Doomstar

where another one was just beginning to show. 'You keep him out there for a while, eh?'

'I'll try.'

'Just one thing, Johnny. You've been gone a long time, and where you were you wouldn't hear about it. Boker, he can handle the White Sun, and he can eat the little I–C boys for supper, I don't worry about that, but there's something else. Something the men don't like to talk about. I don't know if they really think it's silly, or if maybe they're scared. But don't you laugh, Johnny. And when you're out there, you watch and be careful.'

A small cold stillness formed in the pit of Kettrick's stomach, down below the warmth of the food and wine.

'What shall I watch for, Pedah?'

'I don't know exactly,' She stared at him, her eyes unfocused so that he knew she was looking not at him but at something in her own mind. 'I hear it in the marketplace. And one of the Gurran women that runs a fish stall, we got to be pretty good friends, I buy so much fish…all these kids, and it's cheaper. She told me that in their meeting hall a man told them that trouble was coming soon. I hear it, Johnny. Men think women are all silly fools, but we have ears and tongues, and sometimes a little sense between them. I hear it. Trouble is what they say, and something called the Doomstar will bring it.'

The cold stillness spread and moved down deeper into Kettrick's belly. The memory of his dream came back to him with the force of physical reality. 'When do they say the trouble will come?'

'Soon. I don't know. Some say one thing, some another.'

Kettrick remembered his own brilliant piece of deduction back in Vickers' library. The meeting of the League of Cluster Worlds, he had said, would be the time to show the power of the Doomstar. If there were one. And he had calculated six units of Universal Arbitrary Time until that meeting.

There were three and one quarter units left now. Not much. If there were a Doomstar.

He would have asked more questions of Pedah, but Boker came stooping in through the low door.

'Something damned strange,' he said. 'Tell me again, Johnny. What did Seri tell you about Starbird?'

'That I could have her. That she was unscheduled. That she'd be ready to go in three days.'

'Three days, eh?' Boker grunted. 'I went down to the Spaceman's Hall to check the day's posting again, just to make sure. Starbird had a full cargo, scheduled to Gurra, Thwayne, Kirnanoc…'

'Had?'

'When she took off,' said Boker. 'As of this morning.'

'I'll be damned,' said Kettrick. The icy coldness in him dissolved in a burst of heat. He began to shake. 'I'll kill him,' he whispered. 'Accident, is it? Go to the island and I'll let you know, Johnny. Three days, Johnny.' He gripped the edge of the table, tried to stop his shaking. 'I'll kill him.'

'You'll have to jump fast, then,' Boker said. 'After Starbird. Because he went with her.'

7

It was good to be in space again.

Grellah was every insulting thing Boker had said about her, but she had gotten off the ground. Her name was the Hlakran equivalent of Beautiful Queen, a joke that Boker and Hurth were very proud of; you changed one letter and got a dirty word instead.

Kettrick's emergency fund, or part of it, had stocked her, with Boker making the most of the money by dealing bits of it here and there to his creditors. The only thing Kettrick had insisted on was trade goods of top quality and suited for their markets.

It was absolutely essential that they should trade as they went, keeping a semblance of normality. The I–C had a vile habit of dropping in for spot checks on many worlds where they did not maintain a permanent office, and where there no formal port facilities and therefore no records. Kettrick might rely on his friends to keep his own presence secret, but just in case an I–C ship should happen by, he wanted Boker to look completely legitimate.

Kettrick had been smuggled aboard without much trouble. And in the end he had done nothing about contacting Sekma because there did not seem to be any way of doing it short of calling him up on the communicator and talking with a full audience listening in. Their prearranged meeting had become impossible, and so he let the whole thing slide.

Chai had been more of a problem to get on board. She could hardly be passed off as anything but what she was, and the Tchell were rigidly protected. To move one from place to place required papers they did not have and could not possibly get. The boys would just as soon have forgotten the whole thing, but Kettrick was obdurate and they had finally sneaked her in with a load of supplies.

They had posted a fraudulent manifest and sweated blood until they got their clearance. Then, grumbling and creaking, Grellah heaved up off her pad and waddled away into the dark seas of the Cluster that washed the island suns, outbound for Gurra, Thwayn, Kirnanoc, and Trace.

The route of Seri's Starbird.

'Why?' Boker had asked him, when they planned their course. 'I know you want to kill the traitor, but…'

'Because,' said Kettrick, 'this is the course I would take to get to the White Sun. You look at the chart and tell me if there's a better one.'

He did not tell Boker that it was also almost identical with the course he and Sekma had discussed, choosing worlds where the rumors of the Doomstar sounded loudest.

An odd one for Seri to pick. Except for Kirnanoc, they were backward worlds and not especially lucrative for traders unless, like Kettrick, you had the right touch with the people. Kirnanoc was not backward, but it was famous for the very odd ideas its quite odd people cherished about humans. It too needed a special touch.

Boker had admitted that there was not a better course, except that there were a couple of equally good alternates for Gurra, as far out as Kirnanoc. But from there on…

'Trace,' he said, 'is ridiculous as a jumping-off place for the White Sun. From Kirnanoc it's right away in the wrong direction.'

'I know that,' said Kettrick. 'That's why we won't really go there. We'll jump straight from Kirnanoc.'

Boker stared at him. 'You crazy?' He stabbed a thick blue forefinger at the chart. 'You lost your touch or something, Johnny? Look at the distance. Your big Earth-built ships could do it in one hop, all right, but not these inter-Cluster cans. Your jump unit can only wind up so much power, to jump you so far. You go over that peak, and boom! Your whole unit blows, and they post another black-edged notice in the Spaceman's Hall.'

'Very true,' said Kettrick. 'And I have seen Grellah's jump unit, so I'm aware that her peak is more like a trough.'

'So?'

'So even Grellah ought to be able to do it in two jumps.' He indicated points on the chart. 'Come out of the first jump about here and run on conventional power…'

'Johnny, look. Look where you're waving your finger around. The first jump would put us right in the middle of the Lantavan Bank, the worst jungle of drift in the Cluster. Like throwing yourself out of the window into a cement-mixer. It…'

'No. We come out of the first jump this side of the drift, in clear space. Then we go through the Bank on conventional. We're bound to find a piece of drift big enough to set down on, so we can service the jump unit and recharge the fuel loads. Then…'

'We go through the Bank?' said Boker.

'Right here.' Kettrick sketched a diagonal line through the darkened area on the chart. 'Where it's narrowest.'

'And thickest.' Boker had a spaceman's natural horror of drift. 'Look, be sensible. From Whard you can do it easy in one jump. Even Mardir would be better, in spite of the patrols.'

'That's where we got into trouble before,' Kettrick reminded him. 'Mardir is the gateway for a whole sector that's barred to general trade, so we knew better than to try that. But Whard looked like a very attractive back