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  Kettrick stared at him, eyes wide-open and astonished as a child's. "By God, that's magnificent," he said. "I'm not even angry, Sekma. Just awed." He got up, looking at Vickers. "I think I'd like that drink now."

  "Help yourself."

  There was a superbly stocked cellaret open and waiting. Kettrick poured himself a double shot and took it down neat, and felt the small explosion cancel out the rhythmic nerve stabbings in his middle. They were crying Danger! but he had already received that message loud and clear and the repetitive warnings were merely distracting.

  He realized that Fersen was speaking.

  "…myself clearly on record. I consider it an act of sheer insanity to send this man on such a mission. Suppose he did find this — thing. If it does exist. What would prevent him from simply appropriating it for himself?"

  "Johnny is an honest man," said Sekma, "in his own way. And besides…" He swung his blue gaze to Kettrick, smiling sweetly, speaking softly. "He knows that if he did that I would kill him."

  Kettrick grinned. "You forget, I could destroy your whole solar system the minute you showed your ugly face."

  Sekma said, "It wouldn't save you."

  And Kettrick knew that he was telling the truth.

  "Well," he said, "it doesn't arise, because I'm not going. Get a Clusterer, Sekma…one of your own people. What do you want of an Earthman, anyway?"

  "Not just any Earthman. You have another talent, Johnny. You get along with people, even people that aren't human. They like you. They trust you. And being an Earthman, you cut across all the lines. Any Clusterer, regardless of what world he comes from, has X number of enemies ready-made before he ever leaves home. We've had interstellar flight in the Hyades a lot longer than you've had it, and all the fools and knaves in the universe don't originate on Earth. You know all that, Johnny. I'm just repeating the explanation. Because of course that was the first question these gentlemen asked me."

  "All right," said Kettrick. "And now I'll ask one." He faced them. Sekma, Vickers still standing before the fire and watching with his cold flint eyes, The Minotaur sitting with his heavy head bent over a drink, not speaking and apparently not even listening, Fersen stiff-spined and purse-mouthed as an angry dowager. The two astrophysicists had subtly withdrawn themselves from the fray, brooding over their particular nightmare.

  "Sekma, you and the Department of Trade Regulation took my license away from me. You cost me close to a million credits. You barred me out of the Hyades. And for a year and a half after I came back here this pipsqueak Fersen sweated me up one side and down the other trying to find some excuse to throw me to Mr. Raymond, the well-known maneater, and sobbing his little heart out when he couldn't do it. I assume you know this, Mr. Vickers."

  Vickers nodded. "I do."

  "Then you tell me," said Kettrick quietly, "why I should bother to walk across the street to please any of you?"

  Vickers glanced at Raymond, who said in a kind of offhand rumble, "Because you don't have any choice, Kettrick. If you refuse, I'll clap you under hatches so deep and for so long you'll forget what the sky looks like."

  Fersen smiled venomously.

  "On what evidence?" asked Kettrick. "I paid my fine, and that's as far as anyone was ever able to carry it."

  "Oh," said Raymond, "there are ways and means. Of discovering new evidence, that is. Mr. Sekma and I have discussed them."

  "Disgusting, isn't it, Johnny?" said Sekma. "Dishonest, cruel, quite revolting. We frame you, we force you, and all the time we know that we may be sending you to your death."

  There was a look in Sekma's blue eyes that Kettrick had never seen before. It held him silent, even while anger shook him like a great hand. And Sekma said very quietly, "You will see that our need is great."

  Kettrick turned abruptly and walked away from them all and stood for some time staring at a blank curtained window. Nobody spoke to him. After a while, when he could trust himself, he went back to them and said in a perfectly steady voice, "All right, throw me behind bars and be damned to you."

  Fersen opened his mouth and said shrilly, "Hah!" or some similar noise, and Kettrick hit him, very hard, so that he doubled up and hung sideways over the arm of the chair.

