Hunt the Space-Witch! (31 page)

They laid hands on his wrists and clung to him. Angrily he shook them off; his body, so long held shackled, now swung free, and his fists clanged gaily off a silver mask. An acolyte sank, blood spouting.

Ten of the male acolytes were upon him now; only Zigmunn remained alone, cowering in panic behind the throne of the Witch. Barsac's arms threshed; acolytes went spinning to the ground, right and left. His fists pummelled in and out, scattering them as he moved on. He was unstoppable.

Three acolytes now clung to him, then two, then one. He plucked the remaining man off, hurled him aside, and vaulted toward the Witch.

Through
the Witch.

He passed through her as if she were so much dream-smoke, and, clearing the throne, caught Zigmunn by the throat. He stared bitterly at the blood-scars on the Luasparru's face, then whipped off the silver mask with a contemptuous swipe of his hand.

The drug-hazed eyes that peered at his were the Luasparru's, but they were not those of the Zigmunn he had known. Sickened, Barsac released him and the pencil-thin Lausparru went reeling to one side.

“There is no way out of the Cult,” Zigmunn said quietly. “Why did you follow me here? Why have you caused this havoc?”

“I … came to get you,” Barsac said in a strangled voice. “But there's nothing left to get. You belong soul and body to—to
this.
”

“Go back below,” Zigmunn urged crooningly. “Kneel and beg her forgiveness. She will welcome you back. Once you have seen her, you can never escape her. You've given up your self, Barsac.”

He shook his head bitterly. He saw now it had all been in vain; there was indeed no escape, and Zigmunn was lost forever. Heavily he turned away. The Witch was still on her throne, staring forward.

What was she? Thought-projection established by an unscrupulous priesthood? Alien entity seeking companionship on this dead world? He would never know.

The acolytes were recovering from their state of shock, now. They were creeping toward him. From elsewhere in the dusk-cloaked hall, other silver-masked figures advanced on him.

With a sudden bellow of rage, Barsac snatched up the thin figure of Zigmunn and grasped the emaciated Luasparru tightly. Then, with a savage display of force, he dashed Zigmunn against the translucent altar of pink stone.

It shattered; the stone must have been only glass-thin. Zigmunn rolled to one side and lay still.

The curtain of force winked out.

Barsac froze for just a moment, staring down at the shattered altar, and a mighty scream went up from the acolytes who saw. In a vast rush the atmosphere fled outward, and the stinging airlessness of Azonda swept in over the Hall of the Witch.

Moving as though through a sea of acid Barsac ran toward his discarded spacesuit. It seemed to take hours for him to don it, hours more before air coursed through his helmet and he breathed again. Actually, no more than fifteen seconds had gone by.

He turned. A hundred naked figures lay sprawled round the altar. Bubbles of blood trickled from their faces as they coughed out their lives into the vacuum that surrounded them. The Witch sat complacently through it all, paler now but unchanged otherwise and apparently unchangeable.

A harsh cry rumbled up from somewhere in Barsac's throat, and he turned away, retching, and started to run. Back, across the snow, away from the scene of death that had been the Hall of the Witch, toward the waiting golden-green ship that stood on its tail in the distant snow.

He reached the ship. He entered, converted to autopilot, hastily set up for blast-off. No time for elaborate checks and signals, now; there was but one passenger, and that passenger cared little whether he lived or died.

The ship lifted. Barsac clung desperately to the rails of the control-room wall and let the fist of gravity buffet him senseless. He dropped finally and lay flat against the coolness of the deckplates.

He awoke some time later. The ship's chart-tank told him he was well outside the Glaurus system now, cutting diagonally across the lens of the galaxy with the triple system of Ooon as the immediate destination. Barsac stared at his tortured unfamiliar face in the burnished mirror and realized he had escaped the Cult. They lay dead, back on dead Azonda, and he had a ship of his own; all the galaxy lay open for him. Life could begin again.

Or had he escaped the Cult? He wondered, as the nose of his ship drew ever nearer the tricolored glory of Ooon. For the tongue of the incomprehensible Witch had licked his mind, and perhaps Zigmunn had not lied. The Witch would be always with him whether he willed it or not, whether he fled as far as the cinder-stars that lay behind the galactic lens. He stared at the white-haired fleshless face in the mirror, and it seemed to him that behind him waited another face, a featureless blank face, white and shining.

