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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Stars, My Brothers, by Edmond Hamilton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Stars, My Brothers
+
+Author: Edmond Hamilton
+
+Illustrator: Virgil Finlay
+
+Release Date: March 18, 2008 [EBook #24870]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STARS, MY BROTHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE STARS,
+ MY BROTHERS
+
+ By
+ EDMOND
+ HAMILTON
+
+ Illustrated by FINLAY
+
+
+ _He was afraid--not of the present or the future,
+ but of the past. He was afraid of the thing
+ tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless
+ thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon,
+ companion to dead worlds and silent space._
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+1.
+
+Something tiny went wrong, but no one ever knew whether it was in an
+electric relay or in the brain of the pilot.
+
+The pilot was Lieutenant Charles Wandek, UNRC, home address: 1677
+Anstey Avenue, Detroit. He did not survive the crash of his ferry into
+Wheel Five. Neither did his three passengers, a young French
+astrophysicist, an East Indian expert on magnetic fields, and a
+forty-year-old man from Philadelphia who was coming out to replace a
+pump technician.
+
+Someone else who did not survive was Reed Kieran, the only man in Wheel
+Five itself to lose his life. Kieran, who was thirty-six years old, was
+an accredited scientist-employee of UNRC. Home address: 815 Elm Street,
+Midland Springs, Ohio.
+
+Kieran, despite the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor, was in Wheel
+Five because of a woman. But the woman who had sent him there was no
+beautiful lost love. Her name was Gertrude Lemmiken; she was nineteen
+years old and overweight, with a fat, stupid face. She suffered from
+head-colds, and sniffed constantly in the Ohio college classroom where
+Kieran taught Physics Two.
+
+One March morning, Kieran could bear it no longer. He told himself, "If
+she sniffs this morning, I'm through. I'll resign and join the UNRC."
+
+Gertrude sniffed. Six months later, having finished his training for the
+United Nations Reconnaissance Corps, Kieran shipped out for a term of
+duty in UNRC Space Laboratory Number 5, known more familiarly as Wheel
+Five.
+
+Wheel Five circled the Moon. There was an elaborate base on the surface
+of the Moon in this year 1981. There were laboratories and observatories
+there, too. But it had been found that the alternating fortnights of
+boiling heat and near-absolute-zero cold on the lunar surface could play
+havoc with the delicate instruments used in certain researches. Hence
+Wheel Five had been built and was staffed by research men who were
+rotated at regular eight-month intervals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kieran loved it, from the first. He thought that that was because of the
+sheer beauty of it, the gaunt, silver deaths-head of the Moon forever
+turning beneath, the still and solemn glory of the undimmed stars, the
+filamentaries stretched across the distant star-clusters like shining
+veils, the quietness, the peace.
+
+But Kieran had a certain intellectual honesty, and after a while he
+admitted to himself that neither the beauty nor the romance of it was
+what made this life so attractive to him. It was the fact that he was
+far away from Earth. He did not even have to look at Earth, for nearly
+all geophysical research was taken care of by Wheels Two and Three that
+circled the mother planet. He was almost completely divorced from all
+Earth's problems and people.
+
+Kieran liked people, but had never felt that he understood them. What
+seemed important to them, all the drives of ordinary day-to-day
+existence, had never seemed very important to him. He had felt that
+there must be something wrong with him, something lacking, for it seemed
+to him that people everywhere committed the most outlandish follies,
+believed in the most incredible things, were swayed by pure
+herd-instinct into the most harmful courses of behavior. They could not
+all be wrong, he thought, so he must be wrong--and it had worried him.
+He had taken partial refuge in pure science, but the study and then the
+teaching of astrophysics had not been the refuge that Wheel Five was. He
+would be sorry to leave the Wheel when his time was up.
+
+And he was sorry, when the day came. The others of the staff were
+already out in the docking lock in the rim, waiting to greet the
+replacements from the ferry. Kieran, hating to leave, lagged behind.
+Then, realizing it would be churlish not to meet this young Frenchman
+who was replacing him, he hurried along the corridor in the big spoke
+when he saw the ferry coming in.
+
+He was two-thirds of the way along the spoke to the rim when it
+happened. There was a tremendous crash that flung him violently from his
+feet. He felt a coldness, instant and terrible.
+
+He was dying.
+
+He was dead.
+
+The ferry had been coming in on a perfectly normal approach when the
+tiny something went wrong, in the ship or in the judgment of the pilot.
+Its drive-rockets suddenly blasted on full, it heeled over sharply, it
+smashed through the big starboard spoke like a knife through butter.
+
+Wheel Five staggered, rocked, and floundered. The automatic safety
+bulkheads had all closed, and the big spoke--Section T2--was the only
+section to blow its air, and Kieran was the only man caught in it. The
+alarms went off, and while the wreckage of the ferry, with three dead
+men in it, was still drifting close by, everyone in the Wheel was in his
+pressure-suit and emergency measures were in full force.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Within thirty minutes it became evident that the Wheel was going to
+survive this accident. It was edging slowly out of orbit from the
+impetus of the blow, and in the present weakened state of the
+construction its small corrective rockets could not be used to stop the
+drift. But Meloni, the UNRC captain commanding, had got first reports
+from his damage-control teams, and it did not look too bad. He fired
+off peremptory demands for the repair materials he would need, and was
+assured by UNRC headquarters at Mexico City that the ferries would be
+loaded and on their way as soon as possible.
+
+Meloni was just beginning to relax a little when a young officer brought
+up a minor but vexing problem. Lieutenant Vinson had headed the small
+party sent out to recover the bodies of the four dead men. In their
+pressure-suits they had been pawing through the tangled wreckage for
+some time, and young Vinson was tired when he made his report.
+
+"We have all four alongside, sir. The three men in the ferry were pretty
+badly mangled in the crash. Kieran wasn't physically wounded, but died
+from space-asphyxiation."
+
+The captain stared at him. "Alongside? Why didn't you bring them in?
+They'll go back in one of the ferries to Earth for burial."
+
+"But--" Vinson started to protest.
+
+Meloni interrupted sharply. "You need to learn a few things about
+morale, Lieutenant. You think it's going to do morale here any good to
+have four dead men floating alongside where everyone can see them? Fetch
+them in and store them in one of the holds."
+
+Vinson, sweating and unhappy now, had visions of a black mark on his
+record, and determined to make his point.
+
+"But about Kieran, sir--he was only frozen. Suppose there was a chance
+to bring him back?"
+
+"Bring him back? What the devil are you talking about?"
+
+Vinson said, "I read they're trying to find some way of restoring a man
+that gets space-frozen. Some scientists down at Delhi University. If
+they succeeded, and if we had Kieran still intact in space--"
+
+"Oh, hell, that's just a scientific pipe-dream, they'll never find a way
+to do that," Meloni said. "It's all just theory."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Vinson, hanging his head.
+
+"We've got trouble enough here without you bringing up ideas like this,"
+the captain continued angrily. "Get out of here."
+
+Vinson was now completely crushed. "Yes, sir. I'll bring the bodies in."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went out. Meloni stared at the door, and began to think. A commanding
+officer had to be careful, or he could get skinned alive. If, by some
+remote chance, this Delhi idea ever succeeded, he, Meloni, would be in
+for it for having Kieran buried. He strode to the door and flung it
+open, mentally cursing the young snotty who had had to bring this up.
+
+"Vinson!" he shouted.
+
+The lieutenant turned back, startled. "Yes, sir?"
+
+"Hold Kieran's body outside. I'll check on this with Mexico City."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Still angry, Meloni shot a message to Personnel at Mexico City. That
+done, he forgot about it. The buck had been passed, let the boys sitting
+on their backsides down on Earth handle it.
+
+Colonel Hausman, second in command of Personnel Division of UNRC, was
+the man to whom Meloni's message went. He snorted loudly when he read
+it. And later, when he went in to report to Garces, the brigadier
+commanding the Division, he took the message with him.
+
+"Meloni must be pretty badly rattled by the crash," he said. "Look at
+this."
+
+Garces read the message, then looked up. "Anything to this? The Delhi
+experiments, I mean?"
+
+Hausman had taken care to brief himself on that point and was able to
+answer emphatically.
+
+"Damned little. Those chaps in Delhi have been playing around freezing
+insects and thawing them out, and they think the process might be
+developed someday to where it could revive frozen spacemen. It's an iffy
+idea. I'll burn Meloni's backside off for bringing it up at a time like
+this."
+
+Garces, after a moment, shook his head. "No, wait. Let me think about
+this."
+
+He looked speculatively out of the window for a few moments. Then he
+said,
+
+"Message Meloni that this one chap's body--what's his name, Kieran?--is
+to be preserved in space against a chance of future revival."
+
+Hausman nearly blotted his copybook by exclaiming, "For God's sake--" He
+choked that down in time and said, "But it could be centuries before a
+revival process is perfected, if it ever is."
+
+Garces nodded. "I know. But you're missing a psychological point that
+could be valuable to UNRC. This Kieran has relatives, doesn't he?"
+
+Hausman nodded. "A widowed mother and a sister. His father's been dead a
+long time. No wife or children."
+
+Garces said, "If we tell them he's dead, frozen in space and then
+buried, it's all over with. Won't those people feel a lot better if we
+tell them that he's _apparently_ dead, but might be brought back when a
+revival-technique is perfected in the future?"
