The Star Virus

I

Suddenly Rodrone understood why the scene before his eyes held such fascination for him, and why he returned again and again to worlds like this one. Lurid, offbeat and infernal, it offered the exaggerated symbolism of a painting rendered by a schizophrenic; and so drew him to that attractive realm of mental aberration where thoughts and actions could all be bizarre without feelings of shame…

The landscape had the combination of sharpness and gloom that typified an airless planet, and the grotesquely large ruby-colored sun gave it a gory glow in every shade from dark wine to cherry red. Except, that is, for the river of molten ore that slithered down the side of a nearby mountain like a writhing white-hot snake, lighting up the gloom for miles around.

The mining technique was crude but effective. A beaten-up space freighter, centuries old, hovered on its tail low over the mountain, using its main engines to direct a blast of nuclear heat that smelted the metal directly out of the lode.

Men in white spacesuits moved slowly along the banks of the metal river, gesticulating to one another. From his vantage point on the observation ledge of his spaceship, the Stond, they seemed like malicious little imps, eager to hurl one another into the deadly current to be swept along to where it cooled to a glowering red in the collecting bowl that had been blown out of the ground earlier.

A mile away stood the third ship of his expedition, the Revealer. Rodrone lifted a space helmet he carried and placed it over his head; not because he needed its protection—the ledge where he stood was covered with a shimmering transparent film that clung to the hull of the ship like a soap bubble—but because of the communications set it contained. Faintly through the tuned-down speaker, he could hear the men on the ground laughing and daring one another to edge closer to the white-hot stream and take a chance on its suddenly changing course.

He pressed a stud, putting him through to Kulthol down by the collecting bowl. By turning his head slightly, he could see the tiny screen inside the helmet; at the same time Kulthol’s sandy-haired, stubbled face sprang on to the plate.

“Anything?” Rodrone asked.

“Not an atom. We’re wasting our time.”

The molten stream was iron; but it was not iron they were looking for. Occasionally there occurred in ores of this type, on planets of this type circling suns of this type, silicon diamonds: denser and harder than ordinary diamonds and therefore useful industrially. With difficulty, they could be synthesized, but there was a steady market for the natural variety and Rodrone, against the judgment of his fellows, had decided to make a try. Kulthol was vainly sifting the molten metal through a detector grid for signs of the gems, and this was the third location in the past few hours.

“The iron’s good,” Kulthol remarked. “Maybe we could do business in that.”

“Forget it.” Iron was the commonest metal in the universe, and though there were rare times when its price in the metal exchanges made it just worthwhile to make deliveries, this was not one of them. “Pack up the gear,” he ordered. “We’ve done enough.”

The huge ungainly freighter, shaped like two squat towers locked together, swung away from the mountain and settled its creaking bulk on the plain. Rodrone turned his back on the scene, which a moment ago had almost sent him into a psychedelic trance, and entered the hull of the Stond. The ledge withdrew after him, and as the port closed, the air-containing bubble—which was in fact composed of liquid and maintained by pressure—collapsed and vanished.

He laid the space helmet down in an alcove and was confronted for a moment by a full-length mirror. Like many men whose uncertain temperament hid a secret vanity, he could not resist a second or two of self-contemplation. The image facing him was of a tall, spare man with dark skin and thick brown hair. A fringe beard framed a mournful countenance and made his sensitive, almost negroid lips and liquid brown eyes even more brooding, volatile, dangerous. It was the face of a vacillating dreamer, a wastrel and an adventurer. Even in space he wore a short black cloak and thigh-length boots to match the rich brown cloth of his other garments, and a small golden handgun was clamped to the front of his left thigh.

“No dice, eh?”

His revery was interrupted by a young baritone voice, and he turned to the figure who had entered the corridor from the other end.

“No dice,” he answered. The other laughed slyly.

Clave Theory was about twenty-five years old and in appearance seemed to be made of chalk. His flaxen, almost colorless hair was combed back to spread carelessly over his shoulders. His bony frame was clad in loose-fitting, puce-colored clothing, and his broad face was so pale as to seem consumptive, a deathly impression exacerbated by its expression: the eyes had a staring, glassy quality and the lips were habitually drawn back in a half-grin of sinister amusement.

