Collected Short Fiction, page 655
“Smash that thing with them!” The jet leaped away—but, queerly, the flares failed to detonate. Their tracer trails ended in faint red sparks near the oncoming object “The sleeth’s blanketing them,” snarled the Reefer. “You’ll have to do better than that!”
“Fire what’s left!” shouted Andy Quam, and slapped down the manual override, took control of the little flyer’s transflector beams. He spun them into high, reached out with their pale, deadly fingers toward the sleeth, which was growing huge before him, the second flight of flares dimming to darkness just like the first.
A sudden lurch threw him against the control panel. “Mal-function, Monitor Quamodian,” the flyer jerked out. “Pow-er fail-ure—”
The propulsion field was failing even as the reaching transflection beams were paling and dying. The greenish glow of the sleeth brightened suddenly; the flyer’s klaxon tried to blare, succeeded in rattling a crash alert.
“Hold on!” bawled Quamodian. “We’re going to hit—”
And they did; they hit hard, the emergency shields failing to function, hard enough to jolt men like dolls in a coconut shy, struck by a thrown ball. The sleeth roared over them and halted. It was a terrifying sight, horsesized, catlike, tapered muscles bulging under the sleek black fur. Blazing green, enormous and cold, its eyes bulged blindly out at them.
The Reefer pulled himself together and croaked. “They—they can kill us, Quamodian. Those eyes!”
Quamodian didn’t need the warning. There was something in those eyes that was reaching into his mind, freezing his will, icing his spine and muscles. He struggled to make his limbs obey him, and reached for the little hand weapon he kept under the seat of the flyer; but the icy, penetrating numbness had gone too far. He touched the gun, almost caught it, dropped it and sent it skittering across the tipped floor of the flyer; and the sleeth hung there, staring blindly down through the faint shimmer of its transflection field, just touching a fallen tree with one horrendous claw . . .
The great blind eyes seemed suddenly smaller. The frightful currents of cold that had drenched Andy Quam’s body seemed somehow to recede. He could not move, he was not his own master again; but at least, he thought, he was not dying helplessly any more; for some reason the creature had halted the poisonous flow of radiation that had drained the flyer’s power banks and nearly drained their lives.
The Reefer gasped hoarsely: “Knew it! Knew it couldn’t kill its master—” And incredibly, haltingly that big yellow-haired bear of a man was forcing himself to stand erect, lurching with agonizing slowness to the door, dropping to the ground and willing himself to stand erect again, next to the great sleek bulk of the creature from space.
And the forgotten radio speaker of the flyer abruptly rattled harshly and spoke: “Go away, Quamodian. I give you your life—but go!” It was the voice he had heard before, inhuman, unalive, terrifying. Andy Quam fell back, finally drained of the last of his strength. He saw the great talons of die sleeth curve protectingly around the Reefer, clasp him and hold him; saw the great creature surge into the air and away, carrying the Reefer as it disappeared with fantastic speed toward the gap in the hills where the faint smudge of smoke still hung.
And then he felt his flyer rock slightly, twitch, and then slowly and painfully lift itself into the sky. It was not at his order that it flew, but its destination was not in question. It rose to a few hundred feet, turned and headed back for the town.
The hunters had failed. One was now himself a captive, being borne at transsonic speeds toward the cave where the rogue flexed its new powers, practiced at its new repertory of emotions and grew. One was helplessly returning the way he had come. And the girl they had tried to rescue was farther from Andy Quam’s help than the farthest star.
Of one thing he was sure: He had been defeated. His mere human strength had not even sufficed to get him past the rogue’s puppet, the sleeth. He would have no chance against the might of the rogue itself.
XIV
The rogue, wearing the borrowed body of the robot inspector, sank slowly through the cold opal light of the great bubble under the earth. The refrigerated box of food, held lightly in its transflection Fields, seemed suddenly too heavy to carry, and the rogue let it drop.
