"I want only to find out who murdered MacDonald!"
"You want more than that, Hyrst, though you don't know it yet. But
MacDonald's murderer is part of what we're after."
He took Hyrst's arm. "We don't have long. Thanks to my guidance, you
slipped them all except this one. But they'll be hounding after our
trail very quickly."
They went on along the shadowed street. The glare of the lights died
back behind them, and they moved in darkness with only the keen stars to
watch them, and the cold, gritty wind blowing in from the barrens, and
the dark door-ways of the mastaba-like monolithic houses of the
humanoids staring at them like sightless eyes. Hyrst looked up at the
bright, tiny moon that crept amid the stars, and a deep shaking took him
as he thought of men lying up there in the deathly sleep, of himself
lying there year after year....
"In here," said Shearing. It was one of the frigid, musty tombs that the
humanoids called home. It was dark and there was nothing in it at all.
"We can't risk a light. We don't need it, anyway."
They sat down. Hyrst said desperately, "Listen, I want to know some
things. Exactly what are we doing here?"
Shearing answered deliberately, "We are hiding from those who want you,
and we are waiting for a chance to go to our friends."
"Our friends? Your friends, maybe. That woman--I don't know her, and--"
"Now _you_ listen, Hyrst. I'll tell you this much about us now. We're
Lazarites, like you, with the same powers as you. But all Lazarites are
not on _our_ side."
Hyrst thought about that. "Then those others who are hunting us--"
"There are Lazarites among them, too. Not many, but a few. You don't
know us, you don't know them. Do you want to leave me and go back out
and let them have you?"
Hyrst remembered the adder-like face of the young man who had come after
him through the shadows. After a long moment he said, "Well. But what
are _you_ after?"
"The thing that MacDonald was killed for, fifty years ago."
Hyrst said, "The Titanite? They said it hadn't ever been found. But how
it could have remained hidden so long--"
"I want you," Shearing said, "to tell me all about how MacDonald died.
Everything you can remember."
Hyrst asked eagerly, "You think we can find out who killed him? After
all this time? God, if we could--my son--"
"Quiet, Hyrst. Go ahead and tell me. Not in words. Just remember what
happened, and I'll get it."
Yet, by sheer lifetime habit, Hyrst could not remember without first
putting it into words in his own mind, as they two sat in the cold,
whispering darkness.
"There were four of us out there on Titan, you must already know that.
And only four--"
* * * * *
Four men. And one was named MacDonald, an engineer, a secretive, selfish
and enormously greedy man. MacDonald was the man who found a fortune,
and kept it secret, and died.
Landers was one. A lean, brown, lively man, an excellent physicist with
a friendly manner and no obvious ambitions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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