She would be with him always, and the memory of eight months of hell on Glaurus and Azonda. Stroking the lateral grooves that lined his jaws, Barsac studied the chart-tank, and waited for tricolored Ooon to draw near.

The Silent Invaders

Chapter One

The starship
Lucky Lady
thundered out of overdrive half a million miles from Earth, and began the long steady ion-drive glide at Earthnorm grav toward the orbiting depot. In his second-class cabin aboard the starship, the man whose papers said he was Major Abner Harris of the Interstellar Development Corps stared at his face in the mirror. He wanted to make sure for the hundredth time that there was no sign of where his tendrils once had been.

He smiled; and the even-featured, undistinguished face they had put on him drew back, lips rising in the corners, cheeks tightening, neat white teeth momentarily on display. Major Harris scowled, and the face darkened.

It behaved well. The synthetic white skin acted as if it were his own. The surgeons back on Darruu had done a superb job on him.

They had removed the fleshy four-inch-long tendrils that sprouted at a Darruui's temples; they had covered his deep golden skin with an overlay of convincingly Terran white, and grafted it so skilfully that by now it had become his real skin. Contact lenses turned his eyes from red to blue-gray. Hormone treatments had caused hair to sprout on head and body, where none had been before. They had not meddled with his internal plumbing, and there he remained alien, with the Darruui digestive organ where a Terran had so many incredible feet of intestine, with the double heart and the sturdy liver just back of his three lungs.

Inside he was alien. Behind the walls of his skull, he was Aar Khiilom of the city of Helasz—a Darruui of the highest caste, a Servant of the Spirit. Externally, though, he was Major Abner Harris. He knew Major Harris' biography in great detail.

Born 2520, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, Earth. Age now, 42—with a good hundred years of his lifespan left. Attended Western Reserve University, studying galactography; graduated '43. Entered the Interstellar Redevelopment Corps '46, commissioned '50, now a Major. Missions to Altair VII, Sirius IX, Procyon II, Alpheratz IV. Unmarried. Parents killed in highway jet-crash in '44; no known relatives. Height five feet ten, weight 220, color fair, retinal index point-oh-three.

Major Harris was visiting Earth on vacation. He was to spend eight months on Earth before reassignment to his next planetary post.

Eight months, thought the one who called himself Major Harris, would be ample time for Major Harris to lose himself in the billions of Earth and carry out the purposes for which he had been sent here.

The
Lucky Lady
was on the last lap of her journey. Harris had boarded her on Alpheratz IV, after having been shipped there from Darruu by private warpship. For the past three weeks, while the giant vessel had slipped through the sleek gray tunnel in the continuum that was its overdrive channel, Harris had been learning to walk at Earthnorm gravity.

Darruu was a large world—radius 11,000 miles—and though its density was not as great as Earth's, still the gravitational attraction was half again as intense. Darruu's gravity was 1.5 Earthnorm. Or, as Harris had thought of it in the days when his mind centered not on Earth but on Darruu, Earth's gravity was .67 Darruunorm. Either way, it meant that his muscles would be functioning in a field two-thirds as strong as the one they had developed in. He could use the excuse that he had spent most of his time on heavy planets, and that would explain away some of his awkwardness.

But not all. A native Earther, no matter how long he stays on a heavy world, still knows how to cope with Earthnorm gravity. Harris had to learn that. He
did
learn it, painstakingly, during the three weeks of overdrive travel toward the system of Sol.

Now the journey was almost complete. All that remained was the transfer from the starship to an Earth shuttle, and then he could begin life as an Earthman.

Earth hung outside the main viewport twenty feet from Harris' cabin. He stared at it. A great green ball of a world, with two huge continents here, another landmass there, a giant moon moving in slow procession around it, keeping one pockmarked face eternally staring inward, the other glaring at outer space like a single beady bright eye.

The sight made Harris homesick.