It crashed to the seep-stained floor in a thunder that rolled around the cavern, and split open, the little particles of human food spilling out. The noise startled Molly Zaldivar. She looked up at the robot form, her face shocked and hollowed in that icy, lifeless light. A scream blazed through the echoing thunder.
For a moment, seeing the gleaming black egg-shaped body of the robot settling toward her, Molly had had the wild hope that it was the familiar robot inspector from the Starchurch, somehow come to rescue her, perhaps with Andy Quam right behind. But the hope did not last long enough even to show in the terror on her face. She got up stiffly, abandoning the useless radio, and climbed slowly down the spiral steps toward the bottom of the rock bubble.
The sweet high voice of the robot, modulated by the unpracticed mind of the rogue, spoke to her:
“Molly Zaldivar. Why did you speak falsely to me?”
She did not answer. There was a pause, while the rogue pondered its conflicting impulses. “I will not harm you,” it droned at last. “You need not be afraid. . . because I love you, Molly Zaldivar.”
Her face twisted, and she lifted her hands to the floating robot. “If you love me, won’t you let me go?” she cried.
“Because I love you . . . I can never let you go.”
She shouted with all her strength: “Then I hate you, monster!” Her voice was hoarse and despairing; despairing, too, was the angry green radiance that surrounded her in the sight of the rogue, colors and patterns that spoke to him of fury. It left her standing here and soared away, wheeling around the spidery tower. Suddenly it felt the clothing of the robot that it wore confining; it slipped out, left the robot hanging mindlessly on its transflection fields and, once more a nearly invisible cloud of stripped electrons, perched on the metal rails just below the pale, milky mist of light that hung in the center of the sphere.
It spoke to her through the robot: “Molly Zaldivar, I am strong and you are weak. Your hatred cannot harm me. True?”
She shook her head without words, utterly weary.
“But I will not harm you . . . if I can avoid it, Molly Zaldivar. We will stay here . . . until you love me.”
“Then I’ll die here,” she said tonelessly.
The rogue pondered the problem for many nanoseconds. It said at last, “Then I shall absorb you as you die. You will be a member of me, like Cliff Hawk.”
The girl said, weakly, fearfully then with gathering rage: “Oh please—you mustn’t! You say you love me—heaven knows what you mean by that!—but if it means anything at all to you, you must let me go.”
“Never, Molly Zaldivar.”
“You can’t keep me!”
“I can, Molly Zaldivar. I am stronger than you.”
She shrieked: “But there are things which are stronger! Almalik! Almalik is stronger than you. And he will find you yet, even hiding here.”
The rogue searched its memory patterns for a referent for the term “Almalik.” Almost hesitantly it said, “What is ‘Almalik’ ?”
“Almalik is the spokesmen star for Cygnus. Almalik commands multitudes—fusorians and men, robots and stars. His multitudes will find you, here or anywhere. And even if you were as strong as Almalik, you are all alone while he has legions!” The rogue’s plasma rippled in thought “I have met Almalik’s robot,” it said at last “It is now a member of me.”
“One robot! Almalik owns tens of thousands.”
The rogue did not reply. Thoughtfully it clung to the metallic rail of the cryptic old device, studying the girl. She was exhausted now, the green fire of her fury dying, waiting for a move from the rogue.
To the rogue, painfully learning the uses of those human qualities called emotions, Molly Zaldivar was a most confusing stimulus. There was enough of the residual identity of Cliff Hawk in the rogue to give force and direction to its feelings about Molly; it possessed attitude sets which could have been called “pity” or “love.” The rogue recognized that the girl was small, and weak, and mortal and afraid; it even felt some sort of impulse to ease her wild terror, heal her pain and rage. It simply had no effectors capable of the job.
At the same time it recognized that in a sense she represented a threat. The polarization of the other human, Andreas Quamodian, toward her was certain to produce an attempt on his part to interfere again. The rogue did not estimate that the attempt would be successful, but it might be an annoyance; it took the precaution of detaching some parts of its attention to invest its creatures the sleeth and the handling machine, deploying them as scouts between Wisdom Creek and the mountains.
But there were puzzles the rogue could not solve.
