Doomstar Read online

  Doomstar

  Edmond Hamilton

  One man against the universe — one man with a device that could change the sun from a source of life to the ultimate death-dealing weapon…

  Edmond Hamilton

  Doomstar

  1

  The dancers leaped and swayed in the circle of blue-green light. They wore stylized, semihumanoid masks because their own faces might have been displeasing to the Earthly viewers, but otherwise their silvery bodies were unadorned. There were seven of them. Angular and curiously jointed, their movements seemed grotesque at first, and only gradually, as they wove their intricate patterns, did their extreme grace become apparent.

  Sandra shivered. "They give me the creeps," she muttered.

  "Now, now," said Kettrick. "You're letting your species discrimination show."

  "I don't care. I'm just a poor little Earthbound provincial, and I don't like people-sized things that talk, but aren't people." She twirled her glass between tapering, perfectly manicured fingers. "I need another drink, Johnny."

  He ordered it, watching the dancers.

  "You're really enjoying it," Sandra said, and shrugged her perfect shoulders. It was the fashion that winter to be covered up, and her considerable stock of perfections were largely concealed beneath a sort of ornate sack that fell to the floor and was buoyed out over the hips by a light hoop. Her hair, artificially padded and stiffened, curved out in two sweeping circles over her ears, and in the centers of these circles jeweled bells chimed and swung when she moved her head. "But then," she went on, "I guess you got pretty used to the beastie types out there in the Hyades."

  "Mm," said Kettrick. "Well, now. Australopithecus Africanus was a fine little fellow. He was my grandfather, and I inherited a great deal from him. But he was just as much a beastie as any other prototype, and I'll tell you something else, my pretty. They all think of themselves as human, and the rest of us as not quite. So don't get too toplofty."

  "All right, Johnny, don't get sore." She accepted a fresh glass from the waiter and sipped it. "I guess you miss being out there a lot, don't you? I mean, every time I mention it you get all snappish."

  Kettrick smiled. "The solution to that should be quite simple, shouldn't it?"

  "I don't know." Her eyes were a light blue, heavily outlined and shadowed under artificial brows of white metal that glittered even in the dim light. "I used to think it was all that money you lost, and being barred out and all, but now I don't think so. Not all of it, anyway. I've been going with you for two years, and I still can't get through to you, not really, not to touch you, if you know what I mean. Johnny, was there a woman out there in the Hyades?"

  The dancers on the floor struck their final attitudes, bowed gracefully to the applause, and glided away. The lights went up. The music started again and couples began to move out onto the floor. After a while Kettrick reached over and patted Sandra's hand with a curious gentleness.

  "Don't try to think," he said. "It'll only get you a bad pain in the head. Just take things the way they are, and if you aren't happy with them, you can always quit."

  In a small choked voice she said, "Johnny, let's dance." And he realized that she was afraid of him, that she had deliberately waited until they were in a public place to ask him that, and he was ashamed. He stood up and held out his hand, and her big shiny eyes looked at him worriedly, and he suddenly thought what a shabby trick he had done her, choosing her as he had because she was everything he despised in a woman and so he could have both the present flesh and the untouched memory.

  She put her hand in his and stood up, and she must have seen the change in his expression because she smiled, rather tremulously. And that was when Tighe came up and touched Kettrick's shoulder, and said, "Johnny, there's a couple of men who want to see you."

  He pointed to the silk-draped entrance where two men stood with the snow melting on the shoulders of their insulated suits, unfestive, unsmiling, waiting.

  Kettrick looked at them. He patted Sandra's hand again and said, "I'll only be a minute." She sat down slowly and watched him as he walked away with Tighe.

  The two men greeted him quietly, their faces remotely pleasant and very businesslike. They might have been a superior class of salesman. They were not. Kettrick looked stonily at the identification they showed him — he didn't need any, but it was regulation — and he said, "What the hell more do you want from me?"

  One of the men said, "I don't know, Mr. Kettrick. But we have orders to bring you in."

