Star Bridge Part 17

His innocence was apparent. "He's gone," the Warden grumbled. "Impossible."

No, Horn thought impa.s.sively, even Vantee couldn't hold Wu and Lil. They would have to be taken there, and how could they hold them on the way? They must have escaped on Eron.

"We've hunted a man of that description for a long time," the Warden mused, "a fantastically long time." He shrugged. "All right. Throw him out."

Horn leaned forward, caught himself, and obeyed the guard's order to turn around. That didn't sound like a death sentence. He didn't give the guards an excuse to shoot.

Horn led the way down the long corridors, his eyes watchful, cataloging the turns, the doorways, the ventilators, the defensive possibilities.... The hall straightened. In the distance, it ended against a blank wall. As they walked toward it, Horn paced off the distance, counting silently.

Ten paces from the end of the corridor, a mounted gun stuck an ugly barrel through a wall slit on each side. The guns pointed at him. The guards were behind him and well back as the wall lifted. Air swept in. It was icy. Beyond the wall was darkness. Horn s.h.i.+vered.

"Out," one of the guards said quietly.

Horn walked forward. The heavy guns turned to follow him. As Horn's eyes adjusted, he saw the bridge. It was barely wide enough for one man. Beneath it was a ditch. The bottom of the ditch was black. Horn started across the bridge to the dark ma.s.s of land on the other side.

He s.h.i.+vered in his thin, orange uniform. He faced the unknown darkness without a weapon except the strength of his body, the skill of his hands, and the determination of his mind.

Behind him the light was cut off. The wall clanged down with a terrible sound of finality. The way back was closed.

Horn stepped off the bridge onto cold, hard stone. He waited there while his eyes got their night vision. The ground was slightly uneven nearby, but generally it seemed remarkably level. There were no mountains, no hills; the horizon curved perceptibly. Gravity was light; the air was thin and cold, but it was breathable. There was no one near. There was nothing growing. The prison planetoid seemed lifeless.

Horn swung his head. A dim, red glow was on the horizon. It was twilight or dawn. He turned around to study the place he had left. It loomed squat and black. Sheer walls rose vertically from the ditch. The only relief from the blackness was the thick, golden cylinder that speared starward from a dome at the top.

Horn's eyes followed it until it dwindled away to a thread in the distance and disappeared. It went to Eron. From Eron a man could go anywhere in the Empire. It went to Wendre. It might as well not have been there.

The Tube was only a tormenting reminder of what was forever lost. Three hours to Eron? Eternity wouldn't get him back. He was cut off forever, here on this frigid satellite of a forgotten sun.

To get to the Tube you had to go through the fortress, and the fortress was impregnable. This entrance would be the only one, and it was an exit. Only the narrow bridge led to that thick, immovable door. There would be guns to protect it and other things. What could bare hands do against those walls?

No one came back from Vantee. Horn was there until he died. Death was the only door.

It was a strange path that had led him to this place. From one end of the Empire to the other, across the star distances, driven. He could face that now: driven. There were forces that drove men, unknown, unknowable, over strange roads to stranger destinations. Once set your foot upon one of them and compulsion drove you, irresistibly, until the end. This was the end. Journey's end, world's end, life's end. Beyond this, there was nothing.

And yet a man had choice. Only omnipotence can pick out the course of every man's life upon the infinite fabric of s.p.a.ce and time. And the forces were not omnipotent. They were broad and sweeping, yes, and they swept ma.s.ses and empires, not individuals. The men in the stream were carried along with it, unaware of the movement because others were moving, too. But let a man escape the stream, let him strike out boldly for the sh.o.r.e and stand there, dripping, to see the flow, and the things he does then can dam the stream and send it reeling backward. Or he can channel it toward another end.

He had accepted money to kill a man. Nothing forced him to take it; having taken it, he hadn't been bound by anything except his own nature to carry out the verbal contract. He could have become discouraged along the way; he could have faltered at the obstacles piled high; he could have held Kohlnar in his sights and let him go.

