Star Bridge Part 22

"Bring them out here," Duchane was saying. "We'll need some of them to show us the controls. Tie them up...."

They would revive, Horn thought with vast relief as he slipped through the doorway into the large, rock-walled room. All around it, stone panels had opened outward. Behind them were indicators, gauges, switches, screens. Doors opened off the room into other lighted rooms. The room was filled with plastic and metal-clothed men. They were busy. He was one among many; he was unnoticed.

"Kill that one and that one," Duchane said casually. "They won't be useful...."

Horn looked around trying to locate the man. He noticed that the unconscious men were being dragged toward a distant part of the room. Horn circled toward it, threading his way among overturned tables and chairs and Duchane's own men. He located Duchane at last, saw the heavy, dominant face within the plastic bubble, and slipped closer.

Duchane glanced at him curiously as Horn approached and looked away as another man came up with a burden in his arms.

"Ah-h-h!" he breathed. "Wendre!" He looked down into the peaceful, golden face; the red-gold hair dripped like blood over the metal arm of the man who held her. "Treat her with care! I'll have use..."

Horn was behind Duchane now. His gun was a metal finger in Duchane's back, but the new General Manager of Eron could not feel it.

"You'll have use for nothing," Horn broke in. "I'm behind you, Duchane. Don't move! Not if you want to live."

"I knew that face," Duchane said wonderingly.

"Put her down," Horn said slowly. "Put her down carefully. If anyone moves, your master dies-and you know how long you will last then."

They stood like metal statues, all but the man who held Wendre. He started to bend toward the floor.

"Kill her!" Duchane screamed, throwing himself forward and to one side. "Kill him! We can't stop-"

He was twisting in the air, trying to bring his gun around, but the man who held Wendre was tilting his right hand under her body, bringing up the muzzle of the gun.

Horn's left hand cut off Duchane's screams by smas.h.i.+ng the helmet. He was taking a breath; his face went blank and limp. The crash in the helmet was thunderous, but other thunder followed it so quickly that it was like a continuous roll. A hole appeared suddenly in the helmet of the man holding Wendre and was duplicated in his forehead, blackly. He kept on bending and fell slowly over the unconscious girl.

Horn never had time to watch the results. His gun was sweeping the room in an arc, spitting projectiles, and then he was diving through the air toward the protection of an overturned table, which was no protection at all, but concealment at least. And there was someone in the distant doorway, more than one, but the one in front was white-haired Sair, and his index finger was spraying bullets with incredible accuracy. Men were toppling, and the intercom was deafening.

And the room suddenly went black.

THE HISTORY.

The unpredictable....

There are always pebbles to make us stumble, sudden winds to chill our hopes or shred our fears, earthquakes to tumble our plans down around us.... Even the most careful a.n.a.lyses of the shrewdest historians go awry.

No one can predict the unpredictable.

Perhaps it is for the best. When life becomes predictable, it will be life no longer. Only the inanimate repeats itself. And even there, if one digs deep enough, one reaches a level where the principle of uncertainty makes prediction futile.

No one could have predicted longevity. No one, predicting it, could have calculated its effects. It was outside experience. Historians strive for the long view, but they ignore it in their extrapolations.

A man who could plan in terms of centuries and cultures and races-and live to see those plans reach fruition-would be an incalculable force....

20.

PRIME MOVER.

Horn opened his eyes. The light was gentle and golden. It s.h.i.+fted. He felt something cool on his face, cool and wet. And then he realized that the light wasn't golden; it was only a reflection. There was a face above him; the face was golden. He should know that face. Even tired and without makeup it was beautiful.

He sat up quickly. His head reeled. Pain stabbed through it. He leaned back against the rough wall and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was still there.

"You'll be all right in a moment," Wendre said. "The pain goes away."

"What happened?" Horn asked dully.

"Duchane's forces were wiped out, but you had your helmet punctured by a stray bullet. You breathed some gas."

Horn looked down the corridor. There were men lying along the walls, some dead, some wounded, some unconscious. "Sair?" he asked.

"He's fine. They're working now to clean up the last of the resistance. He's a wonderful old man."

Horn remembered him standing in the doorway, throwing bullets into the armored bodies of Duchane's men, not missing a shot. "You don't know the half of it," he said wryly.

"There'll still be sporadic fighting and rioting for days, he says, but he thinks the organized resistance will be finished shortly."

"Duchane?" Horn asked.

"He's alive. They've put him in a cell." She nodded toward the far end of the corridor. It was straight until it faded in darkness.