But the deathly quality was belied by Clave’s easy, quick movements and his obvious health and liveliness. He would take an interest in anything and dare anything, the more outlandish the better. Rodrone liked him immensely, partly because despite Clave’s own picture of himself as an unwavering cynic he was in fact utterly ingenuous.

“We’ll probably have trouble from the bondsmen,” Rodrone said, following Clave into the roomy compartment at the end of the corridor.

“Well, I guess you can handle it.”

The trouble was not long coming. The chamber was one of several distributed through the Stond, sandwiched between the control room and engine and storage spaces. Egg-shaped and about thirty feet on the long axis, it was well furnished but suffered from the chronic untidiness of men living casually. Rodrone sat down and helped himself from a dish of bread and assorted meats, half-aware of voices and the clumps of heavy boots from below.

A door opened. A dozen men crowded through, some still wearing spacesuits, minus helmets. Others wore, on the breasts of tunics of coarse fabric, the insignia of the Merchant House of Karness.

They were led by a burly black-haired man with a look of sullen anger on his face.

“Don’t you know enough to leave your suits downstairs?” Rodrone said mildly. “What kind of house-training did they give you in Karness’s barracks?”

The man flushed. “Enough of that, Rodrone. We want a reckoning!”

“We don’t have a complaints department,” Rodrone said.

“When we joined up with you we expected a better deal,” another told him, struggling to get out of his suit. “After three months we’ve got nothing to show for it”

“Oh no? I observed that you seemed to be enjoying yourselves down on the ground. Like a bunch of damned kids.”

“Now look here,” the big man put in, his tone softening slightly, “there’s plenty of material to be picked up in this cluster. Titanium, gold and beryllium just lying there for the taking. Then there are the organics. It all fetches a decent price, and it only takes a little hard work and application.”

“Oh, so it’s work you’re looking for,” Rodrone sighed mockingly.

“It all fetches a decent price!” the other repeated, his voice rising. “But no, we go chasing off to planets not worth a damn. Ferr told you there would be no gems here”—he gestured to one of their number—“and so did your own man, Harver. So why in hell did we come here?”

“I like it here,” Rodrone replied in a maddeningly bored, affected tone. “Pleasant spot for a vacation.”

They glanced at one another with looks of disgust, then seemed to stiffen as Kulthol entered with one or two of Rodrone’s regular men. Kulthol cast a ferrety glance around the room, then walked across it to place himself strategically near one wall, from where he looked on with evident interest.

Rodrone sighed again, this time to himself. He could see what was coming. The malcontents had originally been bondsmen to the merchant house of Karness and had reneged to join Rodrone’s outfit at his last call on a Karness-dominated planet. Habitually careless as to whom he took on, he had accepted them without question.

In a way, their dissatisfaction was saddening. Reared as serfs in the service of their masters, their notions of how freebooter gangs like Rodrone’s operated were apt to be naive. They had expected to work to a steady schedule, mining metals and other minerals on unpopulated planets and selling them in the metal exchanges, feeding the trade network that extended indefinitely throughout the stars of the Hub. The idea of illegal operations against the merchant houses had probably not entered their minds, and they had certainly not reckoned on being under the orders of a wastrel who was little interested in work, who had set down on this planet by whim and merely used the search for silicon diamonds as an excuse.

In short, they believed in the orderly universe their former masters liked them to believe in. They did not understand the droves of individualists and misfits at large in the colorful, chaotic Hub worlds. Eventually, if Rodrone was right, most of them would crawl back to Karness and take their punishment. A few might stay free.

The spokesman was steeling himself for the final confrontation. “We want to pull out,” he said. “We’re setting up on our own.”

“Go ahead.”

“We need a ship.”

Rodrone paused, appeared to be considering. “Sure,” he said with a shrug. “You can take the old freighter.”

“Are you joking? We’d rot in that thing!” That was unfortunately true. Its ancient engines had broken down three times in the last month already, and Rodrone intended to scrap the old crate anyway.

“Three months spent with me hardly entitles you to make off with the Revealer,” he pointed out.

“We know that.” The black-haired man wiped his brow. “Name your price. We’ll lodge a promissory note with any bank you like and pay off within a stated period.”

“You forget you are renegade bondsmen and the banks might not accept your signature. Besides, I don’t wish to part with the Revealer. I am sorry you are so disappointed with your new life, gentlemen, and if you like I will set you free at our next port of call—even on a Karness planet, if that’s what you want.”

The man spat. “We’re not going back to Karness! We mean to take that ship!”