The answers to some of them were far from this cave. It detached itself from its high iron perch in the opal mist and left the girl, watching and trembling.
The rogue sent its awareness out into the universe. It sensed the tangle of dark hills above the bubble-cave, stretched, expanded and encompassed cubic miles of space with its consciousness. It observed the bright anger and fear of the human creatures from whom it had stolen the box of food, studied the sleeping presence of Andreas Quamodian, observed the deployment of its own tools, the sleeth and the machine; and it reached farther still.
It reached out until it grasped the roundness of the planet Earth, turning between its bare moon and the red, swelling sun, the sun that had struck at the rogue in those first moments of its existence.
The star was still angry, still roiled and troubled. The rogue studied it carefully, but avoided reaching out to it; it had not been harmed by that triple bolt of energy that had been the sun’s riposte, but it did not consider it advisable to provoke another.
The rogue expanded again, reached out its perceptions to the stars. It found them to be suns like this sun, single, coupled, multiple, burning all across the dust and darkness of the galaxy—some tinier than Earth’s cold moon, some mightier than Earth’s sullen sun. Even beyond the stars it peered, to find a bleak and empty vastness of infinite space and cruel cold. Then in the eternal floods of blackness it perceived the glowing, tiny lights of other galaxies. Ill-formed and unfearing, the rogue studied the numbers and varieties of galaxies for a time, then stored them in its memory and returned to nearer stars.
Almalik.
It was time for the rogue to probe into the meaning of the term “Almalik.”
There was no problem in finding Almalik; in the captured impulses of the robot inspector was a clear understanding of where Almalik lay in space, and the rogue turned its attention there.
And there was the might of Almalik, the splendor of his thirteen suns, all greater than the small Earth-star that had tried to destroy the rogue. It counted them, studied their spin, tasted the energies they hurled into the void. Six splendid double stars arranged in hierarchically greater doubles; one single sun with many wheeling planets. The thirteen suns radiated many colors in the optical bands of energies, but the rogue also saw that they shared a common golden glow of unity . . .
And Almalik felt the rogue’s fleeting touch.
Hello, little one.
Almalik did not speak. Least of all did he speak in words; but he sent a signal which was greeting and wry pity at once. The signal was powerful but soundless, serene and slow.
The rogue listened impassively, waiting for more.
Little one, we have been looking for you. The silent voice was mightier than thunder, gentle as—what? The rogue had only an imperfect analogy: gentle as love. We have received information about you. You have destroyed patterns we cherish. You have damaged entities who were part of us. Little one, what do you wish?
The rogue considered the question for some time. It framed an answer with difficulty: Knowledge. Experience. And then, after a pause, it added, Everything.
The multiple suns of Almalik glowed serenely golden; it was almost like a smile. From behind the round Earth, behind the many thousand stars and dust clouds, the signal came: Knowledge you may have. Ask a question.
The rogue asked it at once: Why will you destroy me?
The soundless voice was cool, aloof, immeasurably sure. Little one, we cannot destroy you or any sentient thing.
Green anger filled the rogue. It was a contradiction, Almalik’s statement opposed to Molly Zaldivar’s. It had not known of the existence of lies until Molly Zaldivar told it she loved it, then showed she did not. Now it knew of lies, but little of mortal error; the contradiction seemed to mean a lie: a lie meant enmity. Red hatred froze the rogue. Sudden fury shook its plasma violently.
It dropped from its great, tenuous vantage point, contracted to a swirl of luminescence, sank back into the mountain just as the planet was turning that part of its surface to the angry rising sun. The splendid suns of Almalik were gone. For a while.
The rogue floated down to Molly Zaldivar. In the high, singing voice of the robot it cried: “We are leaving this place. Almalik has lied to me. I hate him now.”
She lay spent and shuddering on the torn cushions, staring at the rogue. It said:
“I hate Almalik. Almalik thinks me small and helpless, and will destroy me if he can. But I am growing. I will grow still more. I will grow until I am mightier than Almalik.”
