Starshine

“ The wristlets, plus a relay on a set of controls to throw the Starshine into overdrive travel through space. The wristlets contained a morsel of hafnium, so that any previous psychographic record of them as individuals would no longer check with the psychogram a searchbeam would encounter. But also, on the first instant of convulsive contraction of muscles beneath the wristlets, they emitted a frantic, tiny signal. That signal kicked over the control-relay. The Starshine flung itself into overdrive escape, faster than light, faster than the pain-beams could follow. ”

“ Dona punched buttons on the Starshine's control-board. The ship lifted. The great black mass which was the night-side of the last planet faded behind and the Starshine drove on into space. And Dona turned back to Kim from her post at the controls.
"Now what?"
Kim stared at nothing, his features somber.
"It's bad," he said sourly. "There's the gang on Terranova. They're fair game if they land on any planet in the whole First Galaxy—and Terranova isn't self-sustaining yet. They'll starve if they stay isolated. There are the people on Ades. Sixteen millions of them. ”

“ Six weeks later, Kim Rendell eased the Starshine to a landing on the solitary satellite of the red dwarf sun Phanis. It was about four thousand miles in diameter. Its atmosphere was about one-fourth the density needed to support human life. Such vegetation as it possessed was stunted and lichenous. The terrain was tumbled and upheaved, with raw rock showing in great masses which had apparently solidified in a condition of frenzied turmoil. It had been examined and dismissed as useless for human colonization many centuries since. That was why Kim and Dona could land upon it. ”

“ Kim Rendell goes to the antique museum of Alphin III, which houses Starshine, an outmoded space-ship. He conceives the daring plan of using the Starshine to save his girl and himself from the dictators of Alphin III. In this world, teleportation of matter has taken the place of transportation from planet to planet, and solar system to solar system, via rocket and atomic-powered vessels. Nevertheless, Kim decides to steal the last space-ship from the antique museum and flee with his girl. ”

“ We need fuel for the Starshine if we're not to be stuck on this one planet forever. My guess is that somebody has come through the matter-transmitter from Ades to argue about it."
He moved to the edge of the terrace to watch the landing. Dona came and stood beside him, her hand twisting into his. The night was very dark, and the two small moons of Terranova cast no more than enough light to outline nearby objects. The house behind Kim and Dona was low and sprawling and, on its polished outer surface, unnamed Second Galaxy constellations glinted faintly. ”

“ Alarm-gongs clanged violently. The little ship hurtled past a monster at a bare two-hundred miles distance, and there was another giant a thousand miles off, and two others and a fifth and sixth....
The six ships drew together into battle formation. Their detectors, too, showed the Starshine. More, as other midgets flicked into being, returning from their raid upon the Empire, they also registered upon the detector-screens of the battle-fleet. ”

“ The transmitter-drive followed. The Starshine floated within a bare few million miles—perhaps less than one million—of a blue-white dwarf star, and the two humans in the ship were alive because they had between them and the sun's atomic furnaces, a planet some six thousand miles in diameter.
"We don't know how our velocity matches this thing," said Kim after an instant. "We could be drifting toward the edge of the shadow. You watch the stars all around. ”

“ He came back.
"He's stupid," he said shortly. "He knows what to guard, and the name of the plant, and where a workman may go to be received into employment. That's all. We'll try again."
The Starshine rose and moved. She was designed for movement in space, with parsecs of distance on every hand. She was unhandy when used as now for an atmosphere-flier. She descended within a factory quadrangle. There was no one about. Literally no one. The dwelling-units were occupied, to be sure, but no one moved anywhere.
When Kim opened the airlock there was a dull, grumbling rumble in the air. ”

“ Kim then sighted the Starshine on another distant target, and found the planet Arth, and dropped a small metal object into the depths of the humid and festering jungles along its equator. Human beings could live only in the polar regions of Arth. Then he visited a certain planet in the solar system of Tabor and a small metal case went twisting through deep water down to the seabed of its greatest ocean. ”

