"And thickest." Boker had a s.p.a.ceman'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 re-minded 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 door. It even worked a couple of times. By the third trip the I-C boys had caught on. What do you want to bet they've got it marked in red on the charts now?"

He shook his head. "Kirnanoc is perfect. It's clear out of that complex, too far away for a normal jump, with a barrier of the drift in between. Only it isn't a barrier if you don't think of it that way. That's the way I planned it. And the only way I know that might work."

"Okay," said Boker. "How do we get back?"

"The same way. Only from the Bank we jump for Trace, instead of Kirnanoc, thus fulfilling our posted i-t, and go on our merry way, rich and unsuspected."

He faced Boker squarely. "There's a risk, I won't try to deny that, but I think we can make it. I haven't been in the Lantavan, but I've been in other banks and gone through them. If we go the safe, logical, simple way we'll never make it at all." He paused. "You can still say no."

Boker shut his eyes. "I am thinking hard," he said, "about one million credits. If I think hard enough, Imight forget the rest."

Then his eyes popped open, bright with alarm. "Johnny, did you tell Seri about jumping off from there? Could he be trying to pick off that million credits for himself?"

Kettrick shook his head, frowning. "No, I didn't tell him. And I don't see how he could, without me.

The Krinn wouldn't trade with him. They'd be much more likely to eat him."

Boker grunted. "That's true enough. I guess it's just a coincidence. But it's d.a.m.ned funny..."

"What is?"

"Seri going into s.p.a.ce himself. It must be the first time in history that he's pried himself away from the elegant life and the pretty ladies."

"He must have his reasons," said Kettrick grimly.

Reasons, yes. A reason to lie, a reason to kill. Kettrick was viciously determined to find out what those reasons were. In the meantime, he wondered. He wondered if Larith had known when she talked to him what Seri meant to do. Won-dered if she was with him in Starbird.

Jump time was a good time for wondering. Before that, when they were making their first run out of the planetary safety zone, there was much to do and much to see. Kettrick had looked with the joyous eye of the returning exile into the heart of the Hyades, the dark magnificent heart studded with the fires of the orange-red giants that made up most of that starry archipelago, with here and there the scattered blaze of the few white stars, of which their destination was one. The Cl.u.s.ter was an open one, not like the close-packed globular star swarms of Cygnus and Hercules. Here a man might drift for a lifetime between the lazy drifting suns, finding such beauty and terror as he might wish for, with a quiet haven always waiting somewhere close at hand.

He could look at it and believe that it had not changed. Except that the star charts now showed, far out on the western fringes, an area marked in red. Deadly radiation, it said. And if he looked closer, using the long range 'scope turned up to full power, he could see the star at the center of that zone of red.

The poisoned star. And he could wonder with a chill unease whether the killer shark had not indeed entered the lagoon, the serpent come to Eden.

Jump time, there was nothing to see, nothing to do but watch the gauges, bear a hand with Glevan as he nursed the grumbling and uncertain unit, eat, sleep, and listen to the sounds of disintegration chattering along Grellah's seams. And hope.

And think.

He brought up the subject of the Doomstar.

They were all in the bridgeroom, the only place in the ship where the lighting system worked adequately and where the energy-bleeders functioned well enough to keep the temperature down to a tolerable level. It tended to build up during jump; if your bleeder system failed, you fried. The subs.p.a.ce, or hypers.p.a.ce, or whatever you chose to call the notness into which the FTL unit took you, apparently did not conduct anything away from a body pa.s.sing through it. It was as though the ship were received encapsulated like a pill in its own skin and shot through an environment that hated and violently rejected it, pa.s.sing it on and out of itself as quickly as possible. There were a lot of beautiful equations and theories to explain the phenomenon, but it still remained, like electricity, a mystery. The scientists knew how it worked, and they knew what they could do with it, but they didn't know why. For all practical purposes, it didn't matter.

