Edmond Hamilton - City at World's End

During the moment that he floundered in the treacherous sand, Kenniston saw the first pallid beam flick out from the ship. It swung in a wide arc, bringing a sudden uproar from the crowd. And then it hit him, and this time the shock was strong. He dropped forward into the sand and lay there like a dead man, utterly still and knowing nothing.

He came back to consciousness, lying flat on his face in a bunk with Gorr Holl’s powerful fingers kneading the nerve centers along his spine.

He groaned, and the Capellan exclaimed in relief.

“Thank the gods you’ve come round! I’ve been working on you the last couple of hours!”

Kenniston sat up painfully. He saw in a small windowless cabin, furnished with a desk and a chair designed to accommodate Gorr Holl’s huge proportions, and it dawned on him that he must be inside the Thanis . “How did I get here?” he asked. It was difficult to speak. His tongue, like the rest of him, was numb and leaden.

“Varn Allan had you brought in. She realized afterward that you were trying to haul her out of trouble, and knocking you out was a mistake.

She wanted you fixed up as quickly as possible.”

Kenniston was too groggy to be sarcastic. He groaned again, and mumbled, “What’s happened, Gorr?”

“Plenty—and all of it bad. Look here.” He touched a stud, and a square section of the metal wall became perfectly transparent, a window.

Kenniston struggled to his feet and looked out through it, at the distant, gleaming dome of New Middletown. And he saw the men of Middletown laboring in the ocher dust before the portal, digging trenches, filling sandbags, drawing up the lines of war.

Gorr Holl pointed out across the dreary waste toward the far-off ridges. Kenniston looked, and saw the brave small cavalcade that toiled down from them, out of the old town. He saw the shrouded field guns, the whole mobile force of the Middletown battery of the National Guard—the little guns that came to bark defiance to the Federation of Stars.

Gorr Holl said, “They gave us three hours to pack up our traps and go—long enough to get their battery in position. After that, they’ll start shooting.”

“The fools,” Kenniston whispered. “The poor bloody fools!” He could have wept with pride, in spite of his full realization of the extent of that folly.

The time was almost up. Those hurrying limbers would reach the portal and swing around, and soon then the men of Middletown would cast the die of their own destruction.

“I’ve got to stop this, Gorr,” he said. “Somehow, I’ve got to stop it!”

Gorr Holl studied him with a curiously intent, measuring look. He said, “How much are you willing to risk on a try? No, wait before you answer. It won’t be easy. Especially for you, with your background, it won’t be easy.”

“Get to the point,” said Kenniston. He grasped almost fiercely at the hint of hope. “Come on! What is it?”

Gorr Holl said, “There are other dying planets beside your Earth. And as I told you, we primitives cling to the worlds of our birth just as your people do. There has been a—well, call it a conspiracy, between the primitive races to stop mass migration, and our whole plans center on the process Lal’lor told you about, Jon Arnol’s process of reviving dead worlds, which has been forbidden by the Federation. Kenniston, we could make Earth a test case!”

“In other words,” said Kenniston slowly, “you want to involve me and my people in a movement to help your peoples buck the Federation law?”

“Quite frankly, yes. But it’s to your benefit, too. If you win, you’ll have Earth and we’ll have our own worlds, to stay on. If you lose well, you’ll be no worse off than you are now.” He put his great paw on Kenniston’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Varn Allan is on the televisor now, getting authorization from Vega Center to use force in carrying out her orders.

Think fast, Kenniston!”

Kenniston thought. It was like moving blindfold through an unfamiliar maze, but he could sense some of the outlines, the undercurrents of disaffection that flowed between the stars. He had no right to involve himself and Middletown in a struggle that he knew almost nothing about… But there beyond the window were the trenches filled with angry men, and the dusty limbers wheeling down, and how could they be worse off than they were now? If there was even an outside chance…

“What do I have to do?” he asked.

Gorr Holl grinned. “Good,” he said. “And remember, you’ll have allies in this thing! Now come on with me, and I’ll tell you on the way.”

The big Cappellan led him out then swiftly through a maze of narrow passageways that ran through the bowels of the Thanis . They met no one, and Kenniston guessed that Gorr Holl was avoiding the main corridors.

He hardly looked at what he could see of the ship as he passed through it. He didn’t care now. All he could think of was the terrible need for haste, the need to avert the disaster that was coming. His ears, his nerves cringed, waiting for the first shell to burst against the Thanis .

He knew it was too soon, but the minutes were passing fast.

Gorr Holl did some rapid explaining as they went. “The evacuation order came from the Board of Governors by an executive committee. According to Federation law, you can make an appeal from that order to the Board of Governors in full session. Now, remember, Kenniston, no one can deny you the right of appeal, so don’t let them bull you out of it.”

They came out on a shadowy catwalk. Gorr Holl stopped and pointed to a corridor some nine feet below. At its end was a closed door.

“That’s the Visor room. Varn Allan is in contact with the committee now. Go in and make your appeal. And remember, Lund is in there too.”

He melted back into the shadows. Kenniston went down a companionway to the corridor and along it to the door at the end. He tried it and it swung open under his hand, and he went through into a high and narrow room, where Varn and Norden Lund turned to face him, startled and surprised by his sudden entrance.

He hardly saw them. Something else caught his gaze and held him transfixed, frozen with a kind of awe.

Two walls of the room were occupied by complicated and unfamiliar mechanisms, all apparently automatic. Facing him was the third wall—a giant-sized screen, reproducing so clear a picture that it was weirdly like a window.

A window into another world…

At a black plastic table sat four figures. Three of these were men in ordinary jackets and slacks—one of them quite old, another elderly, the third dark, brusque-looking, not far into middle age. The fourth at the table was not a man. He was a Spican like Magro, white-furred and oddly catlike with his narrow mane and handsome, faintly cruel face.

But he was older and graver than Magro.

The four of them were like a quartet of businessmen, rudely interrupted in the midst of an earnest conference. They stared out of the screen at Kenniston, and the youngest man demanded of Varn Allan, “Who is this person?”

Kenniston still stood motionless, looking beyond them now. He saw that the room behind them was like the one in which he stood but much larger, a communications room massive with control banks and screens.

Through the window of that room billions of miles across space, Kenniston could see the looming wall of a titanic building. And above it blazed the fiery limb of a diamond Sun, supernal, magnificent, shedding a blue-white blaze across the heavens.

Again the sharp voice from across the galaxy, flashing through the parsecs far faster than light by the magic of latter-day science.

“Varn Allan! Who is this man?”