Читать книгу Child of the Sun - Leigh Brackett - Страница 4

Eric Falken stood utterly still, staring down at his leashed and helpless hands on the controls of the spaceship Falcon.

The red lights on his indicator panel showed Hiltonist ships in a three-dimensional half-moon, above, behind, and below him. Pincer jaws, closing fast.

The animal instinct of escape prodded him, but he couldn’t obey. He had fuel enough for one last burst of speed. But there was no way through that ring of ships. Tractor-beams, criss-crossing between them, would net the Falcon like a fish.

There was no way out ahead, either. Mercury was there, harsh and bitter in the naked blaze of the sun. The ships of Gantry Hilton, President of the Federation of Worlds, inventor of the Psycho-Adjuster, and ruler of men’s souls, were herding him down to a landing at the lonely Spaceguard outpost.

A landing he couldn’t dodge. And then....

For Paul Avery, a choice of death or Happiness. For himself and Sheila Moore, there was no choice. It was death.

The red lights blurred before Falken’s eyes. The throb of the plates under his feet faded into distance. He’d stood at the controls for four chronometer days, ever since the Hiltonists had chased him up from Losangles, back on Earth.

He knew it was because he was exhausted that he couldn’t think, or stop the nightmare of the past days from tramping through his brain, hammering the incessant question at him. How?

How had the Hiltonists traced him back from New York? Paul Avery, the Unregenerate recruit he went to get, had passed a rigid psycho-search—which, incidentally, revealed the finest brain ever to come to the Unregenerate cause. He couldn’t be a spy. And he’d spoken to no one but Falken.

Yet they were traced. Hiltonist Black Guards were busy now, destroying the last avenues of escape from Earth, avenues that he, Falken, had led them through.

But how? He knew he hadn’t given himself away. For thirty years he’d been spiriting Unregenerates away from Gantry Hilton’s strongholds of Peace and Happiness. He was too old a hand for blunders.

Yet, somehow, the Black Guards caught up with them at Losangles, where the Falcon lay hidden. And, somehow, they got away, with a starving green-eyed girl named Kitty....

“Not Kitty,” Falken muttered. “Kitty’s Happy. Hilton took Kitty, thirty years ago. On our wedding day.”

A starving waif named Sheila Moore, who begged him for help, because he was Eric Falken and almost a god to the Unregenerates. They got away in the Falcon, but the Hiltonist ships followed.

Driven, hopeless flight, desperate effort to shake pursuit before he was too close to the Sun. Time and again, using precious fuel and accelerations that tried even his tough body, Falken thought he had escaped.

But they found him again. It was uncanny, the way they found him.

Now he couldn’t run any more. At least he’d led the Hiltonists away from the pitiful starving holes where his people hid, on the outer planets and barren asteroids and dark derelict hulks floating far outside the traveled lanes.

And he’d kill himself before the Hiltonist psycho-search could pick his brain of information about the Unregenerates. Kill himself, if he could wake up.

He began to laugh, a drunken, ragged chuckle. He couldn’t stop laughing. He clung to the panel edge and laughed until the tears ran down his scarred, dark face.

“Stop it,” said Sheila Moore. “Stop it, Falken!”

“Can’t. It’s funny. We live in hell for thirty years, we Unregenerates, fighting Hiltonism. We’re licked, now. We were before we started.

“Now I’m going to die so they can suffer hell a few weeks more. It’s so damned funny!”

* * * *

Sleep dragged at him. Sleep, urgent and powerful. So powerful that it seemed like an outside force gripping his mind. His hands relaxed on the panel edge.

“Falken,” said Sheila Moore. “Eric Falken!”

Some steely thing in her voice lashed him erect again. She crouched on the shelf bunk against the wall, her feral green eyes blazing, her thin body taut in its torn green silk.

“You’ve got to get away, Falken. You’ve got to escape.”

He had stopped laughing. “Why?” he asked dully.

“We need you, Falken. You’re a legend, a hope we cling to. If you give up, what are we to go on?”

She rose and paced the narrow deck. Paul Avery watched her from the bunk on the opposite wall, his amber eyes dull with the deep weariness that slackened his broad young body.

Falken watched her, too. The terrible urge for sleep hammered at him, bowed his grey-shot, savage head, drew the strength from his lean muscles. But he watched Sheila Moore.

That was why he had risked his life, and Avery’s, and broken Unregenerate law to save her, unknown and untested. She blazed, somehow. She stabbed his brain with the same cold fire he had felt after Kitty was taken from him.

“You’ve got to escape,” she said. “We can’t give up, yet.”

Her voice was distant, her raw-gold hair a detached haze of light. Darkness crept on Falken’s brain.

“How?” he whispered.

“I don’t know ... Falken!” She caught him with thin painful fingers. “They’re driving you down on Mercury. Why not trick them? Why not go—beyond?”

He stared at her. Even he would never have thought of that. Beyond the orbit of Mercury there was only death.

Avery leaped to his feet. For a startled instant Falken’s brain cleared, and he saw the trapped, wild terror in Avery’s face.

“We’d die,” said Avery hoarsely. “The heat....”

Sheila faced him. “We’ll die anyway, unless you want Psycho-Change. Why not try it, Eric? Their instruments won’t work close to the Sun. They may even be afraid to follow.”

The wiry, febrile force of her beat at them. “Try, Eric. We have nothing to lose.”

Paul Avery stared from one to the other of them and then to the red lights that were ships. Abruptly he sank down on the edge of his bunk and dropped his broad, fair head in his hands. Falken saw the cords like drawn harp-strings on the backs of them.

