The Starchild Read online

  But there was nothing warlike in the figure that was coming toward him. He was a stubby little man with a big belly and a dirty yellow beard. His clothing was woven out of some kind of rough fiber. It was ragged and filthy and half unbuttoned.

  And clinging to his bald brown head was a black-fanged, green-scaled, red-eyed creature the size of a capuchin monkey. It looked like a toy dragon. And from under the knife-sharp edges of its scales seeped little wisps of smoke.

  Boysie Gann said warily, "Hello."

  "Why, hello," the man said in a mild voice. "You was sleeping. Figured I'd best leave you to sleep it off. Nice to have you here. I wasn't expecting company."

  "I wasn't exactly expecting to be here."

  The man nodded and thrust out a dirty, gnarled hand. "Figured that. Couple fellows dropped you five, six hours ago. Looks like they gave you a rough enough time, so I let you be."

  The creature on its head wheeled to face Gann as its owner moved, glaring at him with hot red eyes. Gann shook the man's hand and said, "I need some water. And food."

  “Why, sure. Come along then." He nodded, the creature scrambling back and forth, and turned to lead the way across the cultivated field toward what seemed to be a tiny black lake. "Omer don't like strangers," he called over his shoulder, "but he won't bother you none. Just don't make any sudden moves is all. Omer's a pyropod —just a baby, of course, but they can be mean."

  Silently Gann agreed. The little creature looked mean enough, with its oozing plumes of smoke and fiery eyes. They loped across the glowing rows of the man's little farm and reached the shore of the lake—no more than a pond, really, fifty feet across, its surface disturbed with the slow, tall waves of low-gravity fluids. On its far bank a sharp cliff rose in a glitter of metallic outcroppings, softened by glowing plants and mosses, and in the base of the cliff was a metal lean-to that hid the mouth of the cave.

  "That's home," said the man cheerfully. "Welcome to it, such as 'tis. Come-in and rest yourself."

  "Thanks," said Gann. "By the way, we didn't really introduce ourselves."

  "Oh? Guess you're right," said the man. "I'm Harry Hickson. And you"—Gann started to speak, but Hick-son didn't pause—"you're what you call it—Machine Major Boysie Gann, out of the spy school on Pluto."

  For twenty-four hours, Gann rested in the cave of the hermit Harry Hickson, and his thoughts were dark. How had Hickson known his name? Even more, how had he known that he was not a shanghaied radar-laser tech, but a graduate of the spy school?

  There was no answer in Gann's brain, so he shut off his mind to conjectures and applied it to restoring his physical condition and reconnoitering his surroundings.

  Evidently he had been unconscious for longer than he had thought on the ship that had dumped him on this reeflet, for he had lost weight and strength and there was a straggly stubble of beard on his chin. But Hickson fed him and cared for him. He gave Gann a bed of sorts to sleep on—only a stack of reeking blankets, but as good as the one he slept on himself—and fed him from the same pot of greasy stew as himself. The diet was crude but filling, supplemented with fruits and roots and shoots of the plants he grew on the rock. The reddish berries, which tasted like a sort of acid citrus fruit, were a good source of all necessary vitamins, Harry told him earnestly, and one of the lichens was a source of protein.

  Gann did not question the food. Clearly it had kept Harry Hickson alive for a long time—the cave showed that it had been his home for months or even years— and it would keep Gann alive for at least as long as he intended to stay on the reeflet.

  And that would not be long. For he had learned from Hickson that there was a way of communicating that would bring help if he needed it. "Never needed it, o' course," he said, fishing a long string of a rhubarb-like vegetable out of his bowl of stew and licking his fingers. "But it's comforting to know it's there ... Say, you worried about that collar, Boysie?"

  Gann stopped in mid-gesture, suddenly aware that he had been tugging at it. "Not exactly," he said quietly.

  "Get it off of you, if you like," Hickson offered mildly. "No trouble. Done it lots o' times."

  Gann stared. "What the Plan are you talking about?" he demanded. "Don't you know what this is? These things are built with automatic destruct circuits, as well as the remote triggering equipment. If anybody tries to take them off—" He touched both sides of the collar with fingertips and flipped them up and outward, pantomiming the explosion of a decapitation charge.

