light. That was how Horn would have planned it. They would have their sectors, too. They would patrol them, relieved by fresh hunters and mounts when they grew tired, and if he managed to slip between them, they would quickly pick up his scent and be after him. How long could he evade them on foot?

  And beyond them, what? Another line of guards with ready guns? And beyond them another?

  The desert night was cool, but Horn was sweating. His situation was hopeless. One man can never hope to escape an empire, if the empire is determined to find him. Not here on the desert, where there was no place to hide. The daylight would be more merciless than the searchlights. With the daylight he was dead. With the daylight, they would scout the hills and send parties of men ferreting out the smallest hiding places. They would leave no crevice unexplored. An empire had to find the assassin.

  Horn realized then what he would have to do. A haystack is no place to hide a needle. The best place is among other needles. The best place to hide a grain of sand is on a beach. A man can only hide among other men. Horn knew where he would have to go.

  He started to turn—and the searching finger found him.

  It swept past. In that moment of passing, Horn sprinted. He sprinted away from the cliffs into the desert, tripped, and rolled in a choking cloud of dust down an arroyo wall. He landed, still running, but now the light was past and he was running in the opposite direction. He was running back toward the cliffs, back toward the mesa; he was running as if death pursued him.

  The whine grew louder, became a chorus. The lights swept in. Horn ran, pressed close to the arroyo wall. In the distan
ce the hounds began to bay. Horn ran a little faster, his breath coming into his lungs in great, burning gasps.

  The lights swept past him and coalesced into a square behind. It was a restless square, moving this way and that as it picked out nothing but desert and then the bell-throated hounds and their armed riders. The square broke apart impatiently and began a new pattern. It was smaller now, and the dark squares were smaller as the arroyo dwindled away to nothing and Horn was running on the flat desert again.

  He dodged and veered. Events were moving too swiftly now for thought and judgment. It was all instinct to pick out the square that would be dark next, instinct and luck as the squares shifted and merged and twisted. Instinct was right or luck held as the cliff face loomed up in front of Horn, and he threw himself in a heap at the base of it, and the lights roamed restlessly behind.

  Left or right? Horn chose the right, only because he had to choose one of them, knowing that the wrong choice would be his last. He crawled along the base of the rocks, freezing when a light swept close, hoping that he looked like a fallen rock.

  He crawled a long way, the baying of the hounds growing louder and urging him to speed he knew would be fatal, and the fear grew that he had turned in the wrong direction. But after an infinity he felt smooth stone under him, punishing his knees, and his left hand touched something that jabbed and rustled, and he slipped behind the bush and into the hole he had left—incredibly—only an hour ago.

  He came back into the valley as if into peace, more blessed because it could not last. The hounds would find his trail. His doubling back might confuse them, but their masters would soon discover that they were making a giant loop into the desert and back to the cliff, and they would find the hole behind the bush because it was the only concealment anywhere on that loop.

  He crawled beside the trickling stream for a moment, because there the bushes didn’t grow as thick, and then, slowly, he collapsed and rolled over on his back with a weariness that was infinite. Chased, hunted, he had come close to the end. The long journey was almost over.