Star Born | Page 5

him. It was then that he saw it...
An arrow of fire streaking across the black bowl of Astra's night sky. A light so vivid, so
alien, that it brought him to his feet with a chill prickle of apprehension along his spine.
In all his years as a scout and woodsman, in all the stories of his fellows and his elders at
Homeport -- he had never seen, never heard of the like of that!
And through his own wonder and alert alarm, he caught Sssuri's added puzzlement.
"Danger--" The merman's verdict fed his own unease.
Danger had crossed the night, from east to west. And to the west lay what they had
always feared. What was going to happen now?
2
PLANETFALL
RAF Kurwi, flitter pilot and techneer, lay on the padded shock cushion of his assigned
bunk and stared with wide, disillusioned eyes at the stretch of stark, gray metal directly
overhead. He tried to close his ears to the mutter of meaningless words coming from
across the narrow cabin. Raf had known from the moment his name had been drawn as
crew member that the whole trip would be a gamble, a wild gamble with the odds all
against them. RS 10 -- those very numbers on the nose of the ship told part of the story.
Ten exploring fingers thrust in turn out into the blackness of space. RS 3's fate was
known -- she had blossomed into a pinpoint of flame within the orbit of Mars. And RS 7
had clearly gone out of control while instruments on Terra could still pick up her
broadcasts. Of the rest -- well, none had returned.
But the ships were built, manned by lot from the trainees, and sent out, one every five
years, with all that had been learned from the previous job, each refinement the engineers
could discover incorporated into the latest to rise from the launching cradle.
RS 10 -- Raf closed his eyes with weary distaste. After months of being trapped inside
her ever-vibrating shell, he felt that he knew each and every rivet, seam, and plate in her
only too well. And there was no reason yet to believe that the voyage would ever end.
They would just go on and on through empty space until dead men manned a drifting
hulk-

There -- to picture that was a danger signal. Whenever his thoughts reached that
particular point, Raf tried to think of something else, to break the chain of dismal
foreboding. How? By joining in Wonstead's monologue of complaint and regret? Raf had
heard the same words over and over so often that they no longer had any meaning --
except as a series of sounds he might miss if the man who shared this pocket were
suddenly stricken dumb.
"Should never have put in for training--" Wonstead's whine went up the scale.
That was unoriginal enough. They had all had that idea the minute after the sorter had
plucked their names for crew inclusion. No matter what motive had led them', into the
stiff course of training -- the fabulous pay, a real interest iri the project, the exploring
fever -- Raf did not believe that there was a single man whose heart had not sunk when he
had been selected for flight. Even he, who had dreamed all his life of the stars and the
wonders which might lie just beyond the big jump, had been honestly sick on the day he
had shouldered his bag aboard and had first taken his place on this mat and waited, dry
mouthed and shivering, for blast-off.
One lost all sense of time out here. They ate sparingly, slept when they could, tried to
while away the endless hours artificially divided into set periods. But still weeks might be
months, or months weeks. They could have been years in space -- or only days. All they
knew was the unending monotony which dragged upon a man until he either lapsed into a
dreamy rejection of his surroundings, as had Hamp and Floy, or flew into murderous
rages, such as kept Morris in solitary confinement at present. And no foreseeable end to
the flight --
Raf breathed shallowly. The air was stale, he could almost taste it. It was difficult now to
remember being in the open air under a sky, with fresh winds blowing about one. He tried
to picture on that dull strip of metal overhead a stretch of green grass, a tree, even the
blue sky and floating white clouds. But the patch remained stubbornly gray, the murmur
of Wonstead went on and on, a drone in his aching ears, the throb of the ship's life beat
through his own thin body.
What had it been like on those legendary early