"I was taken to Vantee," Horn said.

Wendre seemed to understand that he was explaining his absence. "I know. Sair told me. He told me how you escaped, too. It was brilliant, daring-"

"A man does what he has to do," Horn said, shrugging.

"Why did you have to do it?"

Horn looked up at her face, looked into her eyes staring at him curiously. This time he had no urge to look away. Whatever men mean by "love," he felt for Wendre. It wasn't just the desire to possess, though that was part of it. It was a need to see that no sorrow ever touched her. "I thought you might need me," he said steadily.

Her eyes fell away. "Do you expect me to believe that? When you killed my father?"

"I didn't know you then."

"Why did you do it?" she said suddenly.

"For money," Horn said.

"I was afraid of that. It might have been different if you had done it for revenge or an ideal or any pa.s.sion-"

She was turning away. Horn caught her hand impetuously. "Wait! I'm not asking for anything except understanding." She stopped and turned back. "Your father was not a man except to the few people who knew him personally. To everyone else he was, at the most, a symbol, at the least, an inst.i.tution. Symbols and inst.i.tutions don't bleed or suffer; they are things to be shaped, changed, shattered as the need arises. By becoming General Manager of Eron, your father gave up his humanity.

"That's part of it," Horn continued, "but only a small part. To understand the rest, you have to understand my past." Slowly at first and then more rapidly as the words came to him, he told Wendre about the Cl.u.s.ter and his life there, about the way he had been hired to a.s.sa.s.sinate her father, about his difficulties in reaching Earth and then in reaching the mesa, about Wu and Lil, about his arrival on Eron and what had happened afterward. She listened attentively, soberly, her head turned away a little.

"But why I did it," he finished, "I really can't explain because I don't understand it myself. There was the money, but that wasn't important in itself. It was only a symbol of what a man can take from the universe if he is strong enough and clever enough. All my life I'd done that and now I had a chance to do something that would really prove to myself and everyone that I was stronger and smarter.... It wasn't the shooting, you see, it was the getting there and outwitting the people who tried to stop me and overcoming the obstacles, and then when I had him, there in my sights, I had to shoot, because I'd taken money to do it.

"But don't ask me why. I don't know. It was another man, and I can't understand him. Men change, of course. That's axiomatic: a man is never the same two seconds in a row. And when a man lives hard and lives through what I've lived through these last days, he changes fast and he changes a lot. I'm not trying to absolve myself. This hand did it; this finger pulled the trigger."

She shook her head as if she couldn't understand. "To kill an unarmed man, cold-bloodedly, without warning-"

"Unarmed!" Horn exclaimed. "With thousands of guards, dozens of s.h.i.+ps, and the firepower concentrated there! And what of the billions of people your father killed, cold-bloodedly, without warning- No! I don't mean that. When a man lives by his wits, you see, it's him against the universe, and he gets to thinking that he's all alone; everyone's all alone, working against the rest like dogs fighting for a bone. But it isn't true. We're linked together, all of us, just as the worlds are linked together by the Tubes of Eron."

"It's no use, don't you see?" she said pa.s.sionately. "I've got to hate you. Nothing can change the fact that you killed my father."

"Then why did you leave instructions to turn the control room over to me?"

"Because you were right-about Eron being rotten. Once, perhaps, the Empire was worthwhile; once it had something to give to humanity. Now it was only taking. The only way I could save anything that was good about Eron was to help pull it down; you said that only Sair could save it. I thought Sair was dead, and I thought perhaps I could make up for that, a little. If you were right about that I thought you might be right about other things."

"I see," Horn said. He pushed himself up slowly. His head had stopped aching. He started walking down the corridor and bent to scoop up a pistol that a dead man would never use again.

"Where are you going?" Wendre asked.

He looked around to see her walking beside him. "I'm going to talk to Duchane."

"Why?"

"There are two things I want to find out: who hired me and who has the secret of the Tubes."

"And the person who hired you had to know my father's plans at the time of the surrender on Quarnon Four. I told you I was the only person who knew them. Why didn't you suspect me?"

"I did," Horn said, "for a moment."

"Why don't you suspect me now?"

He glanced at her quickly and away. "I believe you."

"I'll go with you," she said hurriedly. "Maybe I can help."

"You don't have to."

"I owe you something. You saved my life three times."

"The first two don't count. One was by instinct, the other by strategy."

