Doomstar

Chai held up a small knife. 'Not hurt deep,' she said. 'I see.'

He understood then that Nillaine had drawn a hidden knife and tried to kill him, and that Chai had slapped it away in the bare nick of time. Kettrick stopped and searched Nillaine, and she lay all limp and unprotesting, sunk in misery. When he was sure she had no other weapon hidden in the blue silk he picked her up again and went on, a little sicker than before.

He came out at last into the main track. There he stopped and said to Chai, 'We can't go through the village, there are too many of them. See if you can find a way around.'

Chai ran on ahead. Presently she vanished. Kettrick walked more slowly now, watching ahead for any sight of someone coming from the village, watching behind lest any of the women from the place of sacrifice should try to take him in spite of his warning. He pictured himself hamstrung by a sudden blow, waiting on the ground for the little bright blades to flash down. Above him the familiar trees were as friendly as ever, showering him with fragrant petals.

Chai appeared again, beckoning. He followed her into what at first appeared to be trackless jungle, and then became indubitably a path, narrow and carefully concealed with vines. He did not bother to ask her how she had found it, and she could not have told him anyway. It seemed to go in the right direction, toward the landing field, bypassing the town. It was a very odd sort of trail, obviously not much used, but carefully kept clear.

They hurried along it, and now Chai carried the pillar club dragging from one hand because it caught in the creepers above and on both sides. She would have dropped it, only Kettrick said no. Apart from Nillaine's little knife, it was the only weapon they had.

When they were, as near as he could judge, about even with the village and some distance east of it, they came to a cleared space not over ten feet in diameter. At one side of it was a little squat structure of heavy plastic sunk deep into the ground. Just recently it seemed to have been completely covered with vines and sods of mossy turf. These had been torn away and the top of the structure opened, revealing a metal-lined cavity below.

Something had rested there, like a strange jewel in an improbable case.

He set Nillaine down and held her by the shoulders. 'Where?' he asked her. 'Where will they take it?'

'I don't know. Seri wouldn't tell us.' And then she cried out, 'You can't stop him! How can you stop him when nobody knows where he's going?'

She covered her face with her hands, and they went on.

Kettrick was sure now that the path led to the landing field, and it did. They emerged from an innocent, vine-curtains section of the jungle wall no different from any other section, and there was Grellah shoving her dark rusky bulk into the sky, perhaps half a mile away. The little booths of the trading fair seemed to have packed up and gone away from around her feet.

'Let me go now,' Nillaine whispered.

And Kettrick said, 'Not yet.'

He started out across the landing field with Chai, running over the black scars of old flames, stumbling on calcined rock and ridges of glassy slag like cheap obsidian, flawed and stained. He had gone only a little way when he heard the tumult of many people pouring down the broad path from the village.

They burst out from the avenue of trees to his left, far to his left but closer than he was to the ship, a bright-colored spate of running, leaping, shouting, crying men and women that spread and fanned across the landing field toward him. They carried knives and other things, but that many would not need weapons. In the end they could pull him and Chai to pieces with their little hands, like monkeys.

Grellah's hatches were all closed. He filled his lungs once and cried despairingly, and after that he kept his breath for running.

His legs were longer than theirs. But they ran swiftly. Their legs scampered like those of children in some wild game that would end only when they dropped exhausted.

He could have run faster without Nillaine. Nevertheless he clung to her as a last desperate resort until he saw Grellah's hatch slide open, and Boker and Hurth came out of it with two of the bell- mouthed heavy rifles that fired stun-gas shells. They began to fire into the forefront of the crowd. Puffs of dark vapor blossomed and spread. The movement of the crowd became suddenly broken and erratic. Kettrick paused and set Nillaine on her feet.

'You will never be strong,' he told her. 'Your brains are like feathers, and you have no more purpose than birds.'

She appeared not to have heard him. She only whispered. 'You have killed us, Johnny. You have killed us.'

Chai let the pillar fall in the blackened dust beside Nillaine. She and Kettrick ran on and left her there, a tiny drooping figure by the profaned fruits, her blue silk garment soiled and torn, the flowers tangled in her hair. Her cheeks were dirty with tears and one small hand was streaked with Kettrick's blood.

Kettrick climbed the ladder with Hurth and Boker hauling at him and Chai pushing from behind. He heard the hatch shut and the warning hooter start to blow. He groped his way blindly to his seat, his own eyes hot with a stinging moisture.

The Doomstar poisoned more than suns.

11

They were in jump again. There was the same sweating heat, the whine and hum of the unit, the blindness of not-space. They had gone into jump long before the prescribed distance out from Gurra had been reached on conventional, impelled by a great desire to hide themselves in this nothingness where no star could shine at all.

Now Boker was doing a second and much more careful job of patching up the cut on Kettrick's back. The others hunched about on the bridgeroom seats, Glevan looking gloomily triumphant, While Hurth, like Boker and Kettrick, looked just plain scared.

'They tried to get us to leave the ship,' Boker was saying, for perhaps the third time. 'Wanted us to come in and have a feast, and I guess we'd have gone if you hadn't said that about sticking close. Funny. Even though I thought there was something wrong…'

'You warned me,' said Kettrick.

'I know. But I guess I couldn't quite believe.'

Kettrick felt the sting of the antibiotic and shook his head. 'Neither could I.'

'They'd have killed us all,' said Glevan. He leaned forward, his intense dark eyes fixed on Kettrick. 'So Seri has the Doomstar.'

Kettrick said, 'I think rather he has a part of it. A component. I saw the hiding place, and it was small.'

Glevan said heavily, 'How great a thing does it take to kill a star?'

'Oh, shut up that bull,' said Hurth. 'Something bigger than what Johnny said, it would have to be.' He pulled at his white mane with nervous fingers and laughed a curious little laugh. 'And here I am talking about the damned thing as though it was ordinary as cheese and a few hours ago I didn't even believe it existed.'

'Neither did I,' said Kettrick. 'Not really.'

Only a myth, said the mocking voice in his dream, echoing his own carelessness. He thought of Seri, somewhere ahead of them in space, speeding somewhere with his load of death, and suddenly he was furious.

'He used my name,' he said. 'He used my friendship with those people.' Another thought struck him. 'I wonder how many more of my friends he's bribed and frightened and lied into helping him.'

'There must be more,' Boker said. 'That would make good sense. They couldn't keep the whole mechanism together, whatever it is; it'd be too dangerous, too likely to be found. And whatever stuff it is they use to, well, to make the change in the sun cycle, they wouldn't want that around, either. I'll bet they've got caches scattered all around the Cluster, a bit here and a piece there, so it could never all be found and destroyed before they were ready to use it.'

He finished with the cut and began to put the first aid box neatly back together again. About some things Boker was scrupulously neat.