Rogue Star Read online

  ROGUE STAR

  Frederik Pohl

  and

  Jack Williamson

  BALLENTINE BOOKS • • NEW YORK

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Rogue Star © 1969 by Frederik Pohl.

  A shorter version of Rogue Star appeared in serial form in IF Magazine © 1968, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

  Published by Ballentine Books

  December 1969

  &

  August 1973

  Cover Jacques Wyrs

  Chapter 1

  The sudden light hurt his eyes and woke him rudely from a dream of Molly Zaldivar. Clutching blindly for support, he found only warmth and yielding softness. A panic sense of dislocation dazed him.

  "Monitor Quamodian!"

  That sweet, synthetic voice restored his sense of place. The Exion research station. The human habitat on the planet Exion Four. The cybernetic dwelling he had built to share with Molly, before she went away. He was in it all alone, floating in the null-gee capsule of his sleeper, a naked foetus in a pink plastic womb.

  "Monitor Andreas Quamodian!" The sleeper's bright robot voice grew more intense. "The speaker has a transfac message for you."

  He grunted his hurt protest and clung to his fading dream of Molly. Somehow he had found her. He'd been fighting Cliff Hawk, to take her back. Somehow, unbelievably, he'd been winning ...

  "Monitor, please!"

  He squirmed inside the padded cocoon, groping to recover that good feeling. He wanted to recall his breathless sense of triumph over Hawk, his blood-speeding certainty that Molly wanted him to win.

  But all the circumstances of the dream vanished as he grasped for them. Painfully awake, he had no idea where in all the clustered galaxies Molly and Cliff Hawk had gone. He couldn't imagine any real-life situation hi which he could hope to beat Cliff Hawk, nor could he quite believe that Molly would ever want him to.

  His squinted eyes came open on his image in the sleeper's mirror. Too much belly. Too little muscle. A round bald spot on top of his head. He turned away from his soft plump whiteness.

  "I wish you hadn't waked me," he muttered at the sleeper. "I'm not on duty. I don't want any calls. Just put me back to sleep."

  "But, sir!" the machine reproved him sulkily. "You can't ignore this message. The sender rated it urgent. The index code implies crisis on an interplanetary scale, with probable danger to billions of your fellow human creatures."

  "Great Almalik!" He blinked at the pink folds of pulsating plastic. "Where's the message from?"

  "The central zone," the sleeper said. "The local address is Planet 3, Star 7718, Sector Z-989-Q, Galaxy 5 ..."

  "That's Earth!"

  "A local name, perhaps," the sleeper said. "We don't record such unofficial designations."

  "I should know. Earth's my native planet. Give me the message."

  "It's coded personal and confidential," the sleeper protested. "You'll have to accept it from the speaker."

  "Get me up," he said. "I'll accept it."

  While the machine was getting him up, he tried to imagine who on Earth the message could be from. Not his parents, certainly. They had accepted the symbiotic way of life while he was still a child. Lately they had migrated to a human colony in Galaxy 9. Secure in the Starchurch, they would never need anything from him.

  Molly Zaldivar?

  Wild hope struck him when he thought of her. Though he had never learned where she and Hawk went from Exion, he knew they were both natives of Earth. Perhaps she had come back home. Perhaps she was through with Hawk. Perhaps she really wanted him.

  He smiled fondly at his recollection. Molly Zaldivar, five years ago. A tall lively girl, who sang and accompanied herself on an Earth guitar. A girl loved by many a being on the planets of Exion, where they first met—even though they both had come from Earth.

  It was easy for him to know why he loved her: the laughter in her voice, even when she sang the saddest ballads of the old mother world, the skin tones that changed oddly from warmest ivory to tawny gold under the queer shifting light of the triple star. But—half the students did not "hear," at least on the audio frequency range used by human beings; many of them did not see with "visible" light. Yet all were fond of Molly Zaldivar.

