Troubled Star
Copyright© 2026 by George O. Smith
Chapter 1
They were parked on the dark side of Mercury, snug and comfortable in their hemisphere of force that kept out the cold and kept in the air. At one side where force met ground, a tall silvery spacecraft rose like a chimney.
They were three:
Chat Honger was tall, red-headed, and thin faced. He looked as though he were incapable of quieting down, but he was really the type of person who has an incredible amount of patience for things which cannot be performed in a hurry.
Bren Fallow was shorter than Chat Honger, darker, stouter, more round of face and more amiable. Definitely, Bren was the methodical type.
The third man was Scyth Radnor. Scyth was the kind of man who is quick to grasp a new idea and as quick to reduce it to practise. His failing was that he seldom looked deep or planned far ahead. Being quick of mind he preferred to play everything by ear because planning required study, and Scyth felt that study for the sake of study consumed too much time—time that could better be spent in the pursuit of fun and games.
Teach them the language and drop them in Greater New York and they would be lost among Manhattan’s millions. Better change their clothing, though. Striped shorts, Greek sandals, a Sam Browne belt across a bare chest, and a Roman toga of iridescent changing hues is not the kind of costume seen on Fifth Avenue.
Aside from their costume they were human to the last detail. Even their speech, when translated, sounded like the human tongue. They used slang, elision, swearwords and poor grammar. They made bum jokes and puns. They sounded more like displaced earthmen than technicians from a culture that had been establishing galactic centers of population for thirty thousand years.
“You’re certain?” asked Bren.
Scyth nodded. “Dead certain now. It was that last computation that sold me.”
“Then I’d better shut down.”
Chat Honger shook his head. “We’ve got a job to do. We’re behind schedule now, fellows, because of this question. We’ve got a beacon to start here, I say let’s get along with it and bedamned to the—”
“You can’t,” said Bren. “The first time you put down in the log that this is a middle sequence flare-star, right smack-dab in the middle of Yalt Gangrow’s Diagram, the Bureau of Colonization is going to ask you if you took a look for habitable planets. Then—then what, Scyth?”
Scyth Radnor shrugged. “The answer is ‘yes’ we took a look and we found one, just at the right distance, the right size, and the right conditioning. To say nothing of upper atmosphere and other data made by observation. So Planet Three is about as habitable as Marandis itself.”
Chat grunted. “Looked for any signs of life?”
Scyth nodded. “The phanobands are as dead as you-know-what. The machinus fields are all as dead as one might expect this far from any established route. There are a few bits and dabs of stuff on the radiomagnetic spectrum which show a recurrent pattern too fast to be anything of natural phenomena, however. I say we ought to take a look.”
Chat shook his head slowly. “I didn’t expect to find it inhabited. But even knowing it is habitable is—”
Bren said, “If mere habitability is all you’re after we can go ahead and establish our beacon and leave Planet Three to be handled later. A beacon wouldn’t ruin the planet itself, you know.”
Scyth said, “We’d better take a look-see anyhow. That last computation on the radiomagnetic stuff looked too much like man-made radiation to me.”
Bren Hallow smiled. “Look,” he said slowly, “If this planet is inhabited, how come the Bureau of Colonization doesn’t know about it. Not one case in the history of Marandis shows the discovery of an inhabited planet that—”
Chat interrupted, sourly, “that didn’t stem from Marandanian origin. But how about the several cases of spacewreck? Look what we’re doing. We’re setting up beacons along a rift through the galaxy from Marandis to the Spiral Cluster. We found this rift after years of hard work and galactic surveying and exploring, and both of you know just how fabulous it is. Well, suppose someone found it twenty thousand years ago and got marooned?”
“So what do we do? Take a run to Planet Three and radiate machinus fields all over space? Not until we know. So, Scyth, can you ducky us up a high-sensitivity job out of one of the standard menslators?”
“I think so. D’you think it will work?”
“If there is a primitive culture of the most low-grade organization there, there will also be one or more leading characters. A man of fame or power—or infame and power—whose person will be in the active minds of a large number of hypothetical inhabitants. We should be able to get some sort of response even if the whole thing is primitive as all get-out. But let’s take a look before we do anything that’s likely to get us into trouble. We’re late now, another few hours isn’t going to hurt much more.”
The discussion in the dome on Mercury’s dark side abated as the trio went to work. Scyth began to tinker with his menslators; Chat began to prowl the confines like a caged animal, thinking deeply, and Bren Hallow went back to his massive equipment that was designed to create a galactic beacon.
On this Third Planet of Sol there were still captains and kings and presidents and commissars and a couple of dictators and a new invention or two, all of which professed to be gentle guardians of the public rights. Only the names had changed, some in violence and some in peace. The names of places were about the same; a few had disappeared in the heat of ideology, but by and large things and people persisted despite atoms, politics and the cussedness of human nature. Youth was still going to hell—and old age was still fuddy-duddy.
One apparent change might have been noticed by a man of the middle of the century, and even he would have expected it.
The history of this change reads like this:
A few years after Global War I, the manufacturer of a breakfast food product known as “Oatflakes” realized a rather monumental increase in the sale of his product. Conscientious investigation showed that this increase was not due to the public becoming addicted to oatmeal as a morning, noon and night diet (with a midnight snack tossed in) but entirely due to a new plaything called the “Wireless.” Wireless, it was found, required as a major component about a quarter of a mile of wire wound around the cylindrical box in which the oatflakes were packed.
Some years later, when the first home-manufacture of radio sets slowed because of professional manufacture of commercial radio, the sale of Oatflakes dropped to normal. At this point the manufacturer of the food product realized that the pathway to high sales was not along the contents, but along the package. Let the public buy the stuff for the box, or the box-top. If he wants to eat the stuff on the inside, that’s his business!
So in the early-middle years of the century there arose a character called Hopalong Cassidy, who portrayed an Old West chivalry and heroic strength great enough to sell boxtops by the gross ton. He tied-in sales with toy and clothing makers until business reached the Law of Diminishing Returns. After selling spurs for roller skates the brains ran out of ideas and turned to new fields.
Space travel was the coming thing, so the youth of the land turned to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.
Tom Corbett’s only trouble was the same as the difficulty encountered by one Frank Merriwell fifty years earlier. After twenty years, Tom Corbett became the oldest undergraduate in Space Academy, just as Merriwell became the oldest undergraduate at Yale. The youth of the race wanted a real spaceman, full fledged and heroic, and so they got it.
Meet Dusty Britton of The Space Patrol...
The sleek spacecraft landed and the clouds of hot dust rose almost to the spacelock, driven up by the fierce reaction blast. A hundred yards from the Patrol cruiser lay the broken spacecraft of Roger Fulton, arch-fiend, cornered at last.
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