The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond Hamilton

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СКАЧАТЬ are Lazarites among them, too. Not many, but a few. You don’t know us, you don’t know them. Do you want to leave me and go back out and let them have you?”

      Hyrst remembered the adder-like face of the young man who had come after him through the shadows. After a long moment he said, “Well. But what are you after?”

      “The thing that MacDonald was killed for, fifty years ago.”

      Hyrst said, “The Titanite? They said it hadn’t ever been found. But how it could have remained hidden so long—”

      “I want you,” Shearing said, “to tell me all about how MacDonald died. Everything you can remember.”

      Hyrst asked eagerly, “You think we can find out who killed him? After all this time? God, if we could—my son—”

      “Quiet, Hyrst. Go ahead and tell me. Not in words. Just remember what happened, and I’ll get it.”

      Yet, by sheer lifetime habit, Hyrst could not remember without first putting it into words in his own mind, as they two sat in the cold, whispering darkness.

      “There were four of us out there on Titan, you must already know that. And only four—”

      * * * *

      Four men. And one was named MacDonald, an engineer, a secretive, selfish and enormously greedy man. MacDonald was the man who found a fortune, and kept it secret, and died.

      Landers was one. A lean, brown, lively man, an excellent physicist with a friendly manner and no obvious ambitions.

      Saul was one, and he was big and blond and quiet, a good drinking companion, a good geologist, a lover of good music. If he had any darker passions, he kept them hidden.

      Hyrst was the fourth man, and the only one of the four still living.…

      He remembered now. He saw the black and bitter crags of Titan stark against the glory of the Rings, and he saw two figures moving across a plain of methane snow, their helmets gleaming in the Saturn-light. Behind them in the plain were the flat, half-buried concrete structures of the little refinery, and all around them were the spidery roads where the big half-tracs dragged their loads of uranium ore from the enchaining mountains.

      The two men were quarrelling.

      “You’re angry,” MacDonald was saying, “because it was I who found it.”

      “Listen,” Hyrst said. “We’re sick, all three of us, of hearing you brag about it.”

      “I’ll bet you are,” said MacDonald smugly. “The first find of a Titanite pocket for years. The rarest, costliest stuff in the System. If you know the way they’ve been bidding to buy it from me—”

      “I do know,” Hyrst said. “You’ve done nothing for weeks but give forth mysterious hints—”

      “And you don’t like that,” MacDonald said. “Of course you don’t! It’s no part of our refinery deal, it’s mine, I’ve got it and it’s hidden where nobody can find it till I sell it. Naturally, you don’t like that.”

      “All right,” said Hyrst. “So the Titanite find is all yours. You’re still a partner in the refinery, remember. And you’ve still got an obligation to the rest of us, so you can damn well get in and do your job.”

      “Don’t worry. I’ve always done my job.”

      “More or less,” said Hyrst. “For your information, I’ve seen better engineers in grade-school. There’s Number Three hoist. It’s been busted for a week. Now let’s get in there and fix it.”

      The two figures in Hyrst’s memory toiled on, out of the area of roads to the edge of the landing field, where the ships come to take away the refined uranium. Number Three hoist rose in a stiff, ugly column from the ground. It was supposed to fetch the uranium up from the underground storage bins and load it into a specially-built hot-tank ship in position at the dock. But Number Three had balked and refused to perform its task. In this completely automated plant, men were only important when something went wrong. Now something was wrong, and it was up to MacDonald, the mechanical engineer, and Hyrst, the electronics man, to set it right.

      Hyrst opened the hatch, and they climbed the metal stairs to the upper chamber. Number Three’s brain was here, its scanners, its tabulating and recording apparatus, its signal system. A red light pulsated on a panel, alone in a string of white ones.

      “Trouble’s in the hoist-mechanism,” said Hyrst. “That’s your department.” He smiled and sat down on a metal bench in the center of the room, with his back to the stair. “D Level.”

      MacDonald grumbled, and went to a skeletal cage built over a round segment of the floor. Various tools were clipped to the ribs of the cage. MacDonald pulled an extra rayproof protectall over his vac-suit and stepped inside the cage, pressing a button. The cage dropped, into a circular shaft that paralleled the hoist right down to the feeder mechanism.

      Hyrst waited. Inside his helmet he could hear MacDonald breathing and grumbling as he worked away, repairing a break in the belt. He did not hear anything else. Then something happened, so swiftly that he had never had any memory of it, and some time later he came to and looked for MacDonald. The cage was way down at the bottom of the shaft and MacDonald was in it, with a very massive pedestal-block on top of him. The block had been unbolted from the floor and dragged to the edge of the shaft, and it could not possibly have been an accident that it tumbled in, between the wide-apart ribs of the cage.

      And that’s how MacDonald died, Hyrst thought—and so I died. They said I forced the secret of his Titanite find out of him, and then killed him.

      Shearing asked swiftly, “MacDonald never gave you any hint of where he’d hidden the Titanite?”

      “No,” said Hyrst. He paused, and then said, “It’s the Titanite you’re after?”

      Shearing answered carefully. “In a way, yes. But we didn’t kill MacDonald for it. Those who did kill him are the men who are after you now. They’re afraid you might lead us to the stuff.”

      Hyrst swore, shaking with sudden anger. “Damn it, I won’t be treated like a child. Not by you, by anyone. I want—”

      “You want the men who killed MacDonald,” said Shearing. “I know. I remember what was in your mind when you met your son.”

      A weakness took Hyrst and he leaned his forehead against the cold stone wall.

      “I’m sorry,” said Shearing. “But we want what you want—and more. So much more that you can’t dream it. You must trust us.”

      “Us? That woman?”

      * * * *

      Once again in Shearing’s mind Hyrst saw the woman with her head against the stars, and the ship looming darkly. He saw the woman much more clearly, and she was like a fire, burning with anger, burning with a single-minded, dedicated purpose. She was beautiful, and frightening.

      “She, and others,” said Shearing. “Listen. We must go soon. We’re to be picked up, secretly. Will you trust us—or would you rather trust yourself to those who are hunting you?”

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