“A pity you couldn’t have come to the point sooner. Well, you know, there’s only one way to get it.”

As he spoke, Rodrone rose to his feet, calmly lifting both hands palms outward to a level with his stomach, as if in a placating gesture.

The bondsmen had probably counted on the fact that if it came to a fight they outnumbered all the loyal followers Rodrone had in the expedition. This was a situation into which most experienced freebooter captains would never have backed themselves, but which did not distress Rodrone unduly.

Automatically the men measured the distance between Rodrone’s hand and the gun on his thigh, at the same time keeping a nervous eye on Kulthol and the others ranging about them. All except Clave, that was. He was eating his meal, outwardly oblivious to the conversation.

As it happened, several already had weapons in their hands, in pockets or behind backs. But as they brought them into view the little golden gun on Rodrone’s thigh suddenly vanished and reappeared in his left hand with a slapping sound. All motions froze.

They stared, incredulous. Rodrone worked his magic trick again, reversing and re-reversing the magnetic control field between the plate on his thigh and the one attached to his wrist. The gun reappeared on his thigh, then flew back to his hand again, quicker than they could move or even see.

“My eye is as quick as my draw, gentlemen,” Rodrone warned them in a low voice.

“They can’t take us all,” growled the black-haired man. “Get them!” He fired, dropping to one knee.

He never rose again. The shot from his bullet-firing weapon zipped past Rodrone, but the thin beam from the freebooter’s tiny gun bored a hole through his skull.

At almost the same instant there was a deafening crash. A flashing shaft of pure energy burned a smoking hole in the wall behind the bondsmen.

Clave was standing, holding a two-handed beam tube before him. “The next burst takes you all,” he said affably.

Kulthol, lounging against a table, laughed.

The bondsmen could scarcely believe their eyes. The beam tube was hardly a weapon for use indoors. They looked at the gaping, still-hot hole, then at the body of their leader sprawled on the floor. Silently, sullenly, they threw down their weapons.

“That’s better,” Rodrone said, returning his gun to its place. “You have behaved very foolishly. Allow me to inform you that the penalty for mutiny, out here beyond the reach of law, is generally far more severe than anything you would suffer at the hands of Karness.”

“What are you going to do with us?” asked one, glowering and afraid.

“Nothing. Punishment bores me.” Rodrone flung himself on a couch, propping a booted foot on a low table. “You may decide for yourselves how you wish to spend the future. If you wish to remain with me, then you will have to accustom yourselves to my ways. Otherwise…” He shrugged. “There are other outfits more assiduous than we are in their search for an honest living. As most of you are trained technicians, in time you may no doubt find a place with them. However, I may as well tell you that I am not completely without plans for some acceptable pickings in the near future, and you can decide shortly whether my methods are really as distasteful to you as you currently imagine. Finally, let me say that it is a matter of complete indifference to me what you do. I don’t care if you end up as slaves of the Vine.”

They all shuddered slightly at the reference to the notorious Dravian Vine, a vegetable growth that secreted a pearly mist instantly addictive to a number of species, of whom man was one, after which they became suppliant servants possessing an eager rapport with the Vine’s wishes. Although lacking sentience in the true sense, the Vine had by one means or another succeeded in establishing itself on a number of worlds close to its planet of origin, and the number of men who spent their lives in its grip certainly ran into the tens of thousands.

“And by the way,” ended Rodrone, pointing with distaste to the floor, “please remove your friend. I’d also like you to repair the wall tomorrow. We like to keep things in good order.”

Saying nothing, the bondsmen picked up their dead spokesman and left the room. It had been very silly of them, Rodrone reflected, to heed the dead man’s counsel.

Kulthol all but spat. “Stupid groundhogs!” he said in contempt.

“Don’t blame them too much,” Rodrone answered absently. He had, he realized, been unkind. It would have been possible to handle the situation more compromisingly. The reason for his behavior was no doubt the contempt he shared with Kulthol for the huge Merchant Houses and the limited lives they imposed on all their serfs from birth to death. A man had to be a rough-hewn individualist to be happy in the loosely-gathered band around Rodrone. Because it was easy to enter did not mean it was easy to live with, and the bondsmen were bewildered. Oddly enough, it was their lifelong habit of obedience that made them rebellious now.

