Star Hunter

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. Mankind's age-old hatred, brought from his native planet
to the distant stars, was evil symbolized by a coil in a twisted,
belly-path across the ground. And on Nahuatl, as well as a dozen other
worlds, Wass was the serpent.

A night wind was rising, stirring the exotic, half-dozen other worlds'
foliage planted cunningly on the terrace to simulate the mystery of an
off-world jungle.

"Hume?" The inquiry seemed to come out of thin air over his head.

"Hume," he repeated his own name calmly.

A shaft of light brilliant enough to dazzle the eyes struck through
the massed vegetation, revealing a path. Hume lingered for a moment,
offering a counterstroke of indifference in what he had always known
would be a test of wits. Wass was Veep of a shadowy empire, but that
was apart from the world in which Ras Hume moved.

He strode deliberately down the corridor illuminated between leaf and
blossom walls. A grotesque lump of crystal leered at him from the
heart of a tharsala lilly bed. The intricate carving of a devilish
nonhuman set of features was a work of alien art. Tendrils of smoke
curled from the thing's flat nostrils, and Hume sniffed the scent of a
narcotic he recognized. He smiled. Such measures might soften up the
usual civ Wass interviewed here. But a star pilot turned out-hunter
was immunized against such mind clouding.

There was a door, the lintel and posts of which had more carving, but
this time Terran, Hume thought—old, very old. Perhaps rumor was
right, Milfors Wass might be truly native Terran and not second,
third, nor fourth generation star stock as most of those who reached
Nahuatl were.

The room beyond that elaborately carved entrance was, in contrast,
severe. Rust walls were bare of any pattern save an oval disk of
cloudy golden shimmer behind the chair at the long table of solid ruby
rock from Nahuatl's poisonous sister planet of Xipe. Without a pause
he walked to the chair and seated himself without invitation to wait
in the empty room.

That clouded oval might be a com device. Hume refused to look at it
after his first glance. This interview was to be person to person. If
Wass did not appear within a reasonable length of time he would leave.

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. And the subtle difference between true flesh and
false was no hindrance in the use of those fingers or their strength.
Save that it had pushed him out of command of a cargo-cum-liner and
hurled him down from the pinnacle of a star pilot. There were bitter
brackets about his mouth, set there by that hand as deeply as if
carved with a knife.

It had been four years—planet time—since he had lifted the Rigal
Rover from the launch pad on Sargon Two. He had suspected it might be
a tricky voyage with young Tors Wazalitz, who was a third owner of the
Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz line, and a Gratz chewer. But one did not argue
with the owners, except when the safety of the ship was concerned. The
Rigal Rover had made a crash landing at Alexbut, and a badly injured
pilot had brought her in by will, hope and a faith he speedily lost.

He received a plasta-hand, the best the medical center could supply
and a pension for life, forced by the public acclaim for a man who had
saved ships and lives. Then—the sack because a crazed Tors Wazalitz
was dead. They dared not try to stick Hume with a murder charge; the
voyage record tapes had been shot straight through to the Patrol
Council, and the evidence on those could be neither faked nor tampered
with. They could not give him a quick punishment, but they could try
to arrange a slow death. The word had gone out that Hume was off pilot
boards. They had tried to keep him out of space.

And they might have done it, too, had he been the usual type of pilot,
knowing only his trade. But some odd streak of restlessness had always
led him to apply for the rim runs, the very first flights to newly
opened worlds. Outside of the survey men, there were few qualified
pilots of his seniority who possessed such a wide and varied knowledge
of the galactic frontiers.

So when he learned that the ships' boards were irrevocably closed to
him, Hume had signed up with the Out-Hunters' Guild. There was a vast
difference between lifting a liner from a launching pad and guiding
civ hunters to worlds surveyed and staked out for their trips into the
wild. Hume relished the exploration part—he disliked the
leading-by-the-hand of nine-tenths of the Guild's clients.

But if he had not been in the Guild service he would never have made
that find on Jumala. That lucky, lucky find! Hume's plasta-flesh
fingers curved, their nails drew across the red surface of the table.
And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden oval
on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped
through to the floor.

