The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe starmen

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe starmenThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The starmenAuthor: Leigh BrackettRelease date: March 17, 2023 [eBook #70310]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Gnome Press, Inc, 1951Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STARMEN ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The starmenAuthor: Leigh BrackettRelease date: March 17, 2023 [eBook #70310]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Gnome Press, Inc, 1951Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: The starmen

Author: Leigh Brackett

Release date: March 17, 2023 [eBook #70310]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Gnome Press, Inc, 1951

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STARMEN ***

THE STARMENLeigh BrackettGNOME PRESS,Inc.New YorkCopyright 1952 by Leigh BrackettFIRST EDITIONAll rights reserved. Editors and reviewersmay use short passages from the bookwithout written permission. Short versioncopyright 1951 by Better Publications, Inc.PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

GNOME PRESS,Inc.New York

FIRST EDITION

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

ONE

Michael Trehearne was to remember that evening as the end of the world, for him. The end of his familiar life in a familiar Earth, and the first glimmering vision of the incredible. It began with the man who spoke to him on the heights behind St. Malo, by the light of the Midsummer Fires.

There was a great crowd of tourists there, come to watch the old Breton festival of the sacred bonfire. Trehearne was among them, but not of them. He stood alone. He was always alone. He was thinking that the ritual being performed in the wide space of stony turf was just too quaint to be endured and wondering why he had bothered with it, when someone said to him with casual intimacy,

"In four days we shall be through with all this, going home. A good thought, isn't it?"

Trehearne turned his head, and looked into a face so like his own that he was startled.

The resemblance was that of a strong racial stamp, rather than any blood kinship. If two Mohawks were to meet unexpectedly in the hills of Afghanistan they would recognize each other, and it was the same with Trehearne and the stranger. There was the same arrogant bone-structure, the odd and striking beauty of form and color that seemed to have no root in any race of Earth, the long yellow eyes, slightly tilted and flecked with sparks of greenish light. And there was the same pride. In Trehearne it was a lonely, bitter thing. The stranger bore his like a banner.

During the moment in which Trehearne stared, amazed, the stranger remarked, "I don't remember seeing you on the last ship. How long have you been here?"

"Since yesterday," answered Trehearne, and knew as he formed the words that they were not the ones expected of him. A wild throb of excitement ran through him. He said impulsively, "Look here, you've mistaken me for someone else, but I'm glad you did!" In his eagerness he all but clutched the man's arm. "I must talk to you."

Something in the stranger's expression had altered. His eyes were now both wary and startled. "Upon what subject?"

"Your family—my family. Forgive me if I seem impertinent, but it's important to me. I've come a long way, from America to Cornwall and now to Brittany, trying to trace down my own line...." He paused, looking again into that remarkable face that watched him, darkly handsome, darkly mocking in the firelight. "Will you tell me your name?"

"Kerrel," said the man slowly. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur. The resemblance is indeed striking. I mistook you for one of my kin."

Trehearne was frowning. "Kerrel?" he repeated, and shook his head. "My people were called Cahusac, before they went into Cornwall."

"There was doubtless a connection," said Kerrel easily. He pointed abruptly to the open space beyond. "Look—they begin the final ritual."

The great bonfire had burned low. The peasants and the fisherfolk, some hundreds of them, were gathered in a circle around the windy glow of the flames. A white-bearded old man began to pray, in the craggy Breton Gaelic.

Trehearne barely turned his head. His mind was full of the stranger, and of all the things that had oppressed and worried and driven him since childhood, the nagging little mysteries about himself to which now, perhaps, he would find the key.

He glanced away only a second, following the gesture of Kerrel's arm. But when he looked back, Kerrel was gone.

Trehearne took half a dozen aimless steps, searching for the man, but he had melted away into the darkness and the crowd, and Trehearne stopped, feeling sold and furious.

His temper, long the bane of a rather luckless existence, reared up and bared its claws. He had always been childishly sensitive to insults. If he could have got his hands on the contemptuous Kerrel he would have thrashed him. He turned again to the festival, controlling himself as he had learned painfully to do, realizing that he was being ridiculous. But his face, so like that of the vanished stranger, had a very ugly look around the mouth.

The Bretons had begun the procession around the waning fire. Short, burly men in bright jackets and broad-brimmed hats, sturdy women in aprons and long skirts, their improbable starched coifs fluttering with ribbons and lace. Sabots clumped heavily on the stony ground. They would march three times sunward, circling the embers, and then solemnly, each one, pick up a pebble and as solemnly cast it into the coals. Then they would scramble for the charred brands and bear them home to be charms against fever and lightning and the murrain until the next Midsummer Eve.

It struck Trehearne that most of them, except the very old, looked painfully self-conscious about it all. In a thoroughly bad humor, he was on the point of leaving. And then he saw the girl.

She was standing some ten feet away from him, in the forefront of the crowd, which had shaped itself into a semi-circle. She had wanted him to see her. She was swinging a white hand-bag like a lazy pendulum on a long strap, and her gaze was fixed on him. She was smiling, and the smile was an open challenge.

In the reflection of the great bed of glowing embers, Trehearne saw that she was another of Kerrel's breed—and his own, whatever it might be. But it was not that recognition that made his heart leap up. It was herself.

The red-gold light danced over her, and perhaps it was only that faery glow that made her seem more than a handsome girl in a white dress. Only a trick of wind and starlight, perhaps, that made Trehearne see in her a changeling, bright, beautiful, wicked, and wise, and no more human than Lilith.

She beckoned to him, with a small imperious movement of her head. He had forgotten his anger for the moment, but now it returned. He began to walk toward her, across the front of the crowd, a tall man, splendidly built and strong, bearing in his own face the stamp of that strange, wicked beauty, his eyes yellow as the fire and as hot. She saw that he was angry, and she laughed.

Whether it was the sound of her laughter that drew the attention of the Bretons, or merely a chance look, Trehearne never knew. He came up to her, and she said,

"I am a Kerrel, also. Will you talk to me?"

He was about to answer, when he realized that the noise of the sabots had broken rhythm, and that the crowd of tourists was staring at him and the girl and then past them at the Bretons. He heard an uneasy muttering of questions in French and English, and behind him a great silence.

He turned. The ritual circle was broken. The old man who had prayed was coming toward them, and with him were other men and women, drawn as though by some compulsion from the ranks of the marchers. They were all old, their faces weathered and seamed by the passing of many winters, and in their eyes he saw the spark of an ancient hatred, the shadow of an ancient fear.

He had seen that same look among the older country folk of Cornwall—directed at himself.

The old man raised his hand. He stopped only a few feet away, and the others with him. There was something infinitely threatening in the squat monolithic bulk of that little crowd, a survival from an older world. The girl flung up her head and laughed, but Trehearne did not feel like laughing.

The old man cursed them.

Trehearne had not one word of Gaelic, but he did not need a knowledge of the tongue. Nor did he need to have explained to him the gesture of angry dismissal. The Bretons had already picked up their stones from the fire. In another minute, they would use them, on himself and the girl.

