The Starchild Read online

  "Yes, sir. But ... well, sir, he did not return as we expected. In fact"—the Colonel's face was a picture puzzle of confusion—"I must confess, sir, that we don't properly know how he did return, as—"

  "Fool!" shouted the Planner. "Bring him to me! Never mind what you don't know. Bring me Boysie Gann!"

  And that too was how it began; but in fact, some parts of it began earlier.

  For Boysie Gann it began many months earlier, when he was a spy.

  Chapter 2

  For Boysie Gann the beginning was on Polaris Station, that great metal wheel that floats in the icy space past Pluto, one link in the Spacewall between the Plan of Man planets and the Reefs.

  Boysie Gann was twenty-six years old and already a Machine Major.

  Boysie Gann was six feet tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed. He was broad through the shoulders and slim at the waist. He moved like a cheerful cat. He looked like a fighter, and he was.

  He reported aboard the Polaris Station with a grin and a disarming look out of his bright blue eyes. "Boysie Gann reporting, sir," he told the deck officer. "Technicadet Gann, at your service." And that was a cheerful lie. He was no cadet, but at the spy school on Pluto the briefing officers had given him a new rank to make his job easier. A Machine Major was a man of importance. He would be watched. A cadet could go anywhere, see anything.

  The deck officer assigned him quarters, procured him help-, in stowing his gear, shook his hand to welcome him aboard, and ordered him to report to the commandant of the Station, Machine Colonel Mohammed Zafar.

  Gann's assignment was to investigate rumors of strange anti-Plan activities on the Polaris Station. Gann was a soldier of the Plan, and he could hardly conceive of anything anti-Plan that was not at the same time corrupt, slovenly, evil, and wrong. He had come to the station expecting to find it rundown and rusty, manned by surly malcontents.

  Yet the discipline was good. The men were on their toes. On the way through the plastic passages of the wheel, stepping high in the light gravity of the station's spin, he saw that the metalwork was bright. Confusing, thought Gann, mildly perplexed; but he knew his duty and he knew how to do it.

  He knocked on the door of the commandant's office and was ordered inside. He came to full attention and a brisk salute.

  "Technicadet Gann reporting as ordered, sir!"

  The Machine Colonel returned his salute methodically. Here, too, Gann was faintly surprised, though he allowed none of the surprise to show through his military bearing and engaging grin. Machine Colonel Zafar was a short brown man in meticulously pressed dress whites, who looked as solid and enduring as the Plan itself. "Welcome aboard, cadet," he said. "Give me your orders, please."

  "Yes, sir!" Gann's orders were also a lie. They showed him to be a relief laser operator fresh out from Earth, They did not mention his true rank, or his intensive training on Pluto. The commandant read them carefully, then nodded.

  "Cadet Gann," he said in his soft, precise voice, "we are glad to have you on Polaris Station. As you know, this station is a major unit in the Spacewall. Our primary job is to detect and intercept any unauthorized traffic between the Plan of Man and the areas beyond Pluto—the wastes that are called the Reefs of Space. Our secondary job is to monitor as much activity in the Reefs as possible. Our radar, laser, and optical systems are the heart of our mission—and so, Cadet Gann, what you do is the most important part of our work here. Don't fail us."

  "Sir," said Boysie Gann earnestly, "I won't fail you! I serve the Plan of Man without question or pause!" And he saluted and left.

  But before he left he dropped his orders and retrieved them, with a flashing grin of apology to the colonel.

  He left with his shoulders high. For in the instant when he was bent out of the commandant's sight, picking up his papers, he had planted a listening bug under the projecting rim of Machine Colonel Zafar’s desk.

  Within an hour of Gann's arrival on Polaris Station he was fitted with an iron collar.

  He had expected it. In so sensitive an installation as the station, every man wore one of the Machine's collars, so that at any instant, wherever he might be, any one of them could be destroyed. There was no other way. A space man gone amok—a traitor loose in the fuel stores—a drunken armorer at the studs of the station's mighty missiles—any individual could do so much harm that it was necessary to have instant control over every man aboard.