The forces that said, "Eron shall fall," had not said when. His bullet had speeded Kohlnar's death; it had precipitated crisis into rebellion. If Kohlnar had died a natural death, the orderly processes of empire would have pa.s.sed on authority without a slip. Certainly Eron would fall; that was inevitable. But when, and how?

The inevitability had come from that. It had been his doing. He had struck the spark of rebellion; his hand had directed the stream that had carried him to Vantee. Anywhere along the way, he could have stopped and said, "Hold! I go no farther!" Perhaps the stream would have rolled unheeding over his head, but for him the inevitability would have ended.

An act of violence had changed the stream. He could not be proud of it, not if it bore sweet fruit for a thousand years, but it was done. Instinct had surrendered him to the stream, and the stream had carried him to Eron. Instinct: the unthinking necessities like survival and food for hunger-they were the tumbling molecules of the stream. They are negative; they are surrender.

But a man could fight the stream; every positive act fights it.

In the Entropy Chapel, he had pitted himself against the stream; the dream had told him that. He had gone with Wu to the meeting at Duchane's because it was, in a sense, rebellion against necessity. And that choice had had its effects. If he had not gone, Wendre would surely be dead or helpless and Wu, if he had gone alone, would have been lost. Perhaps their fates caught up with them later, but that didn't change the importance of the reaction. It had been an act of love-which is positive, too-that had kept him by Wendre's side until her disillusionment and his capture.

He could face it now-that, too-he loved Wendre, and it was hopeless, but a good thing, as well, because it was a positive force and a strong one. It gave him the strength to fight the stream once more, to beat back up the river to the source. If a man can change his fate once, he can change it again. Eron must fall. But how?

The fortress was not impregnable; nothing was. Out of this eddy, where the unseen forces had left him forgotten, he would fight. It might be fatal, but it was important to fight and not be swept along by the unfeeling, inhuman forces that say "rise" and "fall" to empires.

Horn stared again at the tapering, golden Tube, and it was not a mockery but a link with the galaxy. He remembered a moment of defeat in a lonely valley when he had seen the stars connected by a network of nerves, and it was like that again. Not just the stars, it was all mankind, linked together by consequence and compulsion. Intangible, untraceable, almost moral: the smallest event on the most distant edge of the Empire affected everyone in the Empire.

A man could build a philosophy on it, and it might well be better than individualism. It was not exactly these unseen forces, or perhaps the network was a corollary to them, a gentler part. It said: if there is a slave anywhere in the star-flung worlds, no man is free. And it said: while there is a free man anywhere, no man is completely a slave. And so, even the General Manager of Eron was a slave; he could not choose to let the Cl.u.s.ter remain free.

He could not choose because he was a focus of many forces; they would not let him exercise his will. But a free man can choose; in that, individualism is good. In that, all men are free.

There were other things Horn heard: No man can act alone; he is bound up in humanity. No man suffers alone; humanity suffers with him. Injustice to one is injustice to all; every man should resent it as if it happened to him; it did.

What was it Wu had said, in effect? When somebody moves, something has pushed. It was a mistake to say it like that, dehumanized. It's better to say: when somebody moves, somebody has pushed.

There was a simple way of saying it all: no matter how far apart people seem, there is a bridge that joins them all.

Horn had learned that. It was a great deal to have learned. It was worth dying for. But even more important, it was a reason for living.

The Tube. Symbol of oppression. Symbol of hope- The weight landed on his back, bearing him down. Quick, sure hands reached for his throat. Horn stumbled and, stumbling, ducked forward. The weight flew over his shoulder. It was a man, diving into the ditch, dark arms flailing the air like something Horn remembered. But there was no time for memory. The ditch flashed as the man hit the bottom; it was the end of screams and the beginning of the slow stench of cooking flesh.

Before then, Horn had turned, las.h.i.+ng out with hard fists at the shadowy figures that pressed around him. One of them staggered back, but he came in again. These weren't careless, casual guards. They were skilled killers; they had learned to kill with their hands-or be killed.