“ And there were at least half a dozen buildings, plainly factory units, which were more than ten miles in extent on each of their ground dimensions. When the Starshine was below the clouds, Dona focused the electron telescope on one of them and gestured to call Kim's attention to the sight. ”

“ For the first time in the history of the human race, other galaxies were open to the exploration and the colonization of men. It was probably possible for the cosmos itself to be circumnavigated in the Starshine. But its crew of two humans could find no planet of their own race on which they dared to land.
They approached Voorten II, and found a great planet seemingly empty of human beings. There were roads and cities, but the roads were empty and the cities full of human skeletons. ”

“ Hafnium from the one bit of machinery from the one beam-generator of an enemy war-craft, was extended to supply the engine-rooms of a thousand space-craft of the Starshine's design.
In a myriad other ways individuals worked at their chosen problems. Hundreds undoubtedly toiled to contrive a shield for the fighting beams—tuned to kill men only—which were the means by which Ades was to be devastated. The scientists of half a galaxy had tried that five thousand years before without success. ”

“ Dona smiled at him.
"There's one place yet. The Prime Board called us criminals. Let's look up the criminals on Ades. Maybe—and it's just possible—people who have mustered energy and independence enough to commit political crimes would be bearable. If we don't find anything there, why, we'll go to another galaxy, choose a planet and settle down. And I promise I won't be sorry, Kim!"
Kim made his computations and swung the Starshine carefully. He was able to center the course of the space-ship with absolute precision upon the sun around which Ades circled slowly in lonely majesty. ”

“ To the right, within a matter of a very few millions of miles, there was a cloud-veiled planet.
"At least we traveled," Kim said. "And a long way, too. Cosmography's hardly a living science since exploration stopped, but that star surely wasn't in the cluster we came from."
He cut off the alarms and the meteor-repeller beams which strove to sheer the Starshine away from the planet, as they had once driven it backward away from Alphin III. He touched a stud which activated the relay which would turn on overdrive should a fighting-beam touch its human occupants. ”

“ Back inside, she proceeded to anoint Sira's body, exclaiming her pleasure at its perfection. The oil smelled fishy, but it was soothing, and it was not long before the claimant to the throne of Mars was deep in restful slumber.
Late that afternoon the deacon returned and hung his nets up to dry. He was dour, his fever having left him. But he had a strange story to impart.
"I think that girl I picked up is the Princess Sira," he told the old woman. "On the fish buyer's barge, in the teletabloid machine, I saw the forecast of her wedding to Scar Balta. And I'll swear it's the same girl!" ”

“ The car took him out of the city, smooth and fast, and the great flare of Aldebaran sank toward the sea and dusk came on. The stars burgeoned and Trehearne looked up at them. He looked at the far faint spark of little Sol, and thought of Earth and of a changeling born there who had by a miracle won his way home.
That green and distant Earth knew nothing yet of the battle fought and won beyond the edges of the Galaxy. But it had been Earth's battle too and she would know of it in time. Even to Earth, when a generation had passed, the starships would begin to go openly. ”

“ Frances sprang on Starlight's back and went crashing through the woods. A dog sped by her, another. She heard a rider close behind, but she was still ahead; and then she and the dogs pulled up short before a narrow stream and a wall of tangled [Pg 49] vine-clad rocks on the other side. They had run the fox to earth, but he was safe. Even then she was glad.
The dogs were baying like mad about her, Starlight was in a lather of foam and breathing heavily, the loosened tendrils of her hair whipped against her scarlet cheek, her eyes were gleams of fire. ”

“ There never would be a white marble villa on Venus. It was a harmless dream, a substitute for what I had lost. But it didn't matter! Those superimposed patterns had been removed, that thoughtcaster had crippled my thinking, but, by Heaven, I was still an Amalgamated man! They couldn't take that away.
But Starza had been wrong about Carmody.
Nothing definite. But when you dedicate your life into extrapolating curves, frozen chunks of time and motion, into the thunder of jets lifting Amalgamated ships from Terminorb, your mind becomes a very efficient analogue computor, if you know how to use. ”

