"I love you, Johnny," Boker said, "like a brother. But if I'd thought I could do it and get away with it..."

"Sure," said Kettrick. "I know. So now what? Sekma's on his way to Gurra, so we can forget him."

"Johnny, there was something not quite right. When he in-spected the ship, he saw the stuff from Gurra, and of course I had to say I'd got it on Pellin. Flay's sons didn't know the difference but you know d.a.m.n well Sekma did, and yet he never batted an eye. He's a smart man, a very smart man, as n.o.body should know better than we. Maybe he got the message. Maybe he's really on Seri's track himself, and just using their story about you as a cover."

"I clung to some such hope myself," said Kettrick. "I hope it's true. However, just in case it isn't, we'd better think what we're going to do when we hit Kirnanoc." And he added grimly, "There's one good thing about Kirnanoc. I don't have any friends there."

"n.o.body does," said Boker. "And for that reason, you'd better stay in the ship, out of sight, while we're there. I'll do the footwork."

They discussed it over and over while they were in jump.

"Unless we find that Sekma is on the job," said Boker, "We'll have to tell the I-C what we know, there's no doubt about that. Only I'm wondering when."

"What do you mean, when?" asked Hurth, who was in a constant chafe lest his wound not heal quick enough to let him be in on everything that happened.

"If we go to them first thing," said Boker, "right after land, we might never take off again. They might want to hold us for questioning, or until somebody higher up comes and tells them what to do. They might want to throw Johnny in the pokey and the rest of us along with him."Hurth nodded. "I never thought of that."

"I have," said Kettrick. "The Doomstar is more important than what happens to us, but on the other hand...h.e.l.l, they might not even believe us. They might think it was all just a big grandstand play to take the heat off us. And by the time they could get hold of Sekma and check with him, it would be too late."

"My suggestion," said Boker, "is to wait until we're ready to jump, meanwhile finding out all we can about Seri...Then send the I-C a message and run like h.e.l.l."

"Unless," said Kettrick, "Starbird is still on her pad when we get there. If she is, we'd better yell for help, loud and clear."

Glevan, who had little time for talk between nursing Hurth and nursing the jump unit, was of the opinion that they would never catch up with Seri and neither would the I-C, and that the Doomstar would presently be shining for the whole Cl.u.s.ter to see and bow to.

He was also of the opinion that Sekma had gone to Gurra just as he said he would. Kettrick was afraid to think other-wise himself. Yet when they came out of jump and entered their landing pattern at Kirnanoc, he found that he was hoping, wildly hoping, that they would find Sekma waiting for them when they hit the dirt.

The starport of Achera, Kirnanoc's princ.i.p.al city, was as busy as Kettrick remembered it. Achera was the center from which all flowed, blessing and curse alike, to the remainder of the planet. There were some small fields scattered abroad for emergency medical or military use, but they were not open to traders. They were among the human tribes of Kirnanoc, and on this world the human was not the dominant animal. They had nothing to trade, and they supplied neither useful hides nor edible meat.

Humans from other planets found them depressing in the extreme.

Kirnanoc, because it was situated at a kind of crossroads in the Cl.u.s.ter, had worked up quite an enviable position as an exchange and clearing house where traders often came to barter with other traders, as an easier means of obtaining goods from very distant or difficult worlds than by going after them personally. Kettrick had often done business here in the Market, selling cargoes ftom the special touch places like Gurra and Thwayn for a better price than he could get at Tananaru.

Port Authority guided them in to a pad in the northwest quadrant of the field. There were several score of ships ranged in orderly rows as far as the eye, at this level, could see. It was impossible to tell whether or not Starbird was among them.

"I'll go sign in, and check the board," Boker said. "Back in half an hour."

He went out into the tawny glare of the afternoon. Ket-trick watched him walk out to the transport strip and catch one of the trams. He rode away in it toward the Adminis-tration Center and was lost to sight among the looming ships.

Grellah's fans were going, sucking in the outside air. The smell of heat and water and the faint indescribable sweet-ness like a wicked spice that was the true ancient breath of Achera began slowly to replace the stale metallic-tasting stuff inside the ship. Overcome with restlessness, Kettrick went below to work with Glevan and Hurth on the jump unit Chai, who had been forbidden to go outside, sat forlornly peering out the open hatch.

For all his fatalistic pessimism, Glevan had an obsession now about getting that unit ready. He had hardly waited for Grellah to sit down before he was grubbing at her vitals. Hurth, still sore and wobbly, was handing him tools and making insulting answers to Glevan's running commentary concerning the woes that were about to befall the Cl.u.s.ter.