He caught her rather roughly by the arm, but she pulled away and shouted something at the old man, still laughing, still mocking, and he thought again that she was changeling and no ordinary girl. The words she spoke might have been Gaelic, but they had a different sound. Whatever they were, they held no kindness. Trehearne thrust his way through the sightseers, who parted readily to let him through, and in a minute the girl came after him. The voice of the old man followed them down the slope of the hill, and the curious tourists stared after them until they were out of sight.

The girl said, "Are you still angry?"

"What's the matter with them?" demanded Trehearne.

"The peasant folks have long memories. They don't understand what it is they remember, only that evil things once happened to them, because of us."

"What sort of evil things?"

"Have there been any new ones since the beginning?" Her voice held a dry humor. Trehearne had to admit there hadn't been. From the stealing away of maidens to witchcraft, family legends tended to a wearying sameness.

"However," he added, "the Kerrels and the Cahusacs both must have been outstanding in their field, judging from the reception they gave us back there."

He stopped. They were far from the crowd now. The walled island city bulked huge and dark, a medieval shadow against the night and the sea. The girl was a white wraith in the gloom, all astir with the salt wind that tumbled her hair and set her skirts to rippling. He did not speak to her, but stood there silently, trying to see her face in the starlight. After a while she asked him,

"What is in your mind?"

"I am waiting to see if you will vanish like the other Kerrel."

She laughed. "Kerrel is a rude man. I have offered myself to make amends. Surely you can't be angry now!"

It was his turn to laugh. "No. In fact, I'm thankful for your—by the way, what relation is he to you?"

"None."

"But you said—"

"It was a small lie, and it served its purpose."

"Well, anyway, I'm thankful for Kerrel's rudeness. I'd much rather talk to you!" His ill-humor was quite gone. He took her hand, and was amazed to find how strong it was. The girl seemed to radiate an immense vitality, an aliveness that made all the other women of his knowing appear like half-awakened clods.

"What do they call you," he asked, "who arenota Kerrel?"

"Shairn."

"That doesn't sound Breton."

"Doesn't it? My other name is even more unusual. It's unpronounceable, and meansof the Silver Tower."

Her eyes were very bright in the starshine. He thought that in some secret way she was mocking him, but he did not care. He said, "I'll stick to Shairn." They had started down the path again. He told her his own name, and she asked,

"You are American?"

"Fourth generation."

"From Brittany to Cornwall to America," she murmured, as though to herself. "The years, the generations, the mingling of other strains—and still the Vardda blood breeds true! Michael, you're wonderful!"

He repeated the wordVardda, wonderingly.

"A tribal name. You've never heard it." She laughed with pure delight. "You're incredible. No wonder Kerrel made a mistake! Listen, Michael. You wonder about your family, your race. Oh, yes, I heard all that. Well, perhaps I'll tell you—or again, perhaps I won't! There's a little cove beyond the lighthouse. I'll meet you there, in the morning."

TWO

Morning is an indeterminate time for an appointment. Trehearne made it early, clambering over the spray-wet rocks. The sun was warm, and the sea was very blue, flecked with white foam. A high excitement burned in him. He had not slept, thinking of the girl Shairn and the man Kerrel, trying to analyze the strangeness that clung about them and touched some buried chord within himself. He had not succeeded.

There was something almost fierce in the way he moved. He was oppressed by a fear that Shairn would not come. He felt that she was playing some game of her own with him, though for what purpose he could not guess. But having started the game, he was going to see to it that she played it out. If she did not come he would find her, if he had to take the stones of St. Malo apart to do it.

He found the cove. It was deserted. Reason told him that he was impatient, but he was disappointed and angry all the same. Then, looking closer, he saw footprints in the sand, small naked ones leading to the water. A beach robe and a pair of sandals were tucked into a crevice in the rocks.

He searched the waves that rolled idly in between two grey, tumbled shoulders. There was no sign of her. Trehearne's eyes took on a hard, bright glint. He stripped off his shirt and slacks and plunged into the cold surf.

He was an excellent swimmer. In his college days he had gone through a phase of being a star athlete, until he was stopped by a vague conviction that his physique had been designed for something more important than leaping over bars and running arbitrary distances on a cinder track. He had never found the important thing, but the conviction remained with him. It was part of that pride which was the mainspring of his character—a meaningless pride, he was forced to admit, which had served only to make trouble between himself and the world.

He made the circuit of the cove twice before he found her, hiding among the broken rocks of the north wall, half veiled in glistening weed, laughing at him. He reached for her and she went under him like a dolphin, breaking water ten feet away to splash and dive again.

He chased her down into the rustling blue-green depths and up again to the sunlight and the foam, and her body was the color of silver, fleet and lithe and wondrously strong. He might have caught her, but he did not, only touching her with his fingers to show her that he could. Her hair was unbound, a streaming darkness around her head, and her mouth was red, and her eyes were two green dancing motes of the sea itself, unknowable, taunting, fickle as the waves.

At last she rolled over on her back to float, breathless, pleased with herself and him.

"Let us rest!" she said, and he floated near her, watching the motion of her white arms in the water. The lines of an old poem came unbidden to his tongue.

"'What bright babes had Lilith and Adam—'Shapes that coiled in the woods and waters,'Radiant sons and glittering daughters....'"

"'What bright babes had Lilith and Adam—

'Shapes that coiled in the woods and waters,

'Radiant sons and glittering daughters....'"

"The man who wrote that knew only half the truth," said Shairn. "Let's go in."

They found a sheltered spot where the sun was warm. Absently, Shairn smoothed a patch of sand with her palm, and rumpled it again. After a while she said,

"What sort of a man are you, Michael? What do you do? How do you live?"

He looked at her keenly. "Do you really want to know? All right, I'll tell you. I'm a man who has never been satisfied. I've never had a job I could stay with very long. I'm a flier by trade, but even that seems a dull and rather childish business. And why? Because I'm too good for any of it."

He laughed, not without a certain cruel humor. "Don't ask me in what way I'm too good. I seem to be unusually healthy, but that's only important to me. My brain-power has never set the world on fire. I have no tendency to genius. In fact, a suspicion creeps upon me that I'm just not good enough. Whichever way it is, there has always been something lacking, either in me or the world."

Shairn nodded, and again he was conscious of a queer wisdom in her that did not fit with her youth. She smiled, a small thing full of secrets.

"And you thought that if you learned the origin of your blood you would understand yourself."

"Perhaps. My father was a weedy little man with red hair. He swore I was none of his. I didn't look like my mother's side, either. I've never looked like anybody, until I met you and Kerrel. Oddness becomes very wearing, especially when you don't know why you should be odd." He added, "The villagers in Cornwall called me changeling. I had the same thought when I saw you."

"So we are of one race. Could you stay with me, Michael?"

"You're not a woman, you're a witch. I've never met a witch before."

She laughed outright at that. "Nonsense. Witch, changeling—those are words for fools and peasants."

"Who are the Vardda, Shairn?"

