Edmond Hamilton - Doomstar

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Doomstar

Edmond Hamilton

A BELMONT TOWER BOOK

Published by Tower Publications, Inc.

Two Park Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016

The dancers leaped and swayed in the circle of blue-green light. They wore stylized, semihumanoid

masks because their own faces might have been displeasing to the Earthly viewers, but otherwise their

silvery bodies were unadorned. There were seven of them. Angular and curiously jointed, their

movements seemed grotesque at first, and only gradually, as they wove their intricate patterns, did their

extreme grace become apparent.

Sandra shivered. "They give me the creeps," she muttered.

"Now, now," said Kettrick. "You're letting your species discrimination show."

"I don't care. I'm just a poor little Earthbound provincial, and I don't like people-sized things that

talk, but aren't peo-ple." She twirled her glass between tapering, perfectly mani-cured fingers. "I need

another drink, Johnny."

He ordered it, watching the dancers.

"You're really enjoying it," Sandra said, and shrugged her perfect shoulders. It was the fashion that

winter to be covered up, and her considerable stock of perfections were largely concealed beneath a sort

of ornate sack that fell to the floor and was buoyed out over the hips by a light hoop. Her hair, artificially

padded and stiffened, curved out in two sweeping circles over her ears, and in the centers of these circles

jeweled bells chimed and swung when she moved her head. "But then," she went on, "I guess you got

pretty used to the beastie types out there in the Hyades."

"Mm," said Kettrick. "Well, now. Australopithecus Africanus was a fine little fellow. He was my

grandfather, and I inherited a great deal from him. But he was just as much a beastie as any other

prototype, and I'll tell you something else, my pretty. They all think of themselves as human, and the rest

of us as not quite. So don't get too toplofty."

"All right, Johnny, don't get sore." She accepted a fresh glass from the waiter and sipped it. "I guess

you miss being out there a lot, don't you? I mean, every time I mention it you get all snappish."

Kettrick smiled. "The solution to that should be quite sim-ple, shouldn't it?"

"I don't know." Her eyes were a light blue, heavily outlined and shadowed under artificial brows of

white metal that glit-tered even in the dim light. "I used to think it was all that money you lost, and being

barred out and all, but now I don't think so. Not all of it, anyway. I've been going with you for two years,

and I still can't get through to you, not really, not to touch you, if you know what I mean. Johnny, was

there a woman out there in the Hyades?"

The dancers on the floor struck their final attitudes, bowed gracefully to the applause, and glided

away. The lights went up. The music started again and couples began to move out onto the floor. After a

while Kettrick reached over and pat-ted Sandra's hand with a curious gentleness.

"Don't try to think," he said. "It'll only get you a bad pain in the head. Just take things the way they

are, and if you aren't happy with them, you can always quit."

In a small choked voice she said, "Johnny, let's dance." And he realized that she was afraid of him,

that she had deliberately waited until they were in a public place to ask him that, and he was ashamed.

He stood up and held out his hand, and her big shiny eyes looked at him worriedly, and he suddenly

thought what a shabby trick he had done her, choos-ing her as he had because she was everything he

despised in a woman and so he could have both the present flesh and the untouched memory.

She put her hand in his and stood up, and she must have seen the change in his expression because

she smiled, rather tremulously. And that was when Tighe came up and touched Kettrick's shoulder, and

said, "Johnny, there's a couple of men who want to see you."

He pointed to the silk-draped entrance where two men stood with the snow melting on the

shoulders of their in-sulated suits, unfestive, unsmiling, waiting.

Kettrick looked at them. He patted Sandra's hand again and said, "I'll only be a minute." She sat

down slowly and watched him as he walked away with Tighe.

The two men greeted him quietly, their faces remotely pleasant and very businesslike. They might

have been a su-perior class of salesman. They were not. Kettrick looked stonily at the identification they

showed him—he didn't need any, but it was regulation—and he said, "What the hell more do you want

from me?"

One of the men said, "I don't know, Mr. Kettrick. But we have orders to bring you in."

They waited. Kettrick stood still. He stood easily, his shoulders dropped slightly forward, his dark

eyes regarding the two men with a kind of bright speculation. Tighe, who towered over him by several

inches and outweighed him by some fifty pounds, said pleadingly, "Please, Johnny, do your arguing

outside? Please?"

