CHAPTER II

There was a long moment of complete silence, during which Kirk stared wide-eyed at Tauncer, and Tauncer probed him with a gaze like a scalpel.

On Kirk's part, it was a silence of sheer astonishment. No question could have taken him so unexpectedly. He'd been prepared to be grilled on squadron dispositions, forces in being, bases, all the things that the men of Orion Sector would like to know about Lyra. But this—

It didn't make sense. Earth was not part of the present-day star struggle. That old planet, so far back in the galaxy that Kirk had never been within parsecs of it—it was history, nothing more. It had had its day, its sons long ago had spread out to the stars and their blood ran in the veins of men on many worlds, in Kirk himself. But its great day had long been done, and the Sector governors who played the cosmic chess-game for suns paid it no heed at all.

"I'll repeat," said Tauncer softly. "What's Ferdias planning to do about Earth?"

"I haven't," said Kirk, "the faintest idea what you're talking about."

Tauncer sighed. "Possibly." He straightened up. "Even probably. But I've been sent here to make the inquiry, and I'll need more than your word and an expression of innocence. Brix!"

One of the other men came forward. Tauncer spoke to him in a low voice, and he nodded, and went into the shadows across the room. Kirk's heart pounded in alarm. He tried to get up, but he had been too well bound. He could not see his chrono, but he did not think that more than seven or eight minutes had elapsed since he had entered the town. Plenty of time for mischief. He said to Tauncer,

"I didn't walk into this with my eyes completely shut. My men have instructions."

"I'm sure they have. And don't feel too badly about this, Commander. The details of the trap were based on a minute study of your psychology and past record. It would have been almost impossible for you to avoid falling into it. Can't you hurry that up Brix?"

"All ready." Brix came back carrying a light tripod with a projector mounted on it. And now Kirk's heart sank coldly into the pit of his stomach. He had seen that particular type of projector before. It was called a vera-ray, and it beamed electric impulses in a carefully-controlled range that absolutely stunned and demoralized a man's brain, making him temporarily incapable of lying or resisting questioning.

Kirk had no information about Earth to give away. But there were plenty of other things in his mind, things of military importance to Lyra Sector that Solleremos would be only too glad to get hold of.

How long now? Ten minutes more? Too long. Even five minutes would be too long, with that projector pounding his skull.

He couldn't get up, but he could roll. He rolled, acting on a split-second reflex that caught even Tauncer by surprise. The projector was only four or five feet away. Brix and the other men were on top of him again almost at once but not quite in time. He fetched the tripod a thrashing kick, with both his feet bound together. It fell over. He could not hope that it was broken, not on this soft carpeted floor, but it would take them time to set it up again.

He tried to keep them busy as long as he could, but Tauncer understood perfectly well what he was up to. He pulled his men off and set Brix to adjusting the projector again, and turned to Kirk.

"You may as well spare yourself, Commander. I have my mission, and the military have theirs. There are three cruisers standing off and on, just out of radar range—they got word the moment you landed, and they're already on their way."

He smiled briefly. "The price you pay for fame, Commander. The Fifth is Ferdias' elite squadron, and nobody gets command of it unless he's in Ferdias' special favor."

"Friendship is one thing," said Kirk hotly, "and favor is another. I don't like your choice of words."

He was just talking, words, sounds with no meaning. Inside he was thinking of Garstang and the
Starsong
, and all the lives of all the men in her. He had led them here.

He looked at Tauncer, and he began now to hate him, with a hate as deep and cold as space.

"Ferdias will tear your heart out," he said.

"Perhaps," said Tauncer. "But he may have other things to occupy his mind."

"Earth? He's never been there. None of us have. It's only a name, and a half-forgotten one at that. Why should Earth occupy his mind? Why, Tauncer?"

How long is twenty minutes? How long does it take three cruisers to come from Point X beyond radar range to Target Zero? How long does it take a man to realize he's through at last?

Brix said again, "All ready."

Tauncer nodded.

Brix touched a stud on the projector.

As though that touch had done it, a dull and mighty roaring echoed from the desert—the full-throated cry of a heavy cruiser taking off.

The men looked, startled, toward the door. Desperately, Kirk rolled sideways, out of the force that was already battering at the edges of his mind.

"You out there!" he shouted at the doorway. "The men from outside avenge treachery! Call your lord—"

One of Tauncer's men kicked him alongside the jaw. Kirk shut up, hanging with blind determination to his consciousness. Fore-thought had provided this one chance. He would not get another. He did not dare to miss it.

The cruiser came low over the town. Dust sifted out of the cracks of the stone walls. The men fell to their knees, covering their heads with their arms. The floor rocked under them, beaten by the rolling hammers of concussion.

The ripped sky closed upon itself with a stunning, thundering crash. After a minute or two the noise and the shock wave ebbed away.

Silence.

The men began to get up again. But Kirk did not move.

The cruiser came back. This time it was even lower. Garstang must have tickled her belly on the peaked roofs. Christ, thought Kirk, he's overdoing it. This time the stones were shaking loose. When it was over, a long thin shape came in through the doorway. It was the leader of the tall men who had brought Kirk here.

His face was a mask of fear and rage as he spoke to Tauncer. "You said that if we helped you, you would keep all other outsiders away!"

"We will," said Tauncer. "Listen—"

"Yes, listen," mocked Kirk. "Listen to it coming back. It'll keep coming back, unless I walk out of here—until your town is flattened."

