QUEST OF THE STARHOPE

BERT QUINTAL was not particularly surprised when he saw the city. There were a number of them in those vast wastes of northern Mars, drowned in the desert sand, lifeless and forgotten for ages.

He was not even particularly interested. Far to the south, on the edge of the polar barrens, his assistant Larkin was going through the routine motions of digging and classifying in just such a place, to give the Quintal expedition the semblance of a respectable scientific investigation. Quintal was fed up with drowned cities.

Sheer boredom had driven him out in the little one-man scout Starhope, to prowl the dreary wastes in the faint hope of finding something worth taking. Quintal was concerned with life, not death. Life that could be trapped, shipped back to Earth, and exhibited for profit, a procedure that had brought him most of his popular fame and money.

He had found nothing. Looking down at the utter desolation of the landscape, he hated it with a bitter hatred. And then, quite suddenly, Bert Quintal was face to face with the only terror he had ever felt.

It was not really sudden, that terror. It had grown slowly out of the long dull days, and now it stood before him where he had to look.

He had stripped Venus and Mars of all they had. Jupiter was denied him, barred off by the gulf of deep space that no rocket ship could cross.There was no more place to go, nothing to do.

He had never had a friend, nor anyone to love. Nothing but the driving restlessness that sent him from the Chicago slums into the rusty tramp ships as a boy of thirteen, that had made him claw and trample his way to the top, hungry for glory and money, and yet dissatisfied with them, because no matter how much he got there was always something new beyond.

Now there was nothing.

In a kind of desperation, he looked at the dead city below the ship and said, "Well, Butch? Do you see anything?"

He did not speak aloud. There was no need to speak aloud to Butch. Butch answered, also silently, "Those low hills to the west — there's some life there. I think it is the only animal."

Butch was very small, less than the size of Quintal's hand. He clung with his four sucker paws to the back of the Earthman's neck, so that their thoughts should meet easily. Butch came from Venus. He had a wife, and the two were the last of their race.

EVOLUTION had given them bodies that had no worries about food and water. Their transparent fur took from air and sun, and root-like fibres concealed in pouches on their undersides could strike down into the soil to draw nourishment from the earth. They were mostly mind — mind of a power and sensitivity beyoud Quintal's understanding.

He had snatched them up for exhibition on Earth. And then he realized that Butch could give him more another way.

He left the female where she was, knowing with cynical shrewd ness that Butch would give his soul to get back to her. In seven years Butch had saved Quintal's life a score of times and brought him more wealth and more fame than Quintal alone could have won in ten lifetimes.

Now, apparently, even Butch could not help him. "Animal life," he repeated. "Nothing much in that."

"No," said Butch. "You might as well go back to Larkin." The little body stirred against the Earthman's flesh.

"Take me home, Quintal! You haven't any more need of me Please - take me home!"

The man swore, in sudden fury. His hand rose, to slam down on the firing keys.

Then he saw the flicker of movement among the towers of the city below.

iving he shouted. And then ominously, "You saw Butch. You always see. Why did you fire?"

Butch hesitated, and Quintal laughed, shaken out of his black mood by the unheard-of surprise of life in a drowned city.

"Sentimental fool!" he said. "Watch out, shrimp, or you'll never see Venus and that animated powder-puff again."

His body was tense now with excitement. He took the Starhope down, and watched his rocket flares score the white top of the great building where he landed.

The city stood in a sea of sand that rolled in desolate ochre waves under the whip of a thin, sad wind. It was submerged in sand, the dry spray chafing at the towers that were all that showed above the restless breakers.

"Life, here!" whispered Quintal, still not believing it. He grabbed for his warm coverall.

Outside in the cold wind, with Butch hidden as usual under the coverall's hood — Butch saw without eyes and heard without ears—Quintal waited. The mental voice of Butch was sad with his knowledge of what was going to happen.

"The first ones," he sighed. "There, coming around the octagonaltower."