Kettrick shrugged. "What's the use of arguing?" He glanced back to where Sandra was still watching

him anx-iously, and he waved to her. He gave Tighe a fifty credit note and said, "See that she gets home

all right." He re-claimed his evening cloak, snicked the thermostat to on, pulled the hood over his head

and walked out between the two quiet men, and that was the last time Sandra ever saw him.

The cold air hit his face with a clean ringing slap that was very pleasant after the overwarm,

overscented air of the club. Snow was still falling, melting on the heated roadways. There was a dark

unobtrusive car standing at the curb. The driver lounged behind the steering lever with the timeless

patience of a man who had waited just so outside a million doors on a million days and nights. Kettrick

and his escort got in and the car glided off, its turbine humming softly.

For a time it kept to the streets, running between the banked-up lights of the buildings that reared

enormously into the sky, and Kettrick expected to be taken to the gov-ernment building that had become

familiar to him through far too many previous visits. He noticed that the rear-mounted fisheye was

operative, and that the men were watch-ing the traffic behind them on the small monitor screen. He

wondered who they thought would be following them, or him, but he did not bother to ask. He knew

from experience that these lads did not answer questions.

They passed through the gaudy brilliance of Times Square, and then one of the men said something

to the driver and the car turned aside into the narrower crosstown streets and began a series of

well-calculated maneuvers, which a skillful tail might follow but only at the price of betraying himself.

And now Kettrick began to be really curious.

The monitor showed only the normal random traffic be-hind them. One of the men said, "Okay,

Harry," and the driver grunted and sent the car spinning down the nearest high-speed road to Long

Island.

They were not going to the government building, that much was sure. Kettrick tightened his jaw and

waited.

The eventual road was long and lonely, running dark be-tween the walled gardens of estates. The

car slowed and turned into a barred gateway, which presently opened to admit them into a place of

snowy lawns and skeletal shrub-bery, with a clean-scraped driveway curving up to a large house with

lights shining from its windows.

Kettrick went inside with his escort.

In a broad and beautiful hall, a butler took his cloak and bade him wait. The two men remained with

him, impassive, until the butler returned. Then they accompanied him to a doorway and saw him through

it, and closed it firmly be-hind him.

Kettrick looked around the room. It was a library, solid, masculine, and comfortable. Heavy

curtains masked the win-dows. An archaic but pleasant wood fire blazed on the hearth. Kettrick was

aware, in a vague fashion, of the warm tones of book bindings and polished wood and leather, and the

subdued glow of a magnificent carpet. But only vaguely. It was the faces of the men who sat looking at

him that held all his attention.

There was Fersen, Under-Secretary for Interstellar Trade representing Earth in that sector of space

that contained the Hyades. Him Kettrick knew, personally and too well. The others, except one, he

knew only by reputation, but he knew them. And a small pulse of alarm began to beat deep inside him,

because it was unnatural that these men should have sat in this room waiting for one Johnny Kettrick.

They studied him, these men, for a long quiet moment. Howard Vickers, thin and stooped and

schoolmasterish, re-sponsible for the safety of nine planets and a sun. His aide, a deceptively willowy

chap with the most perfectly trimmed mustache Kettrick had ever seen, Marshall Wade. Fersen,

sour-faced and frowning. The bull-shouldered, big-jawed man from the Department of Prosecutions,

Arthur Raymond, otherwise known as The Minotaur. Dr. Hayton Smith, the astrophysicist. And two tall

slender dusky-gold men who sat close to the fire and watched him with eyes of a bright and startling blue.

Howard Vickers, Chief of Solar System Security, broke the silence.

"Please sit down, Mr. Kettrick."

Kettrick hesitated, and the younger and shorter of the two dusky-gold men said, in the sweet slurred

cadence of his native speech, "Better do it, Johnny. It may be a very long night."

Kettrick answered, in the same slurred speech, "Your ad-vice was always good, Sekma, even if I didn't

take it. So I'll take it now."

He sat down in the one empty chair, which had heen placed as though by accident in such a position

that all of the men could watch his every gesture and change of ex-pression. Kettrick had a strange

feeling that he was doing all this in a dream, a rather unpleasant dream, one of those things that seems

quite normal on the surface but which the sleeper knows is a developing nightmare from which he will

presently wake up screaming. But perversely, now that he was well into it, he did not want to wake up.

He was con-sumed with curiosity.

"Would you like a drink?" asked Vickers.

