It was hard to know just who he was. What actually hap-pened as far as Hanardy was concerned, was quite simple: One of the defensive energy screens had gone down before the attack of the strange ships; and ProfessorUngarnsent Hanardy to machine a new part for the screen"s drive unit. While he was engaged in this, Leigh came upon him by surprise, attacked him, and tied him up.
Lying there on the floor, bound hand and foot, Hanardy thought in anguish: "If I ever get loose, I"m gonna hightail it out of here!"
He tested the rope that held him and groaned at its un-yielding toughness. He lay, then, for a while, accepting the confinement of the bonds, but underneath was a great grief and a great fear.
He suspected that ProfessorUngarnand the professor"s daughter, Patricia, were equally helpless, or they would have tried during the past hour to find out what had happened to him.
He listened again, intently, holding himself still. But only the steady throbbing of the distant dynamos was audible. No footsteps approached; there was no other movement.
He was still listening when he felt an odd tugging inside his body.
Shivering a little, Hanardy shook his head as if to clear it of mental fog-and climbed to his feet.
He didn"t notice that the cords that had bound him fell away.
Out in the corridor, he paused tensely. The place looked deserted, empty. Except for the vague vibration from the dynamos, a great silence pressed in upon him. The placehad the look and feel of being on a planet. The artificial gravity made him somewhat lighter than on Earth, but he was used to such changes. It was hard to grasp that he was inside a meteorite, hundreds of thousands of miles from the nearest moon or inhabited planet. Being here was like being inside a big building, on an upper floor.
Hanardy headed for the neatest elevator shaft. He thought: I"d better untie Miss Pat, then her pop, and then get.
It was an automatic decision, to go to the girl first. Des-pite her sharp tongue, he admired her. He had seen her use weapons to injure, but that didn"t change his feeling. He guessed that she"d be very angry-very possibly she"d blame him for the whole mess.
Presently he was knocking hesitantly on the door to Patricia"s apartment. Hesitantly, because he was certain that she was not in a position to answer.
When, after a reasonable pause, there was no reply, he pressed gently on the latch. The door swung open.
He entered pure enchantment.
The apartment was a physical delight. There were French-type windows that opened onto a sunlit window. The French doors were open, and the sound of birds singing wafted in through them. There were other doors leading to the inner world of the girl"s home, and Hanardy, who had occasionally been in the other rooms to do minor repair work, knew that there also everything was as costly as it was here in this large room that he could see.
Then he saw the girl. She was lying on the floor, half-hidden behind her favorite chair, and she was bound hand and foot with wire.
Hanardy walked toward her unhappily. It was he who had brought William Leigh, and he wasn"t quite sure just how he would argue himself out ofanyaccusation she might make about that. His guilt showed in the way he held his thick-setbody, in the shuffling of his legs, in the awkward way he knelt beside her. He began gingerly to deal with the thin wire that enlaced and interlaced her limbs.
The girl was patient. She waited till he had taken all the wire off her and then, without moving from the floor, began to rub the circulation back into her wrists and ankles.
She looked up at him and made her first comment: "How did you avoid being tied up?"
"I didn"t. He got me, too," said Hanardy. He spoke eagerly, anxious to be one of the injured, along with her. He already felt better. She didn"t seem to be angry.
"Then how did you get free?" PatriciaUngarnasked.
"Why, I just-" Hanardy began.
He stopped, thunderstruck. He thought back, then over what had happened. He had been lying there, tied. And then ... and then ...
What?
He stood blank, scarcely daring to think. Realizing that an answer was expected, he began apologetically, "I guess he didn"t tie me up so good, and I was in a kind of a hurry, figuring you were here, and so I just-"
Even as he spoke, his whole being rocked with the remembrance of how tough those ropes had been a few minutes before he freed himself.
He stopped his mumbling explanation because the girl wasn"t listening, wasn"t even looking. She had climbed to her feet, and she was continuing to rub her hands. She was small of build and good-looking in a bitter way. Her lips were pressed too tightly together; her eyes were slightly narrowed with a kind of permanent anxiety. Except for that, she looked like a girl in her teens, but cleverer and more sophisticated than most girls her age.
Even as Hanardy, in his heavy way, was aware of the complexity of her, she faced him again. She said with an un-girl-like decisiveness, "Tell me everything that happened to you."Hanardy was glad to let go of the unsatisfactory recollection of his own escape. He said, "First thing I know, this guy comes in there while I"m working at the lathe. And is he strong, and is he fast! I never would"ve thought he had that kind of muscle and that fast way of moving. I"m pretty chunky, y"understand-"
"What then?" She was patient, but there was a pointedness about her question that channeled his attention back to the main line of events.
