Schuyler smiled slightly. “I seldom waste my time. You’re under a misapprehension. It’s your ability to speak the K’harn language that interests me.”
Evers stared, puzzled. “Why?”
Schuyler said, “When I found my technicians weren’t getting anywhere on those gadgets, I gave orders for my men out there to bring back a couple of K’harn scientists who could explain all that stuff to us. Two scientists of the K’harn were captured and brought here, but one unwisely attempted an escape and was killed. The other is still here, but he’s uncooperative and refuses even to speak to us. We don’t know his language, yet it’s essential that we get him to cooperate.”
Lindeman slowly began to rise to his feet, staring at Schuyler in absolute unbelief as the magnate went on.
“If you know the K’harn language, you can talk to him. Tell him my proposition — that as soon as he’s explained all the machines to my technicians, he’ll be returned to Andromeda. Emphasize to him that—”
It was as far as Schuyler got. Lindeman’s hoarse voice interrupted him, saying,
“So it wasn’t enough for your filthy greed to rob and kill out there, you had to bring two of them here prisoners. Why, you—”
He plunged toward Schuyler’s desk. Evers jumped up but before he could take a step, one of the tough-faced men had fired. The pallid beam from his gun dropped Lindeman like a heap of old clothes.
“You move and you get it too,” said the tough-faced man.
Schuyler said bitingly to the man, “Couldn’t you have grabbed him? There was no need to stun him, you fool.”
The man looked uncomfortable. “I thought—”
“Blockheads trying to think make most of my troubles,” said Schuyler. “Take him down to one of the lower rooms and let him sleep it off.”
The man hastily lifted Lindeman as though he were a mannikin and toted him out. The other tough-faced man remained, his gun in full evidence.
Schuyler turned his gaze back to Evers, who stood with fists tightly clenched. He said, “Your friend will be all right in an hour or so. Now what about my proposition — will you talk to this K’harn?”
“If I do — what?” asked Evers.
“You stay living,” said Schuyler promptly. “I keep my promises. You won’t leave Arkar, but neither of you will be killed or harmed.”
Evers thought about it, mastering his fury. He had no intention whatever of helping Schuyler but he thought himself justified in fighting the devil with fire. If he could stall till the GC ships reached Arkar…
He said slowly, “I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him what you say. But I won’t advise him to accept your proposition. That’s up to him.”
“You have nice scruples,” said Schuyler ironically. “You can also tell him that there are many ways of making people — even not-human people — talk, if we have to use them.” He looked at the man with the gun. “All right, put him in with the K’harn.”
The man who had taken Lindeman away returned. The two men shepherded Evers out of the bronze room, and along gleaming metal corridors to a stairway. They walked behind him, their guns out.
The stairway went down two levels before it ended in another corridor. There were two doors on each side of the short corridor, and each of the doors had a heavy combination-lock.
“Listen,” said Evers to the men, “you know that GC is on its way here right now, don’t you?”
One of the men said simply, “Shut up.”
Evers shut up. He knew when a thing was no use, and it was no use now.
He was halted in front of one of the doors. One of the men went to it and started turning the combination-lock. The other man stood behind Evers, his gun levelled.
The door was suddenly swung open by the man who had unlocked it. The man behind Evers shoved him powerfully at the same moment. Evers plunged forward, into a narrow metal cell. The door slammed shut behind him.
As Evers picked himself up he heard a movement in the corner of the cell. There, in the shadows, the K’harn stood watching him.
Weird child of another universe, this crouching, spidery shape — yet familiar to Evers’ eyes. The semi-human torso, the four powerful limbs that were neither arms nor legs yet were both, the fourfingered hands or feet, the white, hairless face and great dark eyes…
Evers started forward, and then as he opened his mouth to speak, the spidery figure rushed forward and he went down again, with alien hands upon his throat.
CHAPTER VII
Evers rolled on the floor of the cell, frantically trying to break the grip of his unhuman attacker. But two of the K’harn’s limbs pinioned his arms, and the other two hands were at his throat, strangling him. The big dark eyes blazed with a deadly rage, only inches from his own.
He could not breathe and he could not speak and the edges of things were beginning to darken. Evers knew he would be dead in a minute unless he broke that grip. His legs were free, and he brought his knees up in a battering smash at the weird torso.
The K’harn grunted, and the grip of his limbs on Evers relaxed for a brief second. Evers used his doubled-up legs as a lever, put all his strength into them, and thrust his spidery antagonist clear off him.
Instantly, with incredible quickness, the K’harn flashed in toward him again.
“Wait!” choked Evers in the K’harn language. “Friend — I—”
The terrible grip was on him again before he could say more, and he had done all he could and it wasn’t enough.
But the K’harn paused, holding him. His blazing eyes searched Evers’ face, and for the moment he did not tighten his grip.
That strange face so close to Evers, white and hairless, the eyes enormous, the nose rudimentary and the mouth small and lipless, was like a gargoyle-mask glaring down at him. Then the K’harn spoke for the first time, in his oddly-aspirated language.
“Where did you learn our speech?” he hissed. “Are there others of the K’harn prisoned here now?”
Evers could hardly speak at all with the hold still on his throat, but he forced out the syllables of that alien tongue in a husky whisper.
“I am a prisoner like yourself. There are no other K’harn here. I learned your speech from your own folk. I have stood on the worlds of Lah and Ameramm and Ky.”
The great, flaming eyes searched his face. “Ky?” whispered the K’harn. “You have been there?”
“I was there, and I saw the destruction and death that had been dealt there by the evil ones of my own race,” said Evers. “I and my two friends learned your language there, in the looted House of Knowledge.”
“What name has the Master of the House of Knowledge on Ky?” demanded the other.
Evers searched his memory frantically, and then said, “Janja is his name.”
For the first time, the grip relaxed. The K’harn drew back a little. He stood facing Evers, and there was still a menace in the tenseness of his four limbs, the poise of his head, the glare in his eyes.
“Yes,” he whispered. “That is his name. You could not have learned that had you been of the looters. For they only stayed long enough to kill, to seize the instruments of Knowledge, and to take them away and with them, two of us lesser Masters.”
Evers began to realize that this K’harn was half-mad, and he did not wonder at it. To see their peaceful city shattered by the sudden eruption of Schuyler’s ships from the sky, to have death strike from unfamiliar weapons, to be captured and brought on the nightmare traverse between galaxies, to be prisoned and questioned and threatened for weeks, maybe months — he thought he would have gone crazy himself.
“The men who hold us here are my enemies as they are yours,” Evers told him. He began to talk more rapidly, hesitating often as he tried to remember the unfamiliar phrases, telling how he and Lindeman and Straw had gone to Andromeda and of the terrible surprise that had awaited them on the fringe worlds there. He concluded, “We came back to stop what they are doing to your worlds. My people, our government, would stop it if they knew. But we had to prove it, and in trying we were discovered, and one of my friends is dead and one is senseless and I am in this cell with you.”