+
+"I suppose they'd feel better about it," Hausman conceded. "But I don't
+see--"
+
+Garces shrugged. "Simple. We're only really beginning in space, you
+know. As we go on, UNRC is going to lose a number of men, space-struck
+just like Kieran. A howl will go up about our casualty lists, it always
+does. But if we can say that they're only frozen until such time as
+revival technique is achieved, everyone will feel better about it."
+
+"I suppose public relations are important--" Hausman began to say, and
+Garces nodded quickly.
+
+"They are. See that this is done, when you go up to confer with Meloni.
+Make sure that it gets onto the video networks, I want everyone to see
+it."
+
+Later, with many cameras and millions of people watching, Kieran's body,
+in a pressure-suit, was ceremoniously taken to a selected position where
+it would orbit the Moon. All suggestions of the funerary were carefully
+avoided. The space-struck man--nobody at all referred to him as
+"dead"--would remain in this position until a revival process was
+perfected.
+
+"Until forever," thought Hausman, watching sourly. "I suppose Garces is
+right. But they'll have a whole graveyard here, as time goes on."
+
+As time went on, they did.
+
+
+2.
+
+In his dreams, a soft voice whispered.
+
+He did not know what it was telling him, except that it was important.
+He was hardly aware of its coming, the times it came. There would be the
+quiet murmuring, and something in him seemed to hear and understand, and
+then the murmur faded away and there was nothing but the dreams again.
+
+But were they dreams? Nothing had form or meaning. Light, darkness,
+sound, pain and not-pain, flowed over him. Flowed over--who? Who was he?
+He did not even know that. He did not care.
+
+But he came to care, the question vaguely nagged him. He should try to
+remember. There was more than dreams and the whispering voice. There
+was--what? If he had one real thing to cling to, to put his feet on and
+climb back from-- One thing like his name.
+
+He had no name. He was no one. Sleep and forget it. Sleep and dream and
+listen--
+
+"Kieran."
+
+It went across his brain like a shattering bolt of lightning, that word.
+He did not know what the word was or what it meant but it found an echo
+somewhere and his brain screamed it.
+
+"Kieran!"
+
+Not his brain alone, his voice was gasping it, harshly and croakingly,
+his lungs seeming on fire as they expelled the word.
+
+He was shaking. He had a body that could shake, that could feel pain,
+that was feeling pain now. He tried to move, to break the nightmare, to
+get back again to the vague dreams, and the soothing whisper.
+
+He moved. His limbs thrashed leadenly, his chest heaved and panted, his
+eyes opened.
+
+He lay in a narrow bunk in a very small metal room.
+
+He looked slowly around. He did not know this place. The gleaming white
+metal of walls and ceiling was unfamiliar. There was a slight,
+persistent tingling vibration in everything that was unfamiliar, too.
+
+He was not in Wheel Five. He had seen every cell in it and none of them
+were like this. Also, there lacked the persistent susurrant sound of the
+ventilation pumps. Where--
+
+_You're in a ship, Kieran. A starship._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Something back in his mind told him that. But of course it was
+ridiculous, a quirk of the imagination. There weren't any starships.
+
+_You're all right, Kieran. You're in a starship, and you're all right._
+
+The emphatic assurance came from somewhere back in his brain and it was
+comforting. He didn't feel very good, he felt dopey and sore, but there
+was no use worrying about it when he knew for sure he was all right--
+
+The hell he was all right! He was in someplace new, someplace strange,
+and he felt half sick and he was not all right at all. Instead of lying
+here on his back listening to comforting lies from his imagination, he
+should get up, find out what was going on, what had happened.
+
+Of a sudden, memory began to clear. What _had_ happened? Something, a
+crash, a terrible coldness--
+
+Kieran began to shiver. He had been in Section T2, on his way to the
+lock, and suddenly the floor had risen under him and Wheel Five had
+seemed to crash into pieces around him. The cold, the pain--
+
+_You're in a starship. You're all right._
+
+For God's sake why did his mind keep telling him things like that,
+things he believed? For if he did not believe them he would be in a
+panic, not knowing where he was, how he had come here. There was panic
+in his mind but there was a barrier against it, the barrier of the
+soothing reassurances that came from he knew not where.
+
+He tried to sit up. It was useless, he was too weak. He lay, breathing
+heavily. He felt that he should be hysterical with fear but somehow he
+was not, that barrier in his mind prevented it.
+
+He had decided to try shouting when a door in the side of the little
+room slid open and a man came in.
+
+He came over and looked down at Kieran. He was a young man,
+sandy-haired, with a compact, chunky figure and a flat, hard face. His
+eyes were blue and intense, and they gave Kieran the feeling that this
+man was a wound-up spring. He looked down and said,
+
+"How do you feel, Kieran?"
+
+Kieran looked up at him. He asked, "Am I in a starship?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But there aren't any starships."
+
+"There are. You're in one." The sandy-haired man added, "My name is
+Vaillant."
+
+_It's true, what he says_, murmured the something in Kieran's mind.
+
+"Where--how--" Kieran began.
+
+Vaillant interrupted his stammering question. "As to where, we're quite
+a way from Earth, heading right now in the general direction of Altair.
+As to how--" He paused, looking keenly down at Kieran. "Don't you know
+how?"
+
+_Of course I know. I was frozen, and now I have been awakened and time
+has gone by--_
+
+Vaillant, looking searchingly down at his face, showed a trace of
+relief. "You do know, don't you? For a moment I was afraid it hadn't
+worked."
+
+He sat down on the edge of the bunk.
+
+"How long?" asked Kieran.
+
+Vaillant answered as casually as though it was the most ordinary
+question in the world. "A bit over a century."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was wonderful, thought Kieran, how he could take a statement like
+that without getting excited. It was almost as though he'd known it all
+the time.
+
+"How--" he began, when there was an interruption.
+
+Something buzzed thinly in the pocket of Vaillant's shirt. He took out a
+thin three-inch disk of metal and said sharply into it,
+
+"Yes?"
+
+A tiny voice squawked from the disk. It was too far from Kieran for him
+to understand what it was saying but it had a note of excitement, almost
+of panic, in it.
+
+Something changed, hardened, in Vaillant's flat face. He said, "I
+expected it. I'll be right there. You know what to do."
+
+He did something to the disk and spoke into it again. "Paula, take over
+here."
+
+He stood up. Kieran looked up at him, feeling numb and stupid. "I'd like
+to know some things."
+
+"Later," said Vaillant. "We've got troubles. Stay where you are."
+
+He went rapidly out of the room. Kieran looked after him, wondering.
+Troubles--troubles in a starship? And a century had passed--
+
+He suddenly felt an emotion that shook his nerves and tightened his
+guts. It was beginning to hit him now. He sat up in the bunk and swung
+his legs out of it and tried to stand but could not, he was too weak.
+All he could do was to sit there, shaking.
+
+His mind could not take it in. It seemed only minutes ago that he had
+been walking along the corridor in Wheel Five. It seemed that Wheel Five
+must exist, that the Earth, the people, the time he knew, must still be
+somewhere out there. This could be some kind of a joke, or some kind of
+psychological experiment. That was it--the space-medicine boys were
+always making way-out experiments to find out how men would bear up in
+unusual conditions, and this must be one of them--
+
+A woman came into the room. She was a dark woman who might have been
+thirty years old, and who wore a white shirt and slacks. She would, he
+thought, have been good-looking if she had not looked so tired and so
+edgy.
+
+She came over and looked down at him and said to him,
+
+"Don't try to get up yet. You'll feel better very soon."
+
+Her voice was a slightly husky one. It was utterly familiar to Kieran,
+and yet he had never seen this woman before. Then it came to him.
+
+"You were the one who talked to me," he said, looking up at her. "In the
+dreams, I mean."
+
+She nodded. "I'm Paula Ray and I'm a psychologist. You had to be
+psychologically prepared for your awakening."
+
+"Prepared?"
+
+The woman explained patiently. "Hypnopedic technique--establishing facts
+in the subconscious of a sleeping patient. Otherwise, it would be too
+terrific a shock for you when you awakened. That was proved when they
+first tried reviving space-struck men, forty or fifty years ago."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The comfortable conviction that this was all a fake, an experiment of
+some kind, began to drain out of Kieran. But if it was true--
+
+He asked, with some difficulty, "You say that they found out how to
+revive space-frozen men, that long ago?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yet it took forty or fifty years to get around to reviving me?"
+
+The woman sighed. "You have a misconception. The process of revival was
+perfected that long ago. But it has been used only immediately after a
+wreck or disaster. Men or women in the old space-cemeteries have not
+been revived."
+
+"Why not?" he asked carefully.
+
+"Unsatisfactory results," she said. "They could not adjust
+psychologically to changed conditions. They usually became unbalanced.
+Some suicides and a number of cases of extreme schizophrenia resulted.
+It was decided that it was no kindness to the older space-struck cases
+to bring them back."
+
+"But you brought me back?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"There were good reasons." She was, clearly, evading that question. She
+went on quickly. "The psychological shock of awakening would have been
+devastating, if you were not prepared. So, while you were still under
+sedation, I used the hypnopedic method on you. Your unconscious was
+aware of the main facts of the situation before you awoke, and that
+cushioned the shock."
+
+Kieran thought of himself, lying frozen and dead in a graveyard that was
+space, bodies drifting in orbit, circling slowly around each other as
+the years passed, in a macabre sarabande-- A deep shiver shook him.
+
+"Because all space-struck victims were in pressure-suits, dehydration
+was not the problem it could have been," Paula was saying. "But it's
+still a highly delicate process--"
+
+He looked at her and interrupted roughly. "What reasons?" And when she
+stared blankly, he added, "You said there were good reasons why you
+picked me for revival. What reasons?"