"And soon. Very soon." Glevan's hands worked swiftly, his monkey face screwed up and his eyes intent on the ma.s.s of relay terminals he was checking. "If Grellah should turn into a s.p.a.ce hawk as quick-flying as thought, she still would be too slow to catch the Doomstar.""Then why work so hard?" demanded Hurth.

"Because I am a man, and a man is made of folly." His hands flickered among the colored wires, the many-colored posts, checking, tightening. One loose contact could mean disaster. "Man is also made of vanity. Between foolishness and vanity I fashion my own downfall. I like to think that I, with the skill of my hands and brain, can make this old ship do what she cannot do." He glanced abruptly at Kettrick.

"Do you know, Johnny, there is a little less than one unit of Universal Arbitrary Time left before the meeting of the League of Cl.u.s.ter Worlds?"

"I do," said Kettrick. "I do."

And Hurth said gloomily, "Why is it that there's always some crazy idiot that has to make trouble?"

"The great cry of the human race," said Kettrick. "n.o.body ever answered it yet."

They worked. The half hour pa.s.sed, and few minutes more, and then Chai barked down the ladder well.

"John-nee!"

They jumped up, thinking it was Boker. But she said, "Men come. No Boker. Strange men."

They raced up the ladder to the companionway. Through the hatch Kettrick could see a small carrier bouncing toward them over the scorched concrete of the pad. There were several men in it, or rather several Achernans. He could make out the yellow tunics of s.p.a.ceport guards.

"What do they want?" said Hurth. "And where's Boker?"

"I don't know," said Kettrick. "But my guess would be that we've stepped into a hornet's nest."

They stood for a moment, a little stunned by the sudden-ness of it, watching the carrier speed toward them.

"I never did like Kirnanoc," said Glevan softly. "There's a smell of evil about it." He struck Kettrick across the chest, pushing him away. "Get out of sight, Johnny, you and Chai. They've got no way of knowing you're aboard."

Kettrick hesitated.

Hurth said, "Go, Johnny. We may need you, awful bad."

He went then, swinging up the ladder as fast as he could, with Chai behind him. In Grellah's swagging mid-belly was the hatch into the cargo holds. He went through it with Chai and closed it very quietly behind him, and as he did so he heard the carrier stopping far below, and a challenging of voices.

In the close darkness he groped his way among the fixed cargo cradles until he judged he was hidden from anything but a determined inspection. He sat down on the cold iron that was a deck on land and a bulkhead in flight. Chai sat beside him.

They waited, in the silence and the blind dark.

After a short while Kettrick heard the m.u.f.fled clatter of persons going up the ladder to the bridgeroom. There were voices. Even through the bulkhead door he could tell by the sound and cadence of them that they were not any of his. A little later they came down again pausing at various levels, and the pauses were accompanied by the clanging of hatch doors.

The steps approached their own hatch, and Kettrick put his hand on Chai to stop her growling.

"Freeze," he whispered.

They froze, hugged tight against the bolted frame of a cradle. From the baled goods within it a faint scene of crushed gra.s.ses and far-off sunlight touched him and made him think of Nillaine. The door wasflung open. The power-ful beam of a torch probed here and there. The alien voices spoke again, with a soft sweet sibilance that to Kettrick had always been profoundly unpleasant. Then they went away, leaving the hatch open. The light from, the center well made a small puddle in the blackness.

The noises from below were muted but unmistakable. Voices raised in angry protest; a brief confusion; the sound of the carrier starting up and going away; silence.

Kettrick wondered if they had left a guard. He waited a long time, listening. At length he sent Chai to find out. Her ears and nose were far keener than his. She came back shak-ing her head and snorting with displeasure.

"No one, John-nee. Bad smell, like footless thing." In the light from the door she made a gesture indicating a writhing movement.

"They're warm-blooded, just like us," said Kettrick. "They bear their young alive. They have really very pretty skin. But I agree with you."

"What now?"

"We wait till dark."

He looked at his wrist chronometer. It would not be a long wait. After that he would do something.

He had no idea what it would be. But he knew that he had better think about it, and think fast.

He sat by the hatch, where he could hear if anyone came. The ship was uncannily quiet, hollow, creeping with faint echoes. Chai watched. And Kettrick felt most terribly alone.

16.

The worst of it was that he did not know at all what was going on.

The sequence of events was simple. They had landed. Boker had gone to sign in and check the s.p.a.ceport board for Starbird. Boker had not returned. s.p.a.ceport guards had come and taken away Hurth and Glevan. Perfectly simple.

The question was why.

And Kettrick kept thinking, "It would be easier to figure this out if I weren't so scared." He was getting awfully tired of being scared. He wondered if you ever got to a point where the fear nerves were all so calloused that you couldn't feel them any more; if you ever got so bored with fear that you simply forgot it.

He could hear the wind thrumming on the hull, and the sense of aloneness was overpowering.