"No, thank you," said Kettrick. There were times when the instinct of self-preservation was stimulant

enough, and better left to itself.

"Very well. Then first of all, Mr. Kettrick, I will ask you to listen without interrupting. You know Mr.

Sekma. I believe you do not know Dr. Takinu. He is chief of astro-physical research for the Bureau of

Astronomy at Tananaru."

Kettrick bowed slightly to Takinu, who returned the ac-knowledgment. He was older than Sekma,

beginning to show white circles in the tight copper-wire curls that covered his narrow head, and his face

bore lines of strain, great and immediate, that one might look for in the face of a states-man but hardly in

that of an astrophysicist concerned only with the remote crises of stars. Kettrick shot a quick glance at

Smith and saw the shadow of the same thing in the Earthman's eyes.

Fear?

"Dr. Takinu will tell you himself what he has already told us."

Vickers leaned back, and Takinu looked at Kettrick. "It is convenient for you that I speak my own

tongue?"

"It is convenient," Kettrick said.

Fear?

"Good," said Takinu. "That way is quicker." Wearily, as though he had repeated these same words

until he hated them, he went on, "Our instruments picked up and recorded a change in one of the outlying

stars of the Hyades—a small fringe sun with no habitable planets. It was a routine sweep of the sky and

the new data was only noticed when the computers found the discrepancy in the gamma radiation level

for that portion of the sweep. We pinpointed the source of emission and made very exhaustive studies.

Very exhaus-tive, Mr. Kettrick, very careful. The small star had suddenly become lethal."

Takinu paused, frowning, and Sekma spoke.

"What he's trying to find the layman's language for, John-ny, is the explanation of how a star might

suddenly, over-night, become deadly. How the solar processes might be changed, the cycle altered by

some interference with the chemical balance, so that the output of gamma radiation is increased until

every living thing on every planet of that star—if it had habitable planets—would be blasted out of

existence. I don't think you have to go into the physics of it, Takinu. I think Johnny will accept the fact

that it happened."

"That is not difficult to accept," said Takinu. "It is as you say, a fact, demonstrable, actual,

unarguable. What he may not so easily accept is our speculation as to the cause of this fact."

His haunted eyes lingered on Kettrick, and now there was no doubt about the shadow. It was fear.

"I did not rely on my own judgment alone. I communi-cated with my old friend and respected

colleague, Dr. Smith, of your Lunar Observatory." Takinu gestured to Smith and said in lingua franca,

"It is your story now."

Smith said, "I made my own observations. Our instruments had of course detected the same

aberration. My findings agree in every respect with those of Dr. Takinu."

There was a moment of complete silence in the library. Not really silence, because Kettrick's

stretched nerves were aware of every small rustle of cloth and whisper of breath-ing, the preternaturally

loud noises of burning from the hearth. Then Smith said, completely without dramatics: "We do not

believe that the phenomenon was a natural one."

Now again there was silence, and everybody seemed to be waiting for Kettrick to say something.

Instead it was Sekma who spoke, in the lingua franca so that everybody could understand him.

"I'll make it plainer, Johnny. Somebody did it. Somebody has found the way to poison a star."

"You were always a hard-headed man," said Kettrick slowly. "Damned hard, as I know to my

sorrow. Dr. Takinu and Dr. Smith have their particular reasons for believing this unbelievable thing. What

are yours?"

"Talk," said Sekma. "Rumors. Myths. Whispers. In my business I hear them. On a dozen planets,

Johnny—not much, just here a word and there a word, sometimes in a city dive, sometimes at a jungle

fire, but the word was an odd one and always the same. The word was Doomstar."

He let the word hang in the air for a moment, and Ket-trick heard it like the solemn clang of a distant

bell.

"I don't put too much faith in talk," said Sekma. "Any creature, human, semihuman, or nonhuman,

with an articu-late tongue, can be depended on to wag it, and most of them prefer marvels to cold truth

any day of their lives. But when I read Takinu's report, the coincidence was just a little too much to

accept."

Kettrick thought about it. "How did the tongue-waggers react to the news that an actual Doomstar

had appeared?"

"Well, that's the odd part of it. They never knew it had. The occurrence was so obscure that only

astronomers could be aware of it, and most of them would pass it by as a natural accident."

"Wouldn't it be simpler," said Kettrick, "to assume that it is just that?"

