I know what you are, enemy of my people, Hargate thought, his brain stirring into action as air finally began to make its way into his lungs, removing the immediate threat of death. It occurred to him that he had been lucky to receive only a fraction of the reflected discharge—anything like the amount stopped by Vekrynn would have shut down his nervous system for ever. He moved his arms, satisfying himself that they were sufficiently functional for what he had to do, and—scarcely able to believe what was happening to him—came to a terrible decision.
Grasping the wheels of his chair, he rolled himself closer to Vekrynn. Smiling his lop-sided smile, deliberately relaxing his eyes into a squint, he looked up at the Mollanian and extended one hand.
“Please listen to me, sir,” he said. “This isn’t my fight. None of this has anything to do with me. Please take me back to Earth and I’ll make it worth your while.”
Vekrynn managed a small step back, his mouth working with revulsion. “What do you think you’re talking about?”
“I’m talking about the Moon.” Hargate glanced at the crumpled figure of Lorrest and gave a nasal snigger. “There’s a machine there, in the Oceanus Procellarum. I believe Lorrest called it a cone field generator. It will activate itself a few minutes before Ceres is due to go by—and you know what that means, don’t you?”
“Don’t believe him,” Lorrest ground out, his neck corded with the effort of speaking. “It’s a trick.”
“Trick? Trick?” The Warden shuffled slightly, almost losing his balance, and looked down at Hargate. “If what you are saying is true, there isn’t any time for me to…”
“It is true and there is time,” Hargate cut in. “They located a node there—that’s why the spot was chosen—and I can tell you exactly where it is. You’ve got time to go there and…”
“Denny!” Lorrest twitched convulsively. “You can’t do this!”
“Keep it shut,” Hargate said with a contemptuous wave. “Why should I get done in over you? I want to go home.”
“That can easily be arranged,” Vekrynn said urgently. “You claim you know the position of the machine and the node?”
“You bet! I can give you its lunar coordinates, or I can even work out the Mollanian equation for you.”
“I doubt very much that you could—it will be enough if you simply tell me its position.”
“Not so fast, man.” Hargate renewed his grin. “Do we have a deal?”
“Most certainly—as soon as you demonstrate that you can fulfil your side of the bargain.”
“Okay.” Ignoring Lorrest’s desperate efforts to shout him down, Hargate summoned from his memory the precise coordinates given to him earlier and slowly called out the figures. Vekrynn nodded repeatedly as he absorbed the information.
“I’m grateful to you,” he said, gazing intently at Hargate as though seeing him for the first time. “Now we must hurry. Can you reach the top of this hummock unaided?”
“I believe so.” With Hargate struggling to overcome some loss of strength and feeling in his arms, and the Mollanian progressing by ludicrously small steps, they reached the crest at approximately the same time. The Warden’s broad face was drawn and liberally streaked with perspiration, evidence of the tremendous physical effort he was making in order to move at all. Bending his arms with agonised slowness, he fumbled with one of the square links of his golden belt, causing it to spring open like a locket. Inside was a small piece of what looked like dark red glass which Vekrynn touched briefly before closing the link again.
“Dome field generator,” he explained. “We must take air with us.”
“With us? I don’t want to go to the Moon.”
“But it’s so close to your final destination,” Vekrynn replied reasonably. “A very small detour.”
“Does this mean you don’t trust me?”
“Of course not! I trust you every bit as much as you trust me.” Vekrynn extended his left hand for Hargate to clasp it and, eyes narrowing with the exertion, gradually raised his right hand in preparation for the tracing of a mnemo-curve.
The Moon! Hargate had expected to feel terror, but instead a deep, searching sadness diffused through him as he considered what he had to do, the obligation he had accepted on behalf of every man, woman and child now living on his home world, and with the mute authority of all those who had gone before. Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my wheelchair of fire…
The transfer took place.
In spite of his foreknowledge of where he was going and the fact that he had seen a thousand pictures of the Moon’s surface, Hargate gasped aloud as the sky went black. His previous jumps between habitable worlds, dramatic though they were, had not equalled the emotional shock of seeing a carpet of living turf instantaneously replaced by the ancient and sterile dust of the Oceanus Procellarum. The plain stretched without interruption to the horizon, with the few distant mountain peaks that were visible rising from beyond the curve of the lifeless world. A blindingly brilliant sun hung almost at the zenith, drenching everything with a harsh vertical light, and closer to the horizon Earth was visible as a blue-white hemisphere.
Taking his bearings from familiar star groupings, Hargate swung his gaze around the plane of the ecliptic and almost immediately found what he was seeking. Low down in the sky was an object that had no right to be there, a celestial trespasser. The asteroid Ceres was visible as a first-magnitude star. In Hargate’s imagination he could see it growing brighter by the second as it bored its way in at inconceivable velocity from beyond the orbit of Mars. He glanced at his watch and his eyes dilated as he saw that the collision time quoted to him by Lorrest was closer than he had realised. In a scant eighteen minutes a ball of rock seven hundred kilometres in diameter was going to impact with the force of millions of H-bombs, and he—Denny Hargate—was sitting at the precise centre of what would become a continent-sized crater.
“Where is the machine?” Vekrynn shouted, tottering away from Hargate. “I don’t see the machine.”
Wrenching his thoughts away from visions of hell, Hargate shielded his eyes and scanned his surroundings. The first thing he noticed was that there were numerous footprints in the dust beneath his chair. They formed an irregular swathe leading to an area, perhaps fifty paces away, where the surface had been extensively disturbed, apparently by excavation.
Lorrest didn’t tell me they’d buried the machine, he thought. So much the better.
“Over there,” he called out. “It seems to be under the ground.”
Vekrynn turned in the direction indicated, broke into a hobbling run and promptly pitched forward. The semi-paralysis that still affected his mobility prevented him from breaking the fall with his hands, even though it seemed to Hargate that he had gone down in a dreamlike slow motion. Vekrynn lay prone in the dust for a moment, then struggled to his feet and resumed his progress at a more prudent speed. It took Hargate several seconds to appreciate that the lesser gravity of the Moon was actually making walking more difficult for the Mollanian in his present condition.
He switched on the wheelchair’s power and moved the drive control. As he had expected, the chair surged forward, its partially rested batteries more than adequate for propulsion when the whole assemblage had only a sixth of its weight on Earth. For the time being, he was in the novel situation of being more mobile than his adversary.
“It’s all working out my way, Vekrynn, you bastard,” he whispered vindictively, reaching into the hiding place between his right hip and the back of his chair. “Perhaps there is some justice in this universe—perhaps there’s just a trace.”
Vekrynn, having finally reached the site of the excavation, studied the broken ground for a short time and looked up with evident surprise as Hargate brought his chair to a halt close by. “What did they think they were achieving?” he said. “I may not be able to deactivate this type of machine from here, but I can do it from there.” He nodded in the direction of Ceres.