The tall man stood hesitating. Then the
Starsong
roared back over. When it was gone, he picked himself up and with a knife cut the cords around Kirk's wrists and ankles.

"Oh, no," said Tauncer, starting forward. "You can't—"

The tall man turned on him a face livid with frustrated anger. "Shall the children of cluster-kings be destroyed to serve
you
? Shall I call my people in?"

Kirk, scrambling to his feet, saw outside the door the crowd of tall, pale-cloaked men who had gathered. Tauncer saw them too, and stopped.

As Kirk picked up the porto and started for the door, the man Brix cried violently, "Are we just going to stand here?"

Tauncer said levelly, "Why, yes, there are times when you do just that. But I think we'll see the Commander again."

Kirk went out through the door and through the crowd outside it. No one followed him. He got the porto working and talked fast to Garstang, then dropped the porto and sprinted out of the town toward the desert.

The cruiser dropped down ahead of him, as black and big against the stars as a falling world. The lock yawned open, and Garstang was inside it to meet him. He started to ask what had happened, but Kirk pushed him bodily away down the corridor, heading for the bridge.

"Get in there and do your stuff, Joe. We've got three Orion cruisers on our tail, as of the time we landed."

At that moment they heard the voice of the radarman crying out in sudden anguish, "Sir!"

Garstang said in mild reproval, "You ought to give a man more time, Commander. Radar, what's the bearing? All right, stand by—"

Orders crackled over the intercoms. Men moved swiftly at the control-banks. The last thing Kirk heard before the howling roar of take-off drowned everything was Garstang complaining that this sort of thing was hard on a ship. Then there was a dull crash from somewhere outside. The
Starsong
was shaken as though by a great wind. Both Kirk and Garstang had weathered enough fire to know that she had taken no hurt. But the Orion cruisers were in range now, bearing down on them in normal space at planetary speeds. The next shell would likely be a good deal closer. They dared not wait for star-room to go into overdrive.

"Hit it!" yelled Kirk. Garstang threw the relays open. Sirens shrilled and the lights went dim. The
Starsong
shuddered vertiginously.

And then they were in overdrive and racing out toward the twin red suns that guarded the entrance to the Dragon's Throat.

The scanners and ultra-speed radar came into play, replacing normal instruments, making an illusion of sight. And the voice of the radarman said dismally,

"They're still with us, sir. F-Type cruisers, heavy-armed and plenty fast."

For the next quarter of an hour the
Starsong
gained velocity at a suicidal rate, but the Orion cruisers would not be left behind. The radarman called their coordinates in a steady sing-song and Garstang ordered more power and more power, keeping one eye on the stress indicators and the other on the overhanging star-cliffs of the Throat that seemed to be leaping toward the ship.

There was a limit. You could not take the Throat too fast. In that swarm of suns a ship's fabric could be torn apart in some swift tide of gravity, or vaporized in collision. Garstang had already passed the limit. But the Orionids were refusing to be bluffed.

Kirk said nothing. This was Garstang's job, and he let him do it. But he watched the indicators as closely as the captain. Under his feet and all around him he could feel the
Starsong
quiver, wincing and flinching like a live thing now and again as some wild current wrenched at her. His gaze flicked upward to the nebula, like a fiery thundercloud above the Dragon's Throat, and then to the shoaling suns below, with the narrow pass between them. The twin red stars of the binary flashed by and were gone.

Suddenly, in the screen that mirrored space astern, a tiny nova flared and winked away. The
Starsong
trembled, like a running deer that hears the hunter's gun.

"Wide astern," said Garstang. He looked at the cleft of the Throat and shook his head. "But we'll have to slow down for that, and they know it. They'll have time to range us before they come in themselves. They won't," he added grimly, "have to come in."

Kirk nodded. "So we'll fool them. We won't go into the Throat either."

Garstang stood silent for a moment. Then he said, "I was hoping you wouldn't think of that."

"Have you a better idea? Or even a worse one?"

"No." Garstang took a deep breath and spoke into the communicator. "New course, north and zenith, forty degrees. We're running the nebula. On full autopilot. If anyone wants to pray, go ahead."

The
Starsong
shot upward, plunging high into an area so choked with stellar radiance that it made the Dragon's Throat seem like empty space. The manual control-banks were dark and dead. From the calc-room back of the bridge a new sound came, different from the normal occasional outbursts of chattering. This was a steady sound, a sound of authority, the voice of the
Starsong
speaking. She was flying herself now. The men aboard, Captain and Commander, able spaceman and ensign, were her charges, dependent on her wisdom and her radar vision and her strength. There was nothing they could do but wait.

The
Starsong
spiralled higher, her radar system guiding her on a twisting path between the clotted stars. Then Kirk saw a great glowing edge slide onto the screen and grow into a vastness of dust and cosmic drift illumined by the half-smothered stars it webbed.

The Orionid cruisers had altered course and were coming after them. But the
Starsong
was already skimming through glowing arms that reached like misty tentacles searching for other stars to trap and feed upon. Once in the cloud, she would be screened from the cruiser's radar beams by the most effective scrambling device in space, the nebula itself.

Effective. Yes. But potentially as deadly as Orionid warheads. The only difference was that with the nebula you had a chance. Against three cruisers you had none.

Kirk strapped himself into the recoil chair beside Garstang. Nothing moved now within the ship. The frail, breakable organism of breath and heart and bone were encased in protective webs. This was the hour of the ship, the hour of steel and flame and the racing electron, faster than thought.

The
Starsong
spoke to herself in the calc-room, and plunged headlong into the cloud.