  They waited. Kettrick stood still. He stood easily, his shoulders dropped slightly forward, his dark eyes regarding the two men with a kind of bright speculation. Tighe, who towered over him by several inches and outweighed him by some fifty pounds, said pleadingly, "Please, Johnny, do your arguing outside? Please?"

  Kettrick shrugged. "What's the use of arguing?" He glanced back to where Sandra was still watching him anxiously, and he waved to her. He gave Tighe a fifty credit note and said, "See that she gets home all right." He reclaimed his evening cloak, snicked the thermostat to on, pulled the hood over his head and walked out between the two quiet men, and that was the last time Sandra ever saw him.

  The cold air hit his face with a clean ringing slap that was very pleasant after the overwarm, overscented air of the club. Snow was still falling, melting on the heated roadways. There was a dark unobtrusive car standing at the curb. The driver lounged behind the steering lever with the timeless patience of a man who had waited just so outside a million doors on a million days and nights. Kettrick and his escort got in and the car glided off, its turbine humming softly.

  For a time it kept to the streets, running between the banked-up lights of the buildings that reared enormously into the sky, and Kettrick expected to be taken to the government building that had become familiar to him through far too many previous visits. He noticed that the rear-mounted fisheye was operative, and that the men were watching the traffic behind them on the small monitor screen. He wondered who they thought would be following them, or him, but he did not bother to ask. He knew from experience that these lads did not answer questions.

  They passed through the gaudy brilliance of Times Square, and then one of the men said something to the driver and the car turned aside into the narrower crosstown streets and began a series of well-calculated maneuvers, which a skillful tail might follow but only at the price of betraying himself.

  And now Kettrick began to be really curious.

  The monitor showed only the normal random traffic behind them. One of the men said, "Okay, Harry," and the driver grunted and sent the car spinning down the nearest high-speed road to Long Island.

  They were not going to the government building, that much was sure. Kettrick tightened his jaw and waited.

  The eventual road was long and lonely, running dark between the walled gardens of estates. The car slowed and turned into a barred gateway, which presently opened to admit them into a place of snowy lawns and skeletal shrubbery, with a clean-scraped driveway curving up to a large house with lights shining from its windows.

  Kettrick went inside with his escort.

  In a broad and beautiful hall, a butler took his cloak and bade him wait. The two men remained with him, impassive, until the butler returned. Then they accompanied him to a doorway and saw him through it, and closed it firmly behind him.

  Kettrick looked around the room. It was a library, solid, masculine, and comfortable. Heavy curtains masked the windows. An archaic but pleasant wood fire blazed on the hearth. Kettrick was aware, in a vague fashion, of the warm tones of book bindings and polished wood and leather, and the subdued glow of a magnificent carpet. But only vaguely. It was the faces of the men who sat looking at him that held all his attention.

  There
was Fersen, Under-Secretary for Interstellar Trade representing Earth in that sector of space that contained the Hyades. Him Kettrick knew, personally and too well. The others, except one, he knew only by reputation, but he knew them. And a small pulse of alarm began to beat deep inside him, because it was unnatural that these men should have sat in this room waiting for one Johnny Kettrick.

  They studied him, these men, for a long quiet moment. Howard Vickers, thin and stooped and schoolmasterish, responsible for the safety of nine planets and a sun. His aide, a deceptively willowy chap with the most perfectly trimmed mustache Kettrick had ever seen, Marshall Wade. Fersen, sour-faced and frowning. The bull-shouldered, big-jawed man from the Department of Prosecutions, Arthur Raymond, otherwise known as The Minotaur. Dr. Hayton Smith, the astrophysicist. And two tall slender dusky-gold men who sat close to the fire and watched him with eyes of a bright and startling blue.

  Howard Vickers, Chief of Solar System Security, broke the silence.

  "Please sit down, Mr. Kettrick."

  Kettrick hesitated, and the younger and shorter of the two dusky-gold men said, in the sweet slurred cadence of his native speech, "Better do it, Johnny. It may be a very long night."

  2

  Kettrick answered, in the same slurred speech, "Your advice was always good, Sekma, even if I didn't take it. So I'll take it now."