  Still, it was an uncomfortable feeling. Gann touched the collar lightly, and for once the smile was gone from his cheerful face. It was disturbing to know that someone somewhere—the distant Machine on Earth, or one of its satellites nearby, a security officer on Pluto, or the commandant here on the station—could at the surge of a radar pulse detonate the decapitation charge.

  His bunkmate was a tall, lean Nigerian, Technicadet M'Buna. Lounging in the security office waiting for Gann, M'Buna saw his involuntary gesture and laughed. As he held the door and they started off to their duty post M'Buna said, "Makes you nervous, eh? Don't worry. If it goes off, you'll never know it!"

  Gann grinned. He liked M'Buna, had at first encounter already realized that here was an intelligent, patient friend. Yet he said at once, "Nobody likes a collar. And—" he acted a pause, glancing around—"I hear there are people somewhere who do something about it. Out on the Reefs. Men who know how to get the collars off ..."

  M'Buna said uncomfortably, "I wouldn't know anything about that. Here's our station."

  Gann nodded and let it pass. But he had not failed to notice that M'Buna had overlooked one essential act. What Qann said hinted at treason to the Plan. M'Buna's duty was clear: he should have called Gann on it and established exactly what was meant by the hint... . And then reported Gann at once.

  Huge as an ocean liner, flimsy as a dragon kite, Polaris Station was a big plastic wheel. Its spin was just fast enough to keep the crew's soup in the plate and the plate on the table. The hub was stationary, with the radar-laser search dome on the north face, the entry locks on the other.

  The station had been set up first, more than a quarter century before, as a base for exploring the Reef cluster immediately to the galactic north of the sun. The snowball that had supplied reaction mass for the old nuclear rockets was still in detector range, swinging a hundred miles from the station in their coupled orbits. Now there was no need for reaction mass, but the snow-asteroid still had its uses. It served as a cosmic garbage dump, the unreclaimed wastes and offal of the station hauled out there after every watch and left on its surface so that free-orbiting particles of trash would not return false signals to the search instruments back at the station.

  Within forty-eight hours of reporting aboard the station, Machine Major Boysie Gann had bugged the offices of the commandant, the executive officer, the quartermaster, and the intelligence chief. Each tiny instrument was broadcasting a sealed-wave pickup of every word that was uttered in those sacrosanct chambers. Gann himself spot-monitored the transmissions when time allowed. The rest of the time the great records machine on Pluto received the signals, taped them, and transmitted them to Earth and the buried citadel of the Planning Machine itself.

  But all his bugs produced nothing.

  Gann's orders had been less than explicit: Seek out and identify enemies of the Plan. Beyond that there had been only rumors, A vast smuggling enterprise, shipping valuable strategic materials from the inner Plan Worlds to the Reefs. A strange new cult that threatened to unite the Reefs against the inner planets. A leader preaching a hegira, a security leak ... But which of these was true, if any, Gann had not been told. It was not security doctrine to tell agents precisely what they should be looking for, on the grounds that their time was most productively employed when they could develop and follow up on many of their own leads. Yet here there were no leads at all.

  No real leads, at least. A few unguarded remarks at mess. Some slipshod accounting of spare parts for the laser banks. These were anti-Plan irregularities, to be sure, and men had gone to the Body Bank
for far less. Men would go to the Body Bank for them now, from Polaris Station, for Gann had promptly filed the names and data. But he was certain that what he should be looking for was something bigger and worse than an occasional disgruntled or sloppy officer.

  Within one week Gann had proved to his own satisfaction that if there was any major anti-Plan activity going on, it was not on Polaris Station.

  He had to look elsewhere.

  But where else was there?

  It wasn't until he had been there twice that he realized where the "elsewhere" had to be.

  Like all the noncommissioned personnel, Gann took his share of KP, garbage detail, cleanup orderly, and so on. It was not usually a burdensome chore. The radar ovens and cybernated housekeepers did all the work; the only thing left for the men in charge was to make sure they were working properly. Even the short hop from the station to the snowball for garbage disposal was a welcome break in the routine.