+
+Her face became tight and alert. "You were the oldest victim, in point
+of date. That was one of the determining factors--"
+
+"Look," said Kieran. "I'm not a child, nor yet a savage. You can drop
+the patronizing professional jargon and answer my question."
+
+Her voice became hard and brittle. "You're new to this environment. You
+wouldn't understand if I told you."
+
+"Try me."
+
+"All right," she answered. "We need you, as a symbol, in a political
+struggle we're waging against the Sakae."
+
+"The Sakae?"
+
+"I told you that you couldn't understand yet," she answered impatiently,
+turning away. "You can't expect me to fill you in on a whole world
+that's new to you, in five minutes."
+
+She started toward the door. "Oh, no," said Kieran. "You're not going
+yet."
+
+He slid out of the bunk. He felt weak and shaky but resentment energized
+his flaccid muscles. He took a step toward her.
+
+The lights suddenly went dim, and a bull-throated roar sounded from
+somewhere, an appalling sound of raw power. The slight tingling that
+Kieran had felt in the metal fabric around him abruptly became a
+vibration so deep and powerful that it dizzied him and he had to grab
+the stanchion of the bunk to keep from falling.
+
+Alarm had flashed into the woman's face. Next moment, from some hidden
+speaker in the wall, a male voice yelled sharply,
+
+"Overtaken--prepare for extreme evasion--"
+
+"Get back into the bunk," she told Kieran.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It may be," she said with a certain faint viciousness, "that you're
+about to die a second time."
+
+
+3.
+
+The lights dimmed to semi-darkness, and the deep vibration grew worse.
+Kieran clutched the woman's arm.
+
+"What's happening?"
+
+"Damn it, let me go!" she said.
+
+The exclamation was so wholly familiar in its human angriness that
+Kieran almost liked her, for the first time. But he continued to hold
+onto her, although he did not feel that with his present weakness he
+could hold her long.
+
+"I've a right to know," he said.
+
+"All right, perhaps you have," said Paula. "We--our group--are operating
+against authority. We've broken laws, in going to Earth and reviving
+you. And now authority is catching up to us."
+
+"Another ship? Is there going to be a fight?"
+
+"A fight?" She stared at him, and shock and then faint repulsion showed
+in her face. "But of course, you come from the old time of wars, you
+would think that--"
+
+Kieran got the impression that what he had said had made her look at him
+with the same feelings he would have had when he looked at a decent,
+worthy savage who happened to be a cannibal.
+
+"I always felt that bringing you back was a mistake," she said, with a
+sharpness in her voice. "Let me go."
+
+She wrenched away from him and before he could stop her she had got to
+the door and slid it open. He woke up in time to lurch after her and he
+got his shoulder into the door-opening before she could slide it shut.
+
+"Oh, very well, since you insist I'm not going to worry about you," she
+said rapidly, and turned and hurried away.
+
+Kieran wanted to follow her but his knees were buckling under him. He
+hung to the side of the door-opening. He felt angry, and anger was all
+that kept him from falling over. He would not faint, he told himself. He
+was not a child, and would not be treated like one--
+
+He got his head outside the door. There was a long and very narrow
+corridor out there, blank metal with a few closed doors along it. One
+door, away down toward the end of the corridor, was just sliding shut.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He started down the corridor, steadying himself with his hand against
+the smooth wall. Before he had gone more than a few steps, the anger
+that pushed him began to ebb away. Of a sudden, the mountainous and
+incredible fact of his being here, in this place, this time, this ship,
+came down on him like an avalanche from which the hypnopedic
+pre-conditioning would no longer protect him.
+
+_I am touching a starship, I am in a starship, I, Reed Kieran of Midland
+Springs, Ohio. I ought to be back there, teaching my classes, stopping
+at Hartnett's Drug Store for a soft drink on the way home, but I am here
+in a ship fleeing through the stars ..._
+
+His head was spinning and he was afraid that he was going to go out
+again. He found himself at the door and slid it open and fell rather
+than walked inside. He heard a startled voice.
+
+This was a bigger room. There was a table whose top was translucent and
+which showed a bewildering mass of fleeting symbols in bright light,
+ever changing. There was a screen on one wall of the room and that
+showed nothing, a blank, dark surface.
+
+Vaillant and Paula Ray and a tall, tough-looking man of middle age were
+around the table and had looked up, surprised.
+
+Vaillant's face flashed irritation. "Paula, you were supposed to keep
+him in his cabin!"
+
+"I didn't think he was strong enough to follow," she said.
+
+"I'm not," said Kieran, and pitched over.
+
+The tall middle-aged man reached and caught him before he hit the floor,
+and eased him into a chair.
+
+He heard, as though from a great distance, Vaillant's voice saying
+irritatedly, "Let Paula take care of him, Webber. Look at this--we're
+going to cross another rift--"
+
+There were a few minutes then when everything was very jumbled up in
+Kieran's mind. The woman was talking to him. She was telling him that
+they had prepared him physically, as well as psychologically, for the
+shock of revival, and that he would be quite all right but had to take
+things more slowly.
+
+He heard her voice but paid little attention. He sat in the chair and
+blankly watched the two men who hung over the table and its flow of
+brilliant symbols. Vaillant seemed to tighten up more and more as the
+moments passed, and there was still about him the look of a coiled
+spring but now the spring seemed to be wound to the breaking-point.
+Webber, the tall man with the tough face, watched the fleeting symbols
+and his face was stony.
+
+"Here we go," he muttered, and both he and Vaillant looked up at the
+blank black screen on the wall.
+
+Kieran looked too. There was nothing. Then, in an instant, the blackness
+vanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunning
+splendor that Kieran could not grasp it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stars blazed like high fires across the screen, loops and chains and
+shining clots of them. This was not too different from the way they had
+looked from Wheel Five. But what was different was that the starry
+firmament was partly blotted out by vast rifted ramparts of blackness,
+ebon cliffs that went up to infinity. Kieran had seen astronomical
+photographs like this and knew what the blackness was.
+
+Dust. A dust so fine that its percentage of particles in space would be
+a vacuum, on Earth. But, here where it extended over parsecs of space,
+it formed a barrier to light. There was a narrow rift here between the
+titan cliffs of darkness and he--the ship he was in--was fleeing across
+that rift.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The screen abruptly went black again. Kieran remained sitting and
+staring at it. That incredible fleeting vision had finally impressed the
+utter reality of all this upon his mind. They, this ship, were far from
+Earth--very far, in one of the dust-clouds in which they were trying to
+lose pursuers. This was real.
+
+"--will have got another fix on us as we crossed, for sure," Vaillant
+was saying, in a bitter voice. "They'll have the net out for us--the
+pattern will be shaping now and we can't slip through it."
+
+"We can't," said Webber. "The ship can't. But the flitter can, with
+luck."
+
+They both looked at Kieran. "He's the important one," Webber said. "If a
+couple of us could get him through--"
+
+"No," said Paula. "We couldn't. As soon as they caught the ship and
+found the flitter gone, they'd be after him."
+
+"Not to Sako," said Webber. "They'd never figure that we'd take him to
+Sako."
+
+"Do I have a word in this?" asked Kieran, between his teeth.
+
+"What?" asked Vaillant.
+
+"This. The hell with you all. I'll go no place with you or for you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He got a savage satisfaction from saying it, he was tired of sitting
+there like a booby while they discussed him, but he did not get the
+reaction from them he had expected. The two men merely continued to look
+thoughtfully at him. The woman sighed,
+
+"You see? There wasn't time enough to explain it to him. It's natural
+for him to react with hostility."
+
+"Put him out, and take him along," said Webber.
+
+"No," said Paula sharply. "If he goes out right now he's liable to stay
+out. I won't answer for it."
+
+"Meanwhile," said Vaillant with an edge to his voice, "the pattern is
+forming up. Have you any suggestions, Paula?"
+
+She nodded. "This."
+
+She suddenly squeezed something under Kieran's nose, a small thing that
+she had produced from her pocket without his noticing it, in his angry
+preoccupation with the two men. He smelled a sweet, refreshing odor and
+he struck her arm away.
+
+"Oh, no, you're not giving me any more dopes--" Then he stopped, for
+suddenly it all seemed wryly humorous to him. "A bunch of bloody
+incompetents," he said, and laughed. "This is the one thing I would
+never have dreamed--that a man could sleep, and wake up in a starship,
+and find the starship manned by blunderers."
+
+"Euphoric," said Paula, to the two men.
+
+"At that," said Webber sourly, "there may be something in what he says
+about us."
+
+Vaillant turned on him and said fiercely, "If that's what you think--"
+Then he controlled himself and said tightly, "Quarrelling's no good.
+We're in a box but we can maybe still put it over if we get this man to
+Sako. Webber, you and Paula take him in the flitter."
+
+Kieran rose to his feet. "Fine," he said gaily. "Let us go in the
+flitter, whatever that is. I am already bored with starships."
+
+He felt good, very good. He felt a little drunk, not enough to impede
+his mental processes but enough to give him a fine devil-may-care
+indifference to what happened next. So it was only the spray Paula had
+given him--it still made his body feel better and removed his shock and
+worry and made everything seem suddenly rather amusing.
+
+"Let us to Sako in the flitter," he said. "After all, I'm living on
+velvet, I might as well see the whole show. I'm sure that Sako, wherever
+it is, will be just as full of human folly as Earth was."
+
+"He's euphoric," Paula said again, but her face was stricken.
