part0056

Storm woke, and opened his eyes uncertainly. There was a hammering in his head. His eyes ached as though he had just been through a thirty-g acceleration. He felt dazed, stunned, his brain all but burned out by the intensity of what he had experienced.

He rose to his knees, and crouched there a moment like an animal, gathering the strength to raise his head. A long moment passed, and then he looked around.

They looked peaceful enough. Their passing had been quick and merciful. Ellins was sprawled only a few feet from Storm, and the others were strewn like dolls in a wide circle around them. Storm felt a qualm of pity. These men were strangers to him, and though they had been ready to kill him for purely abstract reasons of corporate greed, Storm was saddened that he had needed to kill them for his own survival.

And for the survival of someone else, too.

Where was the alien’s voice? Storm felt no contact at all. The solitude was crushing. In that single moment of union, he had shared his existence with the being from the stars as no two human beings had ever shared it. It had been a kind of marriage, Storm reflected in wonder, though he knew that the alien had been neither of the “male” sort of his race, nor of the “female,” but of that mysterious intermediate sort. A kind of marriage. And a swift divorce.

“Are you all right?” Storm asked, his voice sounding forced and hollow to himself.

No answer from the alien.

The effort, perhaps, of what they had just done, had strained the alien, Storm decided. Perhaps he—it?—was resting.

Storm got to his feet. He was still weak, but the strength was returning rapidly to him. He crossed to Ellins, looked down at him, saw that he and all the others were really dead. Storm picked up the document he had been asked to sign, the waiver of his claim, and crushed it and jammed it into his spacesuit. He found his gimmicked helmet, and studied the controls for a moment, readjusted it to undo what Ellins had done to it, and donned it.

He looked around in satisfaction. The authorities were going to be mystified by this, he thought. He would report that he had gone out to the asteroid to investigate a story that UMC was trying to jump his claim. That he had found a UMC base already established there, but that everyone in it was mysteriously dead. Let the coroners puzzle over it. What would their verdicts read? Heart failure? Cerebral hemorrhage? Death from causes unknown?

Storm didn’t care. The asteroid was his again. UMC would not dare to fight his claim, after being caught red-handed installing orbit-changing rockets. They would quietly shush the matter up, Ellins’ fraudulent claim would vanish from the records, and Storm’s original claim would be reinstated.

All that was fine. But now he had to see after the alien.

He stepped through the airlock, safely helmeted, this time, and jumped into one of the UMC crawlers. A few minutes later, he was on the asteroid’s other hemisphere, roaming the plain in search of the alien’s tunnel.

It took him a little while to find it. It was night, on the other side of the asteroid, and the only illumination came from the stars, and from the faint beam of Storm’s helmet. He discovered the cave, and entered it, making his way down the winding tunnel.

There was no contact with the alien, none at all. Storm was frightened, now.

He came to the final bend in the tunnel, and rounded it, and gasped.

The greenish-yellow cloud-curtain that had screened the star-being’s chamber was all but gone. Only a few faint lemon-colored wisps blocked Storm’s view of the interior of the chamber. Nor was the alien floating high above the chamber floor any longer. He lay in a huddled heap.

And the machinery—the glittering, fantastic instruments from a distant world—

Storm gaped at the sight. Everything destroyed, all the wonderful treasures shattered and incinerated.

“Are you all right?” Storm asked.

The alien’s voice came, feebly, haltingly, I wish … to thank you … for your … help .

“What happened here?” Storm demanded. “Why is everything in ruins?”

I destroyed it , came the answer.

They must not be used by your race , the alien told him. You are not ready … far from ready. These things could have ruined your civilization. They are things no young race can have. They must be developed, not taken from others .

“But you could have seen to it that they didn’t fall into the wrong hands,” Storm said.

You do not … understand. Any hands would have been … the wrong hands—any human hands .

Storm saw what the alien was too tactful to tell him directly. Only a fool or a madman gives a loaded gun to a child, and this creature was neither. Earth’s wisest minds, in the alien’s view, were still only the minds of children. So the glittering instruments had had to perish, lest the next time the alien were less lucky in preventing their capture.

“And you?” Storm said. “You sound so weak!”

I am dying , the alien responded. The effort of doing what we did—I knew it would kill one of us. I am happy it was not you .

“No!” Storm shouted. “Don’t die! Maybe your people will rescue you soon!”