Boker, Hurth, and Glevan. What was happening to them, in the slender hands of the soft-spoken, black-eyed men of Achern, the men with the blunt jaws and the faint stripes running from the corners of the eyes to the fluted ear holes, and the lingering suggestion of folded skin at the throat?

The anger which had been there all along since the first sight of the approaching carrier finally a.s.serted itself. It had a fine cleansing heat to it. People who talked piously against anger were people who had never had any real enemies, and people who preached against hate, all hate, under any circ.u.mstances, were people who had never been in fear of their lives. It was easy to love when you were not fighting for survival, and more than survival, against those who had never heard the word. Kettrick was full of hate, and he welcomed it. He held it, alone in Grellah's iron belly, and it drove the fear away.

Wherever they were and whatever was happening to them, Boker and Hurth and Glevan were depending on him.Well, and so. Think.

Boker had gone to sign in and check the board for Starbird. He would have entered the central rotunda of the Ad-ministration Building. Kettrick remembered it well, a huge cube-shaped structure, very neat and glistening, a black floor, walls faced in an odd shape of pink, a native stone that took a high polish. There were mosaic murals, weirdly fluid things that had a way of wriggling if you looked at them too long.

Boker would have gone to the desk at the right of the entrance, marked registry. He would have placed the plastic square with Grellah's code number in the scanner and then punched the tape machine with his name, the names of his crew, his lading, port of origin, last port of call, next des-tination, and his pad number. Then he would have crossed to the board, a huge lighted panel that dominated the rotunda, with the service wing of the building to the right and the office wing to the left; the office wing where the I-C was.

Boker would have looked for Starbird among the many ships listed there. If the name did not appear, meaning that the ship had departed, he would then have gone to the small booths beside the board. Here on a keyboard he could punch the name Starbird and a data storage center would automatically provide him with the date of departure and destination of that ship.

Routine procedure, comfortably confined to incurious elec-trons. Only Kettrick was sure that that particular set of relays must have been altered to give notice to somebody that Starbird was being paged. And somebody had arrested Boker at once.

Somebody in authority, since the s.p.a.ceport guards had come to take in Boker's crew.

Which meant to Kettrick that Achern was an active center, dedicated to the ultimate victory of the Doomstar, with at least a part of its high officialdom involved.

It was not easy to decide what to do, and he wished for the simple unaffected savagery of Thwayn where there was not such a huge, sophisticated apparatus arrayed against him. One thing was sure. The port Administration Building was no place to go for help or information. And Sekma, obviously, was not at Achern or he would have reacted by now to Grellah's landing. So much for hope.

When he knew that it must be dark outside he went very quietly up the ladder to the bridgeroom and took from the arms locker a skinning knife that Flay had given him as a gift. Then he went into the cubicle he had shared indistinguishably with Boker and cleaned himself of the grease and stains of the afternoon's unfinished labor.

He put on fresh clothing, hiding the knife in his tunic. Under Hurth's bunk in the adjoining cubicle he found a bat-tered round cap with a second officer's badge on it and a limp peak that would partly shadow his face. He also took what money he could find, including small coins. He still had his money belt, but it did him no good for casual spending.

He went down the ladder again, this time to the lower depths where Glevan kept his tools. Here he got a pair of heavy wire cutters. Then he returned to the companionway where he had left Chai on watch.

The ship's lights were out, except for those in the center well. The companionway was dark, showing the open hatch as a lighter area. Chai blew softly through her nose, and touched him.

He crouched close to her. He could see nothing. The out-side floods had not been turned on and the wide s.p.a.ce of the pad was dark except for the glimmer of a cloudy sky. The glare of the administration area was too far off to matter. But he trusted Chai.

"Man?"

"Under ship. Not move."

They had left a guard, then, or more properly a spy. He wanted to tell Chai to kill, but he only said,"Hit him."

She went down the ladder like a puff of smoke and there was no noise at all until somebody pulled in his breath in a startled half cry that was broken off by a heavy slap. A second later she called. He went down the ladder. In the black shadow under Grellah's tripod gear there was a lighter blob. He did not stop to examine it. With Chai running be-side him he went off between the lines of ships.

He went all the way on foot, avoiding the transport strips with their too-many pa.s.sengers.

Fortunately Grellah's pad was in one of the outermost rows. Even so it was a long way, and he expected every moment to hear a warning hooter sound for liftoff, and he prayed that they would not be caught on the pad.

They were not. Ships landed and took off, but they were in other quadrants. The tall wire fence appeared at length be-fore him, topped with intricate barbs to prevent climbing.