  He shared his garbage tour with M'Buna, and they spent their time chatting desultorily at the controls of the "scow"—actually a reactionless space tractor—while the garbage pods steered, unloaded, and returned themselves. M'Buna had never referred to Gann's leading remark about collars. Nor had Gann ever been able to draw him into any unplanned talk; he had given up trying. They talked about home. They talked about promotion. And they talked about girls.

  For Gann there was one girl, and her name was Julie Martinet. "No bigger than a minute, M'Buna," he said earnestly, "and with those beautiful dark eyes. She's waiting for me. When I come back—"

  "Sure," said M'Buna. "Now, this girl I knew in Lagos—"

  "You're talking about a girl," said Gann. "Julie is the girl. The only one who matters."

  "How come you never get any mail from her?" asked M'Buna.

  And Gann froze.

  "She doesn't like to write letters," he said after a moment, but inside he was cursing himself. So foolish a slip! There was a reason, and a perfectly good one, why he got no letters from Julie Martinet. They were piling up for him on Pluto; he was sure of that; but they could not be forwarded here. There was too much risk of someone reading one, and learning from some chance comment that Gann was not the simple laser tech he appeared.

  As soon as he could, Gann changed the subject. "Say," he said, "what's that on the scope?" It was a tiny blip, settling down feather-light toward the surface of the snowball protoplanet. A clutter of trash, of course. Nothing more. It was by no means unusual for some part of the garbage cargo to rebound from the tenuous clutch of the snowball's gravity and wheel around in space for minutes or hours before finally settling into place.

  But M'Buna glanced at the radar display and said casually, 'The commandant, I suppose. He comes out here every once in a while to check things over."

  Carefully, trying to hide his excitement, Gann said, "Wonder what he does there." M'Buna shrugged, reached forward, and turned a switch. The pod had emptied itself and returned to the ship. 'Tell you what," Gann went on. "Let's look."

  He didn't wait for an answer. The pod back, the scow ready, there was nothing to stop him. He fed the ion stream to the reactionless drive and cut in the course-correcting side rockets. The scow began to move.

  M'Buna said tautly, "No! Cut it out, Gann. The Old Man isn't going to want us skylarking around without permission."

  But Gann wasn't listening. He was watching the screens intently.

  If Machine Colonel Zafar was paying surreptitious visits to the ice-planetoid, there had to be a reason. He was going to find out what that reason was. He cut in maximum magnification on the screens, and the surface of the little protoplanet of frozen gases leaped up toward him.

  The thing was eight or ten miles thick, shaped more like a broken cinder block than a sphere. It was unusually dense, as the distant, orbiting blobs of frozen methane and hydrogen went; if it ever drifted hi near the sun, it would make a major comet. In the screen its greenish crust of solid gases looked like a blizzard in slow motion. Disturbed by the impact of the waste they had dumped, the whole snowball was quivering and shaking, its light gas-snow rising in sheets and falling again.

  There was absolutely nothing to be seen ... But even a tiny planetoid has a great deal of surface, by human standards. Somewhere on that surface Colonel Zafar had gone in his flying suit. Gann reached again for the controls to circle around. Some noise warned him.

  He turned, and saw M'Buna leaning toward him, a strange expression of mingled pity and hate on his face; and in M'Buna's hand was a glittering metal pencil, pointed at him;

  In that split second of time that was left to him Gann thought wildly: If only I could get the report in, I've sure found something anti-Plan going on now...

  And that was the last thought he had for a long time. He heard a hiss and just had time to realize that the sting on his cheek was a nerve pellet fired from M'Buna's contraband gun. That was all. Blackness closed over him, and cold.

  Chapter 3

  A nerve pellet is an instant anesthetic. It is also something more.

  It does not wear off. Not ever. The victim of a nerve pellet does not recover consciousness until he is given an antidote.

  When Gann woke up, he had no idea of how long he had been under the influence of the nerve pellet. But what he knew for sure was that he was no longer in the control room of the garbage scow.

