Doomstar

Glevan's voice came back muffled and booming. 'I'm only trying to make a very little miracle, Boker. Don't you worry.' He gave a triumphant cackle. 'We're important men now. We can't afford to die.'

Boker turned without a word and opened up a locker underneath the seat. In a padded honeycomb inside the locker were plastic cylinders. He took one out, uncapped it, drank from it, and passed it on.

They killed the thing between them and then gave up. They should have been drunk. Never, Kettrick thought, had men more needed to be drunk. They were still as sober as Chai.

The Doomstar was not that easily escaped, even in the mind.

And Larith. Was she part of that monstrousness?

He tried not to think of her. He did not have too much success.

Glevan achieved his little miracle, a very small one indeed. They came out of jump with their hearts in their throats and every eye on the radiation counters. They showed a normal reading. Thwayn's sun, older and redder and more tired than most of the Cluster stars, rolled heavily along as it always had, shaking its mane of fire with a sort of sad, diminished glory.

Grellah lumbered in toward the third world, a frosty planet all aglitter with the whiteness of snow.

12

Long before they landed it was obvious that Starbird was not there. There was now only one field on that whole planet, and the scanners pictured it windswept and empty. As Grellah settled down on her ragged tailfires, Kettrick thought he saw through the whipped clouds of dust and smoke the fresh scar of a similar landing. That was all.

They opened the airlock. Kettrick and Boker went outside and waited. Hurth and Glevan were already at work in Grellah's bowels. Once again Chai stretched her legs like a hound let free of the kennel. The wind was cold and clean, blowing off the southern snowfields.

Here in this vast equatorial basin it was still warm enough to support life. Herds could graze and crops could grow in the summertime, and the winters were not unbearable. There was game, and water, and the deepest river hardly ever froze. Kettrick walked about, looking at the white snowbanks left from the coming winter's first fall. He crushed a handful of it and tasted it, and felt a pang of recognition. Here and on Earth, it was the same.

He passed by the burned scat he thought he had seen in the scanner. It was there, the edges clear and fresh.

He went back to the ship. Boker was bundled up in heavy coveralls, not much liking the chill. The Cluster worlds tended to be mild. Even Chai was shivering a little in spite of her thick fur.

'If it was Starbird' Kettrick said, 'we're close on her heels.'

Boker nodded toward the low range of hills that screened the west. 'Here comes our welcoming committee.'

A line of riders mounted on shaggy, thick-legged beasts came at a shuffling trot out of the hills.

Boker drew a long breath and straightened his shoulders. 'It's easy,' he said. 'Just act as though you never heard of the Doomstar.'

'Don't work so hard at it,' Kettrick muttered. 'You couldn't look any guiltier.'

He knew that his own manner must be just about as strained.

The riders came thumping up, powerfully built men in woollen tunics and trousers, with fur-lined boots on their feet and hooded coats on their backs, the coats open and the hoods thrown back because of the warmth of the day. They carried a primitive but quite adequate type of rifle slung across their backs, and in their belts were heavy pistols as well as the ever-useful skinning knives. They were a dark-skinned people, of a greenish cast, with much hair, generally of rusty red.

There was no shouting, no welcoming with open arms. These were men of dignity. They formed a crescent, about twenty strong, in front of the ship and simply sat there on their broad beasts, which breathed heavily and peered through shaggy forelocks. The men examined Kettrick and Boker as though possibly they had never seen them before.

Kettrick and Boker stood with arms folded and stared at a point above the riders' heads. When enough time had gone by to prove to anyone that the men of Thwayne were not impressed by ships or traders, nor in any way anxious to do business with them, one man detached himself from the crescent and rode forward.

'May the Frost King spare your flocks,' he said, in his own harsh tongue.

'And may the Sun King warm your croplands,' answered Kettrick formally, in the same tongue. Then he switched to lingua. 'Hello, Flay.'

'Johnny,' said the man. His rusty heard so long, braided in two braids, and his hair was braided too, and coiled above his ears. He smiled, showing strong yellow teeth. 'Johnny, I'll be damned! Hello, Boker.' Then he looked at Chai. 'What is that?'

'My friend,' said Kettrick, 'and not so thick-pelted as you, Flay!'

Flay looked doubtful. 'Can your friend ride?'

'She can run.'

Flay grunted. 'Well, keep her off my hounds. Where's the rest of you?'

Boker indicated the ship. 'In there. We have trouble, Flay. The ship has broken her intestines. Look.' He reached over and with Kettrick's help exhibited a heavy socketed bar that had been leaning against the tripod gear. One end was snapped off. 'Can you forge us a thing like this? If not, we are your guests till the next ship comes.'

Flay sat silent for a moment, considering the bar. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. The thick beard masked his face and his eyes were blank and pale, narrowed under heavy brows.

'Have you the missing piece?' he said at last.

'We have.' Kettrick held it up. He had broken it off himself with a sledge. They did not really need the bar. They had two more like it in stores. It had seemed a good idea to make Flay think they did need it, just in case.

'Our forges,' said Flay, 'are second to none. We will make you a bar.'

'Good,' said Kettrick. 'How soon?'

'A week,' said Flay. 'Are you in great haste?'

'Haste?' said Boker. 'In this tub?' he laughed.

Kettrick said, 'A week is fine. It will take us at least that long to fix the damage this did when it broke.'

'Then,' said Flay, 'let us go into the city.'

He beckoned forward two led beasts. While Kettrick and Boker mounted, other men strapped the broken bar to a third animal. Kettrick spoke briefly to Chai and she came up close beside his mount, frightening it into what was almost animation. The cavalacade went thumpeting off toward the hills.

The 'city' lay in a sheltered valley. Compared to Ree Darva it was not much, either in size or beauty. But it had its own uniqueness. It was the only city on a whole planet, just as Flay's people were the only population.

Thawyn had been a dying world for a long, long time, and throughout the centuries her peoples had been cramped into smaller and smaller areas, fighting for survival there, fighting for warmth and arable land. Long ago the weak, the lazy, the tender-minded, the numerically or militarily inadequate, had either perished or taken their remnants thankfully to other planets when the advent of Darvan ships gave them that literally heavensent alternative.

Flay's people had held out, and now they had a planet all their own. Firgals, they called themselves, meaning in their own tongue The Ultimate Ones, and they intended to ride their world proudly to its end, refusing to leave the sacred soil where their ancestors were buried, and whence their seed was sprung.

From the crest of the hill above the town it was possible to see why they were so resolute about staying.

The lines of the opening valley guided the eye onward and outward until presently it was lost in the vastness of grasslands that rolled on to the horizon, red-gold under the huge red sun. In the spring they were green like a