She shook her head. "I told you last night. It is a tribal name. You were saying to Kerrel that you had come to Brittany to trace down your family. Do you know where to start?"

"I learned in Cornwall that they came from a place called Keregnac."

He thought she started a little at that name, but she said nothing, and he asked, "Do you know the town?"

"It's not a town," she answered slowly. "Only a tiny village, lying on the edge of a great moor. Yes, I know Keregnac." She picked up a bit of driftwood and began to draw idle patterns in the sand. "I don't think you will learn much there. The village is very old, and is now almost dead."

"But," he said, "I don't have to worry about that now, do I?"

"How do you mean?"

"You, Shairn. You know about my family, my race. I don't have to depend on Keregnac. You'll tell me."

She flung down the bit of driftwood. "Will I?"

"You said last night—"

"I don't remember what I said. And anyway, one says many things at night that sound foolish in the daytime." She stood up. "Perhaps Kerrel was right."

"About what?"

"About you. He made quite a scene when I joined him again. He said a number of things, and some of them were true."

"Such as what?" asked Trehearne evenly.

"Such as that heredity has played a rather cruel trick on you, and that you're better off to know nothing about your ancestry. Get me my robe, Michael, I must go."

But he had reached out and caught her wrist, and his grip was not gentle. "You can't do that," he said. "You can't refuse to tell me now."

"Oh," she said softly, "but I can. And I do."

"Listen," said Trehearne. "I've come a long way, and I've been through a lot. You're a beautiful woman, and I suppose you have a right to your whims, but not about this."

She looked down at his hand that was locked so tight around her wrist, and then up at him again, and her eyes were bright and very hot. "Is that your idea of persuasion?"

"Are you going to tell me?"

"No." She showed him her teeth, silently, in a catlike smile. "Kerrel is waiting for me."

"Let him wait."

"But he won't. We're leaving St. Malo today, and I assure you he won't go without me." He dropped her wrist.

"I'll follow you."

Her eyes were blazing. "That will be a long way."

"Brittany is not so large."

"Did I say I live in Brittany?" She caught up the robe and flung it around her shoulders, and then she said, "All right, Michael, follow me. I'd like that. Follow me as far as you can!"

She left him, going swiftly over the tumbled rocks. Trehearne watched her until she was out of sight, not moving from where he stood. After a long while his gaze was drawn to the sand and the patterns that Shairn had traced there. Amid the aimless, rambling lines a word stood out in large clear letters.

KEREGNAC.

THREE

A hired car and driver took Trehearne, for an exorbitant price, to Keregnac. On the first day they had roads, and made excellent time. On the second the tiny Fiat labored in agony along rutted cart tracks. The sea was far behind them, and the driver complained incessantly of the mad desires of Americans. Why should anyone wish to go to Keregnac, a place that even the Bretons had forgotten?

Trehearne was in a strange and savage mood. The sound of Shairn's name was in his ears, and all the things that she had said and done went round and round in his head, and the more he thought of them the more he hated her, and the more he wanted her. And the more he hated Kerrel, who had her, and who was part of whatever secret life she lived. But Shairn and her affairs were only part of it. He had come close to the end of his quest. He had almost grasped it, only to be denied at the last by a woman's fickle impulse. He would not be denied any longer. Shairn had started something that could not be stopped, no matter where it led.

The driver lost his way among the ruts and the stony hamlets. When he begged directions, the peasants regarded Trehearne in dour silence and could not be compelled to answer. It was impossible even to learn whether others had gone this way before them.

Trehearne had foreseen this possibility. He had had enough such difficulties in Cornwall. He had got a map and directions in St. Malo, and he forced the luckless driver on by dead reckoning. It was night before they came wallowing into a muddy square half paved with ancient stones and saw the lights of half a dozen dwellings clustered around it.

"Go there, to the largest house," said Trehearne. "Ask if this is Keregnac, and tell the master we'll pay well for lodging."

The driver, himself in a thoroughly foul humor by now, did as he was bid, and in a few moments Trehearne found himself in a three-room house of crumbling stone, the walls blackened with smoke and age. A meagre fire burned on the hearth, and two home-made candles furnished all the light.

It was enough to show Trehearne's face.

Oddly enough, the squat, hard-handed peasant who was master of the house showed neither fear nor hatred. Nor was he surprised. A certain slyness crept into his sullen expression, but that was all.

"You shall have the best bed, Monsieur," he said, in vile French and pointed to a gigantic carvedlit-clos. "I have also one good horse. The others have gone ahead into thelandes. You will wish to overtake them."

Trehearne tried to conceal his excitement. "Monsieur Kerrel and Mademoiselle Shairn?"

The peasant shrugged. "You know better than I what their names might be. I am not a curious man. I enjoy good health, and am content."

He called sharply in the Breton tongue, and a woman came to prepare food. She had a heavy, stupid face. She glanced once, sidelong, at Trehearne and after that was careful neither to look at nor speak to him. As soon as the simple meal was on the table, she hid herself in the adjoining room.

The ancient crone who sat knitting by the fire was not so cowed. As though age had placed her above necessity, she kept her bright little eyes fixed upon Trehearne with a mixture of hostility and interest.

"What are you thinking,ma vielle?" he asked her, smiling.

She answered, in French that was almost unintelligible to him, "I am thinking, Monsieur, that Keregnac is greatly honored by the Devil!"

The man snarled at her in Gaelic, bidding her be silent, but Trehearne shook his head.

"Don't be afraid,grandmere. Why do you say that?"

"From time to time he sends his sons and daughters to us. They eat our food, borrow our horses, and pay us well. Oh, very well! We could not live, if it were not for them." Her white coif bobbed emphatically. "But it is still the devil's money!"

Trehearne laughed. "And do I appear like the devil's son?"

"You are the very breed."

Trehearne bent closer to her and said, "Once my family lived here. Their name was Cahusac."

"Cahusac," she said slowly, and between her gnarled fingers the clicking needles stopped. "Eh, that was long and long ago, and Keregnac has forgotten the Cahusacs. They were driven out...."

"Why?"

"They had an only child, a daughter, who married one of these handsome sons of the Evil One, and...." She paused and looked at him wisely. "But forgive me, my old tongue has not yet learned caution."

Trehearne dropped to one knee beside her, so that he might see her face more clearly. His heart was hammering. "No, no,grandmere! Don't stop—it was to hear these things that I came all the way from America. This daughter of the Cahusacs—she had a child?"

"And the villagers would have stoned her to death, and the babe too. But she knew, and fled away." She straightened up and her eyes had grown bleak and stern. "We take their silver, and that is sin enough. And I have spoken too much, and will speak no more."

"No, please!" Trehearne said. "Who are these strangers—these Vardda? You must know. You must tell me!"

But she sat like an image carved from dark wood, her head bent forward over the pale wool spread in her lap. Trehearne stood up, mastering a desire to shake her until the words came, and then he went outside. He walked the few paces to the end of the muddy street and looked out upon a moor that stretched still and desolate under the stars. He stood there for a long time, staring out across the empty heath, his eyes narrowed and intense with thought.