White and haggard in the dead opal light from the ancient cloud, the girl’s face had no expression. She lay hopeless and uncaring, waiting for what the rogue had to say.
“I shall destroy Almalik,” it sang in the robot’s clear whine. “Then you will love me, Molly Zaldivar. You must. Or I will destroy you too.”
TO BE CONCLUDED
Rogue Star
CONCLUSION
The rogue star was mightier than any living creature—but its enemy was a constellation of gigantic suns!
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE . . .
In the great monolithic universe of joined stars and men, ANDREAS QUAMODIAN, Monitor of the Companions of the Star, receives a message from the girl he loves and has given up hope of winning. Back on ancient, backwater Earthy MOLLY ZALDIVAR tells him that their mutual friend, and the man to whom Andy Quam believes he has lost her, CLIFF HAWK, engaged in secret and dangerous experiments. She believes Hawk is trying to create an artificial living organism, a “Rogue Star” which unlike the sentient and generally benign stellar bodies that make up most of the universe’s primary stars will use its enormous powers for disruption and destruction.
Quam hastens to join her. He manages through the transflection network which links worlds galaxies apart, making instantaneous travel possible between Earth and any other planet in civilization. He travels millions of parsecs in less time than it takes to cross a room. But on Earth his progress comes to a halt.
It is Starday. On backward Earth, where the symbiosis among men, fusorians and stars has taken the form of a ritualistic religion, this means nothing can be done. He cannot go to her. He cannot reach her by communicator. He cannot secure a guide. He can only wait.
But Molly Zaldivar hasn’t waited. Alone she has gone to the cavern in the mountains where Hawk and his partner, THE REEFER, a mysterious man from space, are conducting their experiments.
As she approaches the cave, she is terrified to see a SLEETH, a space creature the size of a horse, capable of traveling at enormous speeds by transflection methods, deadly as an interstellar space-destroyer, guarding the entrance. An explosion knocks her out and drives the sleeth away; Cliff Hawk and the Reefer find her and bring her into the cave.
Meanwhile Andy Quam has found some boys who tell him something of what has been happening with Molly Zaldivar. Unable to control his patience, Quam storms into a Starday meeting and demands that the monitor, a robot, help him. The robot refuses at first. But then, when three bolts of energy from the sun lash down and strike at the mountains where the cave is located, the robot relents and agrees to take Quam there.
It is almost too late. The danger Molly Zaldivar warned about has come to pass. The experiment has succeeded; a Rogue Star has been created . . . and it is now beyond human control.
Andy Quam and the robot go to the cave and find Molly and the Reefer injured but still alive. Cliff Hawk is dead. Worse, the rogue has absorbed Hawk’s personality into itself—and it does the same thing with the sleeth, the robot and many smaller beings. It is growing both in power and in knowledge with every moment.
But its growth is perverted and complicated. With the incorporation of what remains of Cliff Hawk into its own individuality, the rogue has acquired some of Hawk’s traits—human traits, incredibly out of place in a creature composed of a plasma of stripped electrons, brother to stars. It even finds itself drawn to Molly Zaldivar in a simulacrum of an emotion like love. It sends out its tool, the sleeth, to bring her back to its cave. Andy Quam tries to rescue her but fails; his flyer is brought down by the energies of the sleeth; his half-ally, the Reefer, is carried off by the rogue’s tools.
Meanwhile the rogue tells Molly of its love. Terrified and repelled, the girl calls it a monster—pathetically tries to trick it by pretending to return its love—but is discovered. The rogue learns another emotion: anger. It threatens to destroy Molly Zaldivar; she warns it that more powerful forces in the universe, like the sentient star, Almalik, will prevent it.
And the rogue determines to destroy Almalik and all the brotherhood of stars.
XV
Andy Quam landed his flyer before the control dome of the transflex cube and grated, “Control dome! Connect me direct with Headquarters of the Companions of the Star, Almalik three!”
“Your authorization, sir?” the control dome inquired politely.
“Fully authorized! Highest priority!”
