Boker had stopped his pacing. They were all looking at him curiously. Suddenly he began to laugh.

"Sekma," he said. "What a bargain he made! Straight as an arrow to the mark I fly, without even trying, and he doesn't know it, and I can't tell him."

Boker said politely, "Sekma, Johnny? I think I lost you somewhere."

"No you didn't. It's just a side issue, that didn't seem important until now."

He told them about Sekma, being now sure that they had nothing to do with the Doomstar. As though he had ever believed they might have, but who would have thought it of Wh.e.l.lan or Nillaine?

They listened. When he was all through, Boker said, "Sekma knew you were back in the Cl.u.s.ter, he sent you back himself, and you still intended to go to the White Sun?"

"I did? That's one reason why I wasn't too unhappy about dropping out of sight there, after the explosion. I didn't report to Sekma. He doesn't know I'm alive either."

It was Kettrick's turn now to pace. He could feel them watching him, feel the temperature rising.

"You've got a right to be sore," he said. "And I am in a mood to heap dust on my own head. I didn't believe in the Doomstar. I thought I could use Sekma while he was using me, get back to the Cl.u.s.ter, get my license reinstated, and pick off that million credits at the White Sun, all at the same time. And I could have done it. I could still do it. Except..."

He turned to face them. "Except the d.a.m.ned thing's real. And I'm scared, and I'd just as soon run back to Tananaru and take the first ship out of there for Earth. Only trouble with that is, I can't."

"Why not, Johnny?" asked Boker.

"Two reasons. Seri and the White Sun. In that order. I can't make you go on with me, I can't even ask you to. But I'll make a deal with you to take me on to Kirnanoc. I can get another ship there..."

"Seri," repeated Boker. "And the White Sun?"

"Why not?"

"But Seri first."

"Naturally. If I don't stop him it'll be because I'm dead, in which case I won't have any use for a million credits." Kettrick found suddenly that he was shouting in a most melodramatic and undignified fashion. "He made a jacka.s.s out of me! A complete jacka.s.s. He murdered Khitu. He tried to murder me and Chai. Now he's on his way to murder a solar system, using my friends to help him, using my name to ruin, poison..." He was running out of breath. "Any-way, after I'm through with Seri, I might as well go out and see the Krinn. Why not?"

"You're an optimist, Johnny," Boker said. "Or maybe just a jacka.s.s. You talk about stopping Seri, as though that's an end to it. That's like saying you'll just take one little step out the airlock door. Seri'sonly a piece of it. You don't know how big the whole thing is, how many people, how much force. You think you can handle all that? You think we can handle all that?"

Kettrick did not answer. It was Hurth who said, very un-happily, "It looks like we're stuck to try."

Boker looked at him. Then he looked at Glevan.

"It will be a worthy battle," Glevan said, and grinned, a grimace of frightening solemnity. "We'll lose, of course. But proudly. That's the thing."

"Sure," said Boker, and shook a drop of sweat off the end of his broad nose. "Sure, that's the thing.

Well, and so. How do you see this, Johnny? How will it go?"

Kettrick swore. "I don't know any more than you do. All I know is that Seri has a piece of the thing and is taking it somewhere. Maybe he'll pick up more pieces along the way. Maybe if we could just catch up with Seri we could stop the whole thing by taking, or destroying, the pieces he has, a.s.suming that each piece is vital to the operation of the whole." He started to pace again, restless with thinking, and Chai watched him from the corner where she sprawled and panted, her large eyes dark and troubled. "If we could catch up with him...Starbird's faster than Grellah, but miracles do happen..."

"Aye," said Glevan, "to some. Not to old, rusty, battered ships. They do not turn into s.p.a.ce hawks."

He rose and left the bridgeroom.

"At Kirnanoc," said Kettrick, "there's an I-C office. We could get help there. We certainly could get help there."

Boker brightened. So did Hurth. "Yes." they said. "Of course."

"Well, then," said Kettrick. He sat down. Then he sprang up again. "What the devil's going on?"

The whine-drone-clack had changed pitch slightly. An un-pleasant small quiver ran through the fabric of the ship. Boker sprang to his feet and roared into the intercom.

"Glevan! If you blow that unit, I'll hunt you down through all the halls of h.e.l.l...!"

Glevan's voice came back m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.sed 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 Cl.u.s.ter stars, rolled heavily along as it al-ways 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.