"Then he ties me up, and then he goes out, and then he takes those Dreeghs from the s.p.a.ceship and disappears into s.p.a.ce." Hanardy shook his head, wonderingly. "That"s what gets me. How did he do that?"
He paused, in a brown study; but he came from the distance of his thought back into the room, to realize guiltily that the girl had spoken to him twice.
"Sorry," he muttered. "I was thinking about how he did that, and it"s kind of hard to get the idea." He finished, almost accusingly: "Do you know what he does?"
The girl looked at him, a startled expression on her face. Hanardy thought she was angry at his inattention and said hastily: "I didn"t hear what you wanted me to do. Tell me again, huh!"
She seemed unaware that he had spoken. "Whatdoes he do, Steve?"
"Why, he just-"
At that point, Hanardy stopped short and glanced back mentally over the glib words he had been using.
It was such a fantastic dialogue, that he could feel the blood draining from his cheeks.
"Huh!" he said.
"What does he do, Steve?" He saw that she was looking at him, as if she understood something that he didn"t. It irritated him.
He said unhappily: "I"d better go and untie your father before that last bunch of Dreeghs shows up."
Having spoken, he stopped again, his mouth open in amazement. He thought: "I must be nuts. What am I saying?"
He turned and started for the door.
"Come back here!"
Her voice, sharp and commanding, cut into him. Defen-sively, he put up between himself and her the thick barrier of stolidity which had served him for so many years in his relations with other people. He swung awkwardly around to face her again. Before he could speak, she said with inten-sity: "How did he do it, Steve?"
The question ran up against a great stubbornness in him. He had no feeling of deliberately resisting her.
But the men-tal fog seemed to settle down upon his being, and he said: "Do what, Miss?"
"Leave?"
"Who?" He felt stupid before her questions, but he felt even more stupid for having had meaningless thoughts and said meaningless things.
"Leigh-you fool! That"s who."
"I thought he took that s.p.a.ceboat of yours that looks like an automobile."
There was a long pause. The girl clenched and unclenched her hands. Now she seemed very unchildlike indeed. Hanardy, who had seen her angry before, cringed and waited for the thunder and lightning of her rage to, lash out at him. Instead, the tenseness faded. She seemed suddenly thoughtful and said with unexpected gentleness: "After that, Steve? After he got out there!"
She swung her arm and pointed at the aviary, where the sunlight glinted beyond the French windows.
Hanardy saw, birds fluttering among the trees. Their musical cries gave the scene a homey touch, as if it really were a garden. As he watched, the tree leaves stirred; and he knew that hidden fans were blowing an artificial breeze. It was like a summer, afternoon, except that just beyond the gla.s.slike wall was the blackness of s.p.a.ce.
It was a cosmic night outside, disturbed here and there by an atom of matter-a planet hidden from sight by its own relative smallness and distance from anything else, a sun, a point of light and energy, quickly lost in darkness so vast that presently its light would fade, and become one grain in a misty bright cloud that obscured the blackness for a moment of universe time and occupied an inch of s.p.a.ce, or so it seemed. ...
Hanardy contemplated that startling vista. He was only vaguely aware that his present intensity of interest was quite different from similar thoughts he had had in the past. On his long journeys, such ideas had slipped into and out of his mind. He recalled having had a thought about it just a few months before. He had been looking out of a porthole, and-just for an instant-the mystery of the empty immensity had touched him. And he"d thought: "What the heck "is behind all this? How does a guy like me rate being alive?"
Aloud, Hanardy muttered: "I"d better get your father free, Miss Pat." He finished under his breath: "And then beat it out of here-fast."
2.
He turned, and this time, though she called after him angrily, he stumbled out into the corridor and went down to the depths of the meteorite, where the dynamos hummed and throbbed; and where, presently, he had ProfessorUngarn untied.
The older man was quite cheerful. "Well, Steve, we"re not dead yet. I don"t know why they didn"t jump in on us, but the screens are still holding, I see."
He was a gaunt man with deep-set eyes and the unhappiest face Hanardy had ever seen. He stood, rubbing the circulation back into his arms. Strength of intellect shone from his face, along with the melancholy. He had defended the meteorite in such a calm, practical way from the attack-ing Dreeghs that it was suddenly easy to realize that this sad-faced man was actually the hitherto unsuspected observer of the solar system for a vast galactic culture, which included at its top echelon the Great Galactic-who had been William Leigh-and at the bottom, ProfessorUngarnand his lovely daughter.
The thoughts about that seeped into Hanardy"s fore-conscious. He realized that the scientist was primarily a pro-tector. He and this station were here to prevent contact between Earth and the galaxy.