"Oh, much simpler, Johnny. Yes. But suppose it isn't. Sup-pose there is, say, only one chance in a

million that it isn't." He smiled at Kettrick, a smile that had in it very little humor. "To quote one of your

great poets, I am myself indifferent honest. But supposing you knew, or thought, that I might just

possibly have in my hands the power to poison your sun. Would you sleep easily of nights?"

Kettrick nodded. "All right, I won't argue that." After a minute he said, "I won't argue that at all. My

God, what blackmail! One demonstration, announced and carried through, and every solar system in the

Hyades would be cringing at your feet."

"And no need to stop with the Hyades," said Sekma.

Kettrick frowned and shook his head. "But there wasn't one. A demonstration would be a necessity,

and there wasn't one. Just one small obscure star."

"We believe this was a test, Johnny. Every new weapon needs a field test. And this was successful.

We believe our demonstration will come later, if…"

"If what?" asked Kettrick, knowing the answer.

"If we don't stop it."

"And if there is, in truth and fact, a weapon."

"This is what we have to find out. Is there a weapon—in truth and fact—and if there is, who has it,

and where."

"That could take a long time."

"But we don't have a long time. Assuming that there is a weapon, we have only as much time as

those who control it choose to give us. How long would you guess that to be?"

"Well," said Kettrick, with a small edge of venom in his good-natured tone, "I'm a little out of touch

with your cal-endar, but let's see. There was a meeting of the League of Cluster Worlds just before

I—ah—left the Hyades. So the next one should be…" He muttered and grumbled to him-self. "This

interstellar arithmetic always did give me a head-ache. Say the next meeting of the League will be within

six units of Universal Arbitrary Time…"

"Close enough," Sekma nodded. "But why pick that par-ticular event?"

"Because if I wanted to make a startling announcement, I would prefer to do it at a time when the

representatives of the various solar systems were gathered together. Think of the money it would save in

interstellar cables. Think of the vastly greater impact." Kettrick shrugged. "Of course, I'm only saying

what I would do."

"It happens that we agree with that theory, Mr. Kettrick," said Vickers. He rose and stood before

the fire, a professor with thin spread legs about to lecture his students. "Would you like a drink now?"

Again Kettrick said, "No, thank you." And he noticed that the eyes in that professorial face was

flint-hard and flint-cold and direct as spear points.

"Perhaps," said Vickers, "you are beginning to understand why you're here?"

Kettrick shook his head. He still sat easily, apparently re-laxed, in his chair, but the palms of his

hands were sweating and his belly was full of hot wires.

"I'd rather have you spell it out."

Vickers nodded. "It's quite simple. We want you to go to the Hyades and find out what you can

about the…" He hesitated very briefly before he said the word. "The Doomstar."

"Well," said Kettrick softly. "Well I'll be damned." He looked around, from Vicktrs to Fersen, from

Fersen to Sekma. "Whose idea was this?"

"Not mine," said Fersen acidly. "I can assure you of that."

Sekma spread his hands in an eloquent gesture. "Johnny, who else knows the Hyades as well as

you? You taught me at least a dozen places I didn't know existed, and I belong to the Cluster." He

smiled. "You have a special talent, Johnny. The years I spent trying to catch up with you were the most

exasperating and lively fun I've ever had. In my official ca-pacity, that is. When it became obvious that

we needed some-one to undertake this mission, of course I thought of you."

Kettrick stared at him, eyes wide-open and astonished as a child's. "By God, that's magnificent," he

said. "I'm not even angry, Sekma. Just awed." He got up, looking at Vickers. "I think I'd like that drink

now."

"Help yourself."

There was a superbly stocked cellaret open and waiting. Kettrick poured himself a double shot and

took it down neat, and felt the small explosion cancel out the rhythmic nerve stabbings in his middle. They

were crying Danger!, but he had already received that message loud and clear and the repetitive

warnings were merely distracting.

He realized that Fersen was speaking.

"…myself clearly on record. I consider it an act of sheer insanity to send this man on such a mission.

Suppose he did find this—thing. If it does exist. What would prevent him from simply appropriating it for

himself?"

"Johnny is an honest man," said Sekma, "in his own way. And besides…" He swung his blue gaze to

Kettrick, smiling sweetly, speaking softly. "He knows that if he did that I would kill him."

Kettrick grinned. "You forget, I could destroy your whole solar system the minute you showed your

ugly face."

