Doomstar

"If we don't stop it."

"And if there is, in truth and fact, a weapon."

"This is what we have to find out. Is there a weapon — in truth and fact — and if there is, who has it, and where."

"That could take a long time."

"But we don't have a long time. Assuming that there is a weapon, we have only as much time as those who control it choose to give us. How long would you guess that to be?"

"Well," said Kettrick, with a small edge of venom in his good-natured tone, "I'm a little out of touch with your calendar, but let's see. There was a meeting of the League of Cluster Worlds just before I — ah — left the Hyades. So the next one should be…" He muttered and grumbled to himself. "This interstellar arithmetic always did give me a headache. Say the next meeting of the League will be within six units of Universal Arbitrary Time…"

"Close enough," Sekma nodded. "But why pick that particular event?"

"Because if I wanted to make a startling announcement, I would prefer to do it at a time when the representatives of the various solar systems were gathered together. Think of the money it would save in interstellar cables. Think of the vastly greater impact." Kettrick shrugged. "Of course, I'm only saying what I would do."

"It happens that we agree with that theory, Mr. Kettrick," said Vickers. He rose and stood before the fire, a professor with thin spread legs about to lecture his students. "Would you like a drink now?"

Again Kettrick said, "No, thank you." And he noticed that the eyes in that professorial face was flint-hard and flint-cold and direct as spear points.

"Perhaps," said Vickers, "you are beginning to understand why you're here?"

Kettrick shook his head. He still sat easily, apparently relaxed, in his chair, but the palms of his hands were sweating and his belly was full of hot wires.

"I'd rather have you spell it out."

Vickers nodded. "It's quite simple. We want you to go to the Hyades and find out what you can about the…" He hesitated very briefly before he said the word. "The Doomstar."

"Well," said Kettrick softly. "Well I'll be damned." He looked around, from Vicktrs to Fersen, from Fersen to Sekma. "Whose idea was this?"

"Not mine," said Fersen acidly. "I can assure you of that."

Sekma spread his hands in an eloquent gesture. "Johnny, who else knows the Hyades as well as you? You taught me at least a dozen places I didn't know existed, and I belong to the Cluster." He smiled. "You have a special talent, Johnny. The years I spent trying to catch up with you were the most exasperating and lively fun I've ever had. In my official capacity, that is. When it became obvious that we needed someone to undertake this mission, of course I thought of you."

Kettrick stared at him, eyes wide-open and astonished as a child's. "By God, that's magnificent," he said. "I'm not even angry, Sekma. Just awed." He got up, looking at Vickers. "I think I'd like that drink now."

"Help yourself."

There was a superbly stocked cellaret open and waiting. Kettrick poured himself a double shot and took it down neat, and felt the small explosion cancel out the rhythmic nerve stabbings in his middle. They were crying Danger! but he had already received that message loud and clear and the repetitive warnings were merely distracting.

He realized that Fersen was speaking.

"…myself clearly on record. I consider it an act of sheer insanity to send this man on such a mission. Suppose he did find this — thing. If it does exist. What would prevent him from simply appropriating it for himself?"

"Johnny is an honest man," said Sekma, "in his own way. And besides…" He swung his blue gaze to Kettrick, smiling sweetly, speaking softly. "He knows that if he did that I would kill him."

Kettrick grinned. "You forget, I could destroy your whole solar system the minute you showed your ugly face."

Sekma said, "It wouldn't save you."

And Kettrick knew that he was telling the truth.

"Well," he said, "it doesn't arise, because I'm not going. Get a Clusterer, Sekma…one of your own people. What do you want of an Earthman, anyway?"

"Not just any Earthman. You have another talent, Johnny. You get along with people, even people that aren't human. They like you. They trust you. And being an Earthman, you cut across all the lines. Any Clusterer, regardless of what world he comes from, has X number of enemies ready-made before he ever leaves home. We've had interstellar flight in the Hyades a lot longer than you've had it, and all the fools and knaves in the universe don't originate on Earth. You know all that, Johnny. I'm just repeating the explanation. Because of course that was the first question these gentlemen asked me."

"All right," said Kettrick. "And now I'll ask one." He faced them. Sekma, Vickers still standing before the fire and watching with his cold flint eyes, The Minotaur sitting with his heavy head bent over a drink, not speaking and apparently not even listening, Fersen stiff-spined and purse-mouthed as an angry dowager. The two astrophysicists had subtly withdrawn themselves from the fray, brooding over their particular nightmare.

"Sekma, you and the Department of Trade Regulation took my license away from me. You cost me close to a million credits. You barred me out of the Hyades. And for a year and a half after I came back here this pipsqueak Fersen sweated me up one side and down the other trying to find some excuse to throw me to Mr. Raymond, the well-known maneater, and sobbing his little heart out when he couldn't do it. I assume you know this, Mr. Vickers."

Vickers nodded. "I do."

"Then you tell me," said Kettrick quietly, "why I should bother to walk across the street to please any of you?"

Vickers glanced at Raymond, who said in a kind of offhand rumble, "Because you don't have any choice, Kettrick. If you refuse, I'll clap you under hatches so deep and for so long you'll forget what the sky looks like."

Fersen smiled venomously.

"On what evidence?" asked Kettrick. "I paid my fine, and that's as far as anyone was ever able to carry it."

"Oh," said Raymond, "there are ways and means. Of discovering new evidence, that is. Mr. Sekma and I have discussed them."

"Disgusting, isn't it, Johnny?" said Sekma. "Dishonest, cruel, quite revolting. We frame you, we force you, and all the time we know that we may be sending you to your death."

There was a look in Sekma's blue eyes that Kettrick had never seen before. It held him silent, even while anger shook him like a great hand. And Sekma said very quietly, "You will see that our need is great."

Kettrick turned abruptly and walked away from them all and stood for some time staring at a blank curtained window. Nobody spoke to him. After a while, when he could trust himself, he went back to them and said in a perfectly steady voice, "All right, throw me behind bars and be damned to you."

Fersen opened his mouth and said shrilly, "Hah!" or some similar noise, and Kettrick hit him, very hard, so that he doubled up and hung sideways over the arm of the chair.

"I'm terribly sorry," Kettrick said to Vickers. "I've wanted to do that for such a long time."

Fersen put his hands over his face and began to whimper. Vickers nodded to his aide, who went over and helped Fersen to the door, closing it briskly behind him. The aide returned, smiling briefly at Kettrick.

"As you say, a pipsqueak."

He sat down again, resuming his alert impassivity, guarding his master's briefcase like a well-trained dog.

Raymond looked at Vickers and shrugged. "It's all one to me."

Kettrick said, "If your need is great, you can do better than that."

"Such as?" asked Vickers.

"Reinstate my license. Let me free of the Hyades again." He turned on Sekma. "You can't force me, you ought to know that even if they don't. I'll go back as a free man, or I won't go at all." In the liquid speech that only he and the Clusterers understood, he added, "You cost me something more than money when you barred me out. I will not pay that cost again."