“One moment, sir,” the control dome said doubtfully. But it did not refuse him. In a moment it said, “I am seeking your circuits, sir. There is a 200-second delay now estimated; will you wait?”
“Fire what’s left!” shouted Andy Quam, and slapped down the manual override, took control of the little flyer’s transflector beams. He spun them into high, reached out with their pale, deadly fingers toward the sleeth, which was growing huge before him, the second flight of flares dimming to darkness just like the first.
A sudden lurch threw him against the control panel. “Mal-function, Monitor Quamodian,” the flyer jerked out. “Pow-er fail-ure—”
The propulsion field was failing even as the reaching transflection beams were paling and dying. The greenish glow of the sleeth brightened suddenly; the flyer’s klaxon tried to blare, succeeded in rattling a crash alert.
“Hold on!” bawled Quamodian. “We’re going to hit—”
And they did; they hit hard, the emergency shields failing to function, hard enough to jolt men like dolls in a coconut shy, struck by a thrown ball. The sleeth roared over them and halted. It was a terrifying sight, horsesized, catlike, tapered muscles bulging under the sleek black fur. Blazing green, enormous and cold, its eyes bulged blindly out at them.
The Reefer pulled himself together and croaked. “They—they can kill us, Quamodian. Those eyes!”
Quamodian didn’t need the warning. There was something in those eyes that was reaching into his mind, freezing his will, icing his spine and muscles. He struggled to make his limbs obey him, and reached for the little hand weapon he kept under the seat of the flyer; but the icy, penetrating numbness had gone too far. He touched the gun, almost caught it, dropped it and sent it skittering across the tipped floor of the flyer; and the sleeth hung there, staring blindly down through the faint shimmer of its transflection field, just touching a fallen tree with one horrendous claw . . .
The great blind eyes seemed suddenly smaller. The frightful currents of cold that had drenched Andy Quam’s body seemed somehow to recede. He could not move, he was not his own master again; but at least, he thought, he was not dying helplessly any more; for some reason the creature had halted the poisonous flow of radiation that had drained the flyer’s power banks and nearly drained their lives.
The Reefer gasped hoarsely: “Knew it! Knew it couldn’t kill its master—” And incredibly, haltingly that big yellow-haired bear of a man was forcing himself to stand erect, lurching with agonizing slowness to the door, dropping to the ground and willing himself to stand erect again, next to the great sleek bulk of the creature from space.
And the forgotten radio speaker of the flyer abruptly rattled harshly and spoke: “Go away, Quamodian. I give you your life—but go!” It was the voice he had heard before, inhuman, unalive, terrifying. Andy Quam fell back, finally drained of the last of his strength. He saw the great talons of die sleeth curve protectingly around the Reefer, clasp him and hold him; saw the great creature surge into the air and away, carrying the Reefer as it disappeared with fantastic speed toward the gap in the hills where the faint smudge of smoke still hung.
And then he felt his flyer rock slightly, twitch, and then slowly and painfully lift itself into the sky. It was not at his order that it flew, but its destination was not in question. It rose to a few hundred feet, turned and headed back for the town.
The hunters had failed. One was now himself a captive, being borne at transsonic speeds toward the cave where the rogue flexed its new powers, practiced at its new repertory of emotions and grew. One was helplessly returning the way he had come. And the girl they had tried to rescue was farther from Andy Quam’s help than the farthest star.
Of one thing he was sure: He had been defeated. His mere human strength had not even sufficed to get him past the rogue’s puppet, the sleeth. He would have no chance against the might of the rogue itself.
XIV
The rogue, wearing the borrowed body of the robot inspector, sank slowly through the cold opal light of the great bubble under the earth. The refrigerated box of food, held lightly in its transflection Fields, seemed suddenly too heavy to carry, and the rogue let it drop.
It crashed to the seep-stained floor in a thunder that rolled around the cavern, and split open, the little particles of human food spilling out. The noise startled Molly Zaldivar. She looked up at the robot form, her face shocked and hollowed in that icy, lifeless light. A scream blazed through the echoing thunder.
