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V

The door to Beljagor's place, offices-cum-residence, barely had time to get out of Falkayn's way. But as he entered the lobby, he skidded to a stop. In a small room opening on this, two Kraoka were talking. One was armed and brassarded, an invader. The other was Quillipup. They froze.

"Greetings," said the liaison agent after a pause. "What brings you here?"

"I want to see your boss," Falkayn answered.

"I believe he is asleep," Quillipup said.

"Too bad." Falkayn started down the hall.

"Stop!" Quillipup bounded after him. "I told you he is asleep."

"And I told you it's a pity he has to be wakened," Falkayn rapped.

Quillipup regarded him. Her dorsal fin rose. The Antoranite glided close behind, hand not far from blaster.

"What have you to say which is so urgent?" Quillipup asked slowly.

Falkayn gave her eyeball for eyeball and responded, "What's so urgent for you, that it can't wait till Beljagor has risen?"

Silence, under the icy white light. Falkayn grew aware of blood pounding in his ears. His skin prickled. That energy gun looked too businesslike for his taste. But Quillipup turned on her heel, without a word, and led her companion back to the office. Falkayn let out a hard-held breath and continued on his way.

He hadn't been told where in the building the factor lived, but the layout of places like this was pretty standardized. The suite door was locked. He buzzed. Nothing happened. He buzzed again.

The scanner must have a screen in the bedroom, because the voice from the annunciator rasped, "You! Do you suppose I'd get up for a pestilential human?"

"Yes," Falkayn said. "Urgent."

"Urgent that you jump off the nearest cliff, right. And a bad night to you." The speaker clicked off.

That adjective "urgent" was being overworked, Falkayn decided. He leaned on the buzzer.

"Stop your infernal racket!" howled Beljagor.

"Sure, when you let me in," Falkayn said. Click.

Falkayn whistled "The Blue Danube" to pass the time while he leaned on the buzzer.

The door flew open. Beljagor bounced forth. Falkayn was interested to note that the Jaleelan slept in pajamas, bright purple ones. "You insolent whelp!" the factor bawled. "Get out of here!"

"Yes, sir," Falkayn said. "You come, too."

"What?"

"I have to show you something in my space boat."

Beljagor's eyes turned red. His tendrils stood erect. He drank air until his small round form seemed ready to explode.

"Please, sir," Falkayn begged. "You've got to. It's terribly important."

Beljagor cursed and swung a fist.

Falkayn sidestepped the blow, picked up the Master Merchant by collar and trousers, and bore him kicking and yelling down the hall. "I told you you had to come," the journeyman said patiently.

The two Kraoka in the lobby had left, and those on sentry-go at the warship made no move to interfere. Maybe, behind furry poker faces, they enjoyed the sight. Falkayn had left the gangway ramp extruded from his speedster but had put a recognition lock on the entrance. It opened for him. He carried Beljagor inside, set him down, and waited for the storm to break.

The Jaleelan spoke no word, only looked at him. His snout quivered a little.

"Okay," Falkayn sighed. "You don't accept my apologies. You'll have my certificate revoked. You'll strangle me with my own guts. Anything else?"

"I suppose you have an explanation," Beljagor said like fingernails going quite slowly over a blackboard.

"Yes, sir. The business won't wait. And I didn't dare speak anyplace but here. Your Quillipup is acting far too friendly with the self-appointed liberators. Be no trick for her to bug your quarters."

What ozone had come in with them—less than by day—must have been processed into oxygen by now. Falkayn slipped off his filter mask. Beljagor mumbled something about Earth-type atmosphere being good for naught except breaking wind. Otherwise, though, the factor had cooled off astonishingly fast. "Talk, cub," he ordered.

"You see," Falkayn said, "I know where Antoran is."

"Heh?" Beljagor jumped several centimeters in the pilot chair he occupied.

"They'd never let me go if they found out I know," Falkayn continued. He leaned back against a bulkhead. His gaze drifted beyond the viewpoints. Both moons had set, and Beta Centauri ruled heaven. "As is, you'll have to come, too."

"What? Impossible! If you think I'll abandon the property of General Motors to a gang of pirates—"

"They'll doubtless send you packing before long in any event," Falkayn said. "Admit that. You just hate to surrender. But we've got to take the bull by the tail and look the situation squarely in the face."