Sekma said, "It wouldn't save you."

And Kettrick knew that he was telling the truth.

"Well," he said, "it doesn't arise, because I'm not going. Get a Clusterer, Sekma…one of your own

people. What do you want of an Earthman, anyway?"

"Not just any Earthman. You have another talent, Johnny. You get along with people, even people

that aren't human. They like you. They trust you. And being an Earthman, you cut across all the lines. Any

Clusterer, regardless of what world he comes from, has X number of enemies ready-made before he

ever leaves home. We've had interstellar flight in the Hyades a lot longer than you've had it, and all the

fools and knaves in the universe don't originate on Earth. You know all that, Johnny. I'm just repeating

the explanation. Because of course that was the first question these gentlemen asked me."

"All right," said Kettrick. "And now I'll ask one." He faced them. Sekma, Vickers still standing

before the fire and watching with his cold flint eyes, The Minotaur sitting with his heavy head bent over a

drink, not speaking and apparently not even listening, Fersen stiff-spined and purse-mouthed as an angry

dowager. The two astrophysicists had subtly with-drawn themselves from the fray, brooding over their

par-ticular nightmare.

"Sekma, you and the Department of Trade Regulation took my license away from me. You cost me

close to a million credits. You barred me out of the Hyades. And for a year and a half after I came back

here this pipsqueak Fersen sweated me up one side and down the other trying to find some excuse to

throw me to Mr. Raymond, the well-known maneater, and sobbing his little heart out when he couldn't

do it. I assume you know this, Mr. Vickers."

Vickers nodded. "I do."

"Then you tell me," said Kettrick quietly, "why I should bother to walk across the street to please

any of you?"

Vickers glanced at Raymond, who said in a kind of off-hand rumble, "Because you don't have any

choice, Kettrick. If you refuse, I'll clap you under hatches so deep and for so long you'll forget what the

sky looks like."

Fersen smiled venomously.

"On what evidence?" asked Kettrick. "I paid my fine, and that's as far as anyone was ever able to

carry it."

"Oh," said Raymond, "there are ways and means. Of dis-covering new evidence, that is. Mr. Sekma

and I have dis-cussed them."

"Disgusting, isn't it, Johnny?" said Sekma. "Dishonest, cruel, quite revolting. We frame you, we force

you, and all the time we know that we may be sending you to your death."

There was a look in Sekma's blue eyes that Kettrick had never seen before. It held him silent, even

while anger shook him like a great hand. And Sekma said very quietly, "You will see that our need is

great."

Kettrick turned abruptly and walked away from them all and stood for some time staring at a blank

curtained win-dow. Nobody spoke to him. After a while, when he could trust himself, he went back to

them and said in a perfectly steady voice, "All right, throw me behind bars and be damned to you."

Fersen opened his mouth and said shrilly, "Hah!" or some similar noise, and Kettrick hit him, very

hard, so that he doubled up and hung sideways over the arm of the chair.

"I'm terribly sorry," Kettrick said to Vickers. "I've wanted to do that for such a long time."

Fersen put his hands over his face and began to whimper. Vickers nodded to his aide, who went

over and helped Fer-sen to the door, closing it briskly behind him. The aide re-turned, smiling briefly at

Kettrick.

"As you say, a pipsqueak."

He sat down again, resuming his alert impassivity, guard-ing his master's briefcase like a well-trained

dog.

Raymond looked at Vickers and shrugged. "It's all one to me."

Kettrick said, "If your need is great, you can do better than that."

"Such as?" asked Vickers.

"Reinstate my license. Let me free of the Hyades again." He turned on Sekma. "You can't force me,

you ought to know that even if they don't. I'll go back as a free man, or I won't go at all." In the liquid

speech that only he and the Clusterers understood, he added, "You cost me something more than money

when you barred me out. I will not pay that cost again."

Sekma appeared to think for a moment. Then he nodded and spoke to Vickers.

"Perhaps it is better this way. It gives him a stake then in the future, something to work for. If he

fails, his license will be worth nothing. The Hyades will be all chaos, no good for trade. And if he lives,

there will be a bar against him that can never be lifted. So I am willing to accept his terms."

"The mission is the important thing," said Vickers, "not the terms under which it is done. Since you

consider Kettrick to be the man for the job—very well, I agree." He glanced at Raymond. "I assume you

have no objection?"

