"Not that," said Gordon, panting for breath. "Look at his face. I've seen that before... he's under H'Harn control. Get that stunner out of his hand!"
Hull carefully peeled back Shorr Kan's fingers until he let go of the weapon, and as soon as it passed into the Antarian's hands Shorr Kan sagged and went limp. Like someone coming out of a faint he looked up at them and mumbled, "What happened? I felt..."
But Gordon had forgotten about him. He wrenched the stunner away from the startled Hull and disarmed it feverishly by withdrawing its charge-chamber. Then, just as quickly, he tossed the useless stunner back to Hull.
"You keep it. I'll keep the charge-chamber, and that way neither one of us can use it if the H'Harn takes control of..."
He never finished the sentence. A bolt as of black lightning, the cold paralyzing force that he had felt before at Teyn, exploded with terrifying silence in his brain. There was no shield against it, no possibility of struggle. It was like death. And simply, he died.
Just as simply and suddenly, he lived again. He was on the deck and his hands were around Shorr Kan's neck, throttling him, and Hull Burrel was pulling him away with such force that he could hear the sinews cracking in the Antarian's back and shoulders.
"Let go," Hull was snarling. "Let go or I'll have to knock you out..."
He let go. Shorr Kan rolled over and slid away, his mouth wide and his chest heaving. "All... all right, now," Gordon stammered. Feeling sick and shaken, he started to get up. But instead of releasing him, Hull's grip abruptly tightened. His knee slammed into Gordon's back and Gordon fell hard forward and his skull rang on the steel deck.
The H'Harn had shifted its attention once more. Glassy-eyed and blank as a statue, the Antarian left Gordon and flung himself on Shorr Kan and tried earnestly to kill him. Shorr Kan managed to fight him off until Gordon could collect his wits and help. Together they got Hull down and held him, and then between breaths he went flaccid and lay looking at them, his eyes wild but quite sane.
"Me, too?" he said, and Gordon nodded. Hull sat up and put his head in his hands. "Why doesn't it just kill us and get it over with?"
"It can't kill us," said Shorr Kan. "Not with mental force. It could destroy our minds, one by one, but I don't think it wants to be flying through the Marches with three mindless maniacs. It seems to be trying to get two of us to eliminate each other so it'll only have one left to control. I expect it needs someone to help it fly the ship."
He stared at the closed door aft. "If we try to get back at it we'll never make it..."
Gordon glanced up at the view-screen, where the thronging stars and shoals of drift crept with such deceptive slowness. This was one of the most crowded regions of the Marches, and Shorr Kan had worried about their velocity. Perhaps...
With desperate inspiration, so desperate that he did not pause a second to think about it, Gordon sprang to the control-board. He began at random to hit the enigmatic controls, punching, twisting, turning them this way and that.
The little ship went crazy. It flashed toward a great belt of drift, then veered wildly off toward a blue sun and its planets, then zoomed zenithward toward a double-double whose four suns yawned before them like great portals of flame. Hull Burrel and Shorr Kan were tumbled against the bulkheads, crying out their surprise.
The H'Harn hidden aft must have been startled, too startled for the moment to stop him.
Hull scrambled toward him. "You'll wreck us!" he cried. "Are you daft? Get your hand off those controls, for God's sake!"
Gordon shoved him aside. "It's our only chance to deal with that creature. Get it scared. Both of you, keep hitting the controls at random. If we all three do that, it can't stop all of us."
Hull stared at the view-screen and the dizzying whirl of suns and worlds and deadly drift. "But we'll crash. It's suicide!"
Shorr Kan had seen Gordon's point. "He's right, Hull. It's risking a crash, but it's the only way." He pushed Hull toward the control-board. "Do it!"
Dazed and only half-understanding, Hull obeyed. The three of them pushed and pulled at things like madmen. The ship corkscrewed, stood on its tail. The protective grav-stasis operating inside the ship shielded them from the worst accelerative effects, but the sheer insanity of flying in this mad fashion was terrifying.
"All right back there!" Gordon yelled. "You can read my mind, you know what I'm saying! If we crash and die, you die with us! Try to take control of any of us again and we will crash!"
He waited for the icy mental bolt to hit him, but it did not. And after a minute there came into his mind a telepathic feeler that was cold, alien, and... fearful.
"Stop!" thought the hidden H'Harn. "We cannot survive if you continue this. Stop it!"
14
Sweat stood out on Gordon's forehead. He saw in the view-screen that the ship was now heading with all its tremendous speed toward the irregular sprawl of a filamentary nebula. That nebula would be rotten with drift.
He took his hands off the controls. "Let be," he told the others. "But be ready to hit them again any moment."
An anxious thought came from the H'Harn. It could see quite clearly, Gordon knew, what was ahead of them, using his eyes as a viewer. "You must change course or we will perish."
"Change course to where?" said Gordon harshly. "To the Magellanic sub-galaxy? That's where you were taking us with your hypnotic suggestions."
"It is necessary for me to return there," came the sullen thought. "But we can make a bargain."
"What kind of bargain?"
"This," thought the hidden H'Harn. "Set a course toward an uninhabited world I know of that is not too distant, and land there. You may then leave the ship."
Gordon looked at the others, Hull's coppery face sweating and haggard, Shorr Kan's a mask of grim doubt.
"I got the thought." Shorr Kan nodded. "You too, Hull? Anyway, I don't think much of it for a bargain. The thing will try to trick us somehow."
"No!" came the sharp thought.
Gordon paused, undecided. He could see no other arrangement that might even possibly work. The situation was fantastic. The three of them in the racing ship, each of them vulnerable to the colossal mental power of the creature back there, but only one at a time.
A thought crossed his mind but he instantly suppressed it. It was nothing he wanted to think about even for one moment. He look at the other two and said, "I think we've got to risk it."
"Very well," came the quick, eager thought of the H'Harn. A little too quick, a little too eager. "I will direct your companion how to fly the ship to that world."
"As you did before?" jeered Gordon. "Oh, no. You're not putting Hull under again and then using him in some underhanded fashion."
"But how then... ?"
Gordon said, "You will explain to Hull the controls of the ship, by direct telepathic statements. He will repeat aloud to us each of your explanations. If at any moment Hull shows the slightest sign of being under your mental dominance, we'll hit the controls and keep on hitting them until we crash."
There was a long pause before any answer came. Hull was looking agonizedly at the screen, and Gordon saw in it that the filamentary nebula was terribly close, winding across space like a gigantic ragged serpent. The serpent was diamonded with points of light that came and went, bigger fragments of drift that caught the light of distant suns and then lost it.
He thought grimly that if the H'Harn did not make up its mind soon, there was not going to be any escape for any of them.
That thought pressured the H'Harn into hasty decision, as Gordon had hoped it would.
"Very well, it is agreed. But your companion must take over at once."
Hull Burrel seated himself at the controls. Gordon and Shorr Kan leaned on either side of him, watching his face for any sign of change, watching the controls, and watching each other.