  The three had been together in the tiny group of Earth people Dr. Scott had gathered to work in his stellar section. Andy Quamodian, already serious, already pudgy, dark and slow. Molly Zaldivar, like a golden flame, her bright hair catching ruddy glints from the red giant component of Exion, her dark eyes flashing the violet light of the dwarf. And—Cliff Hawk.

  Even after five years, Quamodian scowled at the thought of Hawk. He was a rogue in the society of -men, stranger than any alien at the research station, solitary, brooding, angry. He seldom washed, seldom combed his shaggy black hah-, seldom spoke a civil word. Yet somehow Molly had chosen him.

  Waiting now for the machine to steam and rise and dry and clothe him, Quamodian darkly pondered Hawk. Both human, both had drifted all the way from Earth to Exion, this farthest outpost star of the whole galactic cluster. But they were different in nearly every other way.

  Before the fusorians came, Quamodian's commonplace parents had toiled for their living in a commonplace clothing shop in a commonplace city, but Hawk's ancestors were bold outlaws who roved the reefs of space and defied the old interplanetary empire called the Plan of Man. Muddling through his dull career, Quamodian had relied on logic and method and sheer persistence. Scornful of everything systematic and academic, Hawk played brilliant hunches. A half-trained technician, he had finally challenged Scott for leadership of the stellar project. Though he sometimes lacked the words to frame his daring intuitions, they were usually correct.

  Hawk loved Molly Zaldivar—carelessly and roughly, certain that she would sacrifice her own career for any of his whims. Quamodian worshipped her more humbly— always aware that he was only plodding little Andy Quam. When the time came for Molly to choose, she really hadn't a choice. Of course she took the dark, dangerous man who knew the borderlands of space.

  Her choice was not surprising, though the actual sequence of events still puzzled Quamodian. Hawk had somehow quarreled with Dr. Scott about the direction of their efforts in the stellar section to contact rogue stars. When Scott won their final battle, Hawk disappeared, leaving Molly behind.

  After a few unhappy months, Molly was willing to sing her sad ballads to Quamodian. That was when he planned the cybernetic house to share with her. Before it was finished, she heard from Hawk. Just what she heard, Quamodian had never learned. The news, whatever it was, had seemed to bring her more terror than gladness. Yet, without explaining anything, she left at once to follow Hawk.

  Now, five years later, her abrupt departure was still a painful riddle to Quamodian. It kept throbbing like a bad tooth, something he could neither understand nor forget

  "Ready, sir?" the machine droned. "Up you come!"

  With a peristaltic thrust, the flotation field popped him out of his warm cocoon. He swayed for a moment, adjusting to the planet's gravity,
and turned to the speaker.

  "Okay," he said. "I'll take the message."

  "Standard voice identification is required, sir."

  "Great Star! You know who I am."

  "But you know our procedures, sir," the speaker said. 'The full standard voice identification pattern is required before delivery of all transgalactic communications."

  "Ridiculous!" he muttered. "Silly red tape."

  The machine hummed quietly inside its black synthetic skin. With a scowl of annoyance, he caught his breath and recited the formula:

  "Name: Andreas Quamodian. Race: Human. Birthplace: Earth—correction, that's Planet 3, Star 7718, Sector Z-989-Q, Galaxy 5. Organization: Companions of the Star. Status: Monitor. Address: Human habitat, Exion Four, Exion Extragalactic Research Station."

  "Thank you, Monitor Quamodian."

  The machine clicked and ejected a narrow strip of yellow film. He snatched it eagerly, and peered to see who it was from. Molly Zaldivar!

  "Dear Andy—" The film began to quiver in his sweaty fingers. "I hope you can forgive me for leaving you so rudely, because I'm in desperate trouble here on Earth. It's all too complicated to explain by transfac, but I need your help because the Companions here don't believe in rogue stars ..."

  Rogue stars! The phrase brought Quamodian to a painful halt. He wanted Molly to be sending for him because she'd decided that she loved him after all. Not for any other reason.