Darruu was nothing like this. Darruu, from space, seemed to be a giant red fruit, covered over by the crimson mist that was the upper layer of its atmosphere. Beneath that could be discerned the great blue seas and the two hemisphere-large continents of Darraa and Darroo.

And the moons, Harris thought nostalgically. Seven glistening blank faces like coins in the sky, each at its own angle to the ecliptic, each taking its place in the sky nightly like a gem moved by clockwork. And the Mating of the Moons, when the seven came together once a year in a fiercely radiant diadem that filled half the sky—

Angrily he cut the train of thought.

You're an Earthman. Forget Darruu
.

A voice on a speaker overhead said, “Please return to your cabins, ladies and gentlemen. In eleven minutes we will come to a rest at the main spaceborne depot. Passengers intending to transfer here please notify their area steward.”

Harris returned to his cabin while the voice repeated the statement in other languages. Earth still spoke more than a dozen major tongues, which surprised him; Darruu had reached linguistic homogeneity three thousand years or more ago.

Minutes ticked by; at last came the word that the
Lucky Lady
had ended its ion-drive cruise and was tethered to the orbital satellite. Harris left his cabin for the last time and headed downramp to the designated room on D Deck where outgoing passengers were assembling.

“Your baggage will be shipped across. You don't have to worry about that.”

Harris nodded. His baggage was important.

More than three hundred of the passengers were leaving ship here. Harris was herded along with the others through an airlock. Several dozen ungainly little ferries hovered just outside, linked to the huge starliner by connecting tubes. Harris entered a swaying tube, crossed over, and found a seat in the ferry. Minutes later, he was repeating the process in the other direction, as the ferry unloaded its passengers into the main airlock of Orbiting Station Number One.

Another voice boomed,
“Lucky Lady
passengers continuing on to Earth report to Routing Channel Four.
Lucky Lady
passengers continuing on to Earth report to Routing Channel Four. Passengers transhipping to other starlines should go to the nearest routing desk at once.”

At Routing Channel Four, Harris was called upon to produce his papers. He handed over the little fabrikoid portfolio; a spaceport official riffled sleepily through it and handed it back without a word.

As he boarded the Earth-Orbiter shuttle, an attractive stewardess handed him a multigraphed sheet of paper which contained information of a sort a tourist was likely to want to know. Harris scanned it quickly.

“The Orbiting Station is located eighty thousand miles from Earth. It is locked in a twenty-four hour orbit that keeps it hovering approximately above Quito, Ecuador, South America. During a year the Orbiting Station serves an average of 8,500,000 travellers
—”

He finished reading the sheet and put it down. He eyed his fellow passengers in the Earthbound shuttle. There were about fifty of them.

For all he knew, five were disguised Darruui like himself. Or they might be enemies—Medlins—likewise in disguise. Perhaps he was surrounded by agents of Earth's own intelligence corps who had already penetrated his disguise.

Trouble lay on every hand. Inwardly Major Harris felt calm, though there was the faint twinge of homesickness for Darruu that he knew he would never be able entirely to erase.

The shuttle banked into a steep deceleration curve. Artificial grav aboard the Ship remained constant, of course. Earth drew near.

Landing came.

The shuttle hung over the skin of the landing-field for thirty seconds, then dropped; a gantry crane shuffled out to support the ship, and buttress-legs sprang from the sides of the hull. A steward's voice said, “Passengers will please assemble at the airlock in single file.”

They assembled. A green omnibus waited outside on the field, and the fifty of them filed in. Harris found a seat by the window and stared out across the broad field. A yellow sun was in the blue sky. The air was cold; he shivered involuntarily and drew his cloak around him for warmth.

“Cold?” asked the man who shared his seat with him.

“A bit.”

“That's odd. Nice balmy spring day like this, you'd think everybody would be enjoying the weather.”

Harris grinned. “I've been on some pretty hot worlds the last ten years. Anything under ninety degrees and I start shivering, now.”

The other chuckled and said, “Must be near eighty in the shade today.”

“I'll be accustomed to it again before long,” Harris said. “Once an Earthman, always an Earthman.”

He made a mental note to carry out a trifling adjustment on his body thermostat. His skin was lined with subminiaturized heating and refrigerating units—just one of the useful modifications the surgeons had given him.