  "I'm terribly sorry," Kettrick said to Vickers. "I've wanted to do that for such a long time."

  Fersen put his hands over his face and began to whimper. Vickers nodded to his aide, who went over and helped Fersen to the door, closing it briskly behind him. The aide returned, smiling briefly at Kettrick.

  "As you say, a pipsqueak."

  He sat down again, resuming his alert impassivity, guarding his master's briefcase like a well-trained dog.

  Raymond looked at Vickers and shrugged. "It's all one to me."

  Kettrick said, "If your need is great, you can do better than that."

  "Such as?" asked Vickers.

  "Reinstate my license. Let me free of the Hyades again." He turned on Sekma. "You can't force me, you ought to know that even if they don't. I'll go back as a free man, or I won't go at all." In the liquid speech that only he and the Clusterers understood, he added, "You cost me something more than money when you barred me out. I will not pay that cost again."

  Sekma appeared to think for a moment. Then he nodded and spoke to Vickers.

  "Perhaps it is better this way. It gives him a stake then in the future, something to work for. If he fails, his license will be worth nothing. The Hyades will be all chaos, no good for trade. And if he lives, there will be a bar against him that can never be lifted. So I am willing to accept his terms."

  "The mission is the important thing," said Vickers, "not the terms under which it is done. Since you consider Kettrick to be the man for the job — very well, I agree." He glanced at Raymond. "I assume you have no objection?"

  Raymond said again, "It's all one to me." Then he looked squarely at Kettrick for the first time since he came in the door. "But it does seem odd that nowhere in this discussion has a single flicker of altruism shone forth — that is to say, that Mr. Kettrick might have taken on this job not to evade punishment or to gain a reward, but simply because it is in the best interests of all humanity that this power should not reside in the hands of any individual or group of individuals."

  Kettrick laughed. "The answer to that is that I don't really believe in Sekma's Doomstar, any more than Mr. Vickers does." He was rewarded by a startled look, quickly hidden, in the Security Chief's eyes. "Mr. Vickers is in a position where he must investigate, now that the possibility has been raised, but I think he is quite confident that the eventual report will be negative. I agree, and therefore I feel that he can justly pay for the use of my neck."

  He helped himself to another drink and sat down. I'll expect the reinstatement of my license tomorrow, and preferably over FerSeri's dead body. And now that that's settled, suppose we get down to the essentials, like what's the best way to do this and where do I start."

  He smiled at them, feeling expansive, triumphant, and full of love even for The Minotaur. Something deep inside him was singing, and the song was a woman's name, and he was drunk with the light of far-off suns.

  "Gentlemen?" he said. "I'm waiting."

  3

  It was night when Johnny Kettrick came back to Tananaru, second world of one of the great mild orange suns of the Hyades.

  He had come by devious ways. Vickers and Sekma had insisted, and he had been forced to agree with them, that a sudden reversal of the official position in regard to him would make him instantly suspect to those persons he was supposed to seek out. So his reinstated license lay securely in a bank vault, and Kettrick was, as far as anybody here but Sekma and Dr. Takinu knew, reentering the Cluster illegally.

  It had chagrined Kettrick somewhat to find out that Sekma was still one step ahead of him.

  "It would not do," he had said, "for you to take all the risk and trouble of going back merely to engage in some more trading activities. No one would believe this either. But fortunately, Johnny, y
ou have an excuse that anyone, even the maker of a Doomstar, would believe."

  And Kettrick had looked at him, and Sekma had smiled.

  "When I did finally lay you by the heels, you were on your way to the White Sun, with your alien and illegal hands outstretched to grasp the best part of that million credits you have just now reproached me with. One quick, easily portable haul of those beautiful stones and you…But Johnny, didn't you think I knew?"

  "No," said Kettrick, "I did not. But I might as well tell you that I've had exactly that idea in mind, to sneak back into the Cluster just long enough to finish that transaction." He shook his head. "Do you have any idea how long it took me to make friends with the Krinn, to get them to trade with me? And then you had to step in."