There weren't many of them. Perhaps two hundred. They came on wide shimmering wings, fantastic little creatures with furry human bodies no more than four feet high.

They wore kilts of some woven stuff, and they bore tiny pencil tubes in their belts.

They landed like puffs of thistledown, in a wide circle on the roof, as strange and lost and pathetically beautiful as their dead city. "Well," rasped Quintal's mind. "What about them?"

Butch let their combined mental trend wash through him. "They're friendly, so far. I get a peculiar mass impact: 'We are the old race. We are without fear'."

The red northern half-light held them in an unreal glow. They were still, watching Quintal with great luminous eyes, and the Earthman's mind throbbed with calculating greed.

Two of the fairy creatures stepped forward. Male and female, the soft pale fur shining on their perfect bodies. The thought of them crammed into the dark hull of the big expeditionary ship, and then aged and chained for the edification of gaping mobs, gave Quintal no pain whatsoever.

"Well, Butch?"

The tiny body stirred on his neck. "The chief, Chika, and her mate Hjan. Please, Quintal, don't steal these people. Environment has forced them into barbarism, but they were great once. They're all that's left of the ancient People of the Sky"

THE People of the Sky! Legendary creatures out of Mars' lost youth. Quintal could scarcely restrain his excitement. What a find!

The winged man spoke. "Who are you, stranger from the heavens?"

He used a pure archaic form of the bastard Martian spoken in the starveling canal cities.

Quintal answered, "I am a great chief. I greet you, Chika. Hjan, your mate." He didn't have to stumble over the semi-aspirate. Butch gave him the exact pronunciation.

The little people started. "How did you know our names?"

"I am a very great chief," said Quintal. "I know all things."

It was a trick that, thanks to Butch, he used often in dealing with the semi-human beings of lost colonies. In rapid succession Butch read the names of the others, called to the mental forefront by the exchange, and Quintal repeated them solemnly.

Chika bowed with quiet dignity. "You are welcome."

Quintal thanked him. Butch said desperately, "I can't do these things much longer. Haven't you any human decency?"

"If I have," said Quintal, "it doesn't bother me."

Each tower was a sort of isolated camp where a part of the trihe lived. There was no communication over the treacherous sand, except by flying. They lived, Quintal guessed, on the rare Martian birds, and water, greens, and small animals brought from the low hills.

Chika and Hjan led the way down through a roof-trap into huge echoing halls filled with statuary and rotting furniture. Quintal prowled like a predatory beast through the two upper levels and then started down broad inlay steps toward the third.

Chika stopped, and Butch transmitted a quick mental thrill of I earri from the Martian.

"Not down there," said Chika. "There is sand."

Butch said sharply, "Don't anger them, Quintal. This is their one fear – being buried alive in the sand."

Sometimes the lower levels held the sand outside, and Quintal's restless curiosity could no more endure not going down to see than his lungs could endure without air.

"I will go alone, then," he said.

Chika drew back, reluctantly indicating that the Earthman's life was his own to risk. He and Hjan watched silently as Quintal went down, their people, grouped behind them, absurdly tiny on the broad steps of their ancestors.

Butch said again, urgently, "Can't you leave them alone?"

"Why should I?" demanded Quintal, in genuine irritation. "They're only freaks, like all the others."

Sand gritted under his feet, became drifts hiding the bottom of t he steps. A square corridor opened to left and right. Ahead the stair led down again.

There was no light in the fourth level, and the sand was up to the Earthman's knees. He lit his pocket torch and ploughed on.

Sand. Tons of it, an ocean of it, running through the cracks of the heavy metal shutters, spreading into drifts as high as Quintal's head. The fifth level was choked.

"Let's go back," said Butch uneasily.

"There's a door down there where the stair ends. The room beyond it must take up the whole level. I'm going down."

Quintal lay flat and floundered across to a symbolic carving above tce door. Gripping it, he began to dig with his free hand.

The sand rolled back into the hole he made, crawling as though it were alive. Quintal panted and swore, but his curiosity and his bull strength urged him on.