  He sat down in the one empty chair, which had heen placed as though by accident in such a position that all of the men could watch his every gesture and change of expression. Kettrick had a strange feeling that he was doing all this in a dream, a rather unpleasant dream, one of those things that seems quite normal on the surface but which the sleeper knows is a developing nightmare from which he will presently wake up screaming. But perversely, now that he was well into it, he did not want to wake up. He was consumed with curiosity.

  "Would you like a drink?" asked Vickers.

  "No, thank you," said Kettrick. There were times when the instinct of self-preservation was stimulant enough, and better left to itself.

  "Very well. Then first of all, Mr. Kettrick, I will ask you to listen without interrupting. You know Mr. Sekma. I believe you do not know Dr. Takinu. He is chief of astro-physical research for the Bureau of Astronomy at Tananaru."

  Kettrick bowed slightly to Takinu, who returned the acknowledgment. He was older than Sekma, beginning to show white circles in the tight copper-wire curls that covered his narrow head, and his face bore lines of strain, great and immediate, that one might look for in the face of a statesman but hardly in that of an astrophysicist concerned only with the remote crises of stars. Kettrick shot a quick glance at Smith and saw the shadow of the same thing in the Earthman's eyes.

  Fear?

  "Dr. Takinu will tell you himself what he has already told us."

  Vickers leaned back, and Takinu looked at Kettrick. "It is convenient for you that I speak my own tongue?"

  "It is convenient," Kettrick said.

  Fear?

  "Good," said Takinu. "That way is quicker." Wearily, as though he had repeated these same words until he hated them, he went on, "Our instruments picked up and recorded a change in one of the outlying stars of the Hyades — a small fringe sun with no habitable planets. It was a routine sweep of the sky and the new data was only noticed when the computers found the discrepancy in the gamma radiation level for that portion of the sweep. We pinpointed the source of emission and made very exhaustive studies. Very exhaustive, Mr. Kettrick, very careful. The small star had suddenly become lethal."

  Takinu paused, frowning, and Sekma spoke.

  "What he's trying to find the layman's language for, Johnny, is the explanation of how a star might suddenly, overnight, become deadly. How the solar processes might be changed, the cycle altered by some interference with the chemical balance, so that the output of gamma radiation is increased until every living thing on every planet of that star — if it had habitable planets — would be blasted out of existence. I don't think you have to go into the physics of it, Takinu. I think Johnny will accept the fact that it happened."

  "That is not difficult to accept," said Takinu. "It is as you say, a fact, demonstrable, actual, unarguable. What he may not so easily accept is our speculation as to the cause of this fact."

  His haunted eyes lingered on Kettrick, and now there was no doubt about the shadow. It was fear.

  "I did not rely on my own judgment alone. I communicated with my old friend and respected colleague, Dr. Smith, of your Lunar Observatory." Takinu gestured to Smith and said in lingua franca, "It is your story now."

  Smith said, "I made my own observations. Our instruments had of course detected the same aberration. My findings agree in every respect with those of Dr. Takinu."

  There was a moment of complete silence in the library. Not really silence, because Kettrick's stretched nerves were aware of every small rustle of cloth and whisper of breathing, the preternaturally loud noises of burning from the hearth. Then Smith said, completely without dramatics: "We do not believe that the phenomenon was a natural one."

  Now again there was silence, and everybody seemed to be waiting for Kettrick to say something. Instead it was Sekma who spoke, in the lingua franca so that everybody could understand him.

  "I'll make it plainer, Johnny. Somebody did it. Somebody has found the way to poison a star."

  "You were always a hard-headed man," said Kettrick slowly. "Damned hard, as I know to my sorrow. Dr. Takinu and Dr. Smith have their particular reasons for believing this unbelievable thing. What are yours?"

  "Talk," said Sekma. "Rumors. Myths. Whispers. In my business I hear them. On a dozen planets, Johnny — not much, just here a word and there a word, sometimes in a city dive, sometimes at a jungle fire, but the word was an odd one and always the same. The word was Doomstar."