Even with the bleeder system working full blast, it was hot enough. They were all stripped to their sweating skins, ex-cept for Chai, who sat as close to Kettrick as she could get, her gray fur lank and her jaws wide open as she breathed."I heard some talk," said Kettrick. "A couple of the hands on the Aldebaranian ship I came out in were full of some-thing they called the Doomstar." That was not true, but he did not want to tell them the truth, at least yet. "Then Pedah mentioned it. What's it all about, anyway?"

"Blibber blabber," said Boker. "Pedah's as good as they come, but she's female, and she waggles her tongue as hard as she does her behind. She's always coming home with some great tale the market women told her."

Glevan, the little dark Pittanese, shook his head. The blue Hlakrans were a sanguine breed. Glevan was not. Around his village fires men spoke seriously of serious things. His monkey face was drawn with thinking, his eyes puckered from peering at mysteries.

"I have heard the same story, and not from women in the marketplace. That little star out there, Johnny, that one with the ring around it...that was a sign."

"Sign?" said Hurth. He was not as ma.s.sively built as Boker and his crest was less impressive. On the other hand he had ten children, a fact he did not let Boker forget. Now he laughed at Glevan. "A sign of what? That things go wrong sometimes even with stars?"

Boker said, "Oh, no. A deity will come forth, his feet straddling the Cl.u.s.ter, and his voice will be as thunder, crying 'Woe, woe!' Hey, Johnny, why don't they ever cry, 'Hooray,' or something pleasant? Eh?

How about the ones you got on Earth?"

"Deities," said Kettrick, "tend to be rather doleful every-where. What kind of a sign, Glevan? Ignore these pigs."

"A sign of trouble," answered Glevan darkly.

"G.o.d-made? Or man-made?"

Glevan stared at him in honest surprise. "Johnny, if a man could do that to a star he'd be a G.o.d."

Boker and Hurth began to build on that idea a fantasy of such riotous obscenity that soon even Kettrick was laughing. But underneath it he thought that Glevan was right. And he thought that Boker and Hurth did laugh too much, as men will when they fear something and try to charm it away with ridicule, pretending that Medusa is really a clown.

8.

Kettrick was glad when they came out of jump. It was al-ways a dull, nerve-wrangling time, and he had been worried about Chai. She seemed better as soon as the heat abated, physically at least. She ate well again, and for the first time she began to groom herself, asking a brush from Kettrick and then spending hours brushing her coat to its old smooth gloss.

And still...

There was nothing he could put his finger on, except that ever since Khitu's death she had been quiet and withdrawn, and a broody Tch.e.l.l was an unchancy thing to have around. Kettrick was well aware that they could become so morose as to be dangerous. The others were clearly unhappy in her presence, and he had nightmares about the possible conse-quences. He hoped that some relief from the confinement of the ship would help her.

He stood with her at the bridge window, showing her the big orange sun ahead beyond the safety screens. You could see the fire fountains leap up, see the flames shoot in beauti-ful plumed arcs a thousand miles long. You could see the whirlwinds, golden red and shining, dance and bow to each other along the burning equator. After a while a tiny bright ball came whirling out of the sun glare, and Kettricksaid, "Gurra. We land there."

"Go outside?"

"Yes."

"Good," she said, and stretched her mighty arms as though she would break through the cramping iron walls. "We find Seri there?"

"I don't know," said Kettrick, startled. "Why?"

"You talk now, John-nee. Seri make Khitu die."

Her big round eyes met his, uncannily intelligent, patheti-cally animal, direct and fierce. "Why you not talk true be-fore?"

"I was afraid you'd kill him."

"Why not kill?" she said, with a curious softness. "You still love Seri?"

This was what she had been brooding about. She had seen Kettrick's outburst in Boker's place, and she had heard them talk about Seri, recognizing the name even if she could not understand what was said. And all this time she had been puzzling in her half-human, half-animal mind, trying to make sense in her own way of the only partly understood behavior of the people around her.