The newcomer was small compared to the former pilot, but he had
breadth of shoulder which made the upper part of his torso overbalance
his thin hips and legs. He was dressed most conservatively except for
a jeweled plaque resting on the tightly stretched gray silk of his
upper tunic at heart level. Unlike Hume he wore no visible arms belt,
but the other did not doubt that there were a number of devices
concealed in that room to counter the efforts of any assassin.

The man from the mirror spoke with a flat, toneless voice. His black
hair had been shaven well above his ears, the locks left on top of his
skull trained into a kind of bird's crest. As Hume, his visible areas
of flesh were deeply browned, but by nature rather than exposure to
space, the pilot guessed. His features were harsh, with a prominent
nose, a back-slanting forehead, eyes dark, long and large, with heavy
lids.

"Now—" He spread both his hands, palm down and flat on the table, a
gesture Hume found himself for some unknown reason copying. "You have
a proposition?"

But the pilot was not to be hurried, any more than he was to be
influenced by Wass' stage-settings.

"I have an idea," he corrected.

"There are many ideas." Wass leaned back in his chair, but he did not
remove his hands from the table. "Perhaps one in a thousand is the
kernel of something useful. For the rest, there is no need to trouble
a man."

"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."

"And you have such a one?"

"I have such a one." It was Hume's role now to impress the other by
his unshakable confidence. He had studied all the possibilities. Wass
was the right man, perhaps the only partner he could find. But Wass
must not know that.

"On Jumala?" Wass returned.

If that stare and statement was intended to rattle Hume it was a
wasted shot. To discover that he had just returned from that frontier
planet required no ingenuity on the Veep's part.

"Perhaps."

"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. 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.

"A claimant to the Kogan estate—that good enough for you?"

Wass showed no surprise. "And how would such a claimant be profitable
to us?"

Hume appreciated that "us"; he had an in now. "If you supply the
claimant, surely you can claim a reward, in more ways than one."

"True. But one does not produce a claimant out of a Krusha dream. The
investigation for any such claim now would be made by a verity lab and
no imposture will pass those tests. While a real claimant would not
need your help or mine."

"Depends upon the claimant."

"One you discovered on Jumala?"

"No." Hume shook his head slowly. "I found something else on
Jumala—an L-B from Largo Drift intact and in good shape. From the
evidence now in existence it could have landed there with survivors
aboard."

"And the evidence of such survivors living on—that exists also?"

Hume shrugged, his plasta-flesh fingers flexed slightly. "It has been
six planet years, there is a forest where the L-B rests. No, no
evidence at present."

"The Largo Drift," Wass repeated slowly, "carrying, among others,
Gentlefem Tharlee Kogan Brodie."

"And her son Rynch Brodie, who was at the time of the Largo Drift's
disappearance a boy of fourteen."

"You have indeed made a find." Wass gave that simple statement enough
emphasis to assure Hume he had won. His one-in-a-thousand idea had
been absorbed, was now being examined, amplified, broken down into
details he could never have hoped to manage for himself, by the most
cunning criminal brain in at least five solar systems.

"Is there any hope of survivors?" Wass attacked the problem straight
on.

"No evidence even of there being any passengers when the L-B planeted.
Those are automatic and released a certain number of seconds after an
accident alarm. For what it's worth the hatch of this one was open. It
could have brought in survivors. But I was on Jumala for three months
with a full Guild crew and we found no sign of any castaways."

"So you propose—?"

"On the basis of my report Jumala has been put up for a safari choice.
The L-B could well be innocently discovered by a client. Every one
knows the story with the case dragging through the Ten Sector-Terran
Courts now. Gentlefem Brodie and her son might not have been news ten
years ago. Now, with a third of the Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz control going
to them, any find linked with the Largo Drift would gain full galactic
coverage."

"You have a choice of survivor? The Gentlefem?"

Hume shook his head. "The boy. He was bright, according to the stories
since, and he would have the survival manual from the ship to study.
He could have grown up in the wilds of an unopened planet. To use a
woman is too tricky."

"You are entirely right. But we shall require an extremely clever
imposter."