Into these wastes, thelandes, Shairn had gone with Kerrel. Why, for what purpose, he could not guess, any more than he could guess the answers to all the other riddles, and he knew better than to ask his host. The silence mocked him, full of secrets.

He had made some progress. He had traced his family back to Keregnac, and he knew now the reason for their leaving. A Vardda hybrid snatched from death at the hands of an irate peasantry—a romantic story, but unrevealing. The answer to the riddle of his birthright lay still farther on.

How much farther, he did not dream.

At dawn he paid off his driver and his host, mounted the horse that was ready for him, and struck out into the moor. He had no idea what direction he should take. However, the moor could not be endless in extent, and if he searched long enough he was almost bound to find what he was looking for. If Kerrel and Shairn and other "sons and daughters of the devil" came into thelandes, they must have shelter of some kind.

But all that day he rode, across marshland and stony soil, through gorse and bramble and stunted trees, without seeing a cottage or a solitary sheep or even a distant smoke to mark a human habitation. Only here and there a lonely tor stood like a druid sentinel against a lowering sky.

It drew on to dusk. The wind blew, and it began to rain, a fine soaking drizzle that showed promise of going on all night. And still the heath stretched on all sides of him, featureless, without comfort or hope.

There was nothing to do but go on. He let the horse find its own way, sitting hunched in the saddle, wet and wolfishly hungry and at odds with the world.

His mood grew blacker as the light failed. The horse continued to plod on through pitch darkness. The land rolled a good bit, and Trehearne knew from the cant of the saddle when his mount slid down into the hollow of a fold and then scrambled out again up the other side, slipping and stumbling in the mud and wet gorse. It was from the crest of one such low rise that he caught a glimmer of light, ahead and to the left.

He said aloud, "There is a cotter's hut," and would not allow himself to hope for anything else. But he spurred the horse on recklessly. Even so, it seemed hours before he reached the light.

He was close onto the place before he could make out its size and shape in the thick darkness. Then he reined in, completely baffled. This was no cotter's hut, nor was it a manor, nor any normal sort of dwelling. He saw a broken shaft of stone that had once been a squat crenellated tower, and around its foot was a ruin of walls and outbuildings. It was very old, Trehearne thought—probably medieval, and probably the onetime stronghold of a robber baron.

A ruin, lost in the wasteland. And yet it was inhabited. Yellow lamplight poured from the embrasures of the keep. There were horses in the courtyard. There was a sound of voices, and in the rickety outbuildings that leaned against the wall there were lanterns and noises and activity. Trehearne sat still for a time, trying to make some sort of sense out of what he saw, and failing. Then he dismounted and let his weary animal join its fellows, going himself toward the outbuildings and the men who were working there. He carried a small automatic in his pocket. He was not afraid, but he was glad he had it. There was an unsettling queerness about the place, about its situation and whatever reason it had for being.

The wooden structures were not nearly so tumbledown as they seemed at first look. In fact, Trehearne had a ridiculous idea that they had been built that way deliberately. They were crammed now with crates and packing cases, not wooden ones, Trehearne noticed, but light, strong plastic, marked with unfamiliar symbols. Others were being fetched up through openings in the stone that led apparently into the cellars beneath the keep. The men who handled them, with a good deal of laughter and loud talk, were mostly young, and all of the Vardda stock, and their dress was as strange as their language. Trehearne could think of no national costume that included quite that kind of a tunic belted over loose trousers, nor that particular type of sandal. A little shiver slid over him and he stopped just beyond the edge of the lantern-light. The men had not seen him yet, and he was suddenly not sure that he wanted them to. The strangeness began to come through to him, no longer in the mass, but in small casual detail that made it real, and now he began to be afraid, not with his body but with his mind.

From out of the rain and the shadows close by him, someone said, "You must be Trehearne."

The sheer reflex of tight-strung nerves closed Trehearne's grip on the automatic and brought him whirling around. The speaker must have seen the gesture, for he said quietly, "You won't need that. Come back a way, I want to talk to you."

"Who—?"

"Keep your voice down! Come on."

Trehearne followed the blurred figure of a man in a yellow tunic and dark trousers. Even in the gloom he could see that the belt around the man's waist was studded with gems, and the fastenings of his sandals glinted like fireflies in the wet grass. The small shiver twitched again at Trehearne's nerves, and he kept his hand in his pocket, over the comforting prosaic weight of the gun. He had thought at first that the man was Kerrel, but he was too short, and the voice was different. Neither spoke again until they had reached a blank corner of the keep well out of sight of the sheds. Then the man stopped and turned, and Trehearne said, "How did you know me?"

Faint light from an embrasure high above fell on the stranger's face. It was a Vardda face, but it was not beautiful. It was ugly, and kind, with very shrewd eyes and a merry mouth that was not really merry at all, even when it smiled. It was smiling now.

"Your fame has come ahead of you." He nodded toward the wall and what was beyond it. "Kerrel says you won't come, Shairn says you will. They're all betting on you in there." He examined Trehearne closely in the dim light, and shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. You really are remarkable."

"I've been told that before," said Trehearne sourly, and glanced at the stone wall, remembering what Shairn had said to him at the cove. An angry glint came into his eyes, "She's sure of herself."

"Shairn is sure of everything, and herself most of all." The man had been drinking, but he was not even slightly drunk. His tone was serious. "Now listen to me, my friend. I've stood around a long while in the rain watching for you when I should have been attending to my business, and I'm breaking a very important law right now. No one else has seen you. Take your horse and ride like hell away from here, and I'll forget that I have." He laid an urgent hand on Trehearne's shoulder. "This may be hard for you to believe, but I'm offering you your life."

The voices of the men rang down the wind, and Trehearne thought of the crates and cases they were bringing up from below as though preparing them for loading, and suddenly an answer came to him.

"Smuggling," he said. "You could land planes out here, and nobody would ever know it."

"Smuggling is precisely it. Now will you go? I haven't any right to do this, but I hate to see a man die just for a woman's amusement."

"Why are you so sure I'll die?"

"Because you're not true Vardda, and more than that I can't tell you. Just please for God's sake go!"

Trehearne thought, He's sincere, he means it, and smuggling isn't all the answer, these aren't common criminals. Something strange, very strange, and maybe he's right.... The fear that he had had before rose up in him and it was of the body now as well as the mind, a chill premonition of the unnatural. He hesitated, and the ugly man said softly, "Good! I'll get your horse."

There was a creak and a bang and a burst of sound as the great oaken door of the keep swung open. The stranger pressed Trehearne flat against the wall. The doorway was just out of sight, but Trehearne could hear the voices clearly. They were speaking their own unfamiliar tongue, so that what they said was lost to him, but he knew they were talking about him. He heard his name, and the voice that spoke it was Shairn's. Then she laughed. She didn't need to laugh. The sound of her voice would have been enough. Trehearne flung off the stranger's restraining arm and stood away from the wall.

