had spawned and fostered ... these were things that would never die. Old Earth would live forever. Even when she was drifting dust and the Sun was a dead, cold star, Earth would live on in the courage and the dreams that by that time would be spreading to the far corners of the Galaxy.
Russ dug the pipe out of his pocket, searched for the pouch, found it on the desk behind him. It was empty.
“Hell,” he said, “my tobacco’s all gone.”
Greg grinned. “You won’t have to wait long. We’ll be back on Earth in a few more hours.”
Russ put the stem between his teeth, bit down on it savagely. “I guess that’s right. I can dry smoke her until we get there.”
Earth was larger now. Mars had swung astern.
Suddenly a winking light stabbed out into space from the night side of Earth. Signaling ... signaling ... clearing the spacelanes for a greater future than any human prophet had ever predicted.
Falcons of Narabedla
by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Voltage—from Nowhere!
Somewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream. I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. “There’s your eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.” I started to reel in my line, knowing what my brother’s next move would be. “Get the camera, and we’ll try for a picture.”
We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest, his eyes glued in the image-finder. “Golly—” he whispered, almost prayerfully, “six foot wing spread—maybe more—”
The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the cougar’s head. Andy’s camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its beak—
A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting knife in my belt. Andy’s shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then, in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife, ripped, slashing, hearing the bird’s scream of pain and the flapping of wide wings. A red haze spun around me—
Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy’s angry grip was on my shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was hardly recognizable. “Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right? You must be crazy!”
I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly “What happened?”
My brother’s face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling wrathfully. “You tell me what happened! Mike, what in the devil were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack a man if he’s bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with your knife! You must be clean crazy!”
I let the knife drop out of my hand. “Yeah—” I said heavily, “Yeah, I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I’m sorry—I didn’t—” my voice trailed off, helpless. The boy’s hand was still on my shoulder; he let it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. “That’s all right, Mike,” he said in a dead voice, “you scared the daylights out of me, that’s all.” He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my face. “Darn it, Mike, you’ve been acting crazy for a week! I don’t mind the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare hands—” abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run down the slope in the direction of the cabin.
I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken pieces of Andy’s cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in the living hell had I done a thing like that? I’d warned Andy time and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I didn’t wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles, carefully stowed them, cleaned our day’s catch. It was dark before I started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I’d rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He did not turn.
“Andy—” I said.
“It’s okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn’t wait for the fish.”
“Andy—I’ll get you another camera—”
“I said, it’s okay. Now, damn it, eat.”
He didn’t speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room, restlessly. “Mike—” he said entreatingly, “you came here for a rest! Why can’t you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?” He looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. “You’ve turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!”
“I can’t stop now!” I said violently. “I’m on the track of something—and if I stop I’ll never find it!”
“Must be real important,” Andy said sourly, “if it makes you act like bughouse bait.”
I shrugged without answering. We’d been over that before. I’d known it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big blowup. I thought, an-grily. I’m heading for another one, but I don’t care.
“Sit down, Andy,” I told him. “You don’t know what happened down there. Now that the war’s over, it’s no military secret, and I’ll tell you what happened.”
I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my mouth. “That is—I will if I can.”
Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I never finished it, there’s no point in going into details; it’s enough to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I’d built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set of magnetic coils that wouldn’t wind properly. When the thing blew up I hadn’t had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn’t the reason. I was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn’t blame them. I would have liked to think so. It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By the time I had it fixed, the oscillator