Not for many years. And I am not sad at dying. At last to rest … no longer to be alone. I am so tired, so tired —

Storm stared. For an instant, he felt a touch of the warmth of contact that he had known earlier, but it faded. The surge of mental energy needed to merge with Storm’s mind and wipe out the threat Ellins posed had drained the alien’s life-force, and he was dying.

Helplessly, Storm watched the being ebb away.

There was a sudden sensation of coldness, of air rushing down a corridor, and Storm knew that death had come, that a life older than the dinosaur age had ended. Storm turned away. He no longer could comprehend anything of this. For a flickering instant, he had been the alien, he had understood what it meant to live forever. But the moment of union was past, and the things Storm had experienced in the alien’s mind now seemed like fading dreams.

He was alone on the asteroid of death.

Slowly, Storm turned, and made his way through the tunnel again. His ship was waiting, where he had left it. He clambered up the ladder, entered, explored his gear until he found what he wanted: a small explosive charge, the kind used in making mining surveys.

He returned to the cave, and set the charge, and ran into the clear again, and waited. There was no sound, of course. Storm counted off sixty seconds in his mind, and knew that the charge had erupted by now. He entered the cave once again, but this time he could penetrate only to the second bend. Beyond that, the roof of the tunnel had collapsed in the explosion, and the alien and his chamber and the charred ruins of his wonderful instruments were buried forever.

Storm entered his ship. He sat at the controls for a long while, motionless, dazed, like a man emerging from a dream so vivid that it still captivated his waking mind. Then, shaking his head to clear it, he straightened up, and began to set the computer for blastoff.

The asteroid was his.

He needed only to return to Mars and claim it. No one need ever know of the creature in the cavern. That would be Storm’s secret, and no one would ever pry it from him—not ever.

Storm grinned. They stepped out on the terrace of their hotel, and looked out at the tropical glory below them. The sea was heartrendingly beautiful, the deepest blue they had ever seen, as it came rolling up against the crescent of the beach.

“Now you know,” he said. “What’s it like?”

“It’s just like being the wife of a pauper,” she said. “Except more comfortable. Otherwise it’s exactly the same … provided the man is you.”

“Provided,” Storm said. He slipped his arm around her. They had been man and wife for three days. They would have two weeks together, and then he would have to leave her briefly to return to his asteroid, and supervise the start of mining activities there. After that there would be no more separations.

Liz looked up at him. “There’s one strange thing I’ve been meaning to tell you. Don’t say it’s silly, though.”

“One night, when you were away up there—I felt you were calling to me, Johnny. It was the weirdest thing. You seemed to be reaching out, to be touching me with your mind, and I knew it was you, and I told you I loved you, and I asked you to come home quick, and you said you would.”

Storm chuckled and said, “It must have been a dream.”

“But it was so real , Johnny!”

He smiled, but made no answer, and thought of a curious little creature huddling in a cave on a tiny worldlet. Sadness stole over him.

And another thought, a thought that had been recurring almost obsessively in the past few weeks. For thousands of years, the alien had broadcast a beacon beam. Those beamed impulses were streaking across space, and some day they would be picked up by monitoring stations of the alien race.

They would send out a rescue party, of course. They would cross the gulf of space, in search of their lost comrade. Perhaps it would be in the near future, or perhaps not for thousands of years. Storm wondered what would happen to Earth when these unimaginably advanced creatures came to visit.

Here we are, thinking we’re kings of the universe, lords of creation. And then they come, gentle and friendly, but as far beyond us as we are beyond toads and snails .

He shrugged the thought away. It was not his problem to face. Time would supply the answers.

Meanwhile, the asteroid was his, and Liz was his, and the future was his. One other thing was his: the dazzling memory of that tremendous moment when he linked minds with the creature from the stars, and saw that gleaming city in all its splendor.

“A hundred dollars for your thoughts,” Liz said.

He blinked in surprise. “Why such a high price? Inflation?”

“I’m just trying to think like a multi-millionaire’s wife,” she said. “Do you mind?”

Storm laughed. “Not at all. But my thoughts aren’t worth that much. I was just … daydreaming,” he said.

“Tell me about your daydream?”

“I can’t,” he said softly. “It’s … it’s just a silly dream. It doesn’t matter. How about a swim?”

“Love one,” she said.

He smiled at her, and drove the dream from his mind, and they ran hand in hand down to the cool, swirling water, laughing as they ran.