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entirely. It was a girl, her lips white where they had been gagged, her arms
still trailing ropes that Sister Delta Four had not finished taking off her.
"They took your ship," she repeated. "All three of them. They opened the door
for me and left"
Gann hardly heard what she was saying. Something else was filling his mind.
Honey-haired, softly tanned of skin, eyes blue and bright... be knew that
girl.
The girl in the observation dome in Mercury was the girl he had left weeks and
billions of miles from here and now. It was Quarla Snow.
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14
In the bright, refrigerated dome the pumps poured cooling air in upon them,
but the great storm-
racked globe of the Sun that hung in the viewing screen seemed to beat down on
them as if they were naked on Mercury's rock.
Quarla Snow reached out and touched Boysie G^nn's arm. "I thought you were
dead," she said wonderingly, and her eyes went toward Sister Delta Four,
kneeling beside her, patiently, absently rubbing Quarla's chafed wrists.
"Never mind that," said Gann. "How did you get here? Was it the Starchild?"
Quarla shook her head, not in denial but in doubt. "I don't know. After you
disappeared I set out to look for you."
General Wheeler, at one of the optical telescopes, rapped angrily, 'ThereI I
see the villains!
Between us and the Sun!" He studied the controls of his instruments furiously,
selected a switch and turned it. The great image of the Sun hi the screen
danced and dwindled as the field of vision of a new telescope replaced the old
one.
They saw the Plan cruiser that had brought them, already very remote in the
black, star-sprinkled sky that surrounded the blazing globe.
"I wonder who's piloting it," murmured Boysie Gann.
"Those criminals you saw here!" Wheeler barked. "Playing possum! They fooled
youl Now they've taken our ship and we're marooned."
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"General," said Boysie Gann earnestly, "I don't ask you to believe me, but I
was not fooled. They were not pretending to be dead. They were dead."
"Impossible," rasped the general. "Look at the idiots! They're heading
straight for the Sun. The ship isn't designed for photosphere temperatures!
They'll kill themselves!"
Gann turned wearily back to Quarla Snow. "You said you went looking for me.
Why?"
She flushed and looked away. She did not answer the question. She said,
"Colonel Zafar died. My father reported it it was dangerous, you see and he
took the
266
body into Freehaven for examination. He did not know what had become of you.
Neither did I. But
... I thought I could find you."
Sister Delta Four got up quietly, crossed to the girl's Other side, began to
rub circulation into the other wrist, Quarla went on, her eyes avoiding Boysie
Gann's. As she spoke she looked sometimes at Sister Delta Four, sometimes at
General Wheeler, sometimes at the great hanging orb of the Sun and the Plan
cruiser that was moving slowly toward its long, tentacle-like prominences.
She had gone outside, she said, and called her spaceling. Then she brought
Harry Hickson's pyropod out into the open air, released it, watched it circle
them twice, then arrow off into space itself
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. . . and, riding the spaceling, she had followed it.
"After you disappeared and Colonel Zafar died, it seemed to go crazy," she
said. "Raced around the house J thought it was looking for you. And I thought
it might find you, if I set it free."
"The Starchild!" boomed General Wheeler. "Get to the Starchild, woman! Did you
ever find the
Starchild?"
She hesitated. "I think I did," she said at last. "I think I met the Starchild
in the heart of
Reef Whirlpool."
Reef Whirlpool not a planet, not a sun, not a comet. Not even a Reef in the
true sense. It was something that partook of some of the elements of all of
them. It had begun as a Reef, no doubt.
It orbited Sol like a planet, if a distant one; like a comet, most of its bulk
was gases. And it burned with hydrogen-helium fusion at its core, like a star.
Basically Reef Whirlpool was simply a bigger, denser cluster of Reefs than
most of those stepchildren of Sol. Given time and additions enough, it might
some day become the heart of a star.
Its angular momentum was enormous; some stronger force than gravity kept its
parts from flying into space. The Reefs that composed it were older and . . .
stranger than those outside. Pyropods in queerly mutated forms swarmed in and
around it. Its central portions had never been visited by man, not even by the
explorers of the Reefs.
It was a place of terror and legend. The life that it harbored had been a long
time evolving.
Straight as an arrow the baby pyropod that once had belonged to Harry Hickson
hurtled toward Reef
Whirl-
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pool and behind it pursuing, barely able to keep its glowing blue-white trail
in sight, followed
Quarla Snow on her spaceling.
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"I was afraid," she said soberly. "We passed a mating swarm of pyropods. Then
ten thousand of them together, wheeling in space in a single body. If they had
seen us and pursued we wouldn't have had a chance. But it was too late to
worry about that . . . and I was even more afraid of Reef
Whirlpool."
'The Starchild, giril" cried General Wheeler. "Now!" His eyes were fixed
angrily on the screen, where the Plan cruiser was coming closer and closer to~ [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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