+
+"Of all the people in that space-cemetery, we had to pick one who
+thinks like that," said Vaillant, with a sort of restrained fury.
+
+"You said yourself that the oldest one would be the best," said Webber.
+"Sako will change him."
+
+Kieran walked down the corridor with Webber and Paula and he laughed as
+he walked. They had brought him back from nothingness without his
+consent, violating the privacy of death or near-death, and now something
+that he had just said had bitterly disappointed them.
+
+"Come along," he said buoyantly to the two. "Let us not lag. Once aboard
+the flitter and the girl is mine."
+
+"Oh for God's sake shut up," said Webber.
+
+
+4.
+
+It was ridiculous to be flying the stars with a bad hangover, but Kieran
+had one. His head ached dully, he had an unpleasant metallic taste in
+his mouth, and his former ebullience had given way to a dull depression.
+He looked sourly around.
+
+He sat in a confined little metal coop of a cabin, hardly enough in
+which to stand erect. Paula Ray, in a chair a few feet away was
+sleeping, her head on her breast. Webber sat forward, in what appeared
+to be a pilot-chair with a number of crowded control banks in front of
+it. He was not doing anything to the controls. He looked as though he
+might be sleeping, too.
+
+That was all--a tiny metal room, blank metal walls, silence. They were,
+presumably, flying between the stars at incredible speeds but there was
+nothing to show it. There were no screens such as the one he had seen in
+the ship, to show by artful scanning devices what vista of suns and
+darknesses lay outside.
+
+"A flitter," Webber had informed him, "just doesn't have room for the
+complicated apparatus that such scanners require. Seeing is a luxury you
+dispense with in a flitter. We'll see when we get to Sako."
+
+After a moment he had added, "If we get to Sako."
+
+Kieran had merely laughed then, and had promptly gone to sleep. When he
+had awakened, it had been with the euphoria all gone and with his
+present hangover.
+
+"At least," he told himself, "I can truthfully say that this one wasn't
+my fault. That blasted spray--"
+
+He looked resentfully at the sleeping woman in the chair. Then he
+reached and roughly shook her shoulder.
+
+She opened her eyes and looked at him, first sleepily and then with
+resentment.
+
+"You had no right to wake me up," she said.
+
+Then, before Kieran could retort, she seemed to realize the monumental
+irony of what she had just said, and she burst into laughter.
+
+"I'm sorry," she said. "Go ahead and say it. I had no right to wake
+_you_ up."
+
+"Let's come back to that," said Kieran after a moment. "Why did you?"
+
+Paula looked at him ruefully. "What I need now is a ten-volume history
+of the last century, and time enough for you to read it. But since we
+don't have either--" She broke off, then after a pause asked, "Your date
+was 1981, wasn't it? It and your name were on the tag of your
+pressure-suit."
+
+"That's right."
+
+"Well, then. Back in 1981, it was expected that men would spread out to
+the stars, wasn't it?"
+
+Kieran nodded. "As soon as they had a workable high-speed drive. Several
+drives were being experimented with even then."
+
+"One of them--the Flournoy principle--was finally made workable," she
+said. She frowned. "I'm trying to give you this briefly and I keep
+straying into details."
+
+"Just tell me why you woke me up."
+
+"I'm _trying_ to tell you." She asked candidly, "Were you always so
+damned hateful or did the revivification process do this to you?"
+
+Kieran grinned. "All right. Go ahead."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Things happened pretty much as people foresaw back in 1981," she said.
+"The drive was perfected. The ships went out to the nearer stars. They
+found worlds. They established colonies from the overflowing population
+of Earth. They found human indigenous races on a few worlds, all of them
+at a rather low technical level, and they taught them.
+
+"There was a determination from the beginning to make it one universe.
+No separate nationalistic groups, no chance of wars. The governing
+council was set up at Altair Two. Every world was represented. There are
+twenty-nine of them, now. It's expected to go on like that, till there
+are twenty-nine hundred starworlds represented there, twenty-nine
+thousand--any number. But--"
+
+Kieran had been listening closely. "But what? What upset this particular
+utopia?"
+
+"Sako."
+
+"This world we're going to?"
+
+"Yes," she said soberly. "Men found something different about this world
+when they reached it. It had people--human people--on it, very low in
+the scale of civilization."
+
+"Well, what was the problem? Couldn't you start teaching them as you had
+others?"
+
+She shook her head. "It would take a long while. But that wasn't the
+real problem. It was-- You see, there's another race on Sako beside the
+human ones, and it's a fairly civilized race. The Sakae. The trouble
+is--the Sakae aren't human."
+
+Kieran stared at her. "So what? If they're intelligent--"
+
+"You talk as though it was the simplest thing in the world," she
+flashed.
+
+"Isn't it? If your Sakae are intelligent and the humans of Sako aren't,
+then the Sakae have the rights on that world, don't they?"
+
+She looked at him, not saying anything, and again she had that stricken
+look of one who has tried and failed. Then from up forward, without
+turning, Webber spoke.
+
+"What do you think now of Vaillant's fine idea, Paula?"
+
+"It can still work," she said, but there was no conviction in her voice.
+
+"If you don't mind," said Kieran, with an edge to his voice, "I'd still
+like to know what this Sako business has to do with reviving me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The Sakae rule the humans on that world," Paula answered. "There are
+some of us who don't believe they should. In the Council, we're known as
+the Humanity Party, because we believe that humans should not be ruled
+by non-humans."
+
+Again, Kieran was distracted from his immediate question--this time by
+the phrase "Non-human".
+
+"These Sakae--what are they like?"
+
+"They're not monsters, if that's what you're thinking of," Paula said.
+"They're bipeds--lizardoid rather than humanoid--and are a fairly
+intelligent and law-abiding lot."
+
+"If they're all that, and higher in development than the humans, why
+shouldn't they rule their own world?" demanded Kieran.
+
+Webber uttered a sardonic laugh. Without turning he asked, "Shall I
+change course and go to Altair?"
+
+"No!" she said. Her eyes flashed at Kieran and she spoke almost
+breathlessly. "You're very sure about things you just heard about,
+aren't you? You know what's right and you know what's wrong, even though
+you've only been in this time, this universe, for a few hours!"
+
+Kieran looked at her closely. He thought he was beginning to get a
+glimmer of the shape of things now.
+
+"You--all you who woke me up illegally--you belong to this Humanity
+Party, don't you? You did it for some reason connected with that?"
+
+"Yes," she answered defiantly. "We need a symbol in this political
+struggle. We thought that one of the oldtime space pioneers, one of the
+humans who began the conquest of the stars, would be it. We--"
+
+Kieran interrupted. "I think I get it. It was really considerate of you.
+You drag a man back from what amounts to death, for a party rally.
+'Oldtime space hero condemns non-humans'--it would go something like
+that, wouldn't it?"
+
+"Listen--," she began.
+
+"Listen, hell," he said. He was hot with rage, shaking with it. "I am
+glad to say that you could not possibly have picked a worse symbol than
+me. I have no more use for the idea of the innate sacred superiority of
+one species over another than I had for that of one kind of man over
+another."
+
+Her face changed. From an angry woman, she suddenly became a
+professional psychologist, coolly observing reactions.
+
+"It's not the political question you really resent," she said. "You've
+wakened to a strange world and you're afraid of it, in spite of all the
+pre-awakening preparation we gave your subconscious. You're afraid, and
+so you're angry."
+
+Kieran got a grip on himself. He shrugged. "What you say may be true.
+But it doesn't change the way I feel. I will not help you one damned
+bit."
+
+Webber got up from his seat and came back toward them, his tall form
+stooping. He looked at Kieran and then at the woman.
+
+"We have to settle this right now," he said. "We're getting near enough
+to Sako to go out of drive. Are we going to land or aren't we?"
+
+"Yes," said Paula steadily. "We're landing."
+
+Webber glanced again at Kieran's face. "But if that's the way he
+feels--"
+
+"Go ahead and land," she said.
+
+
+5.
+
+It was nothing like landing in a rocket. First there was the business
+referred to as "going out of drive". Paula made Kieran strap in and she
+said, "You may find this unpleasant, but just sit tight. It doesn't last
+long." Kieran sat stiff and glowering, prepared for anything and
+determined not to show it no matter how he felt. Then Webber did
+something to the control board and the universe fell apart. Kieran's
+stomach came up and stuck in his throat. He was falling--up? Down?
+Sideways? He didn't know, but whichever it was not all the parts of him
+were falling at the same rate, or perhaps it was not all in the same
+direction, he didn't know that either, but it was an exceptionally
+hideous feeling. He opened his mouth to protest, and all of a sudden he
+was sitting normally in the chair in the normal cabin and screaming at
+the top of his lungs.
+
+He shut up.
+
+Paula said, "I told you it would be unpleasant."
+
+"So you did," said Kieran. He sat, sweating. His hands and feet were
+cold.
+
+Now for the first time he became aware of motion. The flitter seemed to
+hurtle forward at comet-like speed. Kieran knew that this was merely an
+ironic little joke, because now they were proceeding at something in the
+range of normal velocity, whereas before their speed had been quite
+beyond his comprehension. But he could comprehend this. He could feel
+it. They were going like a bat out of hell, and somewhere ahead of them
+was a planet, and he was closed in, blind, a mouse in a nose-cone. His
+insides writhed with helplessness and the imminence of a crash. He
+wanted very much to start screaming again, but Paula was watching him.
