Even after five years, Quamodian scowled at the thought of Hawk.
He was a rogue in the society of men, stranger than any alien at the research station, solitary, brooding, angry. He seldom washed, seldom combed his shaggy black hair, seldom spoke a civil word. Yet somehow Molly had chosen him.
Waiting now for the machine to steam and rise and dry and clothe him, Quamodian darkly pondered Hawk. Both human, both had drifted all the way from Earth to Exion, this farthest outpost star of the whole galactic cluster. But they were different in nearly every other way.
Before the fusorians came, Quamodian's commonplace parents had toiled for their living in a commonplace clothing shop in a commonplace city, but Hawk's ancestors were bold outlaws who roved the reefs of space and defied the old interplanetary empire called the Plan of Man. Muddling through his dull career, Quamodian had relied on logic and method and sheer persistence. Scornful of everything systematic and academic, Hawk played brilliant hunches. A half-trained technician, he had finally challenged Scott for leadership of the stellar project. Though he sometimes lacked the words to frame his daring intuitions, they were usually correct.
Hawk loved Molly Zaldivar—carelessly and roughly, certain that she would sacrifice her own career for any of his whims. Quamodian worshipped her more humbly—always aware that he was only plodding little Andy Quam. When the time came for Molly to choose, she really hadn't a choice. Of course she took the dark, dangerous man who knew the borderlands of space.
Her choice was not surprising, though the actual sequence of events still puzzled Quamodian. Hawk had somehow quarreled with Dr. Scott about the direction of their efforts in the stellar section to contact rogue stars. When Scott won their final battle, Hawk disappeared, leaving Molly behind.
After a few unhappy months, Molly was willing to sing her sad ballads to Quamodian. That was when he planned the cybernetic house to share with her. Before it was finished, she heard from Hawk. Just what she heard, Quamodian had never learned. The news, whatever it was, had seemed to bring her more terror than gladness. Yet, without explaining anything, she left at once to follow Hawk.
Now, five years later, her abrupt departure was still a painful riddle to Quamodian. It kept throbbing like a bad tooth, something he could neither understand nor forget.
"Ready, sir?" the machine droned. "Up you come!"
With a peristaltic tjirust, the floatation field popped him out of his warm cocoon. He swayed for a moment, adjusting to the planet's gravity, and turned to the speaker.
"Okay," he said. "I'll take the message."
"Standard voice identification is required, sir."
"Great Star! You know who I am."
"But you know our procedures, sir," the speaker said. "The full standard voice identification pattern is required before delivery of all transgalactic communications."
"Ridiculous!" he muttered. "Silly red tape."
The machine hummed quietly inside its black synthetic skin. With a scowl of annoyance, he caught his breath and recited the formula:
"Name: Andreas Quamodian. Race: Human. Birthplace: Earth—correction, that's Planet 3, Star 7718, Sector Z-989-Q, Galaxy 5. Organization: Companions of the Star. Status: Monitor. Address: Human habitat, Exion Four, Exion Extragalactic Research Station."
"Thank you, Monitor Quamodian."
The machine clicked and ejected a narrow strip of yellow film. He snatched it eagerly, and peered to see who it was from. Molly Zaldivar!
"Dear Andy—" The film began to quiver in his sweaty fingers. "I hope you can forgive me for leaving you so rudely, because I'm in desperate trouble here on Earth. It's all too complicated to explain by transfac, but I need your help because the Companions here don't believe in rogue stars . . ."
Rogue stars! The phrase brought Quamodian to a painful halt. He wanted Molly to be sending for him because she'd decided that she loved him after all. Not for any other reason.
Besides, he didn't really understand rogue stars. Neuroplasmic theory was familiar to him in an academic way. Theoretically, he knew how the sentient stars perceived, remembered, thought, and acted—how mass effects induced transcience energy, how bits of information were stored in states of electron spin, how scanning waves flowed through chains of elections in transflex contact, how transcience impulses induced magnetic and electrical and gravitic effects. He respected their tremendous minds, the most retentive and most complex in all the galaxies. He felt a vast admiration for the mellow wisdom of Almalik, the stellar component of the symbiotic citizen that so many human beings had joined. But the rogue stars were something else.
Given its unthinkable intelligence and power, how could a stellar being refuse all fellowship with any other mind? What sort of obsession or psychosis could cause it to close all communication and choose to go its own lonely way?
Quamodian had often listened to debates about that riddle, which was among the basic research problems of Exion Station. He had even discussed it with Molly and Cliff Hawk, in Scott's graduate seminars. He had never heard an answer that made real sense.
"Are you ready to reply, sir?" the speaker was purring. "The sender wants an answer."
"Wait," he said. "Let me finish."
"If you have ever wondered what became of me," the transfac continued, "Cliff Hawk asked me to join him here on Earth. I came because I love him—Andy, I can't help that. I came because I was afraid of what he might be doing here. And I've just discovered that he's doing what I feared. He has learned too much about rogue stars—or maybe too little. Andy, would you believe he's trying now to create a rogue of his own? I need help to stop him.
"Here's what you must do, dear Andy. Get Solo Scott—Hawk's old enemy. I don't know where he is—I tried to reach him at his old address in the stellar section, but he didn't reply. Andy, I want you to find him and bring him to Earth. He's the great rogue star specialist. He'll be able to stop Cliff—and Cliff's dangerous new rogue—if anybody can.
"But hurry, Andy! This is a terrible thing, and I have no hope but you."
Quamodian finished reading with a tired little sigh. Molly's feelings for him hadn't changed, after all. He was still only Andy Quam, a useful little tool when she happened to need him.
"Now, sir?" the speaker droned impatiently. "Will you reply?"
"First," he said, "I want to make a local call. To Dr. Solomon Scott. He used to be director of the stellar section, here on Exion Four."
"Yes, sir." The speaker hummed silently for three seconds. "Sorry, sir," it purred. "Dr. Scott is not available. He left Exion four years ago on a research expedition from which he did not return. He is presumed dead, sir."
"That's too bad," Quamodian said, but a thrill of irrational hope was tingling through him. If Scott was not available, he could go to Earth alone. Little Andy Quam might at last become Molly's rescuing hero! He caught his breath. "Send this answer:
"Dearest Molly, I want to help you but I have bad news. I can't bring Scott. He left Exion Station a year after you did. He was attempting a transflection flight to the vicinity of a rogue—the same one Cliff had discovered, out beyond Exion. He never got back.
"But I'll come, Molly. Because I still love you—in spite of everything. If you want just me, answer at once. I'll get there as soon as I can.
"End of message."
His words flickered across the visual panel as the speaker read them back. He snatched a light-pen and scribbled, "Your devoted Andy," before the small blue tongue of plasma began to lick the symbols away, storing them as variances in electronic spin.