  He let the word hang in the air for a moment, and Kettrick heard it like the solemn clang of a distant bell.

  "I don't put too much faith in talk," said Sekma. "Any creature, human, semihuman, or nonhuman, with an articulate tongue, can be depended on to wag it, and most of them prefer marvels to cold truth any day of their lives. But when I read Takinu's report, the coincidence was just a little too much to accept."

  Kettrick thought about it. "How did the tongue-waggers react to the news that an actual Doomstar had appeared?"

  "Well, that's the odd part of it. They never knew it had. The occurrence was so obscure that only astronomers could be aware of it, and most of them would pass it by as a natural accident."

  "Wouldn't it be simpler," said Kettrick, "to assume that it is just that?"

  "Oh, much simpler, Johnny. Yes. But suppose it isn't. Suppose there is, say, only one chance in a million that it isn't." He smiled at Kettrick, a smile that had in it very little humor. "To quote one of your great poets, I am myself indifferent honest. But supposing you knew, or thought, that I might just possibly have in my hands the power to poison your sun. Would you sleep easily of nights?"

  Kettrick nodded. "All right, I won't argue that." After a minute he said, "I won't argue that at all. My God, what blackmail! One demonstration, announced and carried through, and every solar system in the Hyades would be cringing at your feet."

  "And no need to stop with the Hyades," said Sekma.

  Kettrick frowned and shook his head. "But there wasn't one. A demonstration would be a necessity, and there wasn't one. Just one small obscure star."

  "We believe this was a test, Johnny. Every new weapon needs a field test. And this was successful. We believe our demonstration will come later, if…"

  "If what?" asked Kettrick, knowing the answer.

  "If we don't stop it."

  "And if there is, in truth and fact, a weapon."

  "This is what we have to find out. Is there a weapon — in truth and fact — and if there is, who has it, and where."

  "That could take a long time."

  "But we don't have a long time. Assuming that there is a weapon, we have only as much time a
s those who control it choose to give us. How long would you guess that to be?"

  "Well," said Kettrick, with a small edge of venom in his good-natured tone, "I'm a little out of touch with your calendar, but let's see. There was a meeting of the League of Cluster Worlds just before I — ah — left the Hyades. So the next one should be…" He muttered and grumbled to himself. "This interstellar arithmetic always did give me a headache. Say the next meeting of the League will be within six units of Universal Arbitrary Time…"

  "Close enough," Sekma nodded. "But why pick that particular event?"

  "Because if I wanted to make a startling announcement, I would prefer to do it at a time when the representatives of the various solar systems were gathered together. Think of the money it would save in interstellar cables. Think of the vastly greater impact." Kettrick shrugged. "Of course, I'm only saying what I would do."

  "It happens that we agree with that theory, Mr. Kettrick," said Vickers. He rose and stood before the fire, a professor with thin spread legs about to lecture his students. "Would you like a drink now?"

  Again Kettrick said, "No, thank you." And he noticed that the eyes in that professorial face was flint-hard and flint-cold and direct as spear points.

  "Perhaps," said Vickers, "you are beginning to understand why you're here?"

  Kettrick shook his head. He still sat easily, apparently relaxed, in his chair, but the palms of his hands were sweating and his belly was full of hot wires.

  "I'd rather have you spell it out."

  Vickers nodded. "It's quite simple. We want you to go to the Hyades and find out what you can about the…" He hesitated very briefly before he said the word. "The Doomstar."

  "Well," said Kettrick softly. "Well I'll be damned." He looked around, from Vicktrs to Fersen, from Fersen to Sekma. "Whose idea was this?"

  "Not mine," said Fersen acidly. "I can assure you of that."

  Sekma spread his hands in an eloquent gesture. "Johnny, who else knows the Hyades as well as you? You taught me at least a dozen places I didn't know existed, and I belong to the Cluster." He smiled. "You have a special talent, Johnny. The years I spent trying to catch up with you were the most exasperating and lively fun I've ever had. In my official capacity, that is. When it became obvious that we needed someone to undertake this mission, of course I thought of you."