  "Oh, sure, I know all about that," said Hickson. "Hold still. No, not you, Gann. You, Omer! Don't wiggle so. Makes me nervous."

  He got up from his squatting position at the rude plank table where they ate and came around behind Gann. "Just you sit there, Boysie," he said. "Can move if you want to—it don't matter—but don't look toward me ... Omer, confound you! Get your claws outa my scalp! Raised him from an egg, that little devil, right here in my own smoke pot, but he gets jumpy when he knows I’m going to ... Well, here we are."

  And something moved around Gann's neck. He couldn't see what Hickson was doing, was sure that the tubby little hermit had not brought any tools or instruments. Yet there was a sudden constriction at his throat.

  He heard the lock snap ...

  The collar fell off his neck and clattered to the floor of the cave. Gann leaped to his feet and spun, white-faced, to be ready for the explosion. But no explosion came.

  "Now, rest easy, Boysie," complained the hermit. "You're spooking Omer here. That thing can't blow up any more.” Casually he picked up the collar and lifted it to examine it in the light of a mass of luminous diamond that would have been worth millions on earth. "They make them real nice," he said admiringly. "Lot of detail in this thing. Too bad it can't be something more useful." And he tossed it to the rear of the cave. "Well," he said, "you about ready to move on now?"

  Gann stood silent for a second, looking at him. "Move on where?" he asked.

  "Oh, don't worry, Boysie. I know what you were thinking. Plain as day. You figure I ought to go back and get examined by the Planning Machine, 'cause you don't quite understand what I'm up to, but you think it's unplanned. Well, that's right. Unplanned is what I am. And I don't mind if you do what you're thinking, and take my laser-gun and call help so you can get out of here. But I'm not going with you, Boysie. Make up your mind to that."

  "All right," said Gann, surrendering. But in his mind he was not surrendering at all.

  Hickson had put it very mildly when he said that Gann wanted to take him back for study. Gann not only wanted to; he intended to. In fact, he had never intended anything as hard in his life—had never been so determined or insistent, not even about his career in the service of the Machine, not even in his great love for Julie Martinet.

  This man Harry Hickson was an unplanned disaster hi the making.

  Whoever he was, however he did what he did, he was a terrible danger to the Plan of Man. Gann could almost hear the instructions of his briefing officer back on Pluto —if he had been able to report Hickson's existence to him, and if the briefing officer could issue an order: Subject Hickson is a negative factor. His uncatalogued knowledge must be retrieved for the Plan. Then each organ of his uriautomated body must be obliterated ...

  But how to get him back into the jurisdiction of the Planning Machine?

  There had to be a way. There would be a way. Machine Major Boysie Gann was sure of it. All it required was that he be patient—then, when his chance came, be ready.

  Gann said, "If you mean it, then let's take your gun and signal right now. I'm ready to move on."

  Harry Hickson led Gann to a point of red-scaled rock, puffing and wheezing. On his bald scalp the fledgling pyropod wheeled and slithered, keeping its bright red eyes on Boysie Gann.

  "See up there?" called Hickson over his shoulder. "That star there next to Vega ..."

  Boysie Gann followed his pointing finger. "You mean Theta Lyrae?"

  The hermit turned and looked at him, mildly surprised. "Tha
t's right, Boysie. You fellows learn a lot in that spy school. Too bad you don't ... Well, never mind that. One I mean, it's just below Theta Lyrae. The faint red one. Forget the name, but that one right there. That way's Freehaven."

  Gann felt his blood pound. "Freehaven? I’ve heard of it. A colony of reef rats."

  "Aw, Boysie, don't say it like that. They're free men—that's all. That's the biggest place in the Reefs, Free-haven is. Like a ... well, what would you call it? A kind of a town only it's one whole cluster of Reefs, maybe a hundred thousand miles across. And maybe half a billion miles from here."

  "I see," said Gann, thinking with exultation and pride, What a prize to bring back to Pluto! A whole city to be planned and returned to the brotherhood of the Machine. He could almost see the glowing jet trails of the Plan cruisers vectoring in on the cluster ...