“ That gift I would sooner have, even accompanied as it is, than all the benign influences without it."
"Yet," said the astrologer, "shalt thou even there be met with affliction; for Saturn had the power to thwart the star Venus, that was disposed to favour thee, and evil may be the result of the love thou inspirest. There is one thing remarkable in our science, which is especially worthy of notice in thy lot. The ancients, unacquainted with the star of Herschel, seem also scarcely acquainted with the character which the influence of that wayward and melancholy orb creates. ”

“ The Saarga creaked and groaned and lurched her way deeper and deeper into the Cluster, touching like a tramp freighter at this port and that one, wherever there was trading to do and cargo to be had. Only her ports were planets, and her seas were the nighted gulfs between them. The memory of what had happened on the world of the variable star faded out of Trehearne's conscious mind, though he sometimes started awake in his bunk with the ghastly feeling of suffocation strong on him from a dream. ”

“ The "logs" that formed the stockade and made the walls of the warehouses were of crystal, cut from the crystalline forests that covered much of the land. Trehearne thought of them as trees and forests, simply because they had stems and branches, but they were inorganic, the glittering proliferation of sublimated alien chemicals. They glowed and flashed under the fierce green sun, showing glints of weird color where a prism formation broke the light. And also, in their shining branches, they netted the many-colored rays of the brighter stars that burned even in the daylight sky. ”

“ For example, the Sun conjoined with Aldebaran, Hercules, Antares, or any fixed star having the nature of Mars, threatens a violent death, or, at best, constant illness to the native. The Sun, with the Pleiades, Castor, Pollux, or Præsepe, shows a cruel and headstrong disposition in the native and the probability of violent death. The star Arista, with the Sun, gives great and lasting good fortune. All the stars of the nature of Saturn, conjoined with the Sun, bring calamity and disgrace. ”

“ Of course in cases in which colour is apparent to the unaided vision, only the brightest stars betray colour. Antares, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran are red (orange) colour. Sirius and Canopus are white. Arcturus and Capella are yellowish, so is Pollux. Vega is bluish-white. These appearances are, of course, much more marked when the stars are examined through the telescope, and telescopic stars—which are stars unobservable without a glass—are very much coloured, and the multiple stars give us blue, green, violet, and other tints, besides those already mentioned. ”

“ She sat down beside Roal.
"You're a stranger here." Her low, husky voice made it a statement, rather than a question.
"The dream of every spaceman is to visit Starhouse and hear Alayna, Queen of the Silver Stars, at least once before he dies."
"You're far from dead, miner."
"My good fortune in coming here so soon."
"Starhouse is a place of rest and dreams for weary spacemen. They all find their way here sooner or later." ”

“ Kearny seized me by an arm and pointed a tragic forefinger at a rather brilliant star that shone steadily about thirty degrees above the horizon.
“‘That’s Saturn,’ said he, ‘the star that presides over bad luck and evil and disappointment and nothing doing and trouble. I was born under that star. Every move I make, up bobs Saturn and blocks it. He’s the hoodoo planet of the heavens. ”

“ A large private yacht was slowly descending. She was bedecked with the green and gold bunting of the terrestrial government, the green and orange of Mars. Her hull glittered goldenly. [88]
"Back!" shouted the captain of a Martian guard detail, the soldiers running with pennant-decked ropes looping after them. The crowd surged against the barrier, but more guards were sent out as reinforcements, until they had cleared a space for the ship and a lane to the hall entrance.
"Mars greets the distinguished guests from our sister planet!" boomed the giant loudspeaker in the tower. ”

“ Examples might be multiplied, but there is not enough material at present available for a full discussion, and from what has already been said it is evident that the strontium stars constitute no ordinary absolute magnitude problem, although the condition that produces strong strontium lines in some dwarf stars may be something, like low surface gravity, that also prevails in stars of high luminosity. ”