+
+In a few moments that desire became academic. A whistling shriek began
+faintly outside the hull and built swiftly to a point where nothing
+could have been heard above it. Atmosphere. And somewhere under the
+blind wall of the flitter a rock-hard world-face reeling and rushing,
+leaping to meet them--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The flitter slowed. It seemed to hang motionless, quivering faintly.
+Then it dropped. Express elevator in the world's tallest building, top
+to bottom--only the elevator is a bubble and the wind is tossing it from
+side to side as it drops and there is no bottom.
+
+They hung again, bounding lightly on the unseen wind.
+
+Then down.
+
+And hang again.
+
+And down.
+
+Paula said suddenly, "Webber. Webber, I think he's dying." She began to
+unstrap.
+
+Kieran said faintly, "Am I turning green?"
+
+She looked at him, frowning. "Yes."
+
+"A simple old malady. I'm seasick. Tell Webber to quit playing
+humming-bird and put this thing down."
+
+Paula made an impatient gesture and tightened her belt again.
+
+Hang and drop. Once more, twice more. A little rocking bounce, a light
+thump, motion ceased. Webber turned a series of switches. Silence.
+
+Kieran said, "Air?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Webber opened a hatch in the side of the cabin. Light poured in. It had
+to be sunlight, Kieran knew, but it was a queer color, a sort of tawny
+orange that carried a pleasantly burning heat. He got loose with Paula
+helping him and tottered to the hatch. The air smelled of clean
+sun-warmed dust and some kind of vegetation. Kieran climbed out of the
+flitter, practically throwing himself out in his haste. He wanted solid
+ground under him, he didn't care whose or where.
+
+And as his boots thumped onto the red-ochre sand, it occurred to him
+that it had been a very long time since he had had solid ground
+underfoot. A very long time indeed--
+
+His insides knotted up again, and this time it was not seasickness but
+fear, and he was cold all through again in spite of the hot new sun.
+
+He was afraid, not of the present, nor of the future, but of the past.
+He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, the stiff blind voiceless
+thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds
+and dead space, brother to the cold and the dark.
+
+He began to tremble.
+
+Paula shook him. She was talking but he couldn't hear her. He could only
+hear the rush of eternal darkness past his ears, the thin squeak of his
+shadow brushing across the stars. Webber's face was somewhere above him,
+looking angry and disgusted. He was talking to Paula, shaking his head.
+They were far away. Kieran was losing them, drifting away from them on
+the black tide. Then suddenly there was something like an explosion, a
+crimson flare across the black, a burst of heat against the cold.
+Shocked and wild, the physical part of him clawed back to reality.
+
+Something hurt him, something threatened him. He put his hand to his
+cheek and it came away red.
+
+Paula and Webber were yanking at him, trying to get him to move.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A stone whizzed past his head. It struck the side of the flitter with a
+sharp clack, and fell. Kieran's nervous relays finally connected. He
+jumped for the open hatch. Automatically he pushed Paula ahead of him,
+trying to shield her, and she gave him an odd startled look. Webber was
+already inside. More stones rattled around and one grazed Kieran's
+thigh. It hurt. His cheek was bleeding freely. He rolled inside the
+flitter and turned to look back out the hatch. He was mad.
+
+"Who's doing it?" he demanded.
+
+Paula pointed. At first Kieran was distracted by the strangeness of the
+landscape. The flitter crouched in a vastness of red-ochre sand laced
+with some low-growing plant that shone like metallic gold in the
+sunlight. The sand receded in tilted planes lifting gradually to a range
+of mountains on the right, and dropping gradually to infinity on the
+left. Directly in front of the flitter and quite literally a stone's
+throw away was the beginning of a thick belt of trees that grew beside a
+river, apparently quite a wide one though he could not see much but a
+tawny sparkling of water. The course of the river could be traced clear
+back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its
+bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before.
+There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic
+in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that
+looked like spearheads.
+
+Exotic or not, they made perfectly adequate cover. Stones came whistling
+out of the woods, but Kieran could not see anything where Paula was
+pointing but an occasional shaking of foliage.
+
+"Sakae?" he asked.
+
+Webber snorted. "You'll know it when the Sakae find us. They don't throw
+stones."
+
+"These are the humans," Paula said. There was an indulgent softness in
+her voice that irritated Kieran.
+
+"I thought they were our dear little friends," he said.
+
+"You frightened them."
+
+"_I_ frightened them?"
+
+"They've seen the flitter before. But they're extremely alert to modes
+of behavior, and they knew you weren't acting right. They thought you
+were sick."
+
+"So they tried to kill me. Nice fellows."
+
+"Self-preservation," Webber said. "They can't afford the luxury of too
+much kindness."
+
+"They're very kind among themselves," Paula said defensively. To Kieran
+she added, "I doubt if they were trying to kill you. They just wanted to
+drive you away."
+
+"Oh, well," said Kieran, "in that case I wouldn't dream of disappointing
+them. Let's go."
+
+Paula glared at him and turned to Webber. "Talk to them."
+
+"I hope there's time," Webber grunted, glancing at the sky. "We're
+sitting ducks here. Keep your patient quiet--any more of that moaning
+and flopping and we're sunk."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He picked up a large plastic container and moved closer to the door.
+
+Paula looked at Kieran's cheek. "Let me fix that."
+
+"Don't bother," he said. At this moment he hoped the Sakae, whoever and
+whatever they were, would come along and clap these two into some
+suitable place for the rest of their lives.
+
+Webber began to "talk".
+
+Kieran stared at him, fascinated. He had expected words--primitive
+words, perhaps resembling the click-speech of Earth's stone-age
+survivals, but words of some sort. Webber hooted. It was a soft
+reassuring sound, repeated over and over, but it was not a word. The
+rattle of stones diminished, then stopped. Webber continued to make his
+hooting call. Presently it was answered. Webber turned and nodded at
+Paula, smiling. He reached into the plastic container and drew forth a
+handful of brownish objects that smelled to Kieran like dried fruit.
+Webber tossed these out onto the sand. Now he made a different sound, a
+grunting and whuffling. There was a silence. Webber made the sound
+again.
+
+On the third try the people came out of the woods.
+
+In all there were perhaps twenty-five of them. They came slowly and
+furtively, moving a step or two at a time, then halting and peering,
+prepared to run. The able-bodied men came first, with one in the lead, a
+fine-looking chap in early middle age who was apparently the chief. The
+women, the old men, and the children followed, trickling gradually out
+of the shadow of the trees but remaining where they could disappear in a
+flash if alarmed. They were all perfectly naked, tall and slender and
+large-eyed, their muscles strung for speed and agility rather than
+massive strength. Their bodies gleamed a light bronze color in the sun,
+and Kieran noticed that the men were beardless and smooth-skinned. Both
+men and women had long hair, ranging in color from black to tawny, and
+very clean and glistening. They were a beautiful people, as deer are a
+beautiful people, graceful, innocent, and wild. The men came to the
+dried fruits which had been scattered for them. They picked them up and
+sniffed them, bit them, then began to eat, repeating the
+grunt-and-whuffle call. The women and children and old men decided
+everything was safe and joined them. Webber tossed out more fruit, and
+then got out himself, carrying the plastic box.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"What does he do next?" whispered Kieran to Paula. "Scratch their ears?
+I used to tame squirrels this way when I was a kid."
+
+"Shut up," she warned him. Webber beckoned and she nudged him to move
+out of the flitter. "Slow and careful."
+
+Kieran slid out of the flitter. Big glistening eyes swung to watch him.
+The eating stopped. Some of the little ones scuttled for the trees.
+Kieran froze. Webber hooted and whuffled some more and the tension
+relaxed. Kieran approached the group with Paula. There was suddenly no
+truth in what he was doing. He was an actor in a bad scene, mingling
+with impossible characters in an improbable setting. Webber making
+ridiculous noises and tossing his dried fruit around like a caricature
+of somebody sowing, Paula with her brisk professionalism all dissolved
+in misty-eyed fondness, himself an alien in this time and place, and
+these perfectly normal-appearing people behaving like orang-utans with
+their fur shaved off. He started to laugh and then thought better of it.
+Once started, he might not be able to stop.
+
+"Let them get used to you," said Webber softly.
+
+Paula obviously had been here before. She had begun to make noises too,
+a modified hooting more like a pigeon's call. Kieran just stood still.
+The people moved in around them, sniffing, touching. There was no
+conversation, no laughing or giggling even among the little girls. A
+particularly beautiful young woman stood just behind the chief, watching
+the strangers with big yellow cat-eyes. Kieran took her to be the man's
+daughter. He smiled at her. She continued to stare, deadpan and
+blank-eyed, with no answering flicker of a smile. It was as though she
+had never seen one before. Kieran shivered. All this silence and
+unresponsiveness became eerie.
+
+"I'm happy to tell you," he murmured to Paula, "that I don't think much
+of your little pets?"
+
+She could not allow herself to be sharply angry. She only said, in a
+whisper, "They are not pets, they are not animals. They--"
+
+She broke off. Something had come over the naked people. Every head had
+lifted, every eye had turned away from the strangers. They were
+listening. Even the littlest ones were still.
+
+Kieran could not hear anything except the wind in the trees.
+
+"What--?" he started to ask.
+
+Webber made an imperative gesture for silence. The tableau held for a
+brief second longer. Then the brown-haired man who seemed to be the
+leader made a short harsh noise. The people turned and vanished into the
+trees.
+
+"The Sakae," Webber said. "Get out of sight." He ran toward the flitter.
+Paula grabbed Kieran's sleeve and pushed him toward the trees.
+
+"What's going on?" he demanded as he ran.
