“We found the one thing we didn’t expect,” said Evers. “We found that we weren’t the first Earthmen to reach Andromeda, after all.”
She stared. “Not the first? But who was there before you?”
He said, “Schuyler and his men were there before us!”
He stumbled on back toward the cabin.
CHAPTER IV
Evers dreamed as the ship fled on, and in his sleep a nightmare memory and vision rose before him.
For again he seemed to be in Andromeda galaxy, their little ship forging through mighty halls and corridors of suns, on and on through that solemn vastness of space and fire and strangeness. And then they were landing upon a world, in a city. Under the orange sun it flashed and glittered, an unearthly metropolis of plastic and silvery metal, laced with slender shining cables upon which swiftly came and went forms that were not human.
Destruction had been in that city. Great scorched slashes had been torn in the alien buildings, and many of the shining cables hung broken and useless, and there was a whispering susurration in the air, a sound of grief.
A face rose before Evers, white and hairless and strange, with two enormous dark and shining eyes that were bent upon him in an accusing gaze. From the little mouth came speech, and Evers heard the accusation and he cried out a denial.
“No, no! We did not slay the K’harn!”
He woke on his own yell, and he was sweating in his bunk in the little cabin of the Phoenix, and Sharr was bending over him, her green eyes wide and startled.
She said, “I came — you were yelling—”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said. He unfastened his straps and sat. on the edge of his bunk, still shaking.
He looked forward toward the control-room. He could see Lindeman asleep in one chair, his monkey-like head lolling, and Straw was in the pilot-chair. They were still in overdrive.
The red-haired Valloan girl was looking down at him puzzledly, unconsciously rubbing her left ankle with her bare right foot. It was a ridiculously childish gesture for one who, in that costume, was obviously not at all a child.
“Who are the K’harn?” she asked.
Evers looked at her. “I must really have been yelling.” He said, broodingly, “They’re far away. They live on the outer worlds of Andromeda galaxy.”
Sharr stared at him with a touch of awe in her eyes. “Then there are people there?”
Evers looked up at her. “I’m not sure you’d call them people. They’re not human, hardly even humanoid — yet they’re what the human seed might have developed into in another universe. Four-limbed, strange, but — yes, they’re people. Peaceful, intelligent people, who never deserved what Schuyler brought them.”
She shook her red head wonderingly. “I still can’t believe — how could Schuyler and his men get to that other galaxy before you, and no one ever suspect? How long has he been going there?”
Evers thought. “As near as we can figure it out, Schuyler’s task-forces have been secretly visiting Andromeda galaxy for two years. He has a lot of scientific brains in his pay. Some of them must have figured out how to speed up the overdrive, just as Lindeman did — it was always theoretically possible. With his money and facilities, it’d be quite easy for Schuyler to fit ships with the new drive and send them to Andromeda in total secrecy. To maintain that secrecy, they’ve been waiting to kill us when we got back.”
“But why? What are they doing there?”
“They’re stealing, that’s what they’re doing,” Evers said grimly. “The K’harn, the inhabitants of the Andromeda fringe worlds, are a pretty advanced folk scientifically. Their cities are rich in metals that are rare or unknown here, scientific devices developed along lines unthought of by us, whole treasures of alien knowledge. But, as I said, the K’harn are a peaceful, cooperative folk. War and weapons they don’t know about. It’s been easy for Schuyler’s ships, equipped with heavy weapons, to systematically loot the K’harn cities.”
Sharr’s eyes flashed. “Earthmen — they’re all the same. Why don’t they stay on their own world!”
“I’m an Earthman,” Evers reminded her. “So are my friends. We’re not helping Schuyler, we’re trying to stop what he’s doing.”
He added somberly, “But I don’t blame you. The K’harn thought the same thing when we landed first on one of their worlds. Schuyler’s task-force had been there months before. They thought we were more of the same. They tried to kill us — they did wound Straw — before we made them understand we knew nothing about it.
“We stayed there. The K’harn taught us their language. They were desperately anxious to find out where we came from and where Schuyler’s ships came from, anxious to know if there would be any more marauders from the sky.”
Evers laughed, a jarring sound.
“And when in turn we learned from them what had happened, we couldn’t believe it at first. We’d been so sure we were the first Earthmen to reach Andromeda.
And we found that others had been there for a long time, looting. We went to other K’harn worlds, saw what Schuyler’s men had done. It was one of their wrecked, discarded ships that told us it was Schuyler’s men. We saw enough destruction, enough dead K’harn, to do us. We headed back home, to tell the whole galaxy what they were doing out there. But we knew we’d never get a chance to tell much unless we landed on a world like Valloa and got word secretly to the Council.”
“And I trapped and betrayed you!” cried Sharr. She said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I’d help you stop the evil they’re doing, if I could.”
Evers rose to his feet. “The only way to stop it is to drag it out for everyone to see. That’s why we’re going to Arkar.”
He went forward to the control-room, Sharr trailing after him. They were still in overdrive and the windows still showed only a formless grayness streaked with crazy squiggles of light. In the tank-chart, the blip that was the Phoenix was crawling through a swarm of light-flecks that were suns. Beyond this small Rim cluster was an isolated minor sun with one planet — Arkar.
Few men in the history of the galaxy had ever owned a planet. Schuyler did, legally. He had applied for a perpetual lease on Arkar. It was then an arid, lifeless globe, a desert of dust, with only crumbling stone ruins of infinite age to show that men had once lived there before their world dried and died. There was no one else who wanted the deathly place, and the lease was granted. Promptly some of the Schuyler millions had been poured into it, setting up great electronic water-synthesizers, bringing in vegetation, levelling a spaceport and building the castle that was Schuyler’s home. Arkar, thus Earth-conditioned, had become a flowering, livable world — and it was Schuyler’s world.
Straw looked up at him with a mirthless smile on his round face. “Your little plan is working just fine, Vance. See back there?”
Evers looked at the right-hand edge of the tank. Three blips, widely separated from each other, were crawling through the wilderness of suns. Their courses converged toward the Phoenix.
“GC’s big radar station on Tinno must have picked us up, right away.” said Straw. “We can’t use the inter-galactic drive in here. They’ll soon catch up to us.”
Evers calculated mentally. “It’s cutting things’close, but we should reach Arkar at least twelve hours before them. I’ll take over.”
Straw got up, stretching his towering young figure and tenderly feeling his bandaged arm, as Evers took the pilot-chair.
Lindeman woke up, and looked at them with eyes still red-rimmed from fatigue and sleep. He studied the tank.