The Valloan girl seemed to read his face, for she turned and ran up a stairway that broke the crystal facade beside them. “This way!”
Evers ran after her, his boots slipping clumsily on the worn crystal steps. The girl ahead of him was not wiggling and bouncing now — her long legs moved like an antelope’s. Drugged with fatigue as he was, Evers was panting when they reached the roof.
Under the radiance of the cataract of suns that belted the sky, stretched a bewildering labyrinth of glittering roofs. The chiming of crystal bells was overpoweringly loud up here, coming from all directions but loudest from just ahead. Then he saw, on the next flat roof, the old Valloan man who squatted before his double row of queer conical crystal bells, tapping them with his little hammers, adding his own peculiar chiming rhythm to the ringing confusion that throbbed through the night. Mentally, Evers damned the Valloan fondness for their queer music that kept some of them on the roofs half the night.
“It’s all right, old Oriden never sees anything when he’s at his bells,” said the girl. “We’d better hurry.”
Evers thought they had better. More whistles had joined the first, back toward the Federation compound. He went across the roofs with the girl and didn’t ask where it was they went.
She ducked down a stairway in the middle of the roof, and he followed her down into a corridor that was almost totally dark. He felt glad to be out of the full impact of those chimes.
She opened a door, and he followed her through into a room equally dark. The door closed, and then Evers uttered a little exclamation, his eyes wincing. She had suddenly struck fire to a lamp, and he was momentarily dazzled. The soft little flame of the lamp was reflected brilliantly from the faceted crystal walls and floor and ceiling.
“How you people can stand all this crystal—,” he began, and then stopped. He looked at her suspiciously. “What’s this place? And who are you?”
“I’m Sharr,” she said. “And it’s my place. And you’re safe here — for a while.”
Evers looked around, and thought that it was a hell of a thing that his great dream, the great thing that he and Straw and Lindeman had done — should have led him only to this — a backwater fringe-planet and a poorly furnished room of crystal, and a Valloan girl with red hair and a sexy shape, who stood and inspected him with curious green eyes.
“You didn’t stick your neck out just because you hate police,” Evers told her. “Why did you?”
She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Earthmen are rich. Everyone knows that. One would pay well, I thought, to escape arrest.”
Evers ran his hand wearily over his face, and told her, “I’ve got a few credits on me, but not too many. But I’ll have more later, and—”
He stopped. Sharr wasn’t listening to him. She was looking past him, at the door behind him, and her green eyes were wide with fear, her mouth falling open.
Evers spun around instantly, his hand frantically scooping in his pocket for his weapon.
There was nobody at all behind him.
He heard a hand whizz through the air but he couldn’t turn back in time. A stunning blow hit the nerve-centers in his neck, and skyrockets went off gloriously inside his head.
He woke, how much later he did not know, with a filthy headache. It was some minutes before he became conscious of anything but the pounding of his head. When he did, it was to find his face against the smooth crystal floor.
Evers began to remember. Raging, he tried to scramble up, and discovered at once that his wrists were tightly bound behind him.
He rolled over. The girl Sharr sat in a low chair three feet away, one silk-clad leg crossed over the other, smiling down at him with happy eyes.
“Did you think I didn’t know who you are?” she said. “Why do you suppose I followed you, and risked snatching you away from that GC man? A fortune — and you walk right into my hands!”
“You’re out of your mind,” Evers said thickly. “I told you how much I have.”
Sharr laughed. “It’s not how much you have, but how much you’ll bring. You’re Vance Evers. One of the men who went to Andromeda Galaxy.”
CHAPTER II
The crystal chimes of Valloa whispered down into the room from above, their throbbing tinkling rising and falling in the silence.
Evers lay and looked up at the girl, and then he laughed mirthlessly. “Do you have any idea how far away Andromeda Galaxy is?”
“Very far, they say,” Sharr answered. “They told exactly how far, in the news.” She added. “We do get the news bulletins now, you know, since the Federation decided to civilize us.”
Evers said nothing. This red-haired piece was intelligent, and not to be bluffed, and he was in trouble right up to his neck.
“The bulletins told,” Sharr continued sweetly, “about a man named Eric Lindeman who was a Federation scientist, an astronautical engineer-designer, they called him. And how he wanted to make a star-ship go faster and farther than ever before.”
Yes, Evers thought heavily. Lindeman’s big dream. It had brought them all to this, all three of them. And yet, even now, he could not regret the dream and their passion for it. It had been worth while.
Long ago, man had won the stars, by the invention of the overdrive that hurled ships in a shortcut through hyper-space, thousands of times as fast as light. Out through the galaxy had spread the ships, the commerce and civilization of the Federation, to thousands of suns and worlds.
But beyond the shores of our galaxy, out across the vast ocean of outer space, glimmered other great continents of stars, other galaxies. Could a ship cross that gulf, could man win the galaxies too, if the overdrive were stepped up so that an even tighter dimensional short-cut attained speeds tens of thousands of times greater?
Lindeman was sure it could be done. It had, he pointed out, always been theoretically possible, but nobody had tried it yet. He would try it. And he had infected his assistants — Evers and Straw — with his own enthusiasm. They had eagerly laid their plans for the building of the Lindeman drive.
And then, from the chief of their Bureau, had come the peremptory order to discontinue the research as “impractical and unnecessary at the present time.” All appeals and arguments had been flatly rejected.
Disappointed and angry, Lindeman had quit the Bureau — and had taken Evers and Straw with him. They would build the drive. If not for the Federation, then for themselves. Lindeman had a few past patents that had brought him credits. He used them to buy a four-man express cruiser, and they three had built the Lindeman drive into it. Man was going to step out into inter-galactic space.
But he wasn’t, they soon learned. From Galactic Control, the branch that governed all space travel, came a formal directive that was backed by a decision of the Council itself. No experimental voyages outside the galaxy were permitted, now or in the near future.
“There are thousands of fringe planets in our own galaxy that need development,” said the directive. “There is work for many generations along our own starways. To start a star-rush to another galaxy could fatally cripple the orderly development of our own. Permission denied.”
Lindeman had had enough. His ship had the drive in it and was ready to go. He had cursed the Council, GC and all Bureaus, he had explained to Straw and Evers the penalties they would face if they violated an official directive, and then the three of them had taken off, had plunged out of the galaxy and hit for Andromeda.
And this, Evers thought bitterly, was their homecoming from that voyage. Straw was hurt, and Lindeman was hiding with him in the ship in the jungle, and he lay here trussed up like a pig with a Valloan wench gloating over him.