+
+"Their ears are better than ours. There's a patrol ship coming, I
+think."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The shadows took them in, orange-and-gold-splashed shadows under strange
+trees. Kieran looked back. Webber had been inside the flitter. Now he
+tumbled out of the hatch and ran toward them. Behind him the hatch
+closed and the flitter stirred and then took off all by itself, humming.
+
+"They'll follow it for a while," Webber panted. "It may give us a chance
+to get away." He and Paula started after the running people.
+
+Kieran balked. "I don't know why I'm running away from anybody."
+
+Webber pulled out a snub-nosed instrument that looked enough like a gun
+to be very convincing. He pointed it at Kieran's middle.
+
+"Reason one," he said. "If the Sakae catch Paula and me here we're in
+very big trouble. Reason two--this is a closed area, and you're with us,
+so _you_ will be in very big trouble." He looked coldly at Kieran. "The
+first reason is the one that interests me most."
+
+Kieran shrugged. "Well, now I know." He ran.
+
+Only then did he hear the low heavy thrumming in the sky.
+
+
+6.
+
+The sound came rumbling very swiftly toward them. It was a completely
+different sound from the humming of the flitter, and it seemed to Kieran
+to hold a note of menace. He stopped in a small clearing where he might
+see up through the trees. He wanted a look at this ship or flier or
+whatever it was that had been built and was flown by non-humans.
+
+But Webber shoved him roughly on into a clump of squat trees that were
+the color of sherry wine, with flat thick leaves.
+
+"Don't move," he said.
+
+Paula was hugging a tree beside him. She nodded to him to do as Webber
+said.
+
+"They have very powerful scanners." She pointed with her chin. "Look.
+They've learned."
+
+The harsh warning barks of the men sounded faintly, then were hushed.
+Nothing moved, except by the natural motion of the wind. The people
+crouched among the trees, so still that Kieran would not have seen them
+if he had not known they were there.
+
+The patrol craft roared past, cranking up speed as it went. Webber
+grinned. "They'll be a couple of hours at least, overhauling and
+examining the flitter. By that time it'll be dark, and by morning we'll
+be in the mountains."
+
+The people were already moving. They headed upstream, going at a steady,
+shuffling trot. Three of the women, Kieran noticed, had babies in their
+arms. The older children ran beside their mothers. Two of the men and
+several of the women were white-haired. They ran also.
+
+"Do you like to see them run?" asked Paula, with a sharp note of passion
+in her voice. "Does it look good to you?"
+
+"No," said Kieran, frowning. He looked in the direction in which the
+sound of the patrol craft was vanishing.
+
+"Move along," Webber said. "They'll leave us far enough behind as it
+is."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Kieran followed the naked people through the woods, beside the tawny
+river. Paula and Webber jogged beside him. The shadows were long now,
+reaching out across the water.
+
+Paula kept glancing at him anxiously, as though to detect any sign of
+weakness on his part. "You're doing fine," she said. "You should. Your
+body was brought back to normal strength and tone, before you ever were
+awakened."
+
+"They'll slow down when it's dark, anyway," said Webber.
+
+The old people and the little children ran strongly.
+
+"Is their village there?" Kieran asked, indicating the distant
+mountains.
+
+"They don't live in villages," Paula said. "But the mountains are safer.
+More places to hide."
+
+"You said this was a closed area. What is it, a hunting preserve?"
+
+"The Sakae don't hunt them any more."
+
+"But they used to?"
+
+"Well," Webber said, "a long time ago. Not for food, the Sakae are
+vegetarians, but--"
+
+"But," said Paula, "they were the dominant race, and the people were
+simply beasts of the field. When they competed for land and food the
+people were hunted down or driven out." She swung an expressive hand
+toward the landscape beyond the trees. "Why do you think they live in
+this desert, scraping a miserable existence along the watercourses? It's
+land the Sakae didn't want. Now, of course, they have no objection to
+setting it aside as a sort of game preserve. The humans are protected,
+the Sakae tell us. They're living their natural life in their natural
+environment, and when we demand that a program be--"
+
+She was out of breath and had to stop, panting. Webber finished for her.
+
+"We want them taught, lifted out of this naked savagery. The Sakae say
+it's impossible."
+
+"Is it true?" asked Kieran.
+
+"No," said Paula fiercely. "It's a matter of pride. They want to keep
+their dominance, so they simply won't admit that the people are anything
+more than animals, and they won't give them a chance to be anything
+more."
+
+There was no more talking after that, but even so the three outlanders
+grew more and more winded and the people gained on them. The sun went
+down in a blaze of blood-orange light that tinted the trees in even more
+impossible colors and set the river briefly on fire. Then night came,
+and just after the darkness shut down the patrol craft returned, beating
+up along the winding river bed. Kieran froze under the black trees and
+the hair lifted on his skin. For the first time he felt like a hunted
+thing. For the first time he felt a personal anger.
+
+The patrol craft drummed away and vanished. "They won't come back until
+daylight," Webber said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He handed out little flat packets of concentrated food from his pockets.
+They munched as they walked. Nobody said anything. The wind, which had
+dropped at sundown, picked up from a different quarter and began to blow
+again. It got cold. After a while they caught up with the people, who
+had stopped to rest and eat. The babies and old people for whom Kieran
+had felt a worried pity were in much better shape than he. He drank from
+the river and then sat down. Paula and Webber sat beside him, on the
+ground. The wind blew hard from the desert, dry and chill. The trees
+thrashed overhead. Against the pale glimmer of the water Kieran could
+see naked bodies moving along the river's edge, wading, bending,
+grubbing in the mud. Apparently they found things, for he could see that
+they were eating. Somewhere close by other people were stripping fruit
+or nuts from the trees. A man picked up a stone and pounded something
+with a cracking noise, then dropped the stone again. They moved easily
+in the dark, as though they were used to it. Kieran recognized the
+leader's yellow-eyed daughter, her beautiful slender height outlined
+against the pale-gleaming water. She stood up to her ankles in the soft
+mud, holding something tight in her two hands, eating.
+
+The sweat dried on Kieran. He began to shiver.
+
+"You're sure that patrol ship won't come back?" he asked.
+
+"Not until they can see what they're looking for."
+
+"Then I guess it's safe." He began to scramble around, feeling for dried
+sticks.
+
+"What are you doing?"
+
+"Getting some firewood."
+
+"No." Paula was beside him in an instant, her hand on his arm, "No, you
+mustn't do that."
+
+"But Webber said--"
+
+"It isn't the patrol ship, Kieran. It's the people. They--"
+
+"They what?"
+
+"I told you they were low on the social scale. This is one of the basic
+things they have to be taught. Right now they still regard fire as a
+danger, something to run from."
+
+"I see," Kieran said, and let the kindling fall. "Very well, if I can't
+have a fire, I'll have you. Your body will warm me." He pulled her into
+his arms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She gasped, more in astonishment, he thought, than alarm. "What are you
+talking about?"
+
+"That's a line from an old movie. From a number of old movies, in fact.
+Not bad, eh?"
+
+He held her tight. She was definitely female. After a moment he pushed
+her away.
+
+"That was a mistake. I want to be able to go on disliking you without
+any qualifying considerations."
+
+She laughed, a curiously flat little sound. "Was everybody crazy in your
+day?" she asked. And then, "Reed--"
+
+It was the first time she had used his given name. "What?"
+
+"When they threw the stones, and we got back into the flitter, you
+pushed me ahead of you. You were guarding me. Why?"
+
+He stared at her, or rather at the pale blur of her standing close to
+him. "Well, it's always been sort of the custom for the men to-- But now
+that I think of it, Webber didn't bother."
+
+"No," said Paula. "Back in your day women were still taking advantage of
+the dual standard--demanding complete equality with men but clinging to
+their special status. We've got beyond that."
+
+"Do you like it? Beyond, I mean."
+
+"Yes," she said. "It was good of you to do that, but--"
+
+Webber said, "They're moving again. Come on."
+
+The people walked this time, strung out in a long line between the trees
+and the water, where the light was a little better and the way more
+open. The three outlanders tagged behind, clumsy in their boots and
+clothing. The long hair of the people blew in the wind and their bare
+feet padded softly, light and swift.
+
+Kieran looked up at the sky. The trees obscured much of it so that all
+he could see was some scattered stars overhead. But he thought that
+somewhere a moon was rising.
+
+He asked Paula and she said, "Wait. You'll see."
+
+Night and the river rolled behind them. The moonlight became brighter,
+but it was not at all like the moonlight Kieran remembered from long ago
+and far away. That had had a cold tranquility to it, but this light was
+neither cold nor tranquil. It seemed somehow to shift color, too, which
+made it even less adequate for seeing than the white moonlight he was
+used to. Sometimes as it filtered through the trees it seemed,
+ice-green, and again it was reddish or amber, or blue.
+
+They came to a place where the river made a wide bend and they cut
+across it, clear of the trees. Paula touched Kieran's arm and pointed.
+"Look."
+
+Kieran looked, and then he stopped still. The light was not moonlight,
+and its source was not a moon. It was a globular cluster of stars, hung
+in the sky like a swarm of fiery bees, a burning and pulsing of many
+colors, diamond-white and gold, green and crimson, peacock blue and
+smoky umber. Kieran stared, and beside him Paula murmured, "I've been on
+a lot of planets, but none of them have anything like this."
+
+The people moved swiftly on, paying no attention at all to the sky.
+
+Reluctantly Kieran followed them into the obscuring woods. He kept
+looking at the open sky above the river, waiting for the cluster to rise
+high so he could see it.