"You fool!" whispered the stranger furiously, and caught at him, but Trehearne was remembering things, words, looks, and the anger in him burned away the fear. He walked out into the light that spilled across the courtyard from the open door. Kerrel and a number of others, mostly women, were standing there, but the only one he saw was Shairn, girdled with jewels and wearing a tunic the color of flame, holding in her hand a goblet of wine. A silence fell, and Shairn's gaze was fixed on his. Even so, he could not read it.

She smiled and said, "Thank you, Michael. I've won my bet."

FOUR

A hand fell upon Trehearne's shoulder from behind. It was the man in the yellow tunic, and he had become, in the last few seconds, quite jovially drunk. He gave Trehearne a friendly shove toward the door and called out to the people who stood there, "I found him out here looking for a way in—and I swear the man's a Vardda!" Under his breath he said rapidly in Trehearne's ear, "Keep your mouth shut, or we'll both be in trouble!"

They went together into the keep. The men stared closely at Trehearne, and the women chattered about him in their own tongue. And Kerrel said to Shairn, "Are you satisfied, now you've got him here?"

"Ididn't get him here," she said. "He was going to Keregnac anyway, and nothing could have kept him back then." She turned away, toward a table where there were bottles and various foods, and poured wine into a goblet. "Besides, he's a grown man. He knows what he wants to do. Isn't that so, Michael?"

She handed him the goblet. He took it and said, "Oh yes, that's so. You'd better collect your bet."

"I think," she answered, "I'll let it ride." She raised her goblet to sip the wine, doing it in such a way that her sleeve fell back and showed him the dark bruised ring his fingers had left around her wrist.

The man in the yellow tunic said something in his own language, and her eyes narrowed. But she turned to Kerrel and said mildly, "Edri doesn't approve of me."

"I don't think any of us do right now," said Kerrel. "You should have let the man alone."

"Michael doesn't think so—do you, Michael? I didn't tempt him to follow me. That was his idea."

"Well, he followed you," said Edri, and there was a deep anger in his voice.

"But not all the way," murmured Shairn, and smiled into Trehearne's eyes. "Only the first step, Michael. You were annoyed with me when I wouldn't tell you about the Vardda, very much annoyed. So now you're going to find out." She reached up her fingers and drew them slowly across his cheek. "You look like a Vardda, you bear yourself like one, you even think like one. Butareyou one?"

Kerrel said irritably, "That's impossible, and you know it." He began to speak to Edri and the other men, in that language that Trehearne had never heard before. They seemed disturbed and ill at ease, men beset by a problem to which there was no good solution. Their attitude, and the particular way in which the women looked at him, took away the fine edge of Trehearne's excitement. "They act," he said to Shairn, "as though they're planning where to bury me."

She shrugged. "Oh, they're discussing all sorts of alternatives, but there's only one possible answer." She sat down on the edge of the table, watching him in the catlike way that she had. "Nervous?"

"Cold. The rain was very wet." That was only half the truth, but he was damned if he was going to admit it to her. "And I'm curious. Where do you people come from? What are you doing here? What's all the mystery about?"

"Don't be impatient, Michael. It can't all be told at once." She had been listening intently to what the men were saying, and now she rose again. "I think it's time I took a hand in this. Men always talk in circles."

She joined the group. Trehearne finished off his wine and poured more from a queer stone bottle. It was good, but he couldn't place it on any list of vintages. There was beginning to be a nightmare quality about this culmination of his long search. Everything was too business-like, too solemn—and too insane. He wished they would stop talking about him. He wished somebody would explain to him what was going on out here. The voices went on and on, and suddenly he realized that Shairn had shifted into a language he could understand.

"You see?" she was saying to Kerrel. "I can quote the law as well as you. And you know I'm right."

Kerrel muttered, "It seems to me a choice of evils." And he added furiously, "You should have let the man alone!"

"He has a right to his chance," Shairn said. "He came a long way to get it."

"Do I detect a note of malice there?" inquired Edri.

"Detect what you like. Anyway, there is no other course—unless one of you feels up to killing him right here, in cold blood."

Trehearne's wine-glass came down with a clatter on the table, and he thrust his hand into his pocket so that the automatic bulged it very plainly. He said, "You wouldn't find that so easy."

Edri gave a wry sort of shudder and made gestures at him to relax. "We're not violent people," he said. "It's only that you've faced us with a damnably involved problem, and one we've never had to meet before. You see, there are certain laws."

"Laws?"

"Yes." Edri poured himself wine and drank it thirstily, as though to get the taste of something out of his mouth. "Persons above a certain culture level, possessing sufficient I.Q. or influence to be dangerous, are to be permanently silenced if they discover too much about us. Too big an investment, you understand, in Vardda lives as well as money, to be risked—and there are historical reasons for this precaution. But we're extremely careful, and the situation simply hasn't come up before, at least in my time." He sat down, sighing. "And of course, with you there's the added question. Are you or are you not a Vardda? I thought we might appoint you an honorary one, so to speak, and let you work for us here, but that was too big a transgression for Kerrel to swallow." Edri glanced at the tall man—entirely without love, Trehearne thought. "He's an agent of the Council, which means the long arm of the law. So I guess it's settled, Trehearne."

Trehearne's mouth was dry, and the words didn't want to come out of it, but there was a dangerous light in his eyes. "Whatis settled?"

Shairn came before him, her face uplifted, smiling, sweet. "You're coming with us, Michael. That's what you wanted. Aren't you happy?"

"Coming with you—where?"

"To Llyrdis."

He did not like her smile. He did not like the wisdom in it, the mockery, the knowledge of things beyond his ken. She bore him malice, and somehow she had got her revenge, and he didn't understand how. All the little details joined together in his mind, the language, the dress, the physical appearance, the taste of a purple wine that came from no familiar vineyard, and they pressed down on him like an avalanche, crowned with the echo of an unknown name, and he was cold deep inside himself, cold with a dread that even yet had no clear shape to it.

He repeated, "Llyrdis?"

"Oh, Christ, don't torture the man," said Edri wearily to Shairn. Then he looked at Trehearne and said, "Llyrdis is our home world, the fourth planet of the star you call Aldebaran."

That was all he said. No one else spoke, there was not a sound inside the ancient room of stone, and even outside all noise had ceased, and the wordAldebarantolled in that silence like a far-off bell. A curious weakness came over Trehearne. Shairn's face grew misty and indistinct. The solid ground, the Earth on which he stood, slipped out from under him and vast yawning windows opened on all sides, windows into space, into darkness and wild light....

He said to Edri, quite reasonably, "But that isn't possible."

Somebody put a wine-cup in a hand that didn't belong to him any more, and Edri's voice spoke to him from miles away. "But it is. Drink up, Trehearne. Sovereign remedy for practically everything. Take in the idea slowly, with the wine. We come from another world, another sun. It seems incredible to you. To us, it's only a familiar fact."

Trehearne sat down. The wine burned in his throat, and his head spun round. Everything had turned unreal. "Another world, another sun." He stared down at himself, turning his hands over and back again and staring at them as though he had never seen them before. "My own blood. That's why...." He shook his head, stumbling over his own words, and then he shivered, a muscular reaction that shook him right down to his heels. He repeated carefully, "I am going with you."