Shortly afterwards, a few others began to drift in, including some from the Revealer. They brought in the girls— another addition netted by a recent landing—and the atmosphere began to warm up. Wine was produced from somewhere. Pulsing music filled the air, and suddenly one end of the chamber dissolved into a three-dimensional picture screen showing wild, half-naked dancers that made the blood race.

The bondsmen did not put in an appearance. Rodrone watched for a short while, then smiled wryly, got up and left. He was in no mood for the orgy which the gathering would shortly become.

He withdrew to his private cabin and relaxed in its quiet, soothing atmosphere. Around him were his maps, his books on every conceivable subject—mostly science. A few scientific instruments were littered about, more for decoration than for any purpose they could serve here, and the smell of oiled steel mingled incongruously with the scent from a bunch of exotic pink orchids.

Rodrone was a man caught in an unstable tug of war between the poles of action and thought. Here he could sink into the latter state, brooding and dreaming, seeking to satisfy the cravings of his imagination by erratic dabblings in history and the sciences.

Idly he picked up one of his favorite tomes, a history of prehistoric Earth. It told of the drama of human nations in the confused period before interstellar flight, of Egypt, America, Pan-Asia. Turning the pages, he came to the lavish illustrations of Egyptian religion and gazed for the hundredth time at a picture that would never cease to hold him spellbound: the Barque of Millions of Years, carrying Ra and its crew of the lesser gods on a steady course through the universe.

Rodrone often wondered if the writer of the book, who seemed to have gained his information from haphazard sources, was not wrong in one major fact. Was it not more likely that the civilization of Egypt could have come after that of America, that is after the advent of spaceflight? The preoccupation with solar energy, the bright colors and stiff, stylized depictions of gods and cosmic processes did not belong on a world softened by a rich atmosphere and abundant biological life. They belonged here in alien space, light-years away from human populations, on an airless world whose sharp outlines stood out in a wash of lurid color. This, he felt, was the kind of universe the Egyptian myths understood; it seemed incredible to him that Egypt should have known nothing of other worlds while the Pan-Asian Commune, with its earthbound and totalistic philosophy, should have been the civilization to carry man’s activity into the galaxy before dissolving in its last determined effort to maintain mankind as a single political entity and prevent the explosion of its authority into a never-ending frontier.

There would never be such a thing as unity again… because of the Hub: the dazzling, star-packed swirl visible in every planet’s sky, offering such a plethora of worlds that the very concept of “world” had disappeared from men’s lives. Boundaries had not existed in the five hundred years since men came to the Hub and realized that the age of fences,was over. There were a billion places to go, and under such conditions regular authority became impossible. There were no nations. There were no governments except those partially attempted by the moguls of interstellar trade. It was a half-civilized age of free men, and there seemed no reason why it should not go on forever.

The outlying stellar districts of man’s origin, where stars were thinly spread and separated by tens of light-years, were forgotten as the Hub became man’s habitat. The location of Earth was not to be found on any of Rodrone’s maps.

The ensuing disorganization of human populations was increased by the fact that technology too had exploded and was no longer associated with an organized body of thought. Every man was his own engineer, his own technician, and numerous techniques existed locally which were not known generally. There were scores of different types of spacedrive, for instance. Such scientific contact as did take place was mainly due to men of Rodrone’s caliber—“fuzzy-brains,” to use an ambiguous term that meant execration in some quarters and grudging praise in others. The big Merchant Houses, always ambitious to coagulate political power, hated and feared such men; for while a simple adventurer caused little trouble apart from some rowdyism, and could always be depended upon to transport a cargo or escort it to ward off marauders, thinkers seemed to pose a perpetual threat to their unsteady power, especially if they were the half-hearted kind like Rodrone. To Rodrone, however, the Houses were a parasitic growth little better than the Dravian Vine. His reading of history had strengthened his natural distaste for political institutions of any kind.

In an earlier age he might have been a university professor or an academician. Today he lived by the strength of his arm and the quickness of his wits, and his knowledge in all directions was patchy and bizarre. But tonight he had promised himself a treat. He laid aside the book, pushing the colorful Egyptian gods from his mind, and took down an advanced text on physics heavily larded with mathematics.

But before taking the next step, he paused. There was a little job he wanted to do first. Moving to a servo-panel he made settings, bringing to life the transmitter in another part of the ship. His base on the planet Brüde was currently inside the ten light-year radius within which the space-tensor communicator worked instantaneously, and he had been waiting for a certain piece of news for several weeks now.