Butch loosened his suckers nervously, one by one. The door was visible now for almost half its length.

"Ah!" Quintal dropped into the hole, wrestling with the fastening of the door. It opened abruptly, sending him headlong.

He scrambled up and looked at the vast windowless room.

It was a foundry. There were blast furnaces and long open troughs that ran into the belly of a monstrous structure filling a third of the room. Beyond that were molds and forges and lathes.

He scowled in puzzled amazement. The ancient People of the Skymust have been great indeed, if their science had achieved these heights. Mars was like that. So many cultures had risen and died, so long ago, that no traces of them were left.

WORK in the foundry seemed to have been dropped rather suddenly. A small mountain of ore and scrap awaited the furnaces. Tools had been dropped on the floor. Quintal reflected on that.

"Must have been in the middle of a job when the quakes came," he thought, referring to the shifting of the great polar fault that in ages past had laid waste half the planet.

"The few that survived here simply battened the shutters and for got about it. Just getting enough to eat took up most of their time, afterward."

Butch sighed. "All that art and knowledge and commerce, destroyed at one blow."

"Yeah." Quintal had just seen the hoppers for metal scrap from the tooling, and wondered why they were covered. He went over and raised a lid.

Bits of metal floated lazily up into the air.

Quintal's big hand caught a fragment. He stood staring at it, whie Mars rocked and roared under his feet. After a long, long time, he whispered three words.

"Anti-gravity metal."

The enormous implications of his discovery staggered him Money, power, glory beyond anything a man had ever had. All that and more – much more! The wonderful, the supreme personal importance of that scrap of metal came to him – metal that must be held in the cage of his fingers because it had no weight.

Words crowded into his throat. "I can go out. Out to Jupiter, Saturn – to the ends of space!"

"Take me home," cried Butch. "Quintal, take me home first!"

"Home," repeated Quintal. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn were worlds in themselves. There would be life of some kind on them, to be conqnered and sent home to Earth, to the aggrandizement of Bert Quintal. And for that, he needed Butch.

He didn't need to speak. Butch read his thoughts. Quintal fell the

convulsive shudder of the small warm body on his neck. Then he forgot Butch, and Butch's mate, and Venus. He remembered only that never, never could he be faced with his last horizon. All of space was was his, to play with.

The huge enigmatic hulk through which the troughs ran he guessed must be a cyclotron.

Intense bombardment must alter the atomic structure of the moleten metal to neutralize the magnetism of gravity. Oh, wonderful process that the scientists of Earth had sought for and never found! Quintal began to tremble violently.

With work in progress, the cyclotron must have been ready for use. He didn't know what element the Martians might have used, but even an unstable one would not have degenerated entirely.

"I can cut the rocket tubes, and some of the after bulkheads," he said, talking aloud in his towering excitement. "With what's there, I'll have enough metal for shields. I can use the rocket fuel for the furnaces and the cyclotron.

"But I'll need men. And I don't want Larkin and all the mob of scientists and promoters and thieves that would come the instant the news was out."

He wasn't going to share this with anyone, yet. He wasn't taking any risks.

He grinned suddenly. "Chika!"

Butch said, "They won't do it.They're afraid to come down here."

"I know a way to make them."

Butch saw it, stark and ugly in Quintal's mind. "I can't," he said. "I know how it feels."

Quintal's thought answered, slow and deliberate. "Remember your mate, Butch. She might get lonesome waiting, if I should drop you through the refuse chute in space."

The blob of transparent fur twitched convulsively. Quintal laughed, and ran up the steps.

The little people waited silently. Quintal smiled at them. "Let us go up on the roof again. I will show you my ship."

Chika grinned, and Hjan clapped her small hands. The group flooded up the steps and gathered with rustling wings around the Starhope.

"Come inside, Chika. And you, Hjan. I have gifts."

Chika entered the ship. Hjan danced before him on little furry feet.