Raymond said again, "It's all one to me." Then he looked squarely at Kettrick for the first time since

he came in the door. "But it does seem odd that nowhere in this discussion has a single flicker of altruism

shone forth—that is to say, that Mr. Kettrick might have taken on this job not to evade punishment or to

gain a reward, but simply because it is in the best interests of all humanity that this power should not

reside in the hands of any individual or group of indi-viduals."

Kettrick laughed. "The answer to that is that I don't really believe in Sekma's Doomstar, any more

than Mr. Vickers does." He was rewarded by a startled look, quickly hidden, in the Security Chief's

eyes. "Mr. Vickers is in a position where he must investigate, now that the possibility has been raised, but

I think he is quite confident that the eventual report will be negative. I agree, and therefore I feel that he

can justly pay for the use of my neck."

He helped himself to another drink and sat down. I'll expect the reinstatement of my license

tomorrow, and pref-erably over FerSeri's dead body. And now that that's set-tled, suppose we get

down to the essentials, like what's the best way to do this and where do I start."

He smiled at them, feeling expansive, triumphant, and full of love even for The Minotaur. Something

deep inside him was singing, and the song was a woman's name, and he was drunk with the light of

far-off suns.

"Gentlemen?" he said. "I'm waiting."

It was night when Johnny Kettrick came back to Tananaru, second world of one of the great mild orange

suns of the Hyades.

He had come by devious ways. Vickers and Sekma had in-sisted, and he had been forced to agree

with them, that a sud-den reversal of the official position in regard to him would make him instantly

suspect to those persons he was supposed to seek out. So his reinstated license lay securely in a bank

vault, and Kettrick was, as far as anybody here but Sekma and Dr. Takinu knew, reentering the Cluster

illegally.

It had chagrined Kettrick somewhat to find out that Sekma was still one step ahead of him.

"It would not do," he had said, "for you to take all the risk and trouble of going back merely to

engage in some more trading activities. No one would believe this either. But fortunately, Johnny, you

have an excuse that anyone, even the maker of a Doomstar, would believe."

And Kettrick had looked at him, and Sekma had smiled.

"When I did finally lay you by the heels, you were on your way to the White Sun, with your alien and

illegal hands outstretched to grasp the best part of that million cred-its you have just now reproached me

with. One quick, easily portable haul of those beautiful stones and you…But Johnny, didn't you think I

knew?"

"No," said Kettrick, "I did not. But I might as well tell you that I've had exactly that idea in mind, to

sneak back into the Cluster just long enough to finish that transaction." He shook his head. "Do you have

any idea how long it took me to make friends with the Krinn, to get them to trade with me? And then you

had to step in."

"Even I," said Sekma, "felt that such skill and courage de-served a better reward. But the Krinn are

protected under Cluster law. And how fortunate it turned out that way, be-cause now you have what Mr.

Vickers would call the perfect cover."

And they had left it to Kettrick to find his own way back to Tananaru, technically as illegal an alien

as ever. Even Sekma's department would not be instructed to let him alone. It was up to him not to get

caught.

That was all right with Kettrick. And he thought he might have a surprise or two for Sekma yet.

It had taken him some time to lose his identity. He had done that on the swarming waystation worlds

of Aldebaran, where he had altered the tint of his skin and hair and sub-merged himself in the masses of

humanity and near-humani-ty that mingled around the starports. Using a forged Aldebaranian permit, he

had found a job in the crew of a small freighter bound for the Hyades, of which Tananaru was the port of

entry.

And so he came home.

Carrying his duffel bag over his shoulder, he shuffled with the rest of the shabby gang of men and

man-things through the fourth class gate of the fourth class docking area of the starport, waited while the

relays of the electronic scanner clicked over his permit and found no black mark against it or the

fingerprints thereon, which were not his own, and passed freely on into the noisy squalid streets beyond.

He walked, not hurrying, breathing the air and feeling the presence of this earthly-unearthly world

that had always seemed more home to him than the world of his birth.

He left the vast port area behind, and at length was in the old winding streets of the city that had

been here long be-fore the starships and the outland men, long before the age of power and the machine.