  "Don't get your hopes up," Hickson said dryly. "You ain't there yet, Boysie, and maybe even when you get there you won't find it too easy to pick up a phone and call the Machine. Now hush a minute while I send for your ride out there."

  He picked up the clumsy old laser gun he had taken out of its greasy rag wrappings back in the cave, checked its power settings, raised it, and aimed carefully at the distant red spark that was the line-of-sight to Freehaven.

  Three times he snapped the trigger, then lowered the gun and turned to Gann.

  "That all there is to it. Take 'em a while to get here. Might as well go back to the cave."

  But he paused, glancing at Boysie Gann as if he was mildly embarrassed about something. Then he seemed to come to a decision.

  He turned back to the stars, set down the laser pistol, and stretched out his arms. His lips moved, but Gann could hear no sound. On his bald pate the pyropod hissed and slithered. The hermit's whole body seemed stretched, yearning, toward—toward what?

  Gann could not tell. Toward Freehaven, perhaps. Toward the faint red star that marked its position—or toward Theta Lyrae nearby—or toward the great bright giants of the Summer Triangle that marked that part of the sky, Vega, Altair, and Deneb ...

  Then Harry Hickson relaxed and the pyropod scuttled down from his scalp onto his shoulder as the hermit raised one arm and made a sinuous, undulating motion. Like the wriggle of a snake, Gann thought. Or the looping movement of a swan's neck.

  Swan? Some faint old memory stirred hi Boysie Gann's mind. Something about a swan—and a star...

  But it would not come clear, and he followed Harry Hickson back to the cave.

  Harry Hickson's little reeflet was one drifting island in an expanding infinity of matter and space. The doctrine of the Neo-Hoyle Hypothesis was clear: The universe was limitless, in space, in time—and in matter. New mass was forming everywhere in the form of newly created hydrogen atoms as the old complexes of matter—the stars and the planets, the dust clouds and the galaxies—were spinning slowly apart

  Hickson's reeflet was an infant among bodies of organized matter, probably only a few millions of years in age, in size no more than a dust mote. Yet it was like most of the universe in that; for most matter is young. The spiraling growth in rate of creation of new matter makes that sure. Some galaxies, and even some of the reefs between them, are old beyond computation and imagination, because the steady-state universe has neither beginning nor end. And life is the oldest phenomenon of all. Older than the oldest stars—but yet young, though those scattered and forgotten stars are black and dead.

  Life in space has lived—literally—forever.

  Every possible biology has been evolved, through every conceivable evolutionary test.

  Watching Harry Hickson play with his pet pyropod, Boysie Gann reflected that the strangest life form he knew was man. For here was the pudgy, balding hermit—unplanned and deviant, a deadly danger by every standard of the Planning Machine—solemnly attempting to teach his pyropod to fly.

  He lifted the little horror off his head and set it carefully on a high ledge, then retreated. Spitting and hissing, its red eyes glittering, its scales seeping the smoke of its internal jet fires, it wailed in a thin, raucous screech for him to come back. Then, despairing, it launched itself out into the air, missed Hickson by yards and crashed into the rock wall at the far side of the cave, where it remained, writhing and hissing, until Hickson took pity on it and picked it up. "It's a wonder it doesn't dash its brains out," muttered Gann the fifth time the little beast crashed into the rock.

  "Oh, I guess so," Hickson agreed mildly. "Don't suppose it has any, really, though. A pretty clumsy kind of beast it is—right, Omer?" And he patted the little monster with the appearance of real affection for a moment, then sighed and set it down. He carefully inverted a crate and set it down over the pyropod, then put a mass of silvery fusorian coral upon the crate.

  The pyropod squalled and hissed, but Hickson ignored it. "Hoped I could teach it to fly before I go," he said regretfully, "but I guess I won't make it. Boysie, your transportation ought to be here in an hour. Care to see what the pilot's gonna look like?" He thumbed an old-fashioned two-dimensional color print out of a button-down pocket in his ragged coat and handed it to Gann. It was a pretty, quite young girl, one hand resting on the head of a seal-like creature, before a background of a glowing purple and silver Reef. "Name's Quarla," said the old man affectionately. "Quarla Snow. Daughter of an old friend of mine. He treated me, couple years ago. Doctor, he is, and a good one. Don't know much about what ails me, though ..."