  Nor was he anywhere else in the universe where he had ever been before.

  He lay on an uneven, rocky ledge. Under him was a soft, moist—and warm—blanket of something that seemed to be a lichen, a kind of clinging moss that grew in thick, flaky scales. It was glowing with a soft steady light. On the rocks around him the light was greenish in hue. Farther away, on higher ridges, it shone purple and red.

  And above the rocks the sky was velvet black, with a single dazzling star blazing down on him.

  Boysie Gann struggled to his feet—and soared into the air.

  As he came down he stared about him. When he looked away from the rocks and that bright star his eyes adjusted and he could see other stars. All the familiar constellations ... And then it hit him.

  That bright star was the sun.

  He was on one of the Reefs of Space.

  Gann never knew how he came there. The man who would surely know was M'Buna, and Gann never saw M'Buna again. But it was clear that while under the influence of the nerve pellet he had been transported and marooned. Alone, without a radio, without instruments, without a ship or spacesuit, he might live out his life on that Reef—but he would die there in the end. For he could never leave.

  It was surely a good way to dispose of an unwanted man—simpler even than murder, since there was no body to get rid of.

  He was stiff and cold. His wrists were swollen and his ankles numb. Evidently his captors bad not trusted to the nerve pellet to keep him quiet, but had shackled him as well. But the shackles were gone now, with every other evidence of who it was who had brought him here. His head hurt. He was parched and hungry.

  He began to look around him more methodically.

  His first needs were food and water; but he could not resist a look around at the wonder of the place. Bright metallic fern fronds tinkled like wind gongs from an overgrown vale to one side. A distant whirring sounded like a flock of grouse. Impossible that there should be grouse here, Gann knew; yet there might be some sort of life. The Reefs of Space were created by life, like the coral atolls on Earth's warm seas. Life inhabited them all ...

  But it was not always—not even often!—life of a sort compatible with humankind. For the Reefs were formed from clusters of fusorians, feasting on the hydrogen formed between the stars according to the laws of the Neo-Hoyle Hypothesis, converting it into heavier atoms, then into atoms heavier still. The life in the Reefs was sometimes warm-blooded, carbon-based, oxygen-breathing animal. But more often it was metal or crystal—at best worthless for food; at worst, a deadly danger.

  The bright star Sol was near the south celestial pole, Gann discovered.
That put him more or less galactic north of the sun—and, therefore, almost straight out from Polaris Station. How far out? He had no way of knowing, except that the major Reef clusters were thought to be some two hundred astronomical units from Sol. At a guess, twenty billion miles.

  Gann turned his eyes from the stars and looked about him. He had a world to explore. It might be less than a hundred yards in its longest axis, but it was all he had.

  He rubbed his aching wrists and ankles and began to explore. He climbed carefully out of that small, glowing green dell—carefully, because he knew the danger of a reeflet. The fusorian symbiotes held an atmosphere, somehow; but it was like a soap bubble, and if Gann was so incautious as to step too high and soar through it, he would find himself in the hard vacuum of the space between the stars, and death would come in a horrible explosive burst as his blood boiled off and his cells ruptured, He climbed toward the ridge, paused, and looked around.

  Ahead of him was another dell, this one bearing some sort of glittering bush. The plants were shoulder-high, with plumes of narrow gloss, sprinkled with what seemed to be individual fusorian cells that glowed with their own light. Each leaf darkened from green at the base to black at the tip, and each ended in a bright red berry.

  Queerly, they grew in rows.

  They looked, in fact, like a truck farm in Earth's populous market valleys, and at once Gann's hunger surged forth. They looked like food; He started toward them at a shambling run ...

  And from behind him a voice spoke. "Well, good for you. See you woke up finally. Headed right for the feed-bag too, eh?"

  Machine Major Boysie Gann's training had prepared him for any shock. It was trained reflex that stopped him in midflight, turned him, brought him back down to the glowing mossy surface of the reeflet in a half crouch, ready to do battle.