The Stars My Brothers Read online

takethings more slowly.

  He heard her voice but paid little attention. He sat in the chair andblankly watched the two men who hung over the table and its flow ofbrilliant symbols. Vaillant seemed to tighten up more and more as themoments passed, and there was still about him the look of a coiledspring but now the spring seemed to be wound to the breaking-point.Webber, the tall man with the tough face, watched the fleeting symbolsand his face was stony.

  "Here we go," he muttered, and both he and Vaillant looked up at theblank black screen on the wall.

  Kieran looked too. There was nothing. Then, in an instant, the blacknessvanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunningsplendor that Kieran could not grasp it.

  * * * * *

  Stars blazed like high fires across the screen, loops and chains andshining clots of them. This was not too different from the way they hadlooked from Wheel Five. But what was different was that the starryfirmament was partly blotted out by vast rifted ramparts of blackness,ebon cliffs that went up to infinity. Kieran had seen astronomicalphotographs like this and knew what the blackness was.

  Dust. A dust so fine that its percentage of particles in space would bea vacuum, on Earth. But, here where it extended over parsecs of space,it formed a barrier to light. There was a narrow rift here between thetitan cliffs of darkness and he--the ship he was in--was fleeing acrossthat rift.

  * * * * *

  The screen abruptly went black again. Kieran remained sitting andstaring at it. That incredible fleeting vision had finally impressed theutter reality of all this upon his mind. They, this ship, were far fromEarth--very far, in one of the dust-clouds in which they were trying tolose pursuers. This was real.

  "--will have got another fix on us as we crossed, for sure," Vaillantwas saying, in a bitter voice. "They'll have the net out for us--thepattern will be shaping now and we can't slip through it."

  "We can't," said Webber. "The ship can't. But the flitter can, withluck."

  They both looked at Kieran. "He's the important one," Webber said. "If acouple of us could get him through--"

  "No," said Paula. "We couldn't. As soon as they caught the ship andfound the flitter gone, they'd be after him."

  "Not to Sako," said Webber. "They'd never figure that we'd take him toSako."

  "Do I have a word in this?" asked Kieran, between his teeth.

  "What?" asked Vaillant.

  "This. The hell with you all. I'll go no place with you or for you."

  * * * * *

  He got a savage satisfaction from saying it, he was tired of sittingthere like a booby while they discussed him, but he did not get thereaction from them he had expected. The two men merely continued to lookthoughtfully at him. The woman sighed,

  "You see? There wasn't time enough to explain it to him. It's naturalfor him to react with hostility."

  "Put him out, and take him along," said Webber.

  "No," said Paula sharply. "If he goes out right now he's liable to stayout. I won't answer for it."

  "Meanwhile," said Vaillant with an edge to his voice, "the pattern isforming up. Have you any suggestions, Paula?"

  She nodded. "This."

  She suddenly squeezed something under Kieran's nose, a small thing thatshe had produced from her pocket without his noticing it, in his angrypreoccupation with the two men. He smelled a sweet, refreshing odor andhe struck her arm away.

  "Oh, no, you're not giving me any more dopes--" Then he stopped, forsuddenly it all seemed wryly humorous to him. "A bunch of bloodyincompetents," he said, and laughed. "This is the one thing I wouldnever have dreamed--that a man could sleep, and wake up in a starship,and find the starship manned by blunderers."

  "Euphoric," said Paula, to the two men.

  "At that," said Webber sourly, "there may be something in what he saysabout us."

  Vaillant turned on him and said fiercely, "If that's what you think--"Then he controlled himself and said tightly, "Quarrelling's no good.We're in a box but we can maybe still put it over if we get this man toSako. Webber, you and Paula take him in the flitter."

  Kieran rose to his feet. "Fine," he said gaily. "Let us go in theflitter, whatever that is. I am already bored with starships."

  He felt good, very good. He felt a little drunk, not enough to impedehis mental processes but enough to give him a fine devil-may-careindifference to what happened next. So it was only the spray Paula hadgiven him--it still made his body feel better and removed his shock andworry and made everything seem suddenly rather amusing.

  "Let us to Sako in the flitter," he said. "After all, I'm living onvelvet, I might as well see the whole show. I'm sure that Sako, whereverit is, will be just as full of human folly as Earth was."

  "He's euphoric," Paula said again, but her face was stricken.

  "Of all the people in that space-cemetery, we had to pick one whothinks like that," said Vaillant, with a sort of restrained fury.

  "You said yourself that the oldest one would be the best," said Webber."Sako will change him."

  Kieran walked down the corridor with Webber and Paula and he laughed ashe walked. They had brought him back from nothingness without hisconsent, violating the privacy of death or near-death, and now somethingthat he had just said had bitterly disappointed them.

  "Come along," he said buoyantly to the two. "Let us not lag. Once aboardthe flitter and the girl is mine."

  "Oh for God's sake shut up," said Webber.

  4.

  It was ridiculous to be flying the stars with a bad hangover, but Kieranhad one. His head ached dully, he had an unpleasant metallic taste inhis mouth, and his former ebullience had given way to a dull depression.He looked sourly around.

  He sat in a confined little metal coop of a cabin, hardly enough inwhich to stand erect. Paula Ray, in a chair a few feet away wassleeping, her head on her breast. Webber sat forward, in what appearedto be a pilot-chair with a number of crowded control banks in front ofit. He was not doing anything to the controls. He looked as though hemight be sleeping, too.

  That was all--a tiny metal room, blank metal walls, silence. They were,presumably, flying between the stars at incredible speeds but there wasnothing to show it. There were no screens such as the one he had seen inthe ship, to show by artful scanning devices what vista of suns anddarknesses lay outside.

  "A flitter," Webber had informed him, "just doesn't have room for thecomplicated apparatus that such scanners require. Seeing is a luxury youdispense with in a flitter. We'll see when we get to Sako."

  After a moment he had added, "If we get to Sako."

  Kieran had merely laughed then, and had promptly gone to sleep. When hehad awakened, it had been with the euphoria all gone and with hispresent hangover.

  "At least," he told himself, "I can truthfully say that this one wasn'tmy fault. That blasted spray--"

  He looked resentfully at the sleeping woman in the chair. Then hereached and roughly shook her shoulder.

  She opened her eyes and looked at him, first sleepily and then withresentment.

  "You had no right to wake me up," she said.

  Then, before Kieran could retort, she seemed to realize the monumentalirony of what she had just said, and she burst into laughter.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "Go ahead and say it. I had no right to wake_you_ up."

  "Let's come back to that," said Kieran after a moment. "Why did you?"

  Paula looked at him ruefully. "What I need now is a ten-volume historyof the last century, and time enough for you to read it. But since wedon't have either--" She broke off, then after a pause asked, "Your datewas 1981, wasn't it? It and your name were on the tag of yourpressure-suit."

  "That's right."

  "Well, then. Back in 1981, it was expected that men would spread out tothe stars, wasn't it?"

  Kieran nodded. "As soon as they had a workable high-speed drive. Severaldrives were being experimented with even then."
br />   "One of them--the Flournoy principle--was finally made workable," shesaid. She frowned. "I'm trying to give you this briefly and I keepstraying into details."

  "Just tell me why you woke me up."

  "I'm _trying_ to tell you." She asked candidly, "Were you always sodamned hateful or did the revivification process do this to you?"

  Kieran grinned. "All right. Go ahead."

  * * * * *

  "Things happened pretty much as people foresaw back in 1981,"