The Star Virus

He supposed he could also thank DPKL-59 for his not having seen his wife in the past five years. His information was that she was alive and well on Land V, where he had last left her, but he had no immediate plans to contact her. Yet, with typical ambivalence, he still regarded her as his wife and constant companion. He felt that their relationship went deeper than the need for the repeated reassurances that frequent meetings would have given. For both of them, just the knowledge that the other existed somewhere in the Hub was enough.

At the moment his wife was as far from his thoughts as she was in space from his body. He scanned the room until catching sight of the most flamboyant figure there: Redace Trudo.

Redace was the man Rodrone had invited to help him fathom the secrets of the lens, as he had come to call the mysterious Streall artifact. As Rodrone approached he looked up from his earnest conversation with a reclining girl.

"Greetings," he offered mockingly in his broad, lilting voice. "Why, it is just too much if you think you are going to tear me away from this gorgeous creature here."

Redace was an unashamed, outrageous dandy. Handsome to the point of caricature, he affected a foppish manner that led many, unacquainted with his enormous sexual appetites, to presume him to be homosexual. Sometimes Redace encouraged this impression for his own amusement.

He took great care over his clothes and had a taste for elaborate hats. At the moment he wore an embroidered, padded jacket in violet and silver with flaring side-skirts, and a hat constructed of a number of interleaving arcs, like the petals of a flower, topped by a jaunty feather. Slung from his waist was an old-fashioned mother-of-pearl holster. The decorated gun it carried contained specially tuned lasers to fire deadly beams in all Redace's favorite colors—lavender, apricot, rose pink and a pale, pretty green.

Rodrone had a considerable, though unspoken admiration for the man. He was what he would have liked to be himself: a released personality in complete harmony with himself. He had two qualities rarely found in one man; he was sensual and extrovert, but he also had a mind which mastered any subject with systematic ease. His knowledge of science was wide and penetrating, and he could read any book in Rodrone's library without the aid of DPKL-59. Yet despite his abilities, his outlook on life was unremittingly anarchistic. Scorning trade or productive enterprises, he and his raggle-taggle band lived purely by piracy, which they pursued with such enthusiasm that more than once the Merchant Houses had sent ships to destroy him, failing to winkle him out of the asteroid belt a few light-months from Brüde where he lived in a chaotic jumble of warrens.

"Have you finished the test?" Rodrone asked.

With an affected sigh Redace gestured elegantly, inviting him towards a nearby doorway.

Closing the door on the noise outside, Rodrone soaked up the already familiar scene in the workroom. The lens lay on the floor, surrounded by the equipment Redace had brought with him when his spacer thundered down into the crater. For nearly a month now they had applied every test and experiment they could think of, provided it seemed unlikely to damage the specimen.

Redace was something of an expert in vibratory techniques. Withdrawing behind soundproof baffles, he had bombarded the lens with vibrations of every frequency until the air sang and throbbed and their bodies ached with the dangerous pulsations. Then he had fed the results through a computer.

The computer's verdict had been interesting. The material of the lens—which they still could not analyze—was doped with atoms in a peculiar state of vibration. They were what gave off the glowing swirl in the center. Just what the atoms were they couldn't say, except that they were trans-plutonian.

Beyond that, they had discovered nothing concrete and were forced back on speculation. Redace still clung to the theory Rodrone had abandoned, that the lens was a picture device showing fictional playlets.

"But why are the Streall so desperate to have it back?" Rodrone objected.

The other shrugged. "Who knows what goes on in their outfit? Maybe it's some big chief Streall's kid's favorite toy, so he's sent out the army and the navy to find it."

Rodrone disliked any explanation that smacked of the trivial. He was much too in awe of the lens to accept that. Hour after hour he sat gazing spellbound at the myriad shifting scenes. As he watched, his whole perspective on the universe seemed to change, twist and distort itself, so that several times he had to wing himself back to his normal way of thinking with a snap.