They stood and stared, all their faces bewildered and strange in the light that now struck upon them.
"What is it?” whispered Yrra. A few miles from them, on the other side of the ridge, a great column of opalescent light rose skyward. It was most intense at its base, fading as it ascended. It seethed and coruscated uncannily, yet it maintained itself and sent a strange glow out to touch everything around it.
By that glow, Harlow saw that the opalescent pillar rose from the center of a city. Dark roofs, walls, towers, quivered in the unearthly glow, and shadows clotted the ways between them. There was no other light at all in the silent place, and no visible movement.
"That's the city of the Vorn,” he said. “Lurluun. It's dead, all right."
"But the light?"
"I don't know—” Then Harlow broke off in relief as he saw a flying, shining star that came rushing up toward them. “Dundonald can tell us."
Dundonald had something to tell them, but it was not that. From that hovering star of radiance, his thoughts beat at Harlow frantically.
"It may be too late, Harlow. They've had a message from Frayne. Frayne's ship has entered the Horsehead and is coming on to this world right now!"
CHAPTER VI
The sudden imminence of complete defeat had a curiously numbing effect upon Harlow. He had come a long way, they all had, and they were tired, and it seemed that they were too late and it had all been for nothing. And what was he doing so far from Earth, standing in the night of an alien world and looking across a dead, dark city at a pillar of glory while a floating radiance that had once been human whispered in his mind?
Then Harlow's momentary despair was swept away by good, strong rage. His anger had nothing to do with his mission, important as that was. It was ordinary human anger at being beaten, out-thought, bested, by someone cleverer than himself. He would not let Taggart get away with this!
"Then we've got to hit Taggart before Frayne's ship arrives,” he said.
He spoke aloud, so that Kwolek and the others could understand as well as Dundonald. He asked Dundonald, “Where are Taggart and his sentries?"
"You see that pillar of light, Harlow?"
"I see it. What is it?"
"It's the operative beam of the Converter. It's perpetual, undying. It springs from the mechanism of the Converter itself. Enter the base of the beam and its forces take the atoms of your body, the very electrons, and rearrange them so that you become like me — like the Vorn. But if, as a Vorn, you enter the upper part of the beam, it triggers the reverse process and the beam draws you down and re-arranges your electrons into solidity, into ordinary humanity, again."
"You can tell me how it works later — right now I've got to know about those sentries,” pressed Harlow.
"I'm trying to tell you,” thought Dundonald. “Up on the rim of the Converter itself are two guards with auto-rifles — in case I try to emerge. They also can cover every foot of the big plaza in which the Converter stands. Taggart and his men have their base in a large building on the south side of the plaza. They've got a communic there and their prisoners — my men and Brai — are locked up in a windowless room of the building."
"Taggart's awake?"
"Yes. He was talking by communic with his ship out there. Telling them to hit your ship with missiles the moment you show up, but not to mistake Frayne's ship for yours."
Harlow tried to think fast. This was a soldier's job and he was not a soldier, Star Survey didn't teach strategy. Nor was there time to evolve elaborate plans. He said, “We'll have to knock out the two outside sentries before we can hit Taggart, then. We'll see what the set-up is. Let's move."
They went forward on the double, down the descending roadway toward the dark city that brooded under the loom of the ridge. For light they had the opalescent rays of the great column of brilliance ahead.
Their hurrying feet shuffled the dust and sand of thousands of years’ drifting, and made echoes that whispered in the starless night. The echoes became louder when they came down into one of the wide streets that led straight away between low black buildings toward the vertical beam.
Fast and far had Earthmen come from their little world, thought Harlow. The swift snowballing of technical progress had made one breakthrough after another and now a score of’ Earthmen were hurrying through the night of an alien star-world toward something that could be the biggest breakthrough of all.
A deep shiver shook Harlow as he looked at the shining will-of-the-wisp gliding beside him, and then at the dark and silent buildings. Men had once lived here as men. Now they were all gone, dispersed as the radiant Vorn far across the galaxies, and had that breakthrough been good? He thought of a secret like that in the hands of ambitious men, and looked again at the gliding, dancing star beside him, and he quickened his pace.
They came to where the street debauched into the plaza. They kept close against the side of a building, and Harlow motioned his men to stay there in the shadow. He and Kwolek and Garcia with the flitting gleam of Dundonald, moved forward until they could peer out into the open space.
Plaza, park, shrine — what would you call it? Harlow wondered.
Whatever it had been called, this smoothly-paved space was vast. So vast that far away around its curving rim, a parked star-cruiser as large as his own looked small.
"My Starquest," murmured Dundonald's thought.
Harlow spared it only a glance. His eyes flew to the thing that dominated the plaza, the city, the whole planet.
The Converter. The ultimate triumph of an alien science, the machine that had made men into the Vorn.
It did not look like a machine. At the center of the great paved area there rose a massive, flat-topped cement pedestal. Whatever apparatus there was, whatever perpetual power-source of nuclear or other nature, was hidden inside that. A flight of steps on each side of it led up to the summit of the eminence.
From the center of this flat summit, the opalescent beam sprang upward into the night. At its base, the beam was a curdled, seething luminescence that was dazzling to the eyes, flinging quaking aurora-rays in a twitching brilliance all around the plaza. Higher up, the beam imperceptibly lessened in intensity until far up in the night it was only a vague shining. The Converter. The ultimate step in space travel, the gateway to the freedom of the cosmos.
"The guards — see!” rang Dundonald's thought, urgently.
With an effort, Harlow wrenched his mind from the hypnotic fascination of the beam. Now he saw the two men.
They stood on the unrailed ledge or balcony that surrounded the beam, and the beam itself was between them. Their backs were to the beam as they could not stand its brilliance for too long, but they looked alertly upward and around them every few moments. Each of them carried a heavy, old-fashioned auto-rifle, cradled for instant use.
"They watch in case I try to come back out through the beam,” thought Dundonald. “Always, two watch. And they can see the whole plaza."
"Where are Taggart and the others?” whispered Harlow.
"See there — away to your left, not far from the Starquest. That square building with the domed roof."
Harlow saw it. It was not hard to identify, for light shone out through the windows of that building and all the others were dark.
He dropped back a little to where Kwolek was looking ahead with wide, wondering eyes.
"You'll take all the men except Garcia and me,” he told Kwolek. “Circle around and approach that building from behind. Wait near its front door until Garcia and I have got the two sentries up there on the Converter. Then, when Taggart and the rest come out, jump them fast."