For a moment, seeing the gleaming black egg-shaped body of the robot settling toward her, Molly had had the wild hope that it was the familiar robot inspector from the Starchurch, somehow come to rescue her, perhaps with Andy Quam right behind. But the hope did not last long enough even to show in the terror on her face. She got up stiffly, abandoning the useless radio, and climbed slowly down the spiral steps toward the bottom of the rock bubble.
The sweet high voice of the robot, modulated by the unpracticed mind of the rogue, spoke to her:
“Molly Zaldivar. Why did you speak falsely to me?”
She did not answer. There was a pause, while the rogue pondered its conflicting impulses. “I will not harm you,” it droned at last. “You need not be afraid. . . because I love you, Molly Zaldivar.”
Her face twisted, and she lifted her hands to the floating robot. “If you love me, won’t you let me go?” she cried.
“Because I love you . . . I can never let you go.”
She shouted with all her strength: “Then I hate you, monster!” Her voice was hoarse and despairing; despairing, too, was the angry green radiance that surrounded her in the sight of the rogue, colors and patterns that spoke to him of fury. It left her standing here and soared away, wheeling around the spidery tower. Suddenly it felt the clothing of the robot that it wore confining; it slipped out, left the robot hanging mindlessly on its transflection fields and, once more a nearly invisible cloud of stripped electrons, perched on the metal rails just below the pale, milky mist of light that hung in the center of the sphere.
It spoke to her through the robot: “Molly Zaldivar, I am strong and you are weak. Your hatred cannot harm me. True?”
She shook her head without words, utterly weary.
“But I will not harm you . . . if I can avoid it, Molly Zaldivar. We will stay here . . . until you love me.”
“Then I’ll die here,” she said tonelessly.
The rogue pondered the problem for many nanoseconds. It said at last, “Then I shall absorb you as you die. You will be a member of me, like Cliff Hawk.”
The girl said, weakly, fearfully then with gathering rage: “Oh please—you mustn’t! You say you love me—heaven knows what you mean by that!—but if it means anything at all to you, you must let me go.”
“Never, Molly Zaldivar.”
“You can’t keep me!”
“I can, Molly Zaldivar. I am stronger than you.”
She shrieked: “But there are things which are stronger! Almalik! Almalik is stronger than you. And he will find you yet, even hiding here.”
The rogue searched its memory patterns for a referent for the term “Almalik.” Almost hesitantly it said, “What is ‘Almalik’ ?”
“Almalik is the spokesmen star for Cygnus. Almalik commands multitudes—fusorians and men, robots and stars. His multitudes will find you, here or anywhere. And even if you were as strong as Almalik, you are all alone while he has legions!” The rogue’s plasma rippled in thought “I have met Almalik’s robot,” it said at last “It is now a member of me.”
“One robot! Almalik owns tens of thousands.”
The rogue did not reply. Thoughtfully it clung to the metallic rail of the cryptic old device, studying the girl. She was exhausted now, the green fire of her fury dying, waiting for a move from the rogue.
To the rogue, painfully learning the uses of those human qualities called emotions, Molly Zaldivar was a most confusing stimulus. There was enough of the residual identity of Cliff Hawk in the rogue to give force and direction to its feelings about Molly; it possessed attitude sets which could have been called “pity” or “love.” The rogue recognized that the girl was small, and weak, and mortal and afraid; it even felt some sort of impulse to ease her wild terror, heal her pain and rage. It simply had no effectors capable of the job.
At the same time it recognized that in a sense she represented a threat. The polarization of the other human, Andreas Quamodian, toward her was certain to produce an attempt on his part to interfere again. The rogue did not estimate that the attempt would be successful, but it might be an annoyance; it took the precaution of detaching some parts of its attention to invest its creatures the sleeth and the handling machine, deploying them as scouts between Wisdom Creek and the mountains.
But there were puzzles the rogue could not solve.
The answers to some of them were far from this cave. It detached itself from its high iron perch in the opal mist and left the girl, watching and trembling.
