The Star Virus

Taking his cue, Rodrone stepped to where the loosely-constructed contraption lay around the lens. Finding a heavy metal tube that was part of the machine, he wrenched it loose, lunged forward and brought it crashing down on Sinnt's shoulder-camera.

The blow almost brought Sinnt to his knees. The camera buckled, fragments from the lenses tinkled to the floor. A faint whiff of smoke rose from inside the casing.

Sinnt recovered his balance and stretched out his hands before him. Truly blind, now, he stepped forward uncertainly, then turned, attracted by the sound of his sobbing son.

Stumbling, he made his way towards him. "My boy, my poor boy. Can you stand? Come, we will make our way home somehow. The damage is reparable. Ignore the pain. Come, come."

No one moved to help them as, clinging to one another, they fumbled their way to the door, Foyle acting as his father's eyes. Rodrone had to admit to himself that Sinnt's exit did not lack dignity.

He did not speak until they had gone. "How's your arm?" he asked Clave.

Clave's tight grin masked his pain. "It's okay, thanks. A mediseal will hold it until we get to the ship."

"Well, thanks anyway. You handled Sinnt pretty well."

"It was pretty obvious, really," Clave said. "Sinnt's camera is mounted on his right shoulder. That means he has a permanently blind sector on his left. All you have to do is stay in it and he can't see you. I felt bad about hurting the kid, though."

"Don't. He would have beamed you down with his evil eye. But how did you get here, anyway?"

Clave managed a laugh. "You don't think you got clean away with giving us the brush-off, do you? Redace didn't like what was going on in that house. He thought you were getting into something, so we didn't spend all our time sampling the delights of Kell. We kept a watch on the house. When you left we followed you here, and it didn't seem to us that you were under your own power, so to speak. So we gave you a few hours and then came in. I must say I never bargained for… this! What the hell was going on?"

"Did you see anything?" Rodrone asked curiously.

"Only everybody screaming like crazy."

"These people study the Streall. They've actually got a Streall here. Somehow they managed to project the lens's pictures into our consciousness. But they didn't know that their contraption was accidentally tuned to select particularly terrifying events. Let me tell you, it beats nightmares."

Walking around the table that bore the lens, he tried to pull back the plush red curtain. When it held, he yanked harder and brought it tumbling down. Behind it, on a small platform, lay Seffatt. He was quite dead. At the back of the platform was a narrow tunnel, presumably leading to his private living quarters.

What had he tried to tell them, in those last seconds when death finally claimed him? Rodrone did not think he had really been able to control the society for some years now. The leader had not even realized he was dying. Yet from the look of it, he had hung on to life only by a miracle. The long armadillo-like body was shriveled with age, the natural skirts of hide that normally covered the six legs were discolored and shrunken. Seffatt lay on his side, so that the short, weak legs showed, pitifully curled up. Rodrone could not avoid a feeling of pity.

"Let's get out of here," he said brusquely.

After he had applied medication to Clave's arm they managed to get the lens to the runabout outside. He considered taking the bodies of Redace and the others too, but decided against it. What was the point? There was nothing he could do for Redace in return for what he had done for him.

On the way to the spaceground they passed Mard Sinnt and Foyle, the boy slowly guiding his father along the street. "Redace didn't like Sinnt," Clave remarked. "He didn't like what he was doing to his son. He said he was turning them both into research instruments, not human beings at all."

"This city is full of kookies," Rodrone agreed gruffly.

Though the cost had been heavy, on direct balance the visit to Kelever had paid off. He now knew a lot more about the lens. For one thing, his recent experience demonstrated that the information displayed in it was not merely pictorial; if one knew how to extract the data, it could inform every sense—hearing, smell, touch, and the indefinable sense of being there.

He was certain now that the lens was some sort of plan of the galaxy. Not a physical plan, but perhaps a schemata of all the events taking place in it, building up to some pattern understood only by the Streall. But he did not mention these things to Clave. In the coming weeks he did not mention them to anybody. The only man aboard the Stond with whom he had once been able to converse usefully about the matter, Redace Trudo, would not converse with anybody any more.

VII

Stundaker spaceground was a lusty, brawling, untidy sprawl which Rodrone took in with half his attention. He was used to such sights, and now his mind brooded elsewhere.