"Very soon now," said Edri, in such a sombre tone that Trehearne was startled partly out of his daze, enough to see that Edri looked at him with pity, as one looks at a man about to die. A new alarm took hold of Trehearne, and he cried out,

"What's the matter? What are you hiding from me?"

"An ordeal." Once more Shairn stood before him, and her eyes were searching into him, and she had ceased to smile. "You've been given what you wanted, a chance to learn the truth about yourself."

He rose and put his hands on her as he had once before, and not in tenderness. "Go on."

Her red mouth parted a little to show him the edges of her teeth. "Only a true Vardda can endure the velocities of starflight. Are you afraid, Michael?"

"Yes," he said. "I am." He stood for a long moment, with the blood pounding in his temples and everything, herself, the world, all the years of his own life that had gone before, lost and vague beyond a blinding mist, and then he said slowly, "But you're right, I've got what I wanted."

Outside the keep a man's voice shouted. Someone said, "The ship!" More voices shouted, and the door was flung open. Something dark and cruel came into Trehearne's face. He looked at Shairn and said. "I'll live to thank you." He let her go. People were moving toward the door. He moved with them, as in a dream, but knowing that he would not wake. He lost track of individuals. There were only shadows around him, sounds, motion, without meaning. The walls were gone, and the light. Wet, cold, dark, the outside, the moor, the wind and the naked sky. It had stopped raining. There was a wide rift in the clouds, a valley of stars, and in the valley was a presence, solemn, silent, huge and strange. He watched it, and it settled down, gently as a drift of the night itself, and it sang as it came, a quiet humming that filled all the space between the horizons with a quivering echo more felt than heard. Power. Immensity, and strength. Trehearne drew in a deep unsteady breath. His heartbeats rocked him as he stood. Instinctively his hands moved, a flier's hands, remembering the might of pistons and of jets, groping toward a greater thing. He was not conscious of the motion. He was cold, and the wind flowed through his bones. The great dim bulk dropped down and lay quiet on the moor. Its hull was scored and pitted by the atmospheres of unnamed worlds. Its ports had looked upon infinities where the stars were swallowed up like clouds of fireflies. Trehearne began to walk toward it. If there were others with him, he did not know it. His eyes were on the ship.

A lock-door opened high in the looming flank. White light blazed from it. A folding metal stair came down, and then people descended it and mingled with those that were on the ground. A larger hatch clanged open, lower down. More light blazed out. Machinery began to clatter, and men went back and forth and shouted. The things that were made ready in the sheds began their transfer to the ship. Trehearne reached the foot of the ladder.

He looked up. The vast alien bulk of the ship was above him. It hung over him like the end of the world. It had come out from the darkness between the stars, and it would return there, and he was going with it. There were voices all around him, and some of them were speaking to him, but he did not hear them. He saw no faces. He saw nothing but the curved immensity of the hull that had made such voyages. There were tears in his eyes. They were not of fear, nor of self-pity. They were of exaltation. Men had done this thing. Men had reached out and taken the stars in their hands. They were not men of Earth, but they were of his own race. And they had done it.

He began to climb the ladder, and the treads rang hollow beneath his feet.

High. High up in the cold wind, with the smell of the wet moor heavy on it. A round lock chamber opened before him. He stepped into it, on a metal deck worn bright by the passing of many feet. Others came behind him and pressed him on, down a long transverse corridor faced in metal. The scars of time and hard use were on it. Now and again through a bulkhead door he glimpsed a cabin or an orderly room. They were real. Men lived and worked in them. Someone—Edri—made him turn aside and into a lounge with deep chairs bolted to the deck. "Sit down," said Edri, and he sat obediently. And Edri said, "You have a chance, but you'll have to fight for it. The first time is hard even for...." He stopped, and Trehearne finished for him.

"Even for a true Vardda."

"Even," said Edri gently, "for a Vardda. Trehearne, we're alone in the galaxy. Generations ago our race was founded by a man named Orthis, whose system of controlled mutation made us what we are, the Vardda—the Starmen. It's a difference, a condition of the flesh. With us there is no doubt. With you—your blood is mixed. But you're a throwback in every other way. The mutation may have bred true, also."

His voice carried hope, but no conviction. Trehearne frowned, trying to grasp the sense of what he said. It was hard to think, hard to believe with his mind, in spite of what his senses told him. Things had happened too fast. Too fast, and too big. He caught a glimpse of Shairn's face. It was white, and he realized that all at once she was beginning to be afraid.

"Fight," said Edri. "That's the thing to remember."

All through the ship, the bells rang sharply.

Trehearne took hold of the arms of the chair in which he sat. For a brief moment of panic he wanted to get up and run, but he could hear the sonorous clang of the lock-doors closing and he knew it was no use. Everyone was seated now. The bells rang again. He braced himself, and fixed his gaze on Shairn.

Swift, smooth and awesome as the hand of God, acceleration pressed down upon him. Muttering an all but silent thunder, the ship rushed upward into the sky, and for the first time in history, Earth-born ears listened to the banshee scream of atmosphere past a cleaving hull.

FIVE

The wailing shriek rose to a crescendo, and then it died. Earth was gone. They had stepped away from it. Even its sky was behind them. A weight like to the weight of mountains lay on Trehearne, and he was horribly afraid.

He waited for the pressure to ease. His temples were bursting, it was an agony to breathe, and he thought, It can't go on like this, it's got to let up! But it did not. There was a change in the pitch of the motor vibration. He listened to it climb, higher and higher, until it slipped over the threshhold of hearing, and as it climbed, the pressure grew. The bones of his chest crushed in upon his lungs. Everything around him began to waver and grow vague, to recede slowly into a reddish twilight.

And still the pressure grew.

Something was happening to him. Something unearthly and strange. He was a flier, a test-pilot. He had known pressure before. He had taken all the gravs a power-diving plane could bear and he had never come near blacking out. But this was different. He felt it in the fibres, the very atoms of his being. This was velocity beside which the velocities of the fastest jets was as nothing. This was the speed of interstellar flight. And he could feel it tearing at the separate cells of his flesh, riving them apart, rending the tissues of physical existence.A difference, a condition of the flesh. With us there is no doubt, but you....

Anguish became terror, terror turned into blind panic. His body was shredding apart, dissolving toward a tattered ruin, a heap of bloody rags. This body he had been so proud of, this star-born self that was only a mockery, a sham. The mutation hadn't bred true. He was going to die, to cease utterly from being. He was....

Far, far away, a voice, Shairn's voice, crying, "I've killed him. Poor Michael, I didn't mean for him to die!"