+
+It was some time after this, but before the cluster rose clear of the
+trees, that Kieran got the feeling that something, or someone, was
+following them.
+
+
+7.
+
+He had stopped to catch his breath and shake an accumulation of sand out
+of his boots. He was leaning against a tree with his back to the wind,
+which meant that he was facing their back-trail, and he thought he saw a
+shadow move where there was nothing to cast a shadow. He straightened up
+with the little trip-hammers of alarm beating all over him, but he could
+see nothing more. He thought he might have been mistaken. Just the same,
+he ran to catch up with the others.
+
+The people were moving steadily. Kieran knew that their senses were far
+keener than his, and they were obviously not aware of any danger other
+than the basic one of the Sakae. He decided that he must have been
+seeing things.
+
+But an uneasiness persisted. He dropped behind again, this time on
+purpose, after they had passed a clearing. He stayed hidden behind a
+tree-trunk and watched. The cluster-light was bright now but very
+confusing to the eye. He heard a rustling that he did not think was
+wind, and he thought that something started to cross the clearing and
+then stopped, as though it had caught his scent.
+
+Then he thought that he heard rustlings at both sides of the clearing,
+stealthy sounds of stalking that closed in toward him. Only the wind, he
+told himself, but again he turned to run. This time he met Paula, coming
+back to look for him.
+
+"Reed, are you all right?" she asked. He caught her arm and pulled her
+around and made her run. "What is it? What's the matter?"
+
+"I don't know." He hurried with her until he could see Webber ahead, and
+beyond him the bare backs and blowing hair of the people. "Listen," he
+said, "are there any predators here?"
+
+"Yes," Paula said, and Webber turned sharply around.
+
+"Have you seen something?"
+
+"I don't know. I thought I did. I'm not sure."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Behind us."
+
+Webber made the harsh barking danger call, and the people stopped.
+Webber stood looking back the way they had come. The women caught the
+children and the men fell back to where Webber stood. They looked and
+listened, sniffing the air. Kieran listened too, but now he did not hear
+any rustlings except the high thrashing of the branches. Nothing stirred
+visibly and the wind would carry away any warning scent.
+
+The men turned away. The people moved on again. Webber shrugged.
+
+"You must have been mistaken, Kieran."
+
+"Maybe. Or maybe they just can't think beyond the elementary. If they
+don't smell it, it isn't there. If something is after us it's coming
+up-wind, the way any hunting animal works. A couple of the men ought to
+circle around and--"
+
+"Come on," said Webber wearily.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They followed the people beside the river. The cluster was high now, a
+hive of suns reflected in the flowing water, a kaleidoscopic rippling of
+colors.
+
+Now the women were carrying the smaller children. The ones too large to
+be carried were lagging behind a little. So were the aged. Not much,
+yet. Kieran, conscious that he was weaker than the weakest of these,
+looked ahead at the dim bulk of the mountains and thought that they
+ought to be able to make it. He was not at all sure that he would.
+
+The river made another bend. The trail lay across the bend, clear of the
+trees. It was a wide bend, perhaps two miles across the neck. Ahead,
+where the trail joined the river again, there was a rocky hill.
+Something about the outlines of the hill seemed wrong to Kieran, but it
+was too far away to be sure of anything. Overhead the cluster burned
+gloriously. The people set out across the sand.
+
+Webber looked back. "You see?" he said. "Nothing."
+
+They went on. Kieran was beginning to feel very tired now, all the
+artificial strength that had been pumped into him before his awakening
+was running out. Webber and Paula walked with their heads down, striding
+determinedly but without joy.
+
+"What do you think now?" she asked Kieran. "Is this any way for humans
+to live?"
+
+The ragged line of women and children moved ahead of them, with the men
+in the lead. It was not natural, Kieran thought, for children to be able
+to travel so far, and then he remembered that the young of
+non-predacious species have to be strong and fleet at an early age.
+
+Suddenly one of the women made a harsh, shrill cry.
+
+Kieran looked where she was looking, off to the left, to the river and
+the curving line of trees. A large black shadow slipped across the sand.
+He looked behind him. There were other shadows, coming with long easy
+bounds out of the trees, fanning out in a shallow crescent. They
+reminded Kieran of some animal he had once seen in a zoo, a partly
+catlike, partly doglike beast, a cheetah he thought it had been called,
+only the cheetah was spotted like a leopard and these creatures were
+black, with stiff, upstanding ears. They bayed, and the coursing began.
+
+"Nothing," said Kieran bitterly. "I count seven."
+
+Webber said, "My God, I--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The people ran. They tried to break back to the river and the trees that
+could be climbed to safety, but the hunters turned them. Then they fled
+blindly forward, toward the hill. They ran with all their strength,
+making no sound. Kieran and Webber ran with them, with Paula between
+them. Webber seemed absolutely appalled.
+
+"Where's that gun you had?" Kieran panted.
+
+"It's not a gun, only a short-range shocker," he said. "It wouldn't stop
+these things. Look at them!"
+
+They bounded, sporting around them, howling with a sound like laughter.
+They were as large as leopards and their eyes glowed in the
+cluster-light. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, as though hunting
+was the most delightful game in the world. One of them ran up to
+within two feet of Kieran and snapped at him with its great jaws,
+dodging agilely when he raised his arm. They drove the people, faster
+and faster. At first the men had formed around the women and children.
+But the formation began to disintegrate as the weaker ones dropped
+behind, and no attempt was made to keep it. Panic was stronger than
+instinct now. Kieran looked ahead. "If we can make it to that hill--"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Paula screamed and he stumbled over a child, a girl about five, crawling
+on her hands and knees. He picked her up. She bit and thrashed and tore
+at him, her bare little body hard as whalebone and slippery with sweat.
+He could not hold onto her. She kicked herself free of his hands and
+rushed wildly out of reach, and one of the black hunters pounced in and
+bore her away, shrieking thinly like a fledgling bird in the jaws of a
+cat.
+
+"Oh my God," said Paula, and covered her head with her arms, trying to
+shut out sight and sound. He caught her and said harshly, "Don't faint,
+because I can't carry you." The child's mother, whichever of the women
+it might have been, did not look back.
+
+An old woman who strayed aside was pulled down and dragged off, and then
+one of the white-haired men. The hill was closer. Kieran saw now what
+was wrong with it. Part of it was a building. He was too tired and too
+sick to be interested, except as it offered a refuge. He spoke to
+Webber, with great difficulty because he was winded. And then he
+realized that Webber wasn't there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Webber had stumbled and fallen. He had started to get up, but the
+hunters were on him. He was on his hands and knees facing them,
+screaming at them to get away from him. He had, obviously, had little or
+no experience with raw violence. Kieran ran back to him, with Paula
+close behind.
+
+"Use your gun!" he yelled. He was afraid of the black hunters, but he
+was full of rage and the rage outweighed the fear. He yelled at them,
+cursing them. He hurled sand into their eyes, and one that was creeping
+up on Webber from the side he kicked. The creature drew off a little,
+not frightened but surprised. They were not used to this sort of thing
+from humans. "Your gun!" Kieran roared again, and Webber pulled the
+snub-nosed thing out of his pocket. He stood up and said unsteadily, "I
+told you, it's not a gun. It won't kill anything. I don't think--"
+
+"Use it," said Kieran. "And get moving again. Slowly."
+
+They started to move, and then across the sky a great iron voice spoke
+like thunder. "Lie down," it said, "please. Lie down flat."
+
+Kieran turned his head, startled. From the direction of the building on
+the hill a vehicle was speeding toward them.
+
+"The Sakae," said Webber with what was almost a sob of relief. "Lie
+down."
+
+As he did so, Kieran saw a pale flash shoot out from the vehicle and
+knock over a hunter still hanging on the flanks of the fleeing people.
+He hugged the sand. Something went whining and whistling over him, there
+was a thunk and a screech. It was repeated, and then the iron voice
+spoke again.
+
+"You may get up now. Please remain where you are." The vehicle was much
+closer. They were bathed in sudden light. The voice said, "Mr. Webber,
+you are holding a weapon. Please drop it."
+
+"It's only a little shocker," Webber said, plaintively. He dropped it.
+
+The vehicle had wide tracks that threw up clouds of sand. It came
+clanking to a halt. Kieran, shading his eyes, thought he distinguished
+two creatures inside, a driver and a passenger.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The passenger emerged, climbing with some difficulty over the steep step
+of the track, his tail rattling down behind him like a length of thick
+cable. Once on the ground he became quite agile, moving with a sort of
+oddly graceful prance on his powerful legs. He approached, his attention
+centered on Kieran. But he observed the amenities, placing one delicate
+hand on his breast and making a slight bow.
+
+"Doctor Ray." His muzzle, shaped something like a duck's bill,
+nevertheless formed Paula's name tolerably well. "And you, I think, are
+Mr. Kieran."
+
+Kieran said, "Yes." The star-cluster blazed overhead. The dead beasts
+lay behind him, the people with their flying hair had run on beyond his
+sight. He had been dead for a hundred years and now he was alive again.
+Now he was standing on alien soil, facing an alien form of life,
+communicating with it, and he was so dog-tired and every sensory nerve
+was so thoroughly flayed that he had nothing left to react with. He
+simply looked at the Saka as he might have looked at a fence-post, and
+said, "Yes."
+
+The Saka made his formal little bow again. "I am Bregg." He shook his
+head. "I'm glad I was able to reach you in time. You people don't seem
+to have any notion of the amount of trouble you make for us--"
+
+Paula, who had not spoken since the child was carried off, suddenly
+screamed at Bregg, "Murderer!"