This was Ree Darva, the change-less, the beautiful. Her people could look both ways, and be-cause they

were excited by the future they did not forget to love the past. They were a warm people and liked warm

friendly things, and they found the high glittering glass-and-steel geometries of Earthly cities both cold and

repellent. They modernized their plumbing and their lighting and all the other things that gave them

comfort, but they still pre-ferred to build low sprawling structures of the red-brown stone that kept them

cool in the hot summer noons and warm in the mild winter midnights, and they crowned the flat roofs as

they had always done, with gardens of flowers and graceful shrubs. Now it was summer, and from the

roofs came the sounds of music and laughter and women's voices.

Kettrick smiled, and wandered, but always in the same direction.

Along these narrow ways, more than twenty years ago, he had run with the golden Darva boys and

regretted his ugly sunbrowned skin and straight dark hair. Later, among these same roof gardens, he had

pursued the golden Darva girls and been pleased that his exotic appearance sometimes gave him an edge

over the local swains. His father, Byron Kettrick, had headed the first trade mission to the Hyades from

Earth, and stayed there so long that his youngest child thought of Earth only as a place of exile. When the

senior Kettrick and the rest of the family returned home, Johnny Kettrick bade them farewell, got a

license to trade, and lost himself in that drifting archipelago of suns. Lost himself so well that he forgot

about certain laws and regulations governing alien trade, perhaps in part because he did not think of

himself as an alien. That, and Sekma's perseverance, had been his down-fall.

And now he was home again.

But not safe.

He remembered that with an abrupt start when he saw some men walking ahead of him where two

lanes met. This was a residential area, and a slovenly tramp crewman from Aldebaran would be hard put

to explain what he was doing in it, so far from the port and so late at night. He stepped into the dark

archway of a service gate until the men were out of sight, and then retraced his steps to the last crossing

and began to work his way westward, not dreaming any more.

Three of the five small coppery moons were in the sky, weaving shifting light and shadow. He stayed

in the shad-ows. The busy parts of town where the streets were thronged all night with pleasure seekers

were off to the southeast, and here there was little traffic of any sort. He saw no more pe-destrians. Once

he had to jump to the top of the wall and lie there while a ground car went chirring by in the narrow lane,

its open body filled with laughing youngsters. But that was all, and presently he came to a house that

stood on the bank of a placid little river, where the water gleamed softly in the moonlight.

Kettrick stood a while in the darkness under some orna-mental trees and examined the house.

Lamps still glowed among the shrubbery of the roof garden, light pleasantly subdued so that it aided the

shining of the small moons but did not glare it out. A breeze blowing across the river brought the scent of

flowers and, he thought, a murmur of voices. He shook his head, frowning. He would have preferred the

house to be silent in sleep. It would be awkward if the place was full of guests.

Still, he had to get off the streets, before daylight or a cruising patrol caught him there. He crossed

quickly to the shadow of the house and pressed against it, listening.

He could hear only two voices, speaking quietly in the high garden. He could not hear the words

they were saying. He could not even be sure he recognized them, they were so re-mote. But one of them

was the voice of a woman, and Kettrick's heart gave a sudden wild leap.

He moved on then along the wall to the service gate. It was not barred, and that should have warned

him, but he was impatient now to see the face of the woman on the roof and he slipped in silently, closing

the gate behind him. The paved area behind the house contained two of the small ground cars. Around

the walls were the neat little buildings for the storage of tools and necessary items, with the inevi-table

trees, tall shrubs, and clambering vines making black clots of shadow here and there. The back of the

house was dark, and there was no sound but the breeze and the mur-mur of voices from above.

Kettrick dropped his duffel bag out of sight in some shrub-bery and started for the stone stairway

that led up from the courtyard to the roof.

He was less than halfway there when he heard a rushing whisper of movement in the shadows and

there was a loom-ing of tall shapes, and great horny hands caught him and lifted him and flung him down

breathless on the paving stones, shaken like a child in the hands of strong men. Crushing weight

descended on him. He struggled briefly, startled and gasping for air, seeing in silhouette above him the

shapes of massive bending shoulders and smooth heads against the sky. A smell of dry clean fur came to

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DoomstarEdmondHamiltonABELMONTTOWERBOOKPublishedbyTowerPublications,Inc.TwoParkAvenueNewYork,N.Y.10016Copyright©MCMLXVIbyEdmondHamilton1Thedancersleapedandswayedinthecircleofblue-greenlight.Theyworestylized,semihumanoidmasksbecausetheirownfacesmighthavebeendispleasingtotheEarthlyviewers,butotherwise...

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Edmond Hamilton - Doomstar

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