“I ... can’t,” whispered Falken. The command to sleep was once more a vast shout in his brain. “I can’t think.”

“You must!” said Sheila. “If you sleep, we’ll be taken. You won’t be able to kill yourself. They’ll pick your brain empty. Then they’ll Hiltonize you with the Psycho-Adjuster.

“They’ll blank your brain with electric impulses and then transmit a whole new memory-pattern, even shifting the thought-circuits so that you won’t think the same way. They’ll change your metabolism, your glandular balance, your pigmentation, your face, and your fingerprints.”

He knew she was recounting these things deliberately, to force him to fight. But still the weak darkness shrouded him.

“Even your name will be gone,” she said. “You’ll be placid and lifeless, lazing your life away, just one of Hilton’s cattle.” She took a deep breath and added, “Like Kitty.”

He caught her shoulders, then, grinding the thin bone of them. “How did you know?”

“That night, when you saw me, you said her name. Perhaps I made you think of her. I know how it feels, Eric. They took the boy I loved away from me.”

He clung to her, the blue distant fire in his eyes taking life from the hot, green blaze of hers. There was iron in her. He could feel the spark and clash of it against his mind.

“Talk to me,” he whispered. “Keep me awake. I’ll try.”

Waves of sleep clutched Falken with physical hands. But he turned to the control panel.

The bitter blaze of Mercury stabbed his bloodshot eyes. Red lights hemmed him in. He couldn’t think. And then Sheila Moore began to talk. Standing behind him, her thin vital hands on his shoulders, telling him the story of Hiltonism.

“Gantry Hilton’s Psycho-Adjuster was a good thing at first. Through the mapping and artificial blanking of brain-waves and the use of electro-hypnotism—the transmission of thought-patterns directly to the brain—it cured non-lesional insanity, neuroses, and criminal tendencies. Then, at the end of the Interplanetary War....”

Red lights closing in. How could he get past the Spaceguard battery? Sheila’s voice fought back the darkness. Speed, that was what he needed. And more guts than he’d ever had to use in his life before. And luck.

“Keep talking, Sheila. Keep me awake.”

“... Hilton boomed his discovery. The people were worn out with six years of struggle. They wanted Hiltonism, Peace and Happiness. The passion for escape from life drove them like lunatics.”

He found the emergency lever and thrust it down. The last ounce of hoarded power slammed into the rocket tubes. The Falcon reared and staggered.

Then she shot straight for Mercury, with the thin high scream of tortured metal shivering along the cabin walls.

Spaceshells burst. They shook the Falcon, but they were far behind. The ring of red lights was falling away. Acceleration tore at Falken’s body, but the web of sleep was loosening. Sheila’s voice cried to him, the story of man’s slavery.

The naked, hungry peaks of Mercury snarled at Falken. And then the guns of the Spaceguard post woke up.

“Talk, Sheila!” he cried. “Keep talking!”

“So Gantry Hilton made himself a sort of God, regulating the thoughts and emotions of his people. There is no opposition now, except for the Unregenerates, and we have no power. Humanity walks in a placid stupor. It cannot feel dissatisfaction, disloyalty, or the will to grow and change. It cannot fight, even morally.

“Gantry Hilton is a god. His son after him will be a god. And humanity is dying.”

There was a strange, almost audible snap in Falken’s brain. He felt a quick, terrible stab of hate that startled him because it seemed no part of himself. Then it was gone, and his mind was clear.

He was tired to exhaustion, but he could think, and fight.

Livid, flaming stars leaped and died around him. Racked plates screamed in agony. Falken’s lean hands raced across the controls. He knew now what he was going to do.

Down, down, straight into the black, belching mouths of the guns, gambling that his sudden burst of speed would confuse the gunners, that the tiny speck of his ship hurtling bow-on would be hard to see against the star-flecked depths of space.

Falken’s lips were white. Sheila’s thin hands were a sharp unnoticed pain on his shoulders. Down, down.... The peaks of Mercury almost grazed his hull.

A shell burst searingly, dead ahead. Blinded, dazed, Falken held his ship by sheer instinct. Thundering rockets fought the gravitational pull for a moment. Then he was through, and across.

Across Mercury, in free space, a speeding mote lost against the titanic fires of the Sun.

* * * *

Falken turned. Paul Avery lay still in his bunk, but his golden eyes were wide, staring at Falken. They dropped to Sheila Moore, who had slipped exhausted to the floor, and came back to Falken—and stared and stared with a queer, stark look that Falken couldn’t read.

Falken cut the rockets and locked the controls. Heat was already seeping through the hull. He looked through shaded ports at the vast and swollen Sun.

No man in the history of space travel had ventured so close before. He wondered how long they could stand the heat, and whether the hull could screen off the powerful radiations.

His brain, with all its knowledge of the Unregenerate camps, was safe for a time. Knowing the hopelessness of it, he smiled sardonically, wondering if sheer habit had taken the place of reason.

Then Sheila’s bright head made him think of Kitty, and he knew that his tired body had betrayed him. He could never give up.

He went down beside Sheila. He took her hands and said:

“Thank you. Thank you, Sheila Moore.”

And then, quite peacefully, he was asleep with his head in her lap.

* * * *

The heat was a malignant, vampire presence. Eric Falken felt it even before he wakened. He was lying in Avery’s bunk, and the sweat that ran from his body made a sticky pool under him.

Sheila lay across from him, eyes closed, raw-gold hair pushed back from her temples. The torn green silk of her dress clung damply. The starved thinness of her gave her a strange beauty, clear and brittle, like sculptured ice.