The conclusion she had come to was frightening.

He said, "No, not love Seri. You forget. Seri make me die too, only you held me. But Chai, you listen. Man-law punish Seri. You try, they lock you in cage, for always. You hear?"

She continued to study him. Gradually the fierce light died out of her eyes, and she nodded.

"We catch Seri?"

"We catch him."

"You talk true?"

"We catch him. Maybe not soon. His ship runs faster than ours. But we catch him: And you not kill."

"Not kill." It was equivalent to a promise.

Somehow Kettrick did not entirely trust it.

The bright ball of the planet rushed to meet them, grow-ing huge, blotting out the sun. Grellah stuck her blunt nose into the atmosphere and sank with a despairing shriek toward the midsection of the main land ma.s.s of the eastern hemisphere.

There were two trading ports, one in the east, one in the west on the other side of the world. Sekma had mentioned the eastern one as a center of the Doomstar rumor. Starbird might have landed at either and there was no way of telling until they were down.

Kettrick chose the east.

The dark land opened up below them, clumped trees, jungle tracts, mountain, valley, broad savannah, a winding river, all in shades of brown and ochre, yellow and dull red, the colors turning drab and strange as clouds boiled up against the sun. Grellah slid her puny fires down the great black belly of a thunderhead, a pinp.r.i.c.k against the lightning. Boker brought her tottering in to a landing on a dirt field scorched and bullied with rocket fire, steadied her on her tripod gear, and cut his switches.

Chai was the first one out the lock. The men followed her, hurrying to try and beat the storm, and Kettrick saw her running in the wild gloom, a gray ghost stretched to the wind. Thunder rolled. Fat silver lightning threaded the sky. Except for Grellah and the rusting bones of an old wreck, the field was empty.They took the trail to the village, sweating in the heavy heat. The air reeked with the overrich perfumes of growing things. Tall red-leaved trees on either side of the path shook down showers of petals from their ma.s.sed white blossoms, so that the men seemed to move through a fall of snowflakes.

Chai came up from behind them, panting, her fur dappled with the swirling whiteness.

The storm broke.

Kettrick fought through a blind smother of wind and rain, yearning to be out from under the trees that he could hear but no longer see. Then as the first edge of the storm pa.s.sed he saw movement ahead, and heard laughter, and a few moments later he and the others were in the midst of a crowd of small, bright-skinned people who stretched on tiptoe to throw robes of woven fibre about the men's shoulders, shaking their wet hair and skipping like children in the rain. They ooh-ahed at Chai and left her alone, but the men they half carried, pushing and hurrying along the trail.

They came out into the broad square of the village, with the little high-peaked houses around it leaning their reed thatch into the wind, and they ran across it toward the Tall House where all strangers were brought because it was the only one built high enough to receive them comfortably.

Inside it was dry, with a raised floor of earth and fiber beaten hard. The air still held the stale prestorm heat. The roof rattled and the walls rocked, but Kettrick had been in this house before in a storm and it was welcome shelter.

He looked around and saw a small man coming toward them, wrapped in the red robe of office.

There was no sign of age about him except that his boy's face was beginning to get a wizened look like a pink fruit kept past its time. Kettrick disengaged himself from the general laughing, shoving flurry and called out, "Wh.e.l.lan!"

The little man gave him a startled look and then cried, "Johnny!" He began to hug Kettrick and pound him with his small fists, gabbling all sorts of questions. Over the top of his head Kettrick saw the girl staring at him, and he stared back.

She had been little more than half as high the last time he had seen her. Her thin child's body had rounded into a slender miniaturization of womanhood, delicate and lovely as a sprite. But he knew her in spite of the change, and she had not forgotten him. Her amber eyes lighted up. She smiled and came to him, considerate of her new dignity, and put her hands in his.

"Welcome back, Johnny."

He wanted to pick her up and tousle her hair as he had used to do, just to spite her, but instead he bowed over her hands and said, "Thank you, Nillaine."