  "Even I," said Sekma, "felt that such skill and courage deserved a better reward. But the Krinn are protected under Cluster law. And how fortunate it turned out that way, because now you have what Mr. Vickers would call the perfect cover."

  And they had left it to Kettrick to find his own way back to Tananaru, technically as illegal an alien as ever. Even Sekma's department would not be instructed to let him alone. It was up to him not to get caught.

  That was all right with Kettrick. And he thought he might have a surprise or two for Sekma yet.

  It had taken him some time to lose his identity. He had done that on the swarming waystation worlds of Aldebaran, where he had altered the tint of his skin and hair and submerged himself in the masses of humanity and near-humanity that mingled around the starports. Using a forged Aldebaranian permit, he had found a job in the crew of a small freighter bound for the Hyades, of which Tananaru was the port of entry.

  And so he came home.

  Carrying his duffel bag over his shoulder, he shuffled with the rest of the shabby gang of men and man-things through the fourth class gate of the fourth class docking area of the starport, waited while the relays of the electronic scanner clicked over his permit and found no black mark against it or the fingerprints thereon, which were not his own, and passed freely on into the noisy squalid streets beyond.

  He walked, not hurrying, breathing the air and feeling the presence of this earthly-unearthly world that had always seemed more home to him than the world of his birth.

  He left the vast port area behind, and at length was in the old winding streets of the city that had been here long before the starships and the outland men, long before the age of power and the machine. This was Ree Darva, the changeless, the beautiful. Her people could look both ways, and because they were excited by the future they did not forget to love the past. They were a warm people and liked warm friendly things, and they found the high glittering glass-and-steel geometries of Earthly cities both cold and repellent. They modernized their plumbing and their lighting and all the other things that gave them comfort, but they still preferred to build low sprawling structures of the red-brown stone that kept them cool in the hot summer noons and warm in the mild winter midnights, and they crowned the flat roofs as they had always done, with gardens of flowers and graceful shrubs. Now it was summer, and from the roofs came the sounds of music and laughter and women's voices.

  Kettrick smiled, and wandered, but always in the same direction.

  Along these narrow ways, more than twenty years ago, he had run with the golden Darva boys and regretted his ugly sunbrowned skin and straight dark hair. Later, among these same roof gardens, he had pursued the golden Darva girls and been pleased that his exotic appearance sometimes gave him an edge over the local swains. His father, Byron Kettrick, had headed the first trade mission to the Hyades from Earth, and stayed there so long that his youngest child thought of Earth only as a place of exile. When the senior Kettrick and the rest of the family returned home, Johnny Kettrick bade them farewell, got a license to trade, and lost himself in that drifting archipelago of suns. Lost himself so well that he forgot about certain laws and regulations governing alien trade, perhaps in part because he did not think of himself as an alien. That, and Sekma's perseverance, had been his downfall.

  And now he was home again.

  But not safe.

  He remembered that with an abrupt start when he saw some men walking ahead of him where two lanes met. This was a residential area, and a slovenly tramp crewman from Aldebaran would be hard put to explain what he was doing in it, so far from the port and so late at night. He stepped into the dark archway of a service gate until the men were out of sight, and then retraced his steps to the last crossing and began to work his way westward, not dreaming any more.

  Three of the five small coppery moons were in the sky, weaving shifting light and shadow. He stayed in the shadows. The busy parts of town where the streets were thronged all night with pleasure seekers were off to the southeast, and here there was little traffic of any sort. He saw no more pedestrians. Once he had to jump to the top of the wall and lie there while a ground car went chirring by in the narrow lane, its open body filled with laughing youngsters. But that was all, and presently he came to a house that stood on the bank of a placid little river, where the water gleamed softly in the moonlight.

