Star Bridge by James Gunn Read Free Book Online

broke in. “Empires rise and fall, and that cycle is dictated by forces ignorant of things as insignificant as a man. They are as vast and mysterious in their workings as fate itself. Eron will fall—in its own time. But you will probably be long dead, and I myself may be dead. Even Lil can’t push that finality away forever.”
    â€œForces!” Horn shrugged. “They are only men in the mass. One man can lead them or push them. And one man, acting at the right time, at the right place, in the right way, can topple the greatest boulder.”
    â€œAnd get crushed himself when it falls,” Wu said. “No, thank you. As long as I have lived, as weary as life sometimes grows, I cling to it—more desperately even than you. What have you to lose but a few unhappy years? It is easy for you to be foolhardy and contemptuous of danger. I must be timid and cowardly. This miserable carcass, which has lasted me so long, may last me as long again, with care.”
    Horn was on his feet. He pulled the torch out of the wall and motioned with his head for Wu and Lil to go in front. Wu picked up his suitcase and turned his head back to look at Horn.
    â€œDon’t you believe me, sir?”
    â€œYou aren’t in the pit, are you?” Horn answered. The question Wu asked was something Horn couldn’t answer directly. For the moment he was willing to accept it as a working hypothesis; it fitted the observed data. In addition, it was too fantastic not to have an element of truth. “Keep moving. We may be late as it is.”
    â€œWe mustn’t make you late for your appointment with destiny,” Wu said. The words floated back mockingly.
    The tunnel began to widen. It spilled them into a great chain of vast black areas: warehouses, Horn guessed, for the first interplanetary commerce. Sloping ramps led them up and up again. With the first distant suggestion of sunlight, Horn ground out the torch against the wall and, a little farther on, leaned it against the side of the last broad tunnel.
    Storms had washed mud and debris into the crumbling entrance. The narrow exit that remained was well concealed by a gnarled juniper tree. Horn peered between the leaves. Beyond were ruins: mounds of weathered rubble pierced by an occasional rusted spear, a tottering wall. It was deserted. Horn climbed through the hole and slipped down under the lowest branch. Wu followed with a muffled sigh of relief.
    Horn crept to the shaky wall and glanced quickly over it. He stifled an exclamation. “The Victory Monument!”
    It towered against the noon sky, eight hundred meters away, where once the Mars Docks of Old Sunport had been. But even Sunport, at her proudest, couldn’t have built this.
    Its base was an immense black cube capped with a black hemisphere. It was at least nine hundred meters high. Towering endlessly above that rounded pedestal was a great, cylindrical column. It was faced with luxion and glowed with rising waves of living color. Blood-red just above the black hemisphere, it shimmered through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The top faded to a shining white.
    Crowning the pillar, four kilometers overhead, was a huge, steel-gray sphere, smooth and featureless except at the poles. There, thousands of slender golden spikes bristled in every direction.
    â€œEron!” Wu said at Horn’s elbow.
    â€œI’ve never seen it,” Horn said.
    â€œIt’s a good reproduction,” Wu said. “That’s it. Eron. Your boulder. Let’s see you topple it.”
    Horn turned his eyes away from the monument and studied the area surrounding it. Only around the vast perimeter of the mesa were the ruins visible, and the other side was so distant it dwindled away grayly. Everywhere else the ruins had been sealed under a marble-smooth surface inlaid with murals.
    â€œSunport,” Wu said softly. “They built it high and tall, on the ruins of a city called