Wh.e.l.lan, with a father's disregard for such affectations, smacked her affectionately across the lower drape of her gar-ment. "Go and fetch food for our guests, and wine, lots of wine. This is a time for celebrating." He grinned at Boker and Hurth and Glevan. "I am always happy to see you, thieves though you are. But this is a special, a very special day."

He turned again to Kettrick, looking puzzled. "But Johnny, how does this happen? Only three, four days ago Seri was here, your friend and partner. We asked him then about you, and he said it was the same as before, that the I-C would never let you come back."

Kettrick said in a flat, mild voice, "Seri trades with you now?" He did not look at Boker.

"Oh yes," said Wh.e.l.lan quickly. "In your place, Johnny, though it's not the same. Only I don't understand. Why didn't he..."

"The I-C haven't changed their minds, Wh.e.l.lan. So I just didn't tell them that I was back. I didn't tell Seri either. No reason to get him in trouble." Kettrick smiled, just a little savagely. "Only my three thieving friends know, and now you.""Oh," said Wh.e.l.lan. He began to laugh delightedly. "Oh, ho! Good for you, Johnny! Good! We never loved the I-C here, you know that." Kettrick did indeed. Sekma's lads had been very firm about stopping the export of a certain drug that Wh.e.l.lan's people made and which had been their chief commodity. They had not forgotten it.

Wh.e.l.lan led the way across the room, and Kettrick fol-lowed him, and Boker said in Kettrick's ear, "So your old friend and partner trades with them now in your place? That's interesting."

"It is indeed. And obviously, this is not his first trip into s.p.a.ce."

Three years ago, Wh.e.l.lan had never heard of Seri Otku.

Wh.e.l.lan waved them to the seats of honor on the wide bench that ran around the room. Kettrick sat cross-legged on the thick matting, feeling the house move at his back. Rain rattled like shot on the roof, and the thunder cracked. Chai settled herself tactfully close to the door, watching Kettrick. Wh.e.l.lan chattered.

Kettrick said, "It's bad luck, though, coming just after Seri. I suppose he's traded you out."

Wh.e.l.lan turned to take wine from his daughter's hands. "No," he said carelessly. "No, he offered poor prices. We didn't do much trade. Now, let's drink eh? We worry about business tomorrow."

They drank. Nillaine brought food and served Kettrick her-self, and then sat close by him, studying his face.

"What are you looking for?" he asked her.

"Myself," she said. "Three of our years ago. You looked at me differently then."

"You were different then. Shall I rumple your hair and hold you on my knee, and feed you exotic sweets from other stars until you get the bellyache and your mother hates me?"

"I thought you were a G.o.d then." She had an exquisite smile.

"And what do you think now?"

"You're too big, your hands are coa.r.s.e and your chin is bristly. You are most certainly not a G.o.d.

But it's all right, Johnny. I still love you." She laughed and poured him more wine.

Much later, Kettrick asked if Seri had had a woman with him, and Nillaine said no.

They feasted in the Tall House until long after the storm was gone. Kettrick got pretty drunk on wine and the happy feeling of being there, and the drunker he got the more a peculiar clarity affected his vision, so that he saw in the laughing faces of the beautiful little people who danced and sang and ate and drank with him a salting of new malice, a new excitement burning just beyond his sight, gleaming in the quick sidelong glances and secret smiles. Sometimes when the young men danced they made gestures like warriors, stamping their feet and tossing up their heads, and then the girls would run in and stop them and they would all laugh together and turn to some other dance, a little too ostenta-tiously. They reminded Kettrick of children who knew a big secret. They were keeping it from the adults...himself, Boker, Hurth, and Glevan.

He wondered why.

When it was quite late and he was quite drunk, and Wh.e.l.lan was drunker, Wh.e.l.lan leaned over and looked at him with deep affection and whispered, "Johnny, you stay here with us. Eh? Just a little while.

After that, the I-C..."