The rogue sent its awareness out into the universe. It sensed the tangle of dark hills above the bubble-cave, stretched, expanded and encompassed cubic miles of space with its consciousness. It observed the bright anger and fear of the human creatures from whom it had stolen the box of food, studied the sleeping presence of Andreas Quamodian, observed the deployment of its own tools, the sleeth and the machine; and it reached farther still.
It reached out until it grasped the roundness of the planet Earth, turning between its bare moon and the red, swelling sun, the sun that had struck at the rogue in those first moments of its existence.
The star was still angry, still roiled and troubled. The rogue studied it carefully, but avoided reaching out to it; it had not been harmed by that triple bolt of energy that had been the sun’s riposte, but it did not consider it advisable to provoke another.
The rogue expanded again, reached out its perceptions to the stars. It found them to be suns like this sun, single, coupled, multiple, burning all across the dust and darkness of the galaxy—some tinier than Earth’s cold moon, some mightier than Earth’s sullen sun. Even beyond the stars it peered, to find a bleak and empty vastness of infinite space and cruel cold. Then in the eternal floods of blackness it perceived the glowing, tiny lights of other galaxies. Ill-formed and unfearing, the rogue studied the numbers and varieties of galaxies for a time, then stored them in its memory and returned to nearer stars.
Almalik.
It was time for the rogue to probe into the meaning of the term “Almalik.”
There was no problem in finding Almalik; in the captured impulses of the robot inspector was a clear understanding of where Almalik lay in space, and the rogue turned its attention there.
And there was the might of Almalik, the splendor of his thirteen suns, all greater than the small Earth-star that had tried to destroy the rogue. It counted them, studied their spin, tasted the energies they hurled into the void. Six splendid double stars arranged in hierarchically greater doubles; one single sun with many wheeling planets. The thirteen suns radiated many colors in the optical bands of energies, but the rogue also saw that they shared a common golden glow of unity . . .
And Almalik felt the rogue’s fleeting touch.
Hello, little one.
Almalik did not speak. Least of all did he speak in words; but he sent a signal which was greeting and wry pity at once. The signal was powerful but soundless, serene and slow.
The rogue listened impassively, waiting for more.
Little one, we have been looking for you. The silent voice was mightier than thunder, gentle as—what? The rogue had only an imperfect analogy: gentle as love. We have received information about you. You have destroyed patterns we cherish. You have damaged entities who were part of us. Little one, what do you wish?
The rogue considered the question for some time. It framed an answer with difficulty: Knowledge. Experience. And then, after a pause, it added, Everything.
The multiple suns of Almalik glowed serenely golden; it was almost like a smile. From behind the round Earth, behind the many thousand stars and dust clouds, the signal came: Knowledge you may have. Ask a question.
The rogue asked it at once: Why will you destroy me?
The soundless voice was cool, aloof, immeasurably sure. Little one, we cannot destroy you or any sentient thing.
Green anger filled the rogue. It was a contradiction, Almalik’s statement opposed to Molly Zaldivar’s. It had not known of the existence of lies until Molly Zaldivar told it she loved it, then showed she did not. Now it knew of lies, but little of mortal error; the contradiction seemed to mean a lie: a lie meant enmity. Red hatred froze the rogue. Sudden fury shook its plasma violently.
It dropped from its great, tenuous vantage point, contracted to a swirl of luminescence, sank back into the mountain just as the planet was turning that part of its surface to the angry rising sun. The splendid suns of Almalik were gone. For a while.
The rogue floated down to Molly Zaldivar. In the high, singing voice of the robot it cried: “We are leaving this place. Almalik has lied to me. I hate him now.”
She lay spent and shuddering on the torn cushions, staring at the rogue. It said:
“I hate Almalik. Almalik thinks me small and helpless, and will destroy me if he can. But I am growing. I will grow still more. I will grow until I am mightier than Almalik.”
White and haggard in the dead opal light from the ancient cloud, the girl’s face had no expression. She lay hopeless and uncaring, waiting for what the rogue had to say.