They closed in, a deadly semicircle. Two of them dived at Horn simultaneously, one for his knees, another for his throat. Horn gave his knee to the man who wanted it. He grunted and fell to the side, rolled quickly to his feet. Horn clubbed the other down with the hard edge of his hand; he fell and lay still.

But they had forced him back. He reached behind with one foot. There was only emptiness there. He was on the edge of the ditch. Below was the death the first one had died. He could retreat no farther.

There was the bridge. If he could find it, he could back along it and take them one at a time. But he didn't dare turn and look, and his foot touched nothing as it swung.

They closed in. Did they want him to die? Did they want to force him back? He was safe as long as they had to come to him; he was sure enough of his own strength for that. But if he went to them, it was a different matter. They would be all over him then, and it would be a miracle for him to get away.

But it was that or give ground, and there was no ground to give. He tensed his legs.

THE HISTORY.

Freedom....

How much is it worth? As much as anyone can pay and sometimes a little more. And even then no man can own it clear or bequeath it to his children.

The Cl.u.s.ter had it, and Eron bid. To the Cl.u.s.ter, freedom was worth everything it had. The federated worlds ventured it all, not once but twice. And it wasn't enough.

Eron was shaken by the incredible defeat of the first Quarnon War. A second defeat might have shattered the Empire. But even that risk was worthwhile to erase the insidious propaganda that free worlds existed outside the Empire.

Years pa.s.sed as black fleets drove toward the Cl.u.s.ter at nearly the speed of light and set up Tube Terminals nearby. From them men and machines poured out within hours of the time they left Eron.

And yet the Cl.u.s.ter fought.

How can you estimate the cost? What is the price of a depopulated world? Of civilizations destroyed? Of billions of human lives?

Here is one figure: the share of the Company's revenue received by every man and woman of pure golden blood was cut in half.

Freedom? Set your price. Somewhere a man will want it bad enough to pay anything....

16.

THE KEY.

Horn leaped toward the encircling shadows, twisting, dodging, fists smas.h.i.+ng. There were too many of them. When one reeled back, another took his place. Fists got through Horn's guard. They battered at his face; they found his body. And then the shadows were all over him, clinging to his arms, his back, trying to take his legs out from under him. Horn swayed like a tree about to topple.

One face reached over his shoulder, teeth bared, seeking his throat. Beyond the enclosing ma.s.s of fists and fingers and teeth, a loud voice boomed out, "Enough, you blood-hungry wolves! Enough, I say! I'll have no more of this!"

Horn could feel them being torn away like leeches. At last he stood free. If his legs trembled a little, he controlled them quickly. He looked up at the wild face that loomed above him.

It was not a face to inspire confidence or trust. The features were craggy and big enough to match the better than two-meter height. A mane of violent, red hair fell unruly around the man's broad shoulders. It was matched, below, by a long, bristling, red beard. The dim sun, which had made up its mind to climb over the rocky rim of the planetoid, made the beard even redder.

Horn looked into the deep, joyful blue eyes and took a deep breath. "Thanks," he said simply.

The beard parted. "Nothing!" the giant bellowed. "I like you, little man. You did well against that pack of curs. Even curs get brave when they run together, and a lot of them can bring down the proudest stag. They call me Redblade."

The name was familiar. "The pirate?" Horn asked.

Redblade's eyes sparkled. "You've heard of me?"

Horn nodded. It was a name synonymous with destruction, ma.s.sacre, rape; also with defiance of authority, which was the Empire.

"It took three cruisers to beat me," the pirate boasted, "and then they caught me asleep."

"I'm Horn. Soldier of fortune."

"Another pirate, eh? But smarter. We'd make a pair." His face darkened. "If there was only a chance of getting off this forgotten rock."

"No chance?" Horn said.

Redblade shook his head despondently. "No one has ever done it; not in all the time Vantee has been a prison."

"There's a key to any door."

"Not this one," Redblade said. "Come along. I'll tell you why. You're just in time for breakfast."

