Falken laughed, one harsh wild cry. Then he stood quite still, his hands at his sides, his face a mask cut deep in dark stone.
“Eric,” whispered Sheila. “Please. I can’t be brave for you all the time.”
He was ashamed of himself then. He shook the black despair away with cynical fatalism.
“All right, Sheila. We’ll be heroes to the bitter end. You, Avery. Get your great brain working. How can we save our people, and, incidentally, our own skins?”
Avery flinched as though some swift fear had stabbed him. “Don’t ask me, Falken. Don’t!”
“Why not? What the devil’s the matter....” Falken broke off sharply. Something cold and fierce and terrifying came into his face. “Just a minute, Avery,” he said gently. “Does that mean you think you know a way?”
“I....For God’s sake, let me alone!”
“You do know a way,” said Falken inexorably. “Why shouldn’t I ask you, Paul Avery? Why shouldn’t you try to save your people?”
Golden eyes met his, desperate, defiant, bewildered, and pitiful all at once.
“They’re not my people,” whispered Avery.
They were caught, then, in a strange silence. Soundless wheeling rainbows brushed the new earth, glimmered in the brassy pools. Far up on the black crystal of the vault the Sun-child pulsed and breathed. And there was stillness, like the morning of creation.
Eric Falken took one slow, taut step, and said, “Who are you?”
The answer whispered across the raw red earth.
“Miner Hilton, the son of Gantry.”
*
Falken raised the blaster, forgotten in his hand. Miner Hilton, who had been Paul Avery, looked at it and then at Falken’s face, a shield of dark iron over cold, terrible flame.
He shivered, but he didn’t move, nor speak.
“You know a way to fight that thing,” said Falken, very softly, in his throat. “I want to kill you. But you know a way.”
“I—I don’t know. I can’t....” Golden tortured eyes went to Sheila Moore and stayed there, with a dreadful lost intensity.
Falken’s white teeth showed. “You want to tell, Miner Hilton. You want to help us, don’t you? Because of Sheila!”
Young Hilton’s face flamed red, and then went white. Sheila cried sharply,
“Eric, don’t! Can’t you see he’s suffering?”
But Falken remembered Kitty, and the babies who were born and died on freezing rock, without sun or shelter. He said,
“She’d never have you, Hilton. And I’ll tell you this. Perhaps I can’t force out of you what you know. But if I can’t, I swear to God I’ll kill you with my own hands.”
He threw back his head and laughed suddenly. “Gantry Hilton’s son—in love with an Unregenerate!”
“Wait, Eric.” Sheila Moore put a hand on his arm to stop him, and went forward. She took Miner Hilton by the shoulders and looked up at him, and said,
“It isn’t so impossible, Miner Hilton. Not if what I think is true.”
Falken stared at her in stunned amazement, beyond speech or movement. Then his heart was torn with sudden pain, and he knew, with the clarity of utter truth, that he loved Sheila Moore.
She said to Miner Hilton, “Why did you do this? And how?”
Young Hilton’s voice was flat and strained. He made a move as though to take her hands from his shoulders, but he didn’t. He stared across her red-gold head, at Falken.
“Something had to be done to stamp out the Unregenerates. They’re a barrier to complete peace, a constant trouble. Eric Falken is their god, as—as Sheila said. If we could trap him, the rest would be easy. We could cure his people.
“My father couldn’t do it himself. He’s old, and too well-known. He sent me, because mine is the only other brain that could stand what I had to do. My father has trained me well.
“To get me by the psycho-search, my father gave me a temporary brain pattern. After I was accepted as a refugee, I established mental contact with him....”
“Mental contact,” breathed Falken. “That was it. That’s why you were always so tired, why I couldn’t shake pursuit.”
“Go on,” said Sheila, with a queer gentleness.
Hilton stared into space, without seeing.
“I almost had you in Losangles, Falken, but you were too quick for the Guards. Then, when we were trapped at Mercury, I tried to make you sleep. I was leading those ships, too.
“But I was tired, and you fought too well, you and Sheila. After that we were too close to the Sun. My thought waves wouldn’t carry back to the ships.”
He looked at Falken, and then down at Sheila’s thin face.
“I didn’t know there were people like you,” he whispered. “I didn’t know men could feel things, and fight for them like that. In my world, no one wants anything, no one fights, or tries....And I have no strength. I’m afraid.”
Sheila’s green eyes caught his, compelled them.
“Leave that world,” she said. “You see it’s wrong. Help us to make it right again.”
In that second, Falken saw what she was doing. He was filled with admiration, and joy that she didn’t really care for Hilton—and then doubt, that perhaps she did.
Miner Hilton closed his eyes. He struck her hands suddenly away and stepped back, and his blaster came ready into his hand.
“I can’t,” he whispered. His lips were white. “My father has taught me. He trusts me. And I believe in him. I must!”
Hilton looked where the glow of the Sun-child pulsed against ebon rock. “The Unregenerates won’t trouble us any more.”
He raised the muzzle of his blaster to his head.
*
It was then that Falken remembered his was empty. He dropped it and sprang. He shocked hard against Hilton’s middle, struck him down, clawing for his gun arm. But Hilton was heavy, and strong.
He rolled away and brought his barrel lashing down across Falken’s temple. Falken crouched, dazed and bleeding, in the mud.
He laughed, and said, “Why don’t you kill me, Hilton?”
Hilton looked from Falken’s uncowed, snarling face to Sheila. The blaster slipped suddenly from his fingers. He covered his face with his hands and was silent, shivering.
Falken said, with curious gentleness, “That proves it. You’ve got to have faith in a thing, to kill or die for it.”
Hilton whispered, “Sheila!” She smiled and kissed him, and Falken looked steadfastly away, wiping the blood out of his eyes.
Hilton grasped suddenly at the helmet of his vac-suit. He talked, rapidly, as he worked.
“The Sun-child creates with the force of its mind. It understands telekinesis, the control of the basic electrical force of the universe by thought, just as the wise men of our earth understood it. The men who walked on the water, and moved mountains, and healed the sick.
“We can only attack it through its mind. We’ll try to weaken its thought-force, destroy anything it sends against us.”
His fingers flashed between the helmet radio and the repair kit which is a part of every vac suit, using wires, spare parts, tools.
“There,” said Hilton, after