Kettrick cut the heavy mesh quickly and let Chai and him-self through. An interrupted impulse would show up on a board at Administration, warning that the fence had been cut, and where, and the guards would be sent at once. But they would be looking for thieves breaking in to pilfer from the docked ships, not for someone going the other way. At least he hoped so. Somebody would probably put two and two together when the spy came to and yelled. In the meantime, he had better make what speed he could.

He took time to bend the ends of the cut strands back in the right direction with the plier teeth of the cutters. Then he ran like the devil across the periphery road and the cleared s.p.a.ce beyond, into a belt of trees that followed the moss-grown ditch of a disused ca.n.a.l.

He headed for the city. Behind him he heard a carrier come along the fence line looking for the break. There was no pursuit.

Achern was an old city. Much of it was built of the pink stone, which was extremely hard and enduring, and parts of it were quite incredibly old. It had not changed too greatly with the impact of new technologies and the influx of new races and ideas. The Achernans had greedily a.s.similated what they wanted and rejected the rest, including any resi-dent alien population. They disliked humans intensely and saw to it that there was no little coagulation of permanent intruders that might develop into a political force.

Humanity flowed off its ships into the Market, the taverns and shops and business houses and the other houses along the Ca.n.a.l of the Blue Lanterns, leaving money in Achernan pockets all the way, and then it flowed back into its ships and departed. Diplomatic and other unavoidable human per-sonnel such as the I-C and corporation staffs were rotated on a three-year basis.

There had of course been some new building, chiefly around the starport and chiefly of an industrial nature. In the main, the Achernans found their ancient city adequate just as it was, and if the humans did not they were welcome to go elsewhere.

It was a beautiful city, one of the loveliest in the Cl.u.s.ter. The truly ma.s.sive, piled, pinnacled buildings of pink stone were made to look as delicate as clouds, afloat above the mirroring ca.n.a.ls, their hard outlines all softened with carv-ing as though the wind had fretted them. The Achernans loved carving.

Even the boats on the ca.n.a.ls were carved, and the graceful spans of the bridges. Lamps like silver moons hung in the warm night, and the flowering vine that gave the city its peculiar spicy smell clambered everywhere with branching sprays of white.

Yet Kettrick felt, as always, a tightening of the skin across his back and a deep distaste in which all his senses joined. The design of the buildings was subtly unhuman, the motifs of the carvings not at all subtly unpleasant to the human eye. The boats glided too quietly on the oily water, the sound of voices was too soft, the footsteps too undulant. The pretty flowers shed poison on the air, the sweetness of the opium poppy. And all the piled-up windows and the deep-arched doorways and the curtained boats held glib black glossy eyes that watched and blinked with ophidian disdain.Underneath it all, and perhaps most potent of all, was the faint dry body odor that set his ape hackles on end and made Chai grunt and blow.

He was by no means alone on the streets. The evening was young. There were many places of entertainment. Crowds of outworlders moved freely through the maze of streets and waterways; merchants, traders, officers and crews from the ships, employees of many firms and diplomatic establish-ments. n.o.body looked twice at Kettrick. Chai got an oc-casional startled glance, but the Tch.e.l.l were not unknown here; merchants often used them for guards and Kettrick had seen them more than once around the Market. He walked as quickly as he dared without seeming to hurry, keeping as much as he could to the darker or less crowded ways.

The s.p.a.ceman's Hall was in one part of a very ancient building. Dim shapes of pink stone writhed up the ma.s.sive doorway on either side and met overhead with a flourishing of time-worn wings. Inside was a great blank room, shorn of every fitting that might have told of its former uses. There were cheap wooden benches in it now, where s.p.a.cemen could wait for a berth or make contact with friends or sleep off a drunk.

A big board hung on one wall, with a few Wants scrawled on it. Beside it, in untidy bunches, the postings of current shipping dangled from pegs. In one corner a man from a world way over on the western fringe of the Cl.u.s.ter sat in the midst of a complex of pigeonholes, message boards, files, and a teletype machine. Silky white hair covered his head, the tops of his shoulders, his chest and back. He looked like a melancholy white rabbit, except for his eyes, which were a pale yellow and more like a coyote's.

Kettrick left Chai to sit by the door and went to where the postings hung, moving with a sort of dreary slouch as though he did not greatly care whether he found what he was looking for or not. He began to flip through them, as idly as he could with his nervous hands. He wondered if the s.p.a.ceman's Hall were being watched, if the yellow-eyed man were a spy, if one of the crewmen snoring on the benches were working for the Doomstar.

The teletype began to clatter, chewing out another list-ing from the s.p.a.ceport. Kettrick's eye ran down the lists of ships, searching. The machine fell silent. He heard the yel-low-eyed man get up and start toward him.

Kettrick turned the page. He continued to turn pages while the man inserted the new paper into one of the bunches. He could not find any listing for Starbird. That meant she had left, and he would have to go to the back files for time and destination.