They stopped talking as they approached the cells. Horn recognized them; he had been behind one of these barred doors not many days ago. Behind one of them was Duchane, one-time Director of Security, one-time General Manager of Eron, prisoner. He leaned against the back wall, his face dark and thoughtful, his arms folded across his chest. He looked up as Wendre approached the door and Horn stayed back beyond recognition in the shadows. Duchane's lip curled.

"The only thing worse than a renegade is a civilized woman who has gone native," he said. "I hope you have pleasant memories of the way you survived the downfall of the greatest empire man has ever known-and how you helped bring it down."

"I won't argue with you," Wendre said quietly. "You wouldn't understand actions not motivated by self-interest."

"With what I've seen of fear and cowardice and treachery in the last few days," Duchane said bitterly, "I'm glad for the first time that I'm not of the pure golden blood."

"You're not?" Wendre exclaimed. "Then that explains-"

"What?" Duchane asked violently.

"Your methods," Wendre murmured.

"Do you know what it's like to be all Eronian except a minute fraction and have that imperceptible dilution bar you from all you want? Do you know what it is to have strength and ability and courage and be forbidden to use them because a remote ancestor was careless? Do you know what it is to try to pa.s.s and wonder, always, when the truth may spring upon you and tear away everything you have won?

"Methods!" Duchane exclaimed. "Yes, I had my methods, and they worked. They should; I learned them from your father. Nothing is important but success; means are only stepping stones to goals. You can't imagine what I had to do to get where I wanted." His face darkened, remembering. "I ordered my mother's death; she was a dangerous link to my past. But it didn't matter. It made me General Manager of Eron."

"For a few days," Wendre said. "Your methods made the downfall of the Empire inevitable. More than anyone else, you were the one who destroyed it. Was it worthwhile-for a few days?"

"Better to rule for a few days," Duchane said proudly, "than to serve for a lifetime."

"You wouldn't have ruled long in any case," Horn said, speaking for the first time, "without the secret of the Tubes."

Duchane peered futilely into the shadows. "That's true," he said slowly. He looked back at Wendre. "But you would have given it to me. You would have fought me and suffered but in the end you would have told."

"I couldn't. I didn't know it."

"You had to," Duchane said bewilderedly. "You were pure blood; it would have worked for you. And Kohlnar must have told you-"

"It didn't work for me," Wendre said slowly, "and he told me nothing more than you were told. Perhaps he didn't know either. Perhaps n.o.body knew. It was a joke, a joke on the Empire, but a bigger joke on the Golden Folk. We were so proud and secure in our secret, and we never had it."

"It's a lie!" Duchane protested. "Kohlnar knew. He had to know-"

"It was a mistake then," Horn said quickly, recognizing that Duchane was telling the truth, "having the old man killed."

"I didn't!" Duchane came forward, grabbed the bars, peered between them. "Oh, I thought of it. But it was too dangerous. I was bound to be suspected- Who are you!"

"The a.s.sa.s.sin," Horn said softly.

"Then you know I didn't do it!" Duchane said violently, pulling on the bars that separated them. "You know who hired you-"

"But I don't." Horn stepped forward so that the light fell across his face.

Recognition was instantaneous. Duchane fell back several paces. "You! The a.s.sa.s.sin. The man who sneaked behind me a little while ago. The guard who was with Matal. That's fantastic. And it wasn't Matal. Matal was dead. It looked like Matal, but it couldn't have been. Dead men don't walk. Fantastic!" His eyes slitted thoughtfully; they opened again. "You were with him; who was he?"

"I don't know that, either," Horn said. "What about Fenelon and Ronholm?"

"Oh, they're dead; they're dead," Duchane tossed off absently. "I asked the Index that question. It gave me some very interesting data. Reports of dead men walking and two living men being in two places at the same time. All of the men were of the same general build: short and fat.

"The prototype was a thief, a ragged old man seen frequently with animal companions. He appeared here and there, all over the Empire. He has been imprisoned countless times, and he has always escaped immediately. The record goes back a long way"-Duchane was coming forward, his right hand moving toward the inside of his packet-"right to the beginning of-"

"Look out!" someone shouted. "He's got a gun!"

The pistol in Horn's hand reacted almost with a life of its own. It jerked up and spat silently. Duchane gasped. His eyes looked past them, wide and staring, as his hand slowly slipped away from his jacket. He folded quietly to the floor beside the bars.

"Killing," Wendre said dully, "killing. Do you always have to be killing?" She turned, her head bent, and walked quickly away.