Butch said, in helpless agony, "The rest of the tribe are curious. They'll be inside soon. Please!"

"Shut up," said Quintal, "and watch 'em."

HJAN was lost in wonder at the shiny instrument panel, Chika absorbed in the three dimensional space chalt. Quintal's big hand shot out and jerked the little tube from Hjan's girdle.

She cried out, half spreading her wings before she realised she couldn't fly.

Chika spun about, his light body taut with the startled beginning of anger.

Quintal's heavy fist took him on the jaw. He collapsed, his wings spreading and twitching like those of a wounded bird.

Butch moaned, "Hurry!"

Hjan sprang at Quintal, her childish face hard with silent fury. One wing struck him across the face. The Earthman caught her, slapped her with callous strength.

She whimpered and fell. Quintal picked up the dazed Chika and went out, slamming the inner valve door behind him. He came to the lip of the air lock.

"Now!" said Butch. "Before they have time to think!"

"You!" shouted Quintal. "Look here!" He held Chika aloft in one big hand. "Behold your chief!"

The crowd stood thunderstruck, great eyes wide and glowing irt

the red dusk.Then they pressed forward, and pencil-tubes appeared Butch listened to their minds. "Quick," he said. "Go on!"

"Don't fire!" the Earthman roared. He stood over them, unarmed,

towering, colossal, godlike "Hjan is my prisoner. Only I can free her. If I die, she dies too."

He shook the limp body in his hand. "Chika!"

The chief stirred. His eyes opened slowly. "Yes, Earthman," he whispered.

"I need men to cut metal from my ship and work it in the foundry below. Hjan is my prisoner. Do you understand?"

"I cannot order my people into the lower levels."

"It's that, or Hjan."

Butch trembled on the back of Quintal's neck. "Now! Now!" Quintal shook Chika high over his head. "Order them, or Hjan dies!"

Chika's mouth was set with a terrible grimness. "I cannot order," he whispered. "I will ask."

"A hundred men," cried Quintal. "A hundred, to work in the foundry."

There was a long, long moment of silence. Only sand and wind, the endless soft keening of the desert. Butch clung tautly to Quintal's neck. There was nothing more he could do.

A man stepped forward. Another followed, and another. Their wings drooped in the sullen dusk. A stifled moan went up from the women, and was silenced.

A hundred men, half the tribe, stood before Bert Quintal.

"Good," he said, and set Chika on his feet. "Drop your weapons in the sand, all of you. I'll give you tools from the ship. We'll start work now."

He could never have done it without Butch. In the days that followed, the watchful mind of the little creature hidden under his hood warned him a dozen times of danger. He put down the incipient revolts with a power that made the Martians think him supernatural.

He drove his men. They were slight, but wiry and quick. When the tubes and the bulkheads were cut, he forced them down into the hated lower dark, into the bellowing foundry.

And he made up his mind. He was going to Jupiter alone. With Butch, there was little danger. He'd give Larkin directions for finding the city and tell him to reflt and follow, but he himself would go on, in the Starhope.

He wanted the glory he would get from that plunge into the unknown. But most of all, he wanted free space, with the outer planets toys for him to play with. He wanted it alone. It seemed that his whole life had been but a prelude, a preparation, for this dream.

Of Butch, doomed to years more of exile from Venus and his mate, he thought not at all. Butch was his, utterly. He was nothing.

At last the forward anti-gravity shield was bolted in place with infinite labor, fitted with crude controls for raising or lowering. The stern shield was almost finished. Crossing the roof on the morning of the last day, Quintal was filled with a wild eagerness.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow, Butch, we're off."

BUTCH didn't answer. The silver fire of Venus burned low in the Martian dawn. It sank, and the tiny warm body on his neck shivered and stirred.

Then, suddenly, Butch said, "The wind, Quintal! It's stopped."

The Earthman halted.The desert lay motionless under a brooding sky. Silence, brittle and ominous, hung over the ochre waves of sand.

