Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Centauri Vengeance by Marlowe Stephen Terry W E Illustrator
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 74 lines and 6067 words, and 2 pages
It took hardly more than moments to reach the huge, amazingly transparent glacier. Fifteen years, thought Haven. Fifteen years is nothing to this river of ice. Fifteen hundred years--and it will still hold Drexell Tolliver's body, perfectly preserved. Drexell Tolliver's body, the wound inflicted by Haven's knife, the knife still there, in the dead man's side with Haven's fingerprints on the haft because for the first and only time in his life Haven had been frightened and thus careless....
Haven climbed off the sled and carefully skirted the upper edge of the crevasse he remembered so well. The bottom was in shadow. It was two hundred feet down, certainly, if not more. Haven shuddered. It would have been so easy for a man to slip. Why hadn't he thought of that, fifteen years ago? The crevasse had been here. He could have pushed Tolliver, instead of knifing him.
The waiter led the way at a brisk pace, his animal-pad-soled boots holding on the slick ice, as Haven's did. Finally, the waiter held up his hand:
"Here," he said. "Here Tolliver."
"You know?" Haven gasped. He had never doubted it for a minute, but somehow the two words--here Tolliver--had nevertheless startled him.
"All Alpha City know," said the native, stepping aside as Haven peered down through the utterly clear ice.
The body seemed very small and lonely and far away. It was there as it had been there and as it always would be there and as it had haunted Haven's sleep for fifteen years.
Haven probed his mind for ideas. There had to be something....
A heat blaster, he thought. I can go back to town and get a heat blaster and melt it free again and then--
But the little native had to die. True, he was only one of millions who had apparently seen the body, but he had taken Haven here, and if ever he could be brought to a stellar confederacy court to testify, and if it could be proved that the site of the mine, fifteen years ago, had been galactic and not Centaurian territory, and if he could be made to testify because, after all, he was not on Centauri and not subject to the Centaurian mores, then Haven was finished.
Haven removed the hand-stunner from his furs and pointed it at the native's back.
"Hold it, George! Don't move!"
He dropped the gun in his surprise. It was Louise's voice.
Runners slid whisperingly across the ice. A sled came up. Louise stood in it, a stunner in her own hand. She looked at him as the sled came to a stop. Her face was grim.
"Louise," Haven said accusingly. "You followed me from the hotel. But why--why?"
"Because I had to find out what you had to find out. Because you told me to be ruthless, George, remember? You always told me you had to be ruthless to get anyplace. So I was ruthless too. I married you."
"Ruthless--marrying me? I don't understand."
"You never looked into my past, George. That suited me fine. Well, come on. Get on this sled now! I'm taking you back to Alpha City. We're getting in touch with the Galactic representative to see if you can be indicted for Drexell Tolliver's murder."
"But you--"
Just then the small native came up with Haven's stunner. "You came almost too late, Miss Tolliver," he said.
Tolliver, thought Haven. Tolliver! "Tolliver!" he shouted, and his voice echoed from the ice hills and came back, boomingly, to him. "Tolliver!"
And calmly, Louise told him: "I am Drexell Tolliver's daughter. You fool, George. You fool. The others were here, but they never knew. Not Vorhees, not MacCready, not any of them. Sure, they took your money. They were curious, but why should they say no? You built the whole thing up in your mind. It was your own private nightmare. You never would have been found out if you hadn't come here. If you hadn't dreamed up this reunion, if you hadn't married Drexell Tolliver's daughter."
Haven heard her voice, but hardly heard the words. He began to run. Soon he was running very fast. He did not look back. He heard the bark of her stunner and saw the raw streaks of energy rip by him in the night. Run, he thought. You have to run now. You never had to run before, but you can do anything you have to do, can't you?
He ran faster and faster. The night and the ice swept by. This time he did not see the crevasse. He ran right up to the lip without a sound, into the death-trap he should have prepared for Drexell Tolliver fifteen years before.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page