Poor Michael. A mongrel, a walking deceit. Proud Michael, who thought he was so damned good, and wasn't anything. Idiot Michael, who had run after a witch. And she hadn't meant for him to die. She hadn't really been that angry because he had treated her like an equal—not nicely, perhaps, but like an equal, which he wasn't. That was kind of her, not really to want him killed. He began to be able to see her face again. He wasn't sure whether it was true sight, or only the memory of how she had looked before he began to die. But he could see her, pale, distorted. He was glad he could see her. She was sitting in front of him, and she wasn't far away. Somehow, pressure or no pressure, he was going to get to her. He was going to put his hands around her white throat, and then they could forget about starflight together, and it wouldn't matter that he was a mongrel and she was not. He began to fight against the pressure.

He wanted so little. Only to get up, to move the short distance and lock his fingers at the back of her neck, with his two thumbs lying over the great pulses. So little. He was filled with a raging determination to have it. He fought. He had nothing to fight with but will-power and the instinctive desire of the organism to claw onto life as long as there was a flicker of it left. He wanted to get up, and he fought, an inner struggle without sound or motion, a blind battle to regain control of his own flesh. His face contorted, like the face of a man who lifts something far too heavy, and the sweat ran on it. Slowly, slowly, his hands moved on the chair arms, contracted, became fists. The muscles of his arms tightened, and then the great muscles of the chest and belly, and they labored, and the breath came painfully into his lungs—came, and went, and came again, and his flagging heart stumbled, steadied, and began to beat more evenly. The red mist that wrapped him cleared away a bit and he could see Shairn more distinctly. She was staring at him. Her mouth and eyes were wide open, ludicrous, startled. Then Edri's head came between them and blotted her out, and he was shouting, but the blood was pounding so loud in Trehearne's ears that he could not hear what he said. He raised a hand and tried to thrust Edri away. He did not want to lose sight of Shairn. There was a tremendous exaltation on him. He was winning. He was going to get up and do the thing he wanted to do. The sinews coiled and tensed along his thighs. The pressure didn't hurt so much, and the terrible vibrations of speed were not tearing at him quite so hard. He leaned forward a little, breathing in deep harsh gasps, and his body strained and tightened....

"He's going to live, he's made it. Michael...."

Shairn's voice, thin and shrill through the tumult in his ears. For a moment the meaning didn't penetrate. Then slowly it dawned on him what she had said. And then, more slowly still, he realized that it was true. He could feel the life flowing back into him. He was getting the hang of it now, a simple matter of tensing the muscles in a certain way, and the agony of the vibration lessened, the atoms of his body stopped their ghastly dissolution. It was only a matter of strength—not the kind that can move great weights, but a more subtle kind, a tensile strength that knit the fabric of the flesh together and made it impervious as steel. In an infantile way he had been using it for years without knowing it, in his testing of fast planes. That was why he had never blacked out, why he had never been tortured as other men were by the spectre of inertia waiting for them at the end of a dive. Now he had found at last the purpose his body was made for. He forgot about Shairn. She didn't matter any more. He had won, he was alive, he was going to live, and he was not a sham nor a mockery, he was not even a mongrel. The mutation had bred true. His vision was clearing fast. He raised his head and looked around, and they were all staring at him, the Vardda, the Starmen, who had been so sure he was going to die. They were talking back and forth in excited voices, they were getting up and coming toward him, and Edri was pounding him on the shoulder. He thrust them all away and stood up.

"I'm one of you now," he said. "I passed your test." He was suddenly exhausted and shaken, but he would not show it. He stood erect and faced them.

Shairn took him in her arms and kissed him. Trehearne said, "You're glad I didn't die."

"Yes. Oh, yes!"

"You would have felt just a little guilty, wouldn't you?" He held her off and looked at her. She was very beautiful. Her throat was warm and white. He studied it, thinking what he had wanted to do only a short few minutes ago, and then he shook his head. He said slowly, "I owe you something, Shairn. I won't forget it."

She did not like his tone, and her brows drew into a dark line. She turned away, and over her shoulder Trehearne saw Kerrel looking at him in such an intent, strange way that he challenged it. "You don't look very happy, Kerrel. Does my survival upset you?"

Kerrel shook his head. "I don't enjoy condemning a man, particularly when I have nothing against him. But it brings up other problems. You have no conception of them now, Trehearne, but the thing you have just done brings you automatically into conflict with the most basic tenet of Vardda law, and how the Council will decide the question I don't know." He shifted his gaze to Edri and said in a curiously soft tone, "It could have the most dangerous consequences."

If it was bait, Edri refused to take it. He laughed and said, "This is no time to worry about consequences. I'm going to find Trehearne a cabin and me a bottle, and put the two together for a small celebration. A man doesn't become a Vardda every day." He took Trehearne's elbow and started him toward the door. "Come on."

Trehearne's new-found strength had not deserted him—it was, apparently, automatic when it was once started, like the heart-beat—but the ordinary kind was running out of him like water from a sieve. He made it out into the passageway without staggering, but a few steps farther on he clung to the bolt-heads in the wall and said unhappily, "I think I'm going to fall over."

"Reaction," said Edri. "Don't let it bother you. We all get it, first time out. Here, hang on."

The passage seemed a mile long, but eventually there was a cabin, small, compact, and functional, and there was a bunk, and Trehearne sat down on it. Edri went away somewhere, and came back again after a minute with a bottle. The stuff, whatever it was, went down like white fire, and Trehearne felt better. He set the cup aside and then began to look at his hands, turning them over as though he had never seen them before.

"They seem like everybody else's," he said.

"They're not. You're not. As Kerrel told you, you have no idea yet of what you've done, but as time goes by you will."

"It's quite true, then—about the mutation?"

"Oh, yes, quite. The form and structure of your body cells, and mine, are different from other people's. Due to that altered form and structure, your tissues, and mine, possess a tensile strength in their cell-walls that can withstand incredible acceleration pressure without collapse. And I hope you never know how lucky you were that the mutation was a recessive that finally bred true in you." He filled the glasses again, slowly, withdrawn for a moment into some brooding thought of his own. Then he added sombrely, "Some day I'll tell you the story of Orthis, who found the secret of the mutation. And a grand proud story it is, but with a shameful ending. He.... No. Forget it. The less you know about that, the better. Besides, we're celebrating. Drink up."

Trehearne drank. His head was swimming, and he felt hollow inside. The glass was heavy in his hands. He said, "There'll be trouble when I get to—to Llyrdis?"

"Sufficient unto the day, Trehearne. Worry about that when you come to it."

But he had already ceased to worry. Llyrdis. He said the name again, and it felt strange on his tongue. Llyrdis. A name and a world he had never heard of until a few short hours ago, and now.... The hollow spaces inside him were filled suddenly with homesickness, with a longing, with something akin to horror. He stared at the iron walls that closed him in, and he knew where he was, in an impossible ship with alien people, flying faster than light across nothingness to an alien star.... His stomach contracted, sending up a bitter fluid to burn his throat, and his hands were cold as a dead man's. Earth was gone. His Earth, sky, mountains, sunrise, city streets, country roads, the faces and voices of people, the men he had worked with, the women he had had or wanted to have, all the familiar things—the currency, the bars, the names of nations, books, pictures, shirtmakers, history—what was the use now of all the history he had learned, where did Caesar rank among the stars? Earth was gone, and even the sun had gone with it, and it was in a way as though he had died—and how do you start life again afterward, a stranger? There was this cabin, and outside its walls there was no world, no sunlight, nothing. Nothing.