After about a minute the picture screen lit up to show an empty room bathed in the golden sunlight of a summer afternoon. Through the window opposite he could see a stretch of the crater floor where he had made his permanent camp for a number of years, covered with lilac grass and dotted with fruit trees. In the far wall of the crater gaped the cavern that he used as a hangar for his motley collection of spaceships.

A teenage face framed with golden curls slid into the screen in answer to his call. “Well?” Rodrone snapped.

The youngster’s hazel eyes flashed as he smiled languorously. “We’ve got what you wanted, Rodrone,” he drawled. “Crule came in with it this morning. Want me to lase you the store?”

Rodrone nodded. The youngster was speaking slang based on computer jargon. His words meant roughly “Shall I give you the griff.”

He disappeared for a few moments, then came back. “The planet is called Sultery, Kriga IV. It’s in a small town there on the edge of a desert. Maintown is the name of it; sounds like a lotta fun. Here are the coordinates.”

He lifted up a small plastic card printed with a string of figures and symbols. Rodrone leaned forward and pressed a button, recording the image.

“It’s in a building in the main street, supposed to be the Desert Trading Company. That’s a front, of course. I think they squeeze some kinda juice out of plants in the desert.”

“Crule didn’t go there himself?”

The other shook his head. “No, he did just what you said. It would have been too far, anyway. He’s outside somewhere. Do you want to speak to him?”

“Don’t bother, there won’t be time.” Instantaneous space-tensor communication always faded out after a few minutes, after which a period of hours or days was needed for the tortured space strains to smooth themselves out again. “We’ll be heading for Sultery. I’ll call again later.”

Cutting the connection, he leaned back, feeling a warm glow of anticipation at the good news. Although he also engaged in legitimate mining operations, his preferred activity was to hold up freight ships in space and force their captains to sell their cargoes at rates highly favorable to himself. If he was in a particularly impatient mood, he took their cargoes for nothing.

The finesse lay in not coming too much to the attention of the Guild of Merchant Houses. They found it difficult to protect their shipments and almost impossible to trace where they went after requisition. But if their losses became too troublesome, they would sometimes mount heavily-armed expeditions of war to hunt down a suspected pirate.

The difficulty for a marauder was in knowing what cargoes would be going where at what time. Rodrone had hit on the idea of getting his information at source, from the Houses’ own computer records. His early investigations had soon revealed, however, that the Houses were already alert to this possibility; they kept their information in out-of-the-way places whose locations were known to only a few. Crule, Rodrone’s master con-man, had spent six months as a spy in the Jal-Dee household to find out where this one was.

But now for the pleasurable experience he had promised himself. It was a very cerebral pleasure. Normally the book that lay on his table would have been all but unintelligible to him. His way of thinking was too ephemeral, his interests too widely scattered for concentrated study. That was why he had recourse to the drug DPKL-59. It brought on enhanced consciousness, coupled with such a fantastic heightening of comprehension that meaning glowed at him from equations that otherwise would have left him baffled. So speeded up was his thought that he could race through a book of this kind at twenty times his natural pace.

Afterwards he often understood little of what he had read. But meantime he had the experience of plumbing mysteries and entering extraordinary realms of the intellect, and the flavor of that experience stayed with him.

“Genius in a bottle,” he murmured to himself, taking a little phial of the drug from a locked cabinet. As he poured it carefully into a pressure injector, his mind went back momentarily to the disappointed bondsmen. They were unlucky, he reflected, to have got caught up in his affairs. Rodrone, for all his introspection, had never been sure whether to sum himself up as an unusually strong man or an unusually weak one, for though he was given some sort of allegiance by enough men to man a whole squadron of ill-assorted ships, that was no criterion; men of their sort tended to congregate around the most unlikely characters. He often had the feeling that there was no aim to his leadership, that in the end his willfulness would send the men who trusted him to irrevocable disaster.

But he was not one to feel regret or guilt about his shortcomings. Tomorrow they would set out for Sultery and action. For now, there was the heady delight of thoughts he had never before experienced. With a slight hiss the injector sprayed the drug in a high-pressure mist that penetrated the skin of his wrist and mingled with his bloodstream. His senses reeled; he went hurtling deep down into a fever of mystic abstraction where bodiless intelligence was lord of all.