"What do you mean, you know where Antoran is?" Beljagor spluttered. "Did you swallow something the Horn creature told you for a joke?"

"No, sir, she didn't intend to give me any information. Only, well, she was raised in an isolated, dedicated, Spartan society. She wasn't equipped to handle me." Falkayn grinned. "Figuratively, I mean, not literally. Her fellows didn't allow for the effects of alcohol and smooth talk. Not used to such things themselves, I imagine. Could be they also counted on my being so overbowled by her looks that I'd merely gawk and listen to her. They seem to be a very romantic bunch. Dangerous as hell, but romantic."

"Well? Well? What did Horn say?"

"Little items. They gave the show away, though. Like, Antoran isn't a planet but a star. And just one star hereabouts can possibly fit the data." Falkayn let Beljagor rumble for a moment before he pointed skyward and said, "Beta Centauri."

The factor did explode. He hopped around the cabin, flapping his arms and raving. Falkayn filed the choicer epithets in his memory for later use.

At last Beljagor was sufficiently calm to stand in one spot, raise a finger, and say, "You unutterable imbecile, for your information, Beta is a type B blue giant. People knew before space flight began, giant suns don't have planets. Angular momentum per unit mass proved as much. After the hyperdrive came along, direct expeditions to any number of them clinched the matter. Even supposing, somehow, one did acquire satellites, those satellites never would get habitable. Giant stars burn hydrogen so fast their existence is measured in millions of years. Millions, you hear, not billions. Beta Centauri can hardly be ten million years old. More than half its stable lifetime is past. It'll go supernova and become a white dwarf. Life'd have no chance to evolve before the planets were destroyed. Not that there are any, I repeat. The reason for only the smaller suns having planets is understood. A big protostar, condensing from the interstellar medium, develops too intense a gravitational field for the secondary condensation process to take place outside it.

"I thought even humans learned so much elementary astrophysics in the first grade of school. I was wrong. Now you know."

His voice rose to a scream. "And for this you got me out of bed!"

Falkayn moved to block the cabin exit. "But I do know," he said. "Everybody does. The Antoranites have based their whole strategy on our preconception. They figure by the time we discover Beta Centauri is a freak case, they'll control the whole region."

Beljagor hurled himself back into the pilot chair, folded his arms, and grated, "Well, get the farce over with, since you must."

"Here are the facts," Falkayn said. He ticked them off. "One, the Antoranite System was colonized by Kraoka, who couldn't and didn't settle on planets with suns as cool as Sol. Two, Antoran has six planets in the liquid-water zone. No matter how you arrange their orbits, that zone has to be mighty broad—which indicates a correspondingly luminous star. Three, the outermost of those six planets is too cold and weakly irradiated for Kraokan comfort, but suits humans fairly well. Yet it has brilliant auroras even in the temperate zones. For that, you need a sun which shoots out some terrifically energetic particles: again, a giant.

"Four, this human planet, Neuheim, is far out. The proof lies in three separate facts, (a) From Neuheim, the sun doesn't have a naked-eye disc, (b) There are no solar tides worth mentioning, (c) The year is long, I figure something like two Earth centuries. I know the year is long, because Jutta let slip that her people had to shift some towns poleward a while back. Orbital eccentricity was making the lower latitudes too hot, maybe also too much UV was penetrating the ozone layer in those parts and making poisonous concentrations of ozone at the surface, like here. Nevertheless, the original human settlement was forty years ago. In other words, Neuheim's radius vector changes at so leisurely a rate that it was worth sitting down in areas which the colonists knew would have to be abandoned later. I suppose they wanted to exploit local minerals.

"Okay. In spite of its enormous distance from the primary, Neuheim is habitable, if you don't mind getting a deep suntan. What kind of star can buck the inverse-square law on so grand a scale? What but a blue giant! And Beta Centauri is the only blue giant close by."

He stopped, hoarse and in need of beer. Beljagor sat like a graven image, assuming that anybody would want to grave such an image, while the minutes stretched. A space boat whined overhead, an enemy craft on an unknown errand.

Finally, tonelessly, Beljagor asked, "How could there be planets?"

"I've worked that out," Falkayn replied. "A freak, as I remarked before, perhaps the only case in the universe, but still possible. The star captured a mess of rogue planets."

