His whole plan was in ruins, for it was still hours till the GC cruisers would arrive and he did not now think they were likely to live that long. Yet how could he reproach Sharr, when she had risked her own safety to find them?
“You shouldn’t have—”, he began, and then he stopped. Sharr’s face had gone white, and her eyes, looking over his shoulder into the shadowy cell behind him, were distended. Her mouth opened on a scream.
He knew instantly that she had seen Rrulu in the shadows back there, and that the totally unexpected sight of the big, spidery K’harn was the cause of her horror.
Evers’ hand clapped over her mouth, stifling the scream. He gripped her and spoke in her ear.
“He is a friend. A friend. One of the K’harn I told you about. A prisoner like myself.”
He did not trust her until her efforts to squirm loose and screech quieted down. Then he removed his hand from her mouth.
Sharr shivered, but kept quiet. Only her eyes never left the unhuman figure of the K’harn.
Evers felt the desperation of defeat. They might get out and hide for a little while but their escape would soon be discovered and they would be caught long before GC came, and Schuyler would win after all.
“Damn it, no!” he told himself. “There must be some way to beat him, even if we go under.”
Rrulu moved restlessly forward, and Sharr shivered. And of a sudden, Evers seized on a possibility. It might be a poor one, but it was the only one left.
He said swiftly to Rrulu, “You said you could adapt the instruments of Knowledge of the K’harn for destruction.”
“Yes!” said Rrulu, a somber flash lighting his eyes. “In all this time alone I have calculated the way to do that — something no K’harn ever thought of before.”
“There are many instruments looted from your Houses of Knowledge, in that warehouse,” Evers said. “Could you use them? How long would it take?”
“Not long, if the right instruments are there,” said the K’harn. “If there is a synthesizer there I could reverse the polarity of its forces and—”
Evers interrupted. “All right. We’ll try it. What I want you to do, if you can, is to cause as much destruction as possible here. Then, even if they get us, GC will surely investigate what’s going on here on Arkar.”
He told Sharr rapidly then, and added, “I think we’re gone geese anyway, but if Rrulu can do some spectacular damage, it’ll surely blow the lid off things here. Where’s Lindeman?”
“In the next room,” she whispered. “I did not know which you were in, I had to open them all. A six-year-old child of Valloa would laugh at such locks.” She added, “They didn’t hurt you?”
There was something in her face as she asked the last, and Evers bent forward and kissed her. He took the gun from her hand and went out into the bright corridor.
Rrulu had said there was always a guard on duty but there was no one in the corridor now. Evers hastened to the next door, with Sharr trailing close behind him and looking back fearfully at the K’harn following them.
The door was closed but not locked. He stepped inside and stopped, startled.
Lindeman lay on a cot, stirring and moaning a little as the effect of the stunner began to wear off.
On the floor with his face upward lay one of the tough-faced men.
“He was in the corridor when I came down,” Sharr said. “I shot him. I dragged him in here in case anyone came down.”
Evers thought to himself that Sharr was a true daughter of barbaric Valloa. She had given the man a full-strength beam. Remembering Straw, he could not be sorry.
He sprang forward and began to chafe Lindeman’s wrists and smack his cheeks, trying to bring him back to consciousness.
Lindeman moaned, “Damn you, Schuyler.” But he did not open his eyes.
“We can’t bring him around,” Evers said. “We’ll have to carry him, for we’ve got little time.”
Sharr suddenly turned her head sharply; and then ran to the door.
“There is no time at all,” she whispered. “Listen!”
CHAPTER VIII
Evers sprang to the door, snatching out his weapon. He pushed Sharr back into the room, and stood in the doorway listening.
Boots were clumping down the stair at the end of the hallway. It was only one man, and as his feet came into view on the stair, the man was saying loudly,
“Roy, I—”
At that moment the man’s face came into view as he descended the stair. It was the other tough-faced man. Alarm flashed into his battered face as he saw no one in the corridor.
Before he could move, Evers stepped out into the corridor with his energy-gun levelled.
“It’s on lethal,” Evers said. “Keep your hands away from your sides. Walk this way.”
The tough-faced man looked at him. He was estimating his chances. Whatever was in Evers’ face seemed to be enough to convince him that his chances were not good. He spread his arms out and walked down the corridor.
Sharr, keeping well out of Evers’ line of fire, reached out and took the weapon from the man’s belt. Evers gestured to the open doorway of the cell.
“In there.”
The tough-faced man walked in. He glanced swiftly at Rrulu, crouched burning-eyed and grotesque and terrible, and at Lindeman, lying on the cot. Then he looked at the man on the floor, at his blank face and sightless eyes.
“There’s Roy,” said Evers. “He’s dead. You’ll likely be right with him in another minute.”
The man looked from the figure on the floor to Evers, and his face became gray and sick.
“You can live,” said Evers. “We’re going out of here, and we don’t want to be seen. You lead us out and if no one sees us, you live.”
The touch-faced man was sweating. He said hoarsely, “There’s no way I can do that.”
“That’s too bad for you,” said Evers.
“Kill him,” said Rrulu in his hissing speech.
The man could not understand the words but he understood the menace in the tone and in the unhuman, flaring eyes. He seemed to wilt.
“There’s a stair up to the back car-park, for unloading stuff,” he said.
“That’ll do fine,” said Evers. He spoke to the K’harn in his own language. “Bring my friend, we are going out.” And then to the tough-faced man he said, “All right. Keep right ahead of me.”
They started down the corridor in a strange little procession, the man in front, Evers behind him with the gun in his back, the red-haired Valloan girl and then the big, spidery K’harn, carrying the half-conscious Lindeman by one limb as easily as a doll, and walking with a scuttling glide on the other three.
Their unhappy guide went past the bottom of the stair, and opened a door beyond it. There was a ramp there, leading upward. It ended in another closed door. The tough-faced man swung the door outward and started through.
He suddenly moved very fast. He sprang out and at the same time swung the door violently back to hit Evers in the face.
Evers was taken off guard, yet the trick did not succeed. The door hit his extended foot and that checked its swing. Instantly Evers lunged through it.
Out here in the open, he dared not risk firing a crackling blast from the gun. Instead, as he swung, he raised the weapon and brought its barrel down on the tough man’s head.
He was just in time. A loud yell that had been in the man’s throat came out as a grunt, and he collapsed.
Evers dragged him into the concealment of nearby dandelion shrubs, and then looked around. They were in the shadow of the metal castle’s great wall, near the rear. Through the darkness he descried two parked vehicles under towering lily-trees farther back — a car and two tracs.