12Long 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 snow-banks 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 pa.s.sed 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 Cl.u.s.ter 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 s.h.a.ggy, 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 s.h.a.ggy 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. "h.e.l.lo, 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 d.a.m.ned! h.e.l.lo, 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 him-self 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 in-adequate, had either perished or taken their remnants thank-fully 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 gra.s.s-lands that rolled on to the horizon, red-gold under the huge red sun. In the spring they were green like a green ocean. Great herds of animals grazed on this richness. Here and there were lines of trees along a river bed, or isolated clumps that gave the cattle shelter. The shadowy, whale humps of distant ridges rose out of the gra.s.s and away be-hind them rose the smoke of little hamlets or scatteredsteadings. At the farthest reach of vision, hanging like dreams in the dusky sky, were the high peaks of mountains wrapped in eternal snow.

They stopped on the crest of the hill, to look over over this their world, and Flay looked up at the old red sun as a man looks at his father.

"He will last out my time," said Flay, "and the time of my youngest children's grandchildren, and they tell me perhaps a thousand or two years beyond. Why should a man worry longer than that?"

"Why, indeed?" said Kettrick, and they rode down into the city.

The houses were more like warrens of stone, some of them sunk into the ground like windowed storm cellars, others one or two or even three stories high, all huddled together as though for warmth and mutual a.s.sistance against snow and bitter winds, clambering in rows up and down the hills, thrusting their backsides into the slopes behind them. Chim-neys poured up smoke. The most sheltered places were not for human habitation but for winter pens and cave shelters for stock. s.h.a.ggy creatures of various breeds and sizes clattered or rooted about in the straggling lanes. There were forges and tanneries, industries of various sorts geared to the materials and the needs at hand. It was the Firgals' boast that they were completely self-sufficient.

"We do not need the traders," Flay had told Kettrick on his first landing here. "We would live just as well if none of you ever came again." Kettrick had found that this was true, and he thought they were a very wise people.

The wisdom of their insistence on staying here was an-other matter, but that was their own business.

And perhaps it was not as foolish as it seemed. Here they had the pick of what there was. On another world, they would have to fit themselves to what was left after others had already settled their order of dominance. Kettrick thought that any planet that took the Firgals in would live to regret its generosity.

People pa.s.sing in the streets looked at Kettrick and Boker with polite unconcern. Meanwhile, Kettrick was chafing with impatience, sweating to ask Flay whether the last ship had been Seri's, and resolutely forcing himself to silence. These were not the little b.u.t.terfly people of Gurra. One wrong word could finish Grellah's voyage right here and now.

Of course the Firgals might not be involved at all with Seri and the Doomstar. But Kettrick thought there had been an odd note to Flay's question about their being in a hurry.

The cavalcade began to break up. The parts of the broken bar were taken off to one of the forges.

Flay halted in front of a three-storey dwelling, one of a long rambling line, its back wall melting into the hill behind it. They dismounted and went inside.

The room within was low and smoke-smelling, the black-ened roof beams close over Kettrick's head. Low doorways led into other chambers at the back and at either end, and on to still other chambers. Flay's clan inhabited a considerable stretch of housing, and it seemed to Kettrick that the clan had grown since he had been here last.

Flay's brawny wives and daughters and daughters-in-law and their innumerable young swarmed about busily. From one room came the mingled clacking of looms and female tongues. In another place a group of youngsters were carding wool, making a game out of it with a singsong chant and much laughter, and another group, slightly older and stronger, took turns thumping at a churn. The one who first made b.u.t.ter got a special reward, and the children kept shouting, "Let me, it's my turn!" The older boys and the men were out with the stock now, or gathering fuel, or working in the forges or the tannery or some other industry. Four old women sat by a fireplace spinning yarn, their dark faces strong as weathered wood, their voices cheerful. Only the very little children tumbled about the floors like puppies with nothing to do.

Flay steered the two outlanders through the rooms and up a narrow flight of stairs that turned upon itself at right angles, requiring some nimble footwork. The upper levels were quieter. In a room with littleshuttered windows Flay mo-tioned them to seats in comfortable hide-frame chairs, and set a tall clay bottle and cups before them on a table.

Kettrick resisted the impulse to gulp down the fiery liquor. It was not proper manners. Even so, the warming sips steadied his nerves. The Firgals didn't fool around with effete wines and the like. They lived a hard life in a hard world, and when they wanted a drink they wanted a drink. They made the best whiskey in the Cl.u.s.ter, and kept it, being too short on grains for export.

"Well," said Flay, "and welcome." He filled their cups again and then said quite casually, "Seri didn't tell us you were back, Johnny."

Kettrick made a show of being surprised. "Seri? Seri Otku, who used to be my partner? Has he been here?"

"Only a day and a half ago."

"Well," said Kettrick, "if that isn't a strange coincidence!" He was afraid to pick up his cup, much as he wanted the drink. He was afraid his hand would shake.

"Coincidence?"

"Yes. That we should come so close to meeting here." Eagerly, with all the false sincerity he could muster, he asked, "How is Seri? Is he well and flourishing?"

"He is well," said Flay. "He did not tell us you were back."