As the pirate led him around the broad ditch, Horn said, "Why did those men want to kill me?"

"After you've eaten breakfast, you'll see."

They came to a cl.u.s.ter of ragged men. They were sitting, squatting, standing, several hundred of them, waiting for something to happen.

"Make way!" Redblade roared. "We have a guest."

He forced his way through the throng with easy movements of his shoulders that sent men flying aside. Those that resisted were staggered by a tap of Redblade's hand. Horn recognized a brutality in the pirate; perhaps it was necessary.

They stopped beside a shallow trench gouged out of the rock. A pipe ran to it from the black wall of the fortress. As they arrived, a sticky, yellowish, viscous stuff began to gush from the pipe into the trench.

"Breakfast," Redblade muttered. "Eat."

He knelt and scooped up a handful; Horn went down beside him and tasted the stuff. It was edible but not much more. Horn couldn't afford to be squeamish; he ate hungrily.

"Mus.h.!.+" Redblade said with disgust. "Morning and night, mus.h.!.+"

The pirate was wiping his bearded mouth on a copper-haired forearm. Horn got to his feet. The other men were lining the trench, some of them with their faces half-buried in the mush as they stretched full-length. Men were dragged away by those behind them. Fights started. One man fell into the trench and staggered away, making a meal of what he could sc.r.a.pe off his body.

Horn felt a little sick.

"Pigs!" Redblade said with disgust. "Oh, it's food. They put things in it, someone said, minerals, things. None of us die-from that. It's filling but it isn't satisfying. We get hungry for meat."

Horn s.h.i.+vered. "That was what they wanted."

"Some of us get hungrier than others."

They were walking away from the squatting fortress. In a few minutes it dropped away below the horizon. Horn and Redblade stood at the rim of a large but not deep depression that was shaped like a saucer.

"Understand how we live," Redblade said, "and you'll understand why escape is impossible."

He pointed out the dark holes in the wall that were caves, dug laboriously out of the rock over the years and generations. They were invaluable, Redblade said, as protection against the cold- "No fire?" Horn asked.

Redblade shook his head. That was the basic thing. Vantee had never been alive. There were no deposited stores of chemical energy: oil, coal, or wood. Nothing on Vantee would burn. The planetoid's only resource was rock, and rock has few uses. Aside from rock, the only things the prisoners had were what they had brought out of the fortress with them. They were valued in this ascending order: bone (implements and poor weapons), rags (warmth), and metal- "Metal?"

"Shoe nails, pins, belt buckles, b.u.t.tons, eyelets.... It takes a long time to acc.u.mulate enough to hammer out something as useful as a knife."

Horn accepted it. Without fire, almost all construction and manufacture was impossible.

For amus.e.m.e.nt, Redblade continued, they had such things as men without women can have. Such as they were, they supplied a backbone for the prison culture. They were the private indulgences and the contests.

The contests were athletic and usually b.l.o.o.d.y. Somebody got maimed or killed. A complex system of behavior and social prestige had developed around it. At the present, Redblade was the undisputed champion, having defeated all challengers. It carried certain privileges: a share of all corpses, the right to give as many orders as he could personally enforce- "You could do that anyway," Horn objected.

"True," Redblade admitted, "but they won't gang up on me unless I overestimate my strength or get unreasonable. The result of all this, though, is that no one will do anything he doesn't want to do or can't be made to do."

"They won't act together, then," Horn mused. "That's individualism with a vengeance."

"So," Redblade said, shrugging his ma.s.sive shoulders, "it adds up to this: there's no chance of rescue. No one even knows where Vantee is."

Horn remembered the unfamiliarity of the stars; the sky might as well have been that of another galaxy.

"The only way back is through the Tube," Redblade said, "and the only way to the Tube is through the fortress." He looked down at his huge hands, clenched them. "We tried that once. We threw rocks into the ditch until we could reach the walls. We didn't make a dent in them."

"What happened?"

Redblade shrugged. "The Warden cut off the food until we cleared the ditch out. A lot of us died. You see, though, that it's hopeless."