Waiting for Molly's reply, he scowled impatiently. He knew that his signal was already reaching the far-off Earth, as its invisible impulses automatically sought the shortest route along the transcience links between the shifting convolutions of hyperspace, where long light-years were reduced to micromicrons.
The plasma tongue finished and vanished, leaving the message panel blank. The speaker clicked off. The house hummed quietly around him, hushed and tense. He walked the floor around the speaker, watching the flickering symbols of the universal clock.
Panic whispered that Molly wouldn't want him. Not without Scott. She knew that little Andy Quam had never been an actual member of the Exion research staff, but just a sort of guinea pig. Scott had brought him along to test a hunch that his odd location sense was a transcience effect, but dropped him from the project when the rogue star research became more exciting . . .
"Monitor Quamodian!" The machine's droning tone startled him. "We have a status report on your transgalactic message."
"What-what does Molly say?"
"There's no answer, sir. We can't contact the addressee."
"Why not?" His voice cracked. "Has something happened to Molly Zaldivar?"
"We have no information, sir."
"Take another message." He tried to swallow the squeaky quaver in his voice. "To Molly Zaldivar. Same address. Message follows: On my way to Earth. Sign it, Andy Quam."
. Hurried but methodic, Quamodian prepared for his trip to Earth. He called his supervisor for emergency leave, left instructions with the speaker for care of the house, and asked the flyer to stand by. His spirits soared with the levitator which lifted him to the roof pad, but fell again as he stepped outside.
As always happened whenever he left his cybernetic shell, Exion gave him a queasy shock of dislocation. The place was too far from all the other worlds he knew, too alien to any sort of life. Some freak of cosmic chance had flung the triple star far outside the galactic cluster, and the university had chosen it for the research site because no spark of native life or sentience had ever appeared on any of its bodies.
The station staff had reclaimed and terraformed its twelve dead planets to fit their several ways of life. Those sister worlds were strung across the black sky now, like beads on an unseen string, each aglow with the color of its own synthetic biosphere: supercold liquid helium, frigid methane, hard vacuum, hot carbon dioxide, boiling sulphur.
Exion Four was for the oxygen-tolerant. The human habitat where he lived was only a hasty afterthought—a cragged scrap of crater floor, temporarily pressurized, heated, and humidified enough to allow human survival. Still too thin and cold, its artificial atmosphere was always tainted with hydrocarbons and ammonia escaping from the rocks. Too small to seem like home, the planet turned too slowly.
Shivering, Quamodian hunched himself against the bitter oxy-helium wind. Fighting that first giddy shock of disorientation, he stopped to search that queer sky above the crater cliffs. A tight constriction in his chest relaxed when he found the galaxies—a fuzzy patch of pale light, bitten off by the southward cliffs, fainter than the dimmest planet of Exion.
"Ready, sir?" The flyer opened itself. "Where to, sir?"
"To the regional transport center." He scrambled inside. "I'm in a rush."
The flyer climbed until the violet dwarf peered over the saw-toothed east horizon, dropped back into the dark, and settled toward the lighted ramp outside the transflex cube. The control dome flashed a signal.
"Identification, sir?"
He let the flyer hover while he recited his standard voice pattern and sorted out the documents of his citizenship. The dome extended a long, nimble finger of pale plasma to scan his passport disk, with its endless rows of binary symbols and its holograph of his dark, round head.
"Destination, sir?"
"Earth. That's-wait just a second-that's planet 3, Star 7718, Sector Z-989-Q, Galaxy 5. Route me through the Wisdom Creek station, Octant 5. I'm on emergency business. I need passage at once."
The plasma tendril winked out. Quamodian caught the passport disk as it dropped, stowed it away, then resumed his inching crawl toward the luminous iris of the transflex cube. A long silver tank, no doubt filled with a liquid citizen, was vanishing through the closing gate. Behind it came a multiple creature, a horde of small, bright, black things, hopping and tumbling inside a communal cloud of pale blue mist. A gray-scaled dragon shuffled just ahead of Quamodian, burdened with a heavy metal turret on its back that probably housed unseen symbiotes. Winking crystal ports in the turret peeked out at Quamodian and shyly closed again.
"Sir?" The control dome flashed again. "Have you a reservation number?"
"Great Star!" Impatience exploded in him. "I've got to reach Earth at once. I just received an emergency call. I had no time to arrange a reservation."
"Sorry, sir." The dome's droning regret seemed entirely mechanical. "Intergalactic travel is restricted, as you should know. We cannot approve transit without a reservation based on acceptable priority."
Grumbling, he held up the message from Molly Zaldivar. The slim plasma finger reached down to scan it, hesitated, recoiled.
"Sir, that document is not in the universal language."
"Of course not," he snapped. "It's English. But it ought to be priority enough. Just read it!"
"We have no equivalence data for English, sir."
"Then I'll translate. It's from Earth—that's the mother planet of my race. The sender is a girl—I mean, a youthful female human creature-named Molly Zaldivar. Her message is addressed to me. She's begging for help. She gave the message an urgency index that implies danger to the whole planet. .
"Sir!" Ahead of him, the multiple creature had disappeared into the transflex cube. The dragon was lumbering toward the opening iris. "You're delaying transit. I must ask for an actual reservation number now."
"But this is my priority!" He waved the yellow scrap of transfac tape. "Molly Zaldivar is in some kind of trouble with a rogue star. .
"Sir, that is not an acceptable priority. Please leave the ramp."
"Confound you!" Quamodian shouted. "Can't you get anything through your neuroplasmic wits? This message implies a danger to the whole human race!"
"Sir. The human race is identified in my files as a little breed of barbarians, just recently admitted to the galactic citizenship and still devoid of interesting traits, either physical, moral, or intellectual. No human being is authorized to issue priority for interstellar travel."
"But Molly says we're in danger. . ."
"Sir, please leave the ramp. You may apply to any acceptable source for a transit priority, on the basis of which we can issue you a reservation number."
"I have no time for that. . ."
The dome signaled no reply, but ominously the plasma tendril thickened and began to spread.
"Wait!" Quamodian cried desperately. "I'm a member of the order of Companions of the Star! Surely you know of them. Our mission is to protect humanity, and other races, too."
"My indices do not show any authorization issued to you for this journey by the Companions of the Star, sir. You are holding up traffic. Please move off the ramp."
Quamodian glanced bleakly at the citizen crowding up behind him: forty tons of sentient mineral, granite-hard, jagged and black, afloat on its own invisible transflection field and impatiently extending its own passport at the tip of a blue finger of plasma.
"Don't shove, Citizen!" he barked. "There's been a misunderstanding. Listen, Control. Check your records. We humans are allied to the multiple citizen named Cygnus, which is a symbiotic association of fusorians, stars, robots, and men. Its chief star is Almalik—or don't you find sentient stars any more interesting than men?"