"Nonsense. Single bodies can't make captures." But Beljagor didn't yell his objection.

"Granted. Here's what must have happened. Beta was condensing, with a massive nucleus already but maybe half its mass still spread over God knows how many astronomical units, as a nebular cloud. A cluster of rogue planets passed through. Beta's gravity field swung them around. But because of friction with the nebula, they didn't recede into space again. Energy loss, you see, converting hyperbolic orbits into elliptical ones. Could be that there was also a secondary center of stellar condensation, which later spiraled into the main mass. Two bodies can certainly make captures. But I think friction alone would serve.

"The elliptical orbits were almighty eccentric, of course. Friction smoothed them out some. But Jutta admitted that to this day the planets have paths eccentric enough to cause weather trouble. Which is not the normal case either, you recall. Makes another clue for us."

"Hm-m-m." Beljagor tugged his nose and pondered.

"The planets would've exuded gases and water vapor in the early stages of their existence, through vulcanism, like any other substellar globes," Falkayn plowed on. "The stuff froze in space. But Beta unfroze it.

"I don't know how the Kraoka of Dzua learned what the situation was. Maybe they simply didn't know that blue giants don't have planets. Or maybe they sent a telemetric probe for astrophysical research, and it informed them. Anyhow, they discovered Beta had five potentially good worlds plus one that was marginal for them. So they colonized. Sure, the planets were sterile, with poisonous atmospheres. But the ancient Kraoka were whizzes at environmental engineering. You can sketch for yourself what they did: seeded the air with photosynthetic spores to convert it, released other forms of life to consume the primeval organic matter and form the basis of an ecology, etcetera. Under those conditions, microbes would multiply exponentially, and it'd take no more than a few centuries for a world to become habitable."

Falkayn shrugged. "Beta will blow up and destroy their work in five or ten million years," he finished. "But that's ample time for anyone, hey?"

"Yes," Beljagor said low.

He raised his head, looked directly at the man, and said, "If this be true, we've got to tell the League. A war fleet that went straight to Beta should catch the enemy by complete surprise. Once the home planets were hostage to us, obviously there'd be no fighting."

"Uh-huh." Falkayn suppressed a yawn. Weariness was beginning to overtake him.

"But this is only a hypothesis," Beljagor said. "Your evidence is all hearsay. Horn could've been putting you on. The League can't base a whole operation on an idea which may turn out wrong. That'd be ruinous. We need positive proof."

"Right," Falkayn nodded. "So we'll both go, in our separate boats. You can easily make some excuse for having changed your mind about staying here. They won't suspect a thing if you throw a temper tantrum and storm off into space."

Beljagor grew rigid. "What are you saying? I'm the most patient, long-suffering entity in this cosmos."

"Huh?"

"When I think of what I have to put up with, impertinence like yours, stupidity, greed, thievishness, lack of appreciation—" Beljagor's tone mounted to a dull roar. Falkayn smothered a second yawn.

"Well, such is my life," said the factor as a coda. "I'll think of something. What do you propose after we take off?"

"We'll start ostensibly for HQ," Falkayn said. "Once we're out of detector range, we'll head toward Beta. We'll stop at a safe distance. You wait. I'll run in close to the star and make observations. Then I'll come back to you and we really will skite for friendlier country."

"Why the separate excursion?"

"I might get caught. In that case—if I haven't rejoined you by the agreed time—you can tell the League what we do know and suggest they investigate Beta themselves."

"Hm. Ha. Correct. But why do you volunteer for the dangerous part? I doubt that you're competent."

"Sir," Falkayn said tiredly, "I may be young, but I can handle instruments. This speedster is built for humans—you couldn't operate her efficiently—and she's better adapted to a quick job of spying than your craft. So I'm elected. Besides," he added, "if I get clobbered, I'm a mere journeyman, a human at that. You're a Master Merchant from Jaleel."

His sarcasm went to waste. Beljagor sprang erect with tears starting from his porcine eyes. "Right!" he cried, choked by emotion. "How noble of you to admit it!" He wrung Falkayn's hand. "Please don't think badly of me. I may be loud now and then—I may talk rough when my patience wears thin—but believe me, I've got no prejudice against your race. Humans have fine qualities. Why, some of my best friends are human!"

 

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