“I shall destroy Almalik,” it sang in the robot’s clear whine. “Then you will love me, Molly Zaldivar. You must. Or I will destroy you too.”
TO BE CONCLUDED
Rogue Star
CONCLUSION
The rogue star was mightier than any living creature—but its enemy was a constellation of gigantic suns!
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE . . .
In the great monolithic universe of joined stars and men, ANDREAS QUAMODIAN, Monitor of the Companions of the Star, receives a message from the girl he loves and has given up hope of winning. Back on ancient, backwater Earthy MOLLY ZALDIVAR tells him that their mutual friend, and the man to whom Andy Quam believes he has lost her, CLIFF HAWK, engaged in secret and dangerous experiments. She believes Hawk is trying to create an artificial living organism, a “Rogue Star” which unlike the sentient and generally benign stellar bodies that make up most of the universe’s primary stars will use its enormous powers for disruption and destruction.
Quam hastens to join her. He manages through the transflection network which links worlds galaxies apart, making instantaneous travel possible between Earth and any other planet in civilization. He travels millions of parsecs in less time than it takes to cross a room. But on Earth his progress comes to a halt.
It is Starday. On backward Earth, where the symbiosis among men, fusorians and stars has taken the form of a ritualistic religion, this means nothing can be done. He cannot go to her. He cannot reach her by communicator. He cannot secure a guide. He can only wait.
But Molly Zaldivar hasn’t waited. Alone she has gone to the cavern in the mountains where Hawk and his partner, THE REEFER, a mysterious man from space, are conducting their experiments.
As she approaches the cave, she is terrified to see a SLEETH, a space creature the size of a horse, capable of traveling at enormous speeds by transflection methods, deadly as an interstellar space-destroyer, guarding the entrance. An explosion knocks her out and drives the sleeth away; Cliff Hawk and the Reefer find her and bring her into the cave.
Meanwhile Andy Quam has found some boys who tell him something of what has been happening with Molly Zaldivar. Unable to control his patience, Quam storms into a Starday meeting and demands that the monitor, a robot, help him. The robot refuses at first. But then, when three bolts of energy from the sun lash down and strike at the mountains where the cave is located, the robot relents and agrees to take Quam there.
It is almost too late. The danger Molly Zaldivar warned about has come to pass. The experiment has succeeded; a Rogue Star has been created . . . and it is now beyond human control.
Andy Quam and the robot go to the cave and find Molly and the Reefer injured but still alive. Cliff Hawk is dead. Worse, the rogue has absorbed Hawk’s personality into itself—and it does the same thing with the sleeth, the robot and many smaller beings. It is growing both in power and in knowledge with every moment.
But its growth is perverted and complicated. With the incorporation of what remains of Cliff Hawk into its own individuality, the rogue has acquired some of Hawk’s traits—human traits, incredibly out of place in a creature composed of a plasma of stripped electrons, brother to stars. It even finds itself drawn to Molly Zaldivar in a simulacrum of an emotion like love. It sends out its tool, the sleeth, to bring her back to its cave. Andy Quam tries to rescue her but fails; his flyer is brought down by the energies of the sleeth; his half-ally, the Reefer, is carried off by the rogue’s tools.
Meanwhile the rogue tells Molly of its love. Terrified and repelled, the girl calls it a monster—pathetically tries to trick it by pretending to return its love—but is discovered. The rogue learns another emotion: anger. It threatens to destroy Molly Zaldivar; she warns it that more powerful forces in the universe, like the sentient star, Almalik, will prevent it.
And the rogue determines to destroy Almalik and all the brotherhood of stars.
XV
Andy Quam landed his flyer before the control dome of the transflex cube and grated, “Control dome! Connect me direct with Headquarters of the Companions of the Star, Almalik three!”
“Your authorization, sir?” the control dome inquired politely.
“Fully authorized! Highest priority!”
“One moment, sir,” the control dome said doubtfully. But it did not refuse him. In a moment it said, “I am seeking your circuits, sir. There is a 200-second delay now estimated; will you wait?”
