Space Viking | Page 9

endlessly, through darkness, out of
consciousness.

V
He was crucified, and crowned with a crown of thorns. Who had they
done that to? Somebody long ago, on Terra. His arms were drawn out
stiffly, and hurt; his feet and legs hurt, too, and he couldn't move them,
and there was this prickling at his brow. And he was blind.
[Illustration]
No; his eyes were just closed. He opened them, and there was a white
wall in front of him, patterned with a blue snow-crystal design, and he
realized that it was a ceiling and that he was lying on his back. He
couldn't move his head, but by shifting his eyes he saw that he was
completely naked and surrounded by a tangle of tubes and wires, which
puzzled him briefly. Then he knew that he was not on a bed, but on a
robomedic, and the tubes would be for medication and wound drainage
and intravenous feeding, and the wires would be to electrodes
imbedded in his body for diagnosis, and the crown-of-thorns thing
would be more electrodes for an encephalograph. He'd been on one of
those robomedics before, when he had been gored by a bisonoid on the
cattle range.
[Illustration]
That was what it was; he was still under treatment. But that seemed so
long ago; so many things--he must have dreamed them--seemed to have
happened.
Then he remembered, and struggled futilely to rise.
"Elaine!" he called. "Elaine, where are you?"
There was a stir and somebody came into his limited view; his cousin,
Nikkolay Trask.

"Nikkolay; Andray Dunnan," he said. "What happened to Elaine?"
Nikkolay winced, as though something he had expected to hurt had hurt
worse than he had expected.
"Lucas." He swallowed. "Elaine ... Elaine is dead."
Elaine is dead. That didn't make sense.
"She was killed instantly, Lucas. Hit six times; I don't think she even
felt the first one. She didn't suffer at all."
Somebody moaned, and then he realized that it had been himself.
"You were hit twice," Nikkolay was telling him. "One in the leg;
smashed the femur. And one in the chest. That one missed your heart
by an inch."
"Pity it did." He was beginning to remember clearly, now. "I threw her
down, and tried to cover her. I must have thrown her straight into the
burst and only caught the last of it myself." There was something else;
oh, yes. "Dunnan. Did they get him?"
Nikkolay shook his head. "He got away. Stole the Enterprise and took
her off-planet."
"I want to get him myself."
He started to rise again; Nikkolay nodded to someone out of sight. A
cool hand touched his chin, and he smelled a woman's perfume,
nothing at all like Elaine's. Something like a small insect bit him on the
neck. The room grew dark.
Elaine was dead. There was no more Elaine, nowhere at all. Why, that
must mean there was no more world. So that was why it had gotten so
dark.
He woke again, fitfully, and it would be daylight and he could see the
yellow sky through an open window or it would be night and the

wall-lights would be on. There would always be somebody with him.
Nikkolay's wife, Dame Cecelia; Rovard Grauffis; Lady Lavina
Karvall--he must have slept a long time, for she was so much older than
he remembered--and her brother, Burt Sandrasan. And a woman with
dark hair, in a white smock with a gold caduceus on her breast.
Once, Duchess Flavia, and once Duke Angus himself. He asked where
he was, not much caring. They told him, at the Ducal Palace.
He wished they'd all go away, and let him go wherever Elaine was.
Then it would be dark, and he would be trying to find her, because
there was something he wanted desperately to show her. Stars in the
sky at night, that was it. But there were no stars, there was no Elaine,
there was no anything, and he wished that there was no Lucas Trask,
either.
But there was an Andray Dunnan. He could see him standing
black-cloaked on the terrace, the diamonds in his beret-jewel glittering
evilly; he could see the mad face peering at him over the rising barrel
of the submachine gun. And then he would hunt for him without
finding him, through the cold darkness of space.
The waking periods grew longer, and during them his mind was clear.
They relieved him of his crown of electronic thorns. The feeding tubes
came out, and they gave him cups of broth and fruit juice. He wanted to
know why he had been brought to the Palace.
"About the only thing we could do," Rovard Grauffis told him. "They
had too much trouble at Karvall House as it was. You know,