  Besides, he didn't really understand rogue stars. Neuroplasmic theory was familiar to him in an academic way. Theoretically, he knew how the sentient stars perceived, remembered, thought, and acted—how mass effects induced transcience energy, how bits of information were stored in states of electron spin, how scanning waves flowed through chains of electron in transflex contact, how transcience impulses induced magnetic and electrical and gravitic effects. He respected their tremendous minds, the most retentive and most complex in all the galaxies. He felt a vast admiration for the mellow wisdom of Almalik, the stellar component of the symbiotic citizen that so many human beings had joined. But the rogue stars were something else.

  Given its unthinkable intelligence and power, how could a stellar being refuse all fellowship with any other mind? What sort of obsession or psychosis could cause it to close all communication and choose to go its own lonely way?

  Quamodian had often listened to debates about that riddle, which was among the basic research problems of Exion Station. He had even discussed it with Molly and Cliff Hawk, in Scott's graduate seminars. He had never heard an answer that made real sense.

  "Are you ready to reply, sir?" the speaker was purring. "The sender wants an answer."

  "Wait," he said. "Let me finish."

  "If you have ever wondered what became of me," the transfac continued, "Cliff Hawk asked me to join him here on Earth. I came because I love him—Andy, I can't help that. I came because I was afraid of what he might be doing here. And I've just discovered that he's doing what I feared. He has learned too much about rogue stars —or maybe too little. Andy, would you believe he's trying now to create a rogue of his own? I need help to stop him.

  "Here's what you must do, dear Andy. Get Solo Scott —Hawk's old enemy. I don't know where he is—I tried to reach him at his old address in the stellar section, but he didn't reply. Andy, I want you to find him and bring him to Earth. He's the great rogue star specialist. He'll be able to stop Cliff—and Cliffs dangerous new rogue— if anybody can.

  "But hurry, Andy! This is a terrible thing, and I have no hope but you."

  Quamodian finished reading with a tired little sigh. Molly's feelings for him hadn't changed, after all. He was still only Andy Quam, a useful little tool when she happened to need him.

  "Now, sir?" the speaker droned impatiently. "Will you reply?"

  "First," he said, "I want to make a local call. To Dr. Solomon Scott. He used to be director of the stellar section, here on Exion Four."

  "Yes, sir." The speaker hummed silently for three seconds. "Sorry, sir," it purred. "Dr. Scott is not available. He left Exion four years ago on a research expedition from which he did not return. He is presumed dead, sir."

  "That's too bad," Quamodian said, but a thrill of irrational hope was tingling through him. If Scott was not available, he could go to Earth alone. Little Andy Quam might at last become Molly's rescuing hero! He caught his breath. "Send this answer:

  "Dearest Molly, I want to help you but I have bad news. I can't bring Scott. He left Exion Station a year after you did. He was attempting a transflection flight to the vicinity of a rogue—the same one Cliff had discovered out beyond Exion. He never got back.

  "But I'll come, Molly. Because I still love you—in spite of everything. Jf you want just me, answer at once. I'll get there as soon as I can.

  "End of message."

  His words flickered across the visual panel as the speaker read them back. He snatched a light-pen and scribbled, "Your devoted Andy," before the small blue tongue of plasma began to lick the symbols away, storing them as variances in electronic spin.

  Waiting for Molly's reply, he scowled impatiently. He knew that his signal was already reaching the far-off Earth, as its invisible impulses automatically sought the shortest route along the transcience links between the shifting convolutions of hyperspace, where long light-years were reduced to micromicrons.

  The plasma tongue finished and vanished, leaving the message panel blank. The speaker clicked off. The house hummed quietly around him, hushed and tense. He walked the floor around the speaker, watching the flickering symbols of the universal clock.

