The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond Hamilton

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СКАЧАТЬ experts. Over and over, for decades—and always they found the same thing. Landers and Saul could not possibly have killed MacDonald, and you were the only other human being there. Proof? I can show you barrels of it. And all of it proof that my father was a murderer.”

      He leaned a little toward Hyrst, and the tears ran down his lined, careworn face. He said, “All right, you’ve come back. Alive, still young. But I’m warning you. If you try again to get that Titanite, if you shame us all again after all this time, if you even come near us, I’ll kill you.”

      He went out. Hyrst sat, looking after him, and he thought that no man before him had ever felt what tore him now.

      Inside his mind came Shearing’s whisper, with a totally unexpected note of compassion. But some of us have, Hyrst. Welcome to the brotherhood. Welcome to the Legion of Lazarus.

      CHAPTER II

      Mars roared and glittered tonight. And how was a man to stand the faces and lights and sounds, when he had come back from the silence of eternity?

      Hyrst walked through the flaring streets of Syrtis City with slow and dragging steps. It was like being back on Earth. For this city was not really part of the old dead planet, of the dark barrens that rolled away beneath the night. This was the place of the rocket-men, the miners, the schemers, the workers, who had come from another, younger world. Their bars and entertainment houses flung a sun-like brilliance. Their ships, lifting majestically skyward from the distant spaceport, wrote their flaming sign on the sky. Only here and there moved one of the hooded, robed humanoids who had once owned this world.

      The next corner, said the whisper in Hyrst’s mind. Turn there. No, not toward the spaceport. The other way.

      Hyrst thought suddenly, “Shearing.”

      Yes?

      “I am being followed.”

      His physical ears heard nothing but the voices and music. His physical eyes saw only the street crowd. Yet he knew. He knew it by a picture that kept coming into his mind, of a blurred shape moving always behind him.

      Of course you’re being followed, came Shearing’s thought. I told you they’ve been waiting for you. This is the corner. Turn.

      Hyrst turned. It was a darker street, running away from the lights through black warehouses and on the labyrinthine monolithic houses of the humanoids.

      Now look back, Shearing commanded. No, not with your eyes! With your mind. Learn to use your talents.

      Hyrst tried. The blurred image in his mind came clearer, and clearer still, and it was a young man with a vicious mouth and flat uncaring eyes. Hyrst shivered. “Who is he?”

      He works for the men who have been waiting for you, Hyrst. Bring him this way.

      “This—way?”

      Look ahead. With your mind. Can’t you learn?

      Stung to sudden anger, Hyrst flung out a mental probe with a power he hadn’t known he possessed. In a place of total darkness between two warehouses ahead, he saw a tall man lounging at his ease. Shearing laughed.

      Yes, it’s me. Just walk past me. Don’t hurry.

      Hyrst glanced backward, mentally at the man following him through the shadows. He was closer now, and quite silent. His face was tight and secret. Hyrst thought, How do I know this Shearing isn’t in it with him, taking me into a place where they can both get at me—

      He went past the two warehouses and he did not turn his head but his mind saw Shearing waiting in the darkness. Then there was a soft, shapeless sound, and he turned and saw Shearing bending over a huddled form.

      “That was unkind of you,” said Shearing, speaking aloud but not loudly.

      Hyrst, still shaking, said, “But not exactly strange. I’ve never seen you before. And I still don’t know what this is all about.”

      Shearing smiled, as he knelt beside the prone, unmoving body. Even here in the shadows, Hyrst could see him with these new eyes of the mind. Shearing was a big man. His hair was grizzled along the sides of his head, and his eyes were dark and very keen. He reached out one hand and turned the head of the prone young man, and they looked at the lax, loose face.

      “He’s not dead?” said Hyrst.

      “Of course not. But it will be a while before he wakes.”

      “But who is he?”

      Shearing stood up. “I never saw him before. But I know who he’s working for.”

      * * * *

      Hyrst flung a sudden question at Shearing, and almost without thinking he followed it to surprise the answer in Shearing’s mind. The question was, Who are you working for? And the answer was a woman, a tall and handsome woman with angry eyes, standing against a drift of stars. There was a ship, all lonely on a dark plain, and she was pointing to it, and somehow Hyrst knew that it was vitally important to her, and to Shearing, and perhaps even to himself. But before he could do more than register this fleeting vision on his own consciousness, Shearing’s mind slammed shut with exactly the same violent effect as a door slammed in his face. He reeled back, throwing up his arms in a futile but instinctive gesture, and Shearing said angrily,

      “You’re getting too good. I’ll give you a social hint—it’s customary to knock before you enter.”

      Hyrst said, still holding the pieces of his head together, “All right—sorry. So who is she?”

      “She’s one of us. She wants what we want.”

      “I want only to find out who murdered MacDonald!”

      “You want more than that, Hyrst, though you don’t know it yet. But MacDonald’s murderer is part of what we’re after.”

      He took Hyrst’s arm. “We don’t have long. Thanks to my guidance, you slipped them all except this one. But they’ll be hounding after our trail very quickly.”

      They went on along the shadowed street. The glare of the lights died back behind them, and they moved in darkness with only the keen stars to watch them, and the cold, gritty wind blowing in from the barrens, and the dark door-ways of the mastaba-like monolithic houses of the humanoids staring at them like sightless eyes. Hyrst looked up at the bright, tiny moon that crept amid the stars, and a deep shaking took him as he thought of men lying up there in the deathly sleep, of himself lying there year after year.…

      “In here,” said Shearing. It was one of the frigid, musty tombs that the humanoids called home. It was dark and there was nothing in it at all. “We can’t risk a light. We don’t need it, anyway.”

      They sat down. Hyrst said desperately, “Listen, I want to know some things. Exactly what are we doing here?”

      Shearing answered deliberately, “We are hiding from those who want you, and we are waiting for a chance to go to our friends.”

      “Our friends? Your friends, maybe. That woman—I don’t know her, and—”

      “Now you listen, Hyrst. I’ll tell you this much about us now. We’re Lazarites, СКАЧАТЬ