Nothing....

Edri led him swiftly to a tiny adjoining cubicle and left him alone with his misery while he used the intercom by the cabin door. Presently the ship's doctor joined him. They got Trehearne back into the bunk, and a needle glittered briefly in the light, sending him to a place where there were not even any dreams.

On Number Four screen in the ship's control room, the pinpoint fleck that represented an isolated yellow sun flickered, faded, and went out.

SIX

Trehearne looked up from the bunk and asked, "How long have I slept?"

"Nearly twenty-four hours by Earth reckoning," Edri answered. "You needed it." He leaned over and offered Trehearne a prosaic pack of American cigarettes. "Smoke?"

Trehearne took one and sat up. He smoked for some time in silence, remembering. Finally he said, "It all happened, didn't it?"

Edri nodded.

"I know it must have, but I don't believe it." Trehearne shook his head. "Of all the incredible.... What were you doing there, Edri? How can you come and go on Earth without anyone knowing? What are the Vardda, besides—well, mutants?"

"Traders. Merchants. The most commercial race in the galaxy." Edri lifted the cover off a tray on a small table by the bunk. "I brought your breakfast. Go ahead and eat while I gabble. How we come and go is fairly simple. We land at odd intervals, here and there in the waste spaces of which Earth has a number. We do our business, and after a while are picked up again. As I told you before, we're exceedingly careful, and the fact that hardly anyone on Earth would believe the truth if they were told it is a protection. Of course, trading in secret that way, we're limited in what we can take, and Earth exports—the genuine articles and not mere copies—command very high prices. You'd be amazed at the value of French perfumes, Scotch whiskey, and American films on planets you never heard of."

"Do you trade with them all in secret?"

"Good Lord, no! Most worlds, even the very primitive ones, we can deal with quite openly. They might not like us, but they benefit enormously from our commerce."

"Then why not Earth?"

"Well," said Edri, "I don't like to offend your sensibilities as a native of the place, but Earth is a crazy planet. Oh, it's not the only one. There's a number of them scattered about, and we avoid open contact with all of them. You see, Trehearne, most worlds develop, or remain undeveloped, more or less homogeneously in the matter of civilization. I don't mean they're entirely peaceful, because they're not, but in the long run their populations are more predictable, more stable than on the Earth-type worlds that have grown up all out of joint. You know what I mean—on one side of the world atomic power, on the other the wooden plough and the blowgun. Too big a gap, and it makes trouble all down the line. Now, a primitive society regards war as a sport and takes an honest pleasure in it. A society in a high state of culture regards it as something outgrown and obsolete as hunting game for food. Everybody knows where they are. But when you get a world with great big overlapping mobs of population, every one of them in a different stage of cultural development and every one of them subject to a constant bombardment of outside stimuli they can't assimilate, you have got a mixture that keeps exploding in all directions. We have a healthy desire not to get blown up, and besides, it's impossible to establish any profitable trade with a world continually torn by wars. So—does that answer your question?"

"I take it," Trehearne said sourly, "that the Vardda don't think much of Earth."

"It's a good world. It'll settle down some day. Nobody can fight forever. They either knock themselves back into barbarism again, or they grow up."

Trehearne put down the fork on the empty plate, and looked at Edri, rather angrily. "Don't the Vardda ever fight?" he demanded. "I gather there's a vast commercial empire. There must be trade wars, battles over markets and rights. No empire was ever built without them."

"No other empire was ever built," said Edri quietly, "without any competition. I think you still don't quite understand. We have an absolute, complete, and unbreakable monopoly on interstellar flight. Only the Vardda ships go between the stars, and only the Vardda men can fly them. You know the reason, you proved it in yourself. We don't have to fight."

Trehearne let go a long, low whistle. "And we thought we had monopolies on Earth! But I don't see why, if you could mutate, others couldn't do it, too. How do you hold them down?"

"We don't hold anybody down. We don't rule, influence, or interfere with any world but our own. We learned long ago that it was bad business. As to the mutation, it's impossible. The secret of the process was lost with Orthis, some thousand years ago." He rose abruptly from the chair where he had been sitting, and pointed to some garments in the locker. "I think those will fit you. Get dressed, and I'll show you around."

Trehearne looked doubtfully at the clothes, a tunic of dark green silk, dark trousers, a modestly jewelled belt, and sandals. Edri grinned.

"You'll get used to them. And you won't feel half as peculiar as you would look going about in those ridiculous tweeds."

Trehearne shrugged, and put them on. He had to admit they were comfortable. There was a mirror set inside the locker door, and he studied himself in it. He was startled to see how changed he was in the Vardda dress. The last vestige of Earth was gone.

Still looking into the mirror, he said, "Edri...."

"Yes?"

"I am a Vardda now. I've proved it. What can they do to me, on Llyrdis?"

"I wish I could tell you. Actually, you are a true Vardda, a complete atavism. But legally—that's another thing. That basic tenet of Vardda law that Kerrel referred to is a prohibition against admitting into our race non-Vardda strains of any kind. Keeping the Vardda blood pure isn't just pride, it's an economic necessity, and the one unbreakable tabu. The solution of that puzzle will be up to the Council, and my advice is to forget it until then. Come on, and I'll give you something else to think about."

Trehearne was glad enough to go. The lost, sick, nightmarish feeling was creeping back on him again, and he was glad of any diversion. They went out into the corridor, and he followed Edri forward. He became aware of a deep inner vibration of power that filled the ship, a sort of humming drone that seemed to challenge the whole universe to make it stop. It sang in his ears, in his blood and his quivering nerve-ends, and the excitement he had felt when he first saw the ship returned to him full force. This was the ultimate. All his life he had been playing with children's toys, but here, under his feet and all around him, was the highest dream of men.

"What's the motive power? What's the principle? And how can you go faster than light? The limiting speed, contraction, mass...."

Edri laughed. "One at a time, please. And such simple little questions, too! It took centuries to evolve a technology capable of answering them, and you want me to explain it all in a few words. Well, a few words is all I know about it. I'm a drinker by profession, not a scientist. Anyway, a really functional ship, whether it plies water, air, or space, must get its motive power by reacting against the element it travels in. And so, right now, the big atomic-powered generators in the stern are producing fifth-order rays which react against the fabric of space itself. And space, not wishing to be torn apart, obligingly thrusts us onward. Very simple, I believe, once you know the trick."

Trehearne grunted.

"As to limiting speeds," said Edri, "the Vardda scientists used to believe in them too—until they got to playing around with cosmotrons. One day a particle they were experimenting with upset them horribly by going much faster than light, and that's how they discovered the fifth-order rays. They found out, as your scientists will find, that the theoretical absolutes you set up from limited knowledge will prove illusory when your knowledge expands. I could explain all that to you if I knew continuum-mechanics better than I do!"

"I couldn't understand it anyway," said Trehearne, "so it's just as well."

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