  Panic whispered that Molly wouldn't want him. Not without Scott. She knew that little Andy Quam had never been an actual member of the Exion research staff, but just a sort of guinea pig, Scott had brought him along to test a hunch that his odd location sense was a transcience effect, but dropped him from the project when the rogue star research became more exciting ...

  "Monitor Quamodian!" The machine's droning tone startled him. "We have a status report on your trans-galactic message."

  "What—what does Molly say?"

  "There's no answer, sir. We can't contact the addressee."

  "Why not?" His voice cracked. "Has something happened to Molly Zaldivar?"

  "We have no information, sir."

  "Take another message." He tried to swallow the squeaky quaver in his voice. "To Molly Zaldivar. Same address. Message follows: On my way to Earth. Sign it, Andy Quam."

  Chapter 2

  Hurried but methodic, Quamodian prepared for his trip to Earth. He called his supervisor for emergency leave, left instructions with the speaker for care of the house, and asked the flyer to stand by. His spirits soared with the levitator which lifted him to the roof pad, but fell again as he stepped outside.

  As always happened whenever he left his cybernetic shell, Exion gave him a queasy shock of dislocation. The place was too far from all the other worlds he knew, too alien to any sort of life. Some freak of cosmic chance had flung the triple star far outside the galactic cluster, and the university had chosen it for the research site because no spark of native life or sentience had ever appeared on any of its bodies.

  The station staff had reclaimed and terraformed its twelve dead planets to fit their several ways of life. Those sister worlds were strung across the black sky now, like beads on an unseen string, each aglow with the color of its own synthetic biosphere: supercold liquid helium, frigid methane, hard vacuum, hot carbon dioxide, boiling sulphur.

  Exion Four was for the oxygen-tolerant. The human habitat where he lived was only a hasty afterthought—a cragged scrap of crater floor, temporarily pressurized, heated, and humidified enough to allow human survival. Still too thin and cold, its artificial atmosphere was always tainted with hydrocarbons and ammonia escaping from the rocks. Too small to seem like home, the planet turned too slowly.

  Shivering, Quamodian hunched himself against the bitter oxy-helium wind. Fighting that first giddy shock of disorientat
ion, he stopped to search that queer sky above the crater cliffs. A tight constriction in his chest relaxed when he found the galaxies—a fuzzy patch of pale light, bitten off by the southward cliffs, fainter than the dimmest planet of Exion.

  "Ready, sir?" The flyer opened itself. "Where to, sir?"

  "To the regional transport center." He scrambled inside. "I'm in a rush."

  The flyer climbed until the violet dwarf peered over the saw-toothed east horizon, dropped back into the dark, and settled toward the lighted ramp outside the transflex cube. The control dome flashed a signal.

  "Identification, sir?"

  He let the flyer hover while he recited his standard voice pattern and sorted out the documents of his citizenship. The dome extended a long, nimble finger of pale plasma to scan his passport disk, with its endless rows of binary symbols and its holograph of his dark, round head.

  "Destination, sir?"

  "Earth. That's—wait just a second—that's Planet 3, Star 7718, Sector Z-989-Q, Galaxy 5. Route me through the Wisdom Creek station, Octant 5. I'm on emergency business. I need passage at once."

  The plasma tendril winked out. Quamodian caught the passport disk as it dropped, stowed it away, then resumed his inching crawl toward the luminous iris of the transflex cube. A long silver tank, no doubt filled with, a liquid citizen, was vanishing through the closing gate. Behind it x came a multiple creature, a horde of small, bright, black things, hopping and tumbling inside a communal cloud of pale blue mist. A gray-scaled dragon shuffled just ahead of Quamodian, burdened with a heavy metal turret on its back that probably housed unseen symbiotes. Winking crystal ports in the turret peeked out at Quamodian and shyly closed again.

  "Sir?" The control dome flashed again. "Have you a reservation number?"

  "Great Star!" Impatience exploded in him. "I've got to reach Earth at once. I just received an emergency call. I had no time to arrange a reservation."