+
+She sprang at him, striking him in blind hysteria.
+
+
+8.
+
+Bregg sighed. He caught Paula in those fine small hands that seemed to
+have amazing strength and held her, at arm's length. "Doctor Ray," he
+said. He shook her. "Doctor Ray." She stopped screaming. "I don't wish
+to administer a sedative because then you will say that I drugged you.
+But I will if I must."
+
+Kieran said, "I'll keep her quiet."
+
+He took her from Bregg. She collapsed against him and began to cry.
+"Murderers," she whispered. "That little girl, those old people--"
+
+Webber said, "You could exterminate those beasts. You don't have to let
+them hunt the people like that. It's--it's--"
+
+"Unhuman is the word you want," said Bregg. His voice was exceedingly
+weary. "Please get into the car."
+
+They climbed in. The car churned around and sped back toward the
+building. Paula shivered, and Kieran held her in his arms. Webber said
+after a moment or two, "How did you happen to be here, Bregg?"
+
+"When we caught the flitter and found it empty, it was obvious that you
+were with the people, and it became imperative to find you before you
+came to harm. I remembered that the trail ran close by this old outpost
+building, so I had the patrol ship drop us here with an emergency
+vehicle."
+
+Kieran said, "You knew the people were coming this way?"
+
+"Of course." Bregg sounded surprised. "They migrate every year at the
+beginning of the dry season. How do you suppose Webber found them so
+easily?"
+
+Kieran looked at Webber. He asked, "Then they weren't running from the
+Sakae?"
+
+"Of course they were," Paula said. "You saw them yourself, cowering
+under the trees when the ship went over."
+
+"The patrol ships frighten them," Bregg said. "Sometimes to the point of
+stampeding them, which is why we use them only in emergencies. The
+people do not connect the ships with us."
+
+"That," said Paula flatly, "is a lie."
+
+Bregg sighed. "Enthusiasts always believe what they want to believe.
+Come and see for yourself."
+
+She straightened up. "What have you done to them?"
+
+"We've caught them in a trap," said Bregg, "and we are presently going
+to stick needles into them--a procedure necessitated by your presence,
+Doctor Ray. They're highly susceptible to imported viruses, as you
+should remember--one of your little parties of do-gooders succeeded in
+wiping out a whole band of them not too many years ago. So--inoculations
+and quarantine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lights had blazed up in the area near the building. The car sped toward
+them.
+
+Kieran said slowly, "Why don't you just exterminate the hunters and have
+done with them?"
+
+"In your day, Mr. Kieran--yes, I've heard all about you--in your day,
+did you on Earth exterminate the predators so that their natural prey
+might live more happily?"
+
+Bregg's long muzzle and sloping skull were profiled against the lights.
+
+"No," said Kieran, "we didn't. But in that case, they were all animals."
+
+"Exactly," said Bregg. "No, wait, Doctor Ray. Spare me the lecture. I
+can give you a much better reason than that, one even you can't quarrel
+with. It's a matter of ecology. The number of humans destroyed by these
+predators annually is negligible but they do themselves destroy an
+enormous number of small creatures with which the humans compete for
+their food. If we exterminated the hunters the small animals would
+multiply so rapidly that the humans would starve to death."
+
+The car stopped beside the hill, at the edge of the lighted area. A sort
+of makeshift corral of wire fencing had been set up, with wide wings to
+funnel the people into the enclosure, where a gate was shut on them. Two
+Sakae were mounting guard as the party from the car approached the
+corral. Inside the fence Kieran could see the people, flopped around in
+positions of exhaustion. They did not seem to be afraid now. A few of
+them were drinking from a supply of water provided for them. There was
+food scattered for them on the ground.
+
+Bregg said something in his own language to one of the guards, who
+looked surprised and questioned him, then departed, springing strongly
+on his powerful legs. "Wait," said Bregg.
+
+They waited, and in a moment or two the guard came back leading one of
+the black hunting beasts on a chain. It was a female, somewhat smaller
+than the ones Kieran had fought with, and having a slash of white on the
+throat and chest. She howled and sprang up on Bregg, butting her great
+head into his shoulder, wriggling with delight. He petted her, talking
+to her, and she laughed doglike and licked his cheek.
+
+"They domesticate well," he said. "We've had a tame breed for
+centuries."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He moved a little closer to the corral, holding tight to the animal's
+chain. Suddenly she became aware of the people. Instantly the
+good-natured pet turned into a snarling fury. She reared on her hind
+legs and screamed, and inside the corral the people roused up. They were
+not frightened now. They spat and chattered, clawing up sand and pebbles
+and bits of food to throw through the fence. Bregg handed the chain to
+the guard, who hauled the animal away by main force.
+
+Paula said coldly, "If your point was that the people are not kind to
+animals, my answer is that you can hardly blame them."
+
+"A year ago," Bregg said, "some of the people got hold of her two young
+ones. They were torn to pieces before they could be saved, and she saw
+it. I can't blame her, either."
+
+He went on to the gate and opened it and went inside. The people drew
+back from him. They spat at him, too, and pelted him with food and
+pebbles. He spoke to them, sternly, in the tone of one speaking to
+unruly dogs, and he spoke words, in his own tongue. The people began to
+shuffle about uneasily. They stopped throwing things. He stood waiting.
+
+The yellow-eyed girl came sidling forward and rubbed herself against his
+thigh, head, shoulder and flank. He reached down and stroked her, and
+she whimpered with pleasure and arched her back.
+
+"Oh, for God's sake," said Kieran, "let's get out of here."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Later, they sat wearily on fallen blocks of cement inside a dusty,
+shadowy room of the old building. Only a hand-lamp dispelled the gloom,
+and the wind whispered coldly, and Bregg walked to and fro in his
+curious prance as he talked.
+
+"It will be a little while before the necessary medical team can be
+picked up and brought here," he said. "We shall have to wait."
+
+"And then?" asked Kieran.
+
+"First to--" Bregg used a word that undoubtedly named a city of the
+Sakae but that meant nothing to Kieran, "--and then to Altair Two. This,
+of course, is a council matter."
+
+He stopped and looked with bright, shrewd eyes at Kieran. "You are quite
+the sensation already, Mr. Kieran. The whole community of starworlds is
+already aware of the illegal resuscitation of one of the pioneer
+spacemen, and of course there is great interest." He paused. "You,
+yourself, have done nothing unlawful. You cannot very well be sent back
+to sleep, and undoubtedly the council will want to hear you. I am
+curious as to what you will say."
+
+"About Sako?" said Kieran. "About--them?" He made a gesture toward a
+window through which the wind brought the sound of stirring, of the
+gruntings and whufflings of the corralled people.
+
+"Yes. About them."
+
+"I'll tell you how I feel," Kieran said flatly. He saw Paula and Webber
+lean forward in the shadows. "I'm a human man. The people out there may
+be savage, low as the beasts, good for nothing the way they are--but
+they're human. You Sakae may be intelligent, civilized, reasonable, but
+you're not human. When I see you ordering them around like beasts, I
+want to kill you. That's how I feel."
+
+Bregg did not change his bearing, but he made a small sound that was
+almost a sigh.
+
+"Yes," he said. "I feared it would be so. A man of your times--a man
+from a world where humans were all-dominant--would feel that way." He
+turned and looked at Paula and Webber. "It appears that your scheme, to
+this extent, was successful."
+
+"No, I wouldn't say that," said Kieran.
+
+Paula stood up. "But you just told us how you feel--"
+
+"And it's the truth," said Kieran. "But there's something else." He
+looked thoughtfully at her. "It was a good idea. It was bound to work--a
+man of my time was bound to feel just this way you wanted him to feel,
+and would go away from here crying your party slogans and believing
+them. But you overlooked something--"
+
+He paused, looking out the window into the sky, at the faint
+vari-colored radiance of the cluster.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You overlooked the fact that when you awoke me, I would no longer be a
+man of my own time--or of any time. I was in darkness for a hundred
+years--with the stars my brothers, and no man touching me. Maybe that
+chills a man's feelings, maybe something deep in his mind lives and has
+time to think. I've told you how I feel, yes. But I haven't told you
+what I think--"
+
+He stopped again, then said, "The people out there in the corral have my
+form, and my instinctive loyalty is to them. But instinct isn't enough.
+It would have kept us in the mud of Earth forever, if it could. Reason
+took us out to the wider universe. Instinct tells me that those out
+there are my people. Reason tells me that you--" he looked at Bregg,
+"--who are abhorrent to me, who would make my skin creep if I touched
+you, you who go by reason--that you are my real people. Instinct made a
+hell of Earth for millennia--I say we ought to leave it behind us there
+in the mud and not let it make a hell of the stars. For you'll run into
+this same problem over and over again as you go out into the wider
+universe, and the old parochial human loyalties must be altered, to
+solve it."
+
+He looked at Paula and said, "I'm sorry, but if anyone asks me, that is
+what I'll say."
+
+"I'm sorry, too," she said, rage and dejection ringing in her voice.
+"Sorry we woke you. I hope I never see you again."
+
+Kieran shrugged. "After all, you did wake me. You're responsible for me.
+Here I am, facing a whole new universe, and I'll need you." He went over
+and patted her shoulder.
+
+"Damn you," she said. But she did not move away from him.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories Fact and Science
+    Fiction_ May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
+    that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor
+    spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Stars, My Brothers, by Edmond Hamilton
+
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