  Kettrick stood a while in the darkness under some ornamental trees and examined the house. Lamps still glowed among the shrubbery of the roof garden, light pleasantly subdued so that it aided the shining of the small moons but did not glare it out. A breeze blowing across the river brought the scent of flowers and, he thought, a murmur of voices. He shook his head, frowning. He would have preferred the house to be silent in sleep. It would be awkward if the place was full of guests.

  Still, he had to get off the streets, before daylight or a cruising patrol caught him there. He crossed quickly to the shadow of the house and pressed against it, listening.

  He could hear only two voices, speaking quietly in the high garden. He could not hear the words they were saying. He could not even be sure he recognized them, they were so remote. But one of them was the voice of a woman, and Kettrick's heart gave a sudden wild leap.

  He moved on then along the wall to the service gate. It was not barred, and that should have warned him, but he was impatient now to see the face of the woman on the roof and he slipped in silently, closing the gate behind him. The paved area behind the house contained two of the small ground cars. Around the walls were the neat little buildings for the storage of tools and necessary items, with the inevitable trees, tall shrubs, and clambering vines making black clots of shadow here and there. The back of the house was dark, and there was no sound but the breeze and the murmur of voices from above.

  Kettrick dropped his duffel bag out of sight in some shrubbery and started for the stone stairway that led up from the courtyard to the roof.

  He was less than halfway there when he heard a rushing whisper of movement in the shadows and there was a looming of tall shapes, and great horny hands caught him and lifted him and flung him down breathless on the paving stones, shaken like a child in the hands of strong men. Crushing weight descended on him. He struggled briefly, startled and gasping for air, seeing in silhouette above him the shapes of massive bending shoulders and smooth heads against the sky. A smell of dry clean fur came to him. There was a low, almost gentle growling, and then the suggestive pricking of claws at his throat.

  Kettrick began to laugh.

  "Hroo, hroo!" he said to them in their own tongue. "Khitu, Chai…it be Johnny. John-nee!"

  A brilliant light sprang on, slamming away the shadows. Half blinded, Kettrick looked up into the two broad faces bent above his own, seeing the round dark eyes begin to brighten.

  "John-nee?"

  The claw tips went away from his throat.

  "John-nee! John-nee!" they clamored, and bared their white teeth, laughing. Their strong arms lifted him up, and the great hands were now as gentle as velvet. "Long go away," Chai said. "You play with us, see if we forget."

  Khitu shook him reproachfully. "You come by dark. Look different. But smell the same, same John-nee!"

  "Same Johnny," he sa
id, and patted them with rough affection, as he would two great dogs, rumpling the fine smoke-gray fur. Then he looked up and saw the two people standing on the stone steps, looking down at him.

  One was a man, a golden Darvan with copper curls. He wore light summer clothing, shorts and sandals and a thin shirt that left his supple body half bare above the waist. His name was Seri Otku, and he had used to be Kettrick's partner. He had a shocker in his hand.

  The other was a woman, a golden Darvan also, but her skin was pale and warm like honey in the sun, and her hair had a softer luster and it was long enough to brush her bare shoulders when she turned her head. Her eyes were blue and her mouth was red, and she was built and curved and balanced so that every move she made was music. She wore a gown of soft green like a flowing of mist around her. Her name was Larith, and she had used to be something to Kettrick too.

  Now she came down one step, and then another, looking at him as she might have looked at a ghost come rattling unbidded at her door.

  "Johnny," she whispered. "Johnny, you shouldn't have come back!"

  4

  Kettrick walked to the steps and stood for a long moment without saying anything. She was as he remembered her, as he had dreamed of her and wanted her ever since his exile had begun. He did not want to speak. He only wanted to look at her, standing there in her green dress, with the, light shining on her hair. As if it were in some remote distance behind her, he saw Seri lay aside the shocker and move forward.

  And now a question formed itself in his mind. It was not a new question. It was as old almost as his exile. He did not want to ask it, but it was necessary.