  The hermit seemed to realize he was rambling and caught himself up short. "Guess that's all," he said, smiling with a touch of embarrassment. "Swan bless you, Boysie. Give Quarla my love." And in a moment, before Gann could realize what he was about to do, the old man had turned, pushed aside the metal door that overhung the entrance to the cave, and stepped out.

  Gann shook his head, half in rueful amusement, half in surprise. "Hey!" he called. "Hickson! Where are you going? Wait for me!" And he hurried to the door of the cave and out onto the sward the old hermit had so carefully cropped.

  The man was not there.

  His footprints were there, still visible in the faint bruises on the lichenous surface of the earth.

  But Harry Hickson was gone.

  Gann ranged the surface of the entire reef in the next few hours, shouting and searching. But there was no answer to his call, no sight of Hickson anywhere.

  The man had simply vanished.

  Chapter 4

  In the cave Machine Major Gann found the old man's laser gun—an ancient Technicorps model that must have been smuggled into space before the Spacewall was set up. It gave him a small feeling of confidence to carry it, though there was no visible enemy to shoot it at.

  He needed that confidence.

  No man can be alone. Each man has his place in the Plan of Man under the benevolent guidance of the Planning Machine. Each man serves the Plan, so that Plan may serve all men ...

  That was doctrine, and Boysie Gann found himself foolishly repeating it as he clambered up the red-scaled rock to the point from which Hickson had signaled to Freehaven. It did not help very much.

  No man can be alone ... but Boysie Gann felt very much alone indeed, on that tiny floating islet of reef, under the blazing stare of a billion stars.

  There was no reason for him to be on this point of rock, rather than anywhere else on the surface of the reeflet. He had no reason to believe his rescuer would come to look for him there. Had no reason to be sure there would be a rescuer at all, in fact, for what the half-demented hermit, Harry Hickson, had said could not be accepted as reliable ...

  Yet he stayed there, waiting, for hours. He leaned against a cairn of rock and scanned the skies. Only the distant, unfriendly stars returned his look. He sat, leaning against the rock, and drowsed. No sound or motion disturbed him. Then...

  There was a faint blur of greenish mist in the low black sky, moving at the threshold of vision.

  Gann sprang to his feet, eyes peering into the immense emptiness above him. The greenish blur was so
faint that he could not be sure it was real. Yet ... surely there was something there and, following it, a cluster of even fainter reddish sparks.

  Gann raised the laser, checked the settings to make sure he was not firing a blast of destruction into the sky, and thumbed the trigger thrice, as he had seen Hickson do, pointing it toward the greenish blur.

  A moment... then the green glow veered toward him.

  It was his rescuer—he was sure of it. But what were the red sparks? Even as he watched, the tiny, distant coals veered too, following the greenish glow. Rapidly they grew nearer ...

  Then one of the red sparks dashed ahead of the rest, with a long blue trail of incandescence faintly visible behind it. It was like an ominous comet as it dived through the greenish cloud.

  Noise smote Gann's ears abruptly: a sudden roaring, like the jet of an old-time rocket.

  The things had come at last into the shallow atmosphere of his reeflet. He heard the shriek of their motion through the air—and something else.

  Something was screaming.

  The red spark thundered overhead, out of the green cloud, toward Gann like some deadly ancient missile homing in on a radar trace—then at the last moment rose up a dozen yards above his head, and as it passed he caught a sudden glimpse of nightmare.

  Metal scales like, broken mirrors. Enormous talons, dripping something that glowed and was golden, something that splattered to the ground near Gann like a soft, fitful rain. The red spark divided into two red, monstrous, blinking eyes, mirror-rimmed, in a head like a maniac dragon's. And the roaring blue flame was the tail of the thing.

  "Pyropod!" breathed Boysie Gann aloud, transfixed.

  He had never seen an adult before—had heard of them only as distant rumors, like the sort of ghost stories unplanned parents used to tell their children. The baby pyropod that had been Harry Hickson's pet had not prepared him for the huge, menacing reality that shrieked through the air above him now. He stood, stunned.