Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack. Marion Zimmer Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ of your men. He must have found the hidden door. If only he is still sane, we have a bare chance. ...

      “Stop there,” Montray ordered curtly.

      “Stop there,” echoed a harsh wild voice, and the disheveled figure of John Reade, hatless, his jacket charred, appeared in the doorway. “Andrew!” His distorted shout broke into a sobbing gasp of relief, and he pitched headlong into Andrew’s arms. “Andy, thank God you’re here! They—shot me—”

      Andrew eased him gently to the ground. Montray bent over the old man, urging, “Tell us what happened, John.” “Shot in the side—Andy you were right—something got

      Spade first, then Kater fired the tent—Spade rushed him, shot Mike Fairbanks—then—then, Andy, it got me, it sneaked inside me, inside my head when I wasn’t looking, inside my head—”

      His” head lolled on Andrew’s shoulder.

      Montray let go his wrist with a futile gesture. “He’s hurt pretty bad. Delirious.”

      “His head’s as clear as mine. He’s fainted, that’s all,” Andrew protested. “If we bring him around, he can tell us—”

      “He’ll be in no shape to answer questions,” said the scientist from Dupont, very definitely, “not for a long time. Montray, round up the men; we’ve got to get out of here in a hurry—”

      “Look out!” shouted somebody. A pistol shot crashed and the scream of an injured man raised wild echoes. Andrew felt his heart suck and turn over; then he suddenly sank into blindness and felt himself leap to his feet and run toward the voices. Kamellin had taken over!

      Spade Hansen, tottering on his feet, stumbled toward them. His shirt hung raggedly in charred fragments. Through some alien set of senses, like seeing double, Andrew sensed the presence of another, one of Kamellin’s kind.

      If I can get through to him—”

      Montray cocked, levelled his pistol.

      “Hansen!” His voice cracked a whip, “stand where you are!”

      Spade yelled something.

      “Po’ki hai marrai nic Mahari—”

       “You fool! They are afraid of us! Stand back!

      Spade flung himself forward and threw his pistol to the ground at Andrew’s feet. “Kamellin!” .he screamed, but the voice was not his own. Andrew’s heart thudded. He stepped forward, letting the dark intruder in his mind take over all his senses again. A prisoner, he heard the alien voice shouting, felt his throat spewing forth alien syllables. There were

      shouts, a despairing howl, then somewhere two pistols cracked together and Andrew flickered back to full consciousness to see Hansen reel, stumble and fall inert. Andrew sagged, swayed; Montray held him upright, and Andrew whispered incredulously, “You shot him!”

      “I didn’t,” Montray insisted. “Rick Webber burst out of that doorway—fired into the crowd. Then—”

      “Is Rick dead too?”

      “As a doornail.” Montray gently lowered the younger man to the sand beside Reade. “You were raving yourself, for a minute, young Slayton.” He shouted angrily at the roughneck who had shot, “You didn’t have to kill Webber! A bullet in the leg would have stopped him!”

      “He ran right on me with the gun—”

      Montray sighed and struck his forehead with his clenched hands. “Somebody made a stretcher for Reade and one for the kid here.”

      “I’m all right.” Andrew shoved Montray’s hand aside; bent to look at Reade.

      “He’s in a bad way,” the man from Dupont said “We’d better get them both back to Mount Denver while there’s time.” He looked sharply at Andrew. “You had better take it easy, too. You went shouting mad yourself, for a minute.” He stood up, turning to Montray.

      “I think my theory is correct. Virus strains can live almost indefinitely where the air is dry. If such a plague killed off the people who built the city, it would explain why everyone who’s come up here has caught it—homicidal and suicidal.”

      “That isn’t it—”

      Montray checked him forcibly. “Slayton, you’re a sick man too. You’ll have to trust our judgment,” he said. He tucked his own coat around Reade and stood up, his face gray in the fading moonlight. “I’m going to the governor,” he said, “and have this place put off limits. Forty-two men dead of an unknown Martian virus, that’s too much. Until we get the money and the men to launch a full-scale medical project and knock it out, there won’t be any more private expeditions—or public ones, either. The hell with Xanadu.” He cocked his pistol and fired the four-shot signal to summon any stragglers.

      Two of the men improvised a stretcher and began to carry Reade’s inert Body toward the sandbus. Andrew walked close, steadying the old man’s limp form with his hands. He was beginning to doubt himself. Under the setting moon, the sand biting his face, he began to ask himself if Montray had been right. Had he dreamed, then rationalized? Had he dreamed Kamellin? Kamellin? he asked.

      There was no answer from the darkness in his mind. Andrew smiled grimly, his arm easing Reade’s head in the rude litter. If Kamellin had ever been there, he was gone, and there was no way to prove any of it—and it didn’t matter any more.

      “... therefore, with regret, I am forced to move that project Xanadu be shelved indefinitely,” Reade concluded. His face was grim and resigned, still thin from his long illness. “The Army’s attitude is inflexible, and lacking men, medics and money, it seems that the only thing to do with Xanadu is to stay away from it.”

      “It goes without saying,” said the man at the head of the table, “that we all appreciate what Major Reade and Mr. Slayton have been through. Gentlemen, no one likes to quit. But in the face of this, I have no alternative but to second Major Reade’s suggestion. Gentlemen, I move that the Martian chapter of the Geographic Society be closed out, and all equipment and personnel transferred to Aphrodite Base Twelve, South Venus.”

      The vote was carried without dissent, and Reade and Andrew, escaping the bombardment of questions, drifted into the cold sunlight of the streets. They walked for a long time without speaking. Reade said at last:

      “Andy, we did everything we could. Montray put his own commission in jeopardy for us. But this project has cost millions already. We’ve just hit the bottom of the barrel, that’s all.”

      Andrew hunched his shoulders. “I could be there in three days.”

      “I’d like to try it, too.” Reade sounded grim. “ But forget it, Andy. Shein-la Mahara is madness and death. Forget it. Go home—”

      “Home? Home where? To Earth?” Andrew broke off, staring. What had Reade said?

      “Say that again. The name of the city.*”

      “Shein-la Mahari, the city of—” Reade gulped. “What in the hell—” he looked at Andy in despair. “I thought I could forget, convince myself it never happened. It left me when Hansen СКАЧАТЬ