Man and his earth-born civilization were still too low on the scale of development to be admitted to awareness that a gigantic galactic culture existed. Interstellar ships of other low-echelon cultures which had been admitted to the galactic union were warned away, from the solar system whenever they came too close. Accidentally, the hunted, lawless Dreeghs had wandered into this forbidden sector of s.p.a.ce. In their l.u.s.t for blood and life energy they had avidly concentrated here in the hope of gaining such a quant.i.ty of blood, and so great a supply of life energy, that they would be freed for endless years from their terrible search.
It had been quite a trap, which had enabled the Great Galactic to capture so many of them. But now another ship-load of Dreeghs was due; and this time there was no trap. ProfessorUngarn wa.s.speaking: "Did you get that part machined before Leigh tied you up?" He broke off: "What"s the matter, Steve?"
"Huh! Nothing." Hanardy came out of a depth of wonder-ment: "I"d better get onto that job. It"ll take a half hour, maybe."
ProfessorUngarnnodded and said matter-of-factly: "I"ll feel better when we get that additional screen up.
There"s quite a gang out there."
Hanardy parted his lips to say that that particular "gang" was no longer a problem, but that another supership, a late arrival, would shortly appear on the scene. He stopped the words, unspoken; and now he was consciously dismayed. "What"s going on?" he wondered. "Am I nuts?"
Almost blank, he headed down to the machine shop. As he entered, he saw the ropes that had bound him, lying on the floor. He walked over in a haze of interest and stooped to pick up one of the short sections.
It came apart in his ringers, breaking into a fine, powdery stuff, some of which drifted into his nostrils. He sneezed noisily.
The rope, he discovered, was all like that. He could hardly get over it. He kept picking up the pieces, just so that he could feel them crumble. When he had nothing but a scat-tering of dust, he stood up and started on the lathe job. He thought absently: "If that next batch of Dreeghs arrives, then maybe I can start believing all this stuff."
He paused and for the first time thought: "Now, where did I get that name, Dreegh?"
Instantly, he was trembling so violently that he had to stop work. Because-if he could get the professor to admit that that was what they were-Dreeghs-then. ...
Then what?
"Why, it"d prove everything," he thought. "Just that one thing!"
Already, the crumbled rope, and whatever it proved, was fading into the background of his recollection, no longer quite real, needing to be reinforced by some new miracle. As it happened, he asked the question under optimum circ.u.m-stances. He handed the part to the scientist and managed to ask about the Dreeghs as the older man was turning away.Ungarnbegan immediately with an obvious urgency to work on the shattered section of the energy screen drive. It was from there, intent on what he was doing, and in an absent-minded tone, that he answered Hanardy"s question.
"Yes, yes,"he muttered. "Dreeghs. Vampires, in the worst sense of the word ... but they look just like us."
At that point he seemed to realize to whom he was talking. He stopped what he was doing and swung around and stared at Hanardy.
He said at last very slowly, "Steve, don"t repeat everything you hear around this place. The universe is a bigger territory than you might think but people will ridicule if you try to tell them. They will say you"re crazy."
Hanardy did not move. He was thinking: "He just don"t realize. I gotta know. All this stuff happening-"
But the idea of not telling was easy to grasp. At s.p.a.ce-port, on the moon,Europa,at the bars that he frequented, he was accepted by certain hangers-on as a boon com-panion. Some of the people were sharp, even educated, but they were cynical, and often witty, and were particularly scathing of serious ideas.
Hanardy visualized himself telling any one of them that there was more to s.p.a.ce than the solar system-more life, more intelligence-and he could imagine the ridiculing discussion that would begin.
Though they usually treated him with tolerance-it sure wouldn"t do any good to tell them.
Hanardy started for the door. "I gotta know," he thought again. "And right now I"d better get on my ship and beat it before that Dreegh comes along pretending that he"s Pat"s future husband."
And he"d better leave on the sly. The professor and the girl wouldn"t like him to go away now. But defending this meteorite was their job, not his. They couldn"t expect him to deal with the Dreegh who had captured, and murdered, Pat"s boy friend.
Hanardy stopped in the doorway, and felt blank. "Huh!" he said aloud.
He thought: Maybe I should tell them. They won"t be ableto deal with the Dreegh if they think he"s somebody else.
"Steve!" It was ProfessorUngarn.
Hanardy turned. "Yeah, boss?" he began.
"Finish unloading your cargo."
"Okay, boss."
He walked off heavily along the corridor, tired and glad that he had been told to go and relieved that the decision to tell them could not be put into effect immediately. He thought wearily: First thing I"d better do is take a nap.