Star Hunter quotes

Nahuatl’s larger moon pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl.

Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike-flowers on the top terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He understood.

And Hume hoped to any unseen watcher he presented the appearance of a man not impressed by stage settings.

After all he was now in the seller’s space boots, and it was a seller’s market.

Ras Hume rested his right hand on the table. Against the polished glow of the stone, the substance of it was flesh-tanned brown—a perfect match for his left.

“Agreed,” Hume returned evenly. “

But that one idea in a thousand can also pay off in odds of a million to one, when and if a man has it.

”

“Come, Out-Hunter Hume. We are both busy men, this is no time to play tricks with words and hints. Either you have made a find worth the attention of my organization or you have not. Let me be the judge.”

This was it⁠—the corner of no return.

But Wass had his own code. The Veep had established his tight control of his lawless organization by set rules, and one of them was, don’t be greedy.

This was it—the corner of no return. But Wass had his own code. The Veep had established his tight control of his lawless organization by set rules, and one of them was, don’t be greedy.

Wass was never greedy, which is why the patrol had never been able to pull him down, and those who dealt with him did not talk.

If you had a good thing, and Wass accepted temporary partnership, he kept his side of the bargain rigidly. You did the same—or regretted your stupidity.

“Ah, yes. The Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz combine incurred your displeasure. I see you are also a man who does not forget easily. And that, too, I understand. It is a foible of my own, Out-Hunter.

I neither forget nor forgive my enemies, though I may seem to do so and time separates them from their past deeds for a space.

”

“Excellent. Out-Hunter Hume, I salute a new colleague.” At last Wass’ right hand came up from the table. “

May we both have luck equal to our industry.

”

And he had wits enough to guess that the potion he had just swallowed contained some drug. Only now he did not care at all.

Anything which could wipe out in moments all the shame, fear, and sick despair the Starfall had planted in him was worth swallowing.

Why the other had drugged him was a mystery, but he was content to wait for enlightenment.

But this wasn’t happening! Of course, it couldn’t happen to him, Vye Lansor, state child, swamper in the Starfall. Things such as this did not happen, except in a thaline dream, and he wasn’t a smoke eater!

It was the kind of dream a man didn’t want to wake from, not if he was port-drift.

“Would you be willing to sign on?”

He felt, he thought painfully as he toasted the dry looking, grayish meat on a sharpened stick, as if a part of him knew very well what manner of animal he had killed.

And yet, far inside him, another person he could not understand stood aloof watching in amazement.

He was Rynch Brodie, and he had been traveling on the Largo Drift with his mother.

Now the sky above him was no longer a bowl of light, but rather a muted halo of evening. Rynch sat up, his heart pounding as if he had been racing to outdistance the rising wind now pushing against his half-naked body.

What was he doing here? Where was here?

Panic, carried through from that awakening, dried his mouth, roughened his skin, made wet the palms of the hands he dug into the sand on either side of him.

Then, puzzled, it withdrew to report. And since that to which it reported was governed by a set pattern which had not been altered for eons, its only answer was a basic command reaffirmed. Again it made contact, strove to carry out that order fruitlessly.

Where it should have found easy passage, a clear channel to carry influence to the sleeper’s brain, it found a jumble of impressions, interwoven until they made a protective barrier.

The invader strove to find some pattern, or meaning—withdrew baffled. But its invasion, as ghostly as that had been, loosened a knot here, cleared a passage there.

The lights in the bubbles went out one by one. Within the circle barrier of the force field men slept. And by midnight the rain began to fall, streaming down the sides of the bubbles, soaking the ashes of the fire.

Out of the dark crept that which was not thought, not substance, but alien to the off-world men.

But the barrier, meant to deter multi-footed creatures, with wings or no visible limbs at all, proved to be a better protection than its creators had hoped. There was no penetration—only a baffled butting of one force against another.

Deep in the darker woods on the mountain sides there was a stirring.

Things whimpered in their sleep, protested subconsciously commands they could never understand, only obey.

With the coming of dawn there would be a marshaling of hosts, a new assault—not on the camp, but on any leaving its protection.

Starns and Yactisi dropped back, though Starns was fussing with his tri-dee. Rovald caught up. He had drawn his ray tube in answer to Hume’s hand wave.

Any action foreign to the regular habits of an animal was to be mistrusted.

Getting to his feet Hume paced along the line of marks. They were fresh—hot fresh. And they still led in a straight line for the woods. With another wave of his hand he stopped Chambriss.

The Hunter shook his head. “You don’t kill,” he recited the credo of his Guild, “not until you are sure.

There is a method behind this, and method means intelligence.

”

The dark eye pits continued to stare. A light breeze ruffled the fuzz covering of wide shoulders, long muscular arms. Not a head moved, not one of those heavy, rounded jaws opened to emit any answering sound. Hume halted.

The silence was threatening, a portending atmosphere spread from the alien things as might a tangible wave.

For perhaps two breaths they stood so, man facing alien. Then Hume turned, walked back, his face set. Rynch offered him the ray tube.

Hume shrugged. “

Your guess is as good as mine. And both of us can be wrong.

”

It began as a low hum, hardly to be distinguished from the distant howling of the wind.

Then it slid up scale until the thin wail became an ululating scream torturing the ears, dragging out of hiding those fears of a man confronting the unknown in the dark.

Hume tugged at Vye, drew the other by force back into the brush. Scratched, laced raw by the whip of branches, they stood in a small hollow with the drift of leaves high about their ankles.

“

We aren’t dead. And as long as a man is breathing, and on his feet, with all his wits in his skull, he always has a chance.

I’ve blasted off-world with odds stacked high on the other side of the board.” He flexed that plasta-flesh hand which was so nearly human and yet not by the fraction which had changed the course of his life.

I’ve blasted off-world with odds stacked high on the other side of the board.” He flexed that plasta-flesh hand which was so nearly human and yet not by the fraction which had changed the course of his life. “

I’ve lived on the edge of the big blackout for a long time now⁠—after a while you can get used to anything.

”

He was at the final ring of trees. To get to the water he must descend again. A dead trunk extended over the water. If he could run out on that and lower the bulb, it could work.

Eerie silence. No flying things, no tree dwelling reptiles or animals, no disturbance of any water creature on the unruffled surface of the lake.

Yet the sensation of life, inimical life, lurking in the depths of the wood, under the water, bore in upon him.

Vye turned to look down the slope suspiciously. Had Hume another warning of menace out of the wood? He could sight no movement there.

And from this distance the lake was a topaz sheet of calm which could hide anything.

Hume was already several paces ahead, scrambling as if the valley monsters were again on their track.

Hume shook his head. “No, he’s no client. But he’s human.”

It narrowed down to that when a man was on the frontier worlds⁠—humans stood together.

Vye wanted to deny it, but his own emotions, as well as the centuries of age-old tradition, argued him down. Wass was a Veep, one of the criminal parasites dabbling in human misery along more than one solar lane.

To his surprise Hume laughed. “Seems all very far and out of orbit now, doesn’t it, Lansor?

Yes, our billion credit deal⁠—but that was thought out before we knew there were more players around the table than we counted.

I wonder. …”

“

I was still me⁠—as long as I stayed away from conditioning.

”

There was no difference in the scene below, save that where the two bodies of the blue beasts had lain there were now only clean and shining bones.

Darkness spread out from the lake woods like a growing stain of evil promise as the sun fell behind the peaks. Night came earlier here than in the plains.

“Watch!” Vye had been gazing down the gap; he was the first to note that movement in the cloaking bush.