Quintal's eyes narrowed. "Storm coming. It could bury the city. We've got to hurry."

He ran down the broad stairway, past the silent women who crouched on the upper levels, waiting. Chika met him at the found. door, his eyes deep with bitter hate.

"It is nearly done," he said. "Tonight, you will let Hjan go."

"Sure, sure," the Earthman snapped. "Get busy."

Great winged shadows leaped across the walls. Furnaces roared and the huge wicked hum of the cyclotron filled the room. Even through that, the racket of hammers and the scream of lathes, Quintal al heard the first low, snarling moan of the wind.

The winged folk faltered, looking at Chika with frightened until Quintal drove them on again. He could hear the rub and strain sand against the buried tower. If it got in, disaster would follow, "Hurry," Quintal snarled. "Hurry, blast you!"

Chika touched him. "Let us go," he said. "We can make it to the hills if we go now."

"Please, Quintal," Butch pleaded. "They'll carry us. They can come back and finish."

"They'd drop us in the sand, you fool." Quintal was in a frenzy lest the work be left unfinished. It might take months to clear the building again.

He said, "Send your women. But you've got to finish here!" "They won't go without their men," said Chika. "I beg you!"

"Listen," said Quintal ominously, "I'll kill your Hjan with my own hands, and you too, if you don't get in there and work."

"They worked, in misery and haste and fear.

The shield floated free of its rest. They held it with ropes, like a monstrous balloon.

Quintal led the way up the steps. The women followed without sound, no more than glowing eyes and shadowy wings in the corridor. They went up on the roof.

Wind beat them with brutal hands.The sky was ocherous and sullen. Under it, all across the yellow sea, the restless sandy breakers heaved and tossed.

Quintal shouted at the men to hurry. Flailing wings fought, little wiry bodies strained. The great unwieldly shield floated into place. The wind grew, and grew.

"For Heaven's sake!" cried Butch, but Chika had already caught Quintal in the murky dusk.

"We must go! Quintal, give me Hjan!"

Quintal struck him way, cursing the slowness of the men working at the bolting. Sand slashed across the roof. Great breakers of it piled and rolled against the towers, crested with choking spume.

One bolt was finished. The wind had grown to a vast shriek.

Men broke away from the Starhope, losing all fear of Quintal in their terror of the sand. Quintal saw them trying to take off with their women toward the distant hills, saw their thin wings ribboned and torn, their bodies hurled into the hungry desert. The last of the People of the Sky.

"Quintal!" screamed Chika. "Give me Hjan!"

The last bolt was unfinished. Quintal got the welder and did it himself, his massive body braced in ungainly strength. Then he clawed his way toward the lee side of the ship. Chika had vanished.

The ship rocked wildly under the Earthman as he stumbled through the air lock, making the two vac suits jerk in their hooks. He wondered, in a brief flash, why one flapped more than the other. But the drifts were high on the weather side, and he was mad to get away before he was buried.

He slammed the outer valve and hurried on, not bothering to close the inner one. He wasn't going beyond the atmosphere, yet.

Hjan faced him in the cabin. Her eyes burned with witch-fires.

"You killed my people," she whispered. "You killed Chika."

QUINTAL shoved past her, and she sprang on his back. She was strong, and she hated him. Her flailing wings blinded and beat him.

He didn't want to damage her. She was valuable, being the last. He got his hand around her throat, and when she faltered, he slapped her hard across the temple. She relaxed in his hands, and he took her and put her through the door into the after part of the ship.

Butch said softly in his mind, "Quintal, what did God give you in place of a heart?"

The Earthman swore irritably. Ripping Butch loose from his neck, he flung him after Hjan and locked the door.

The loss of Chika and his tribe meant exactly as much to him as the loss of a flock of prize chickens. He was angry, not with himself for forcing them to work too long, but with fate for ringing in this storm and upsetting his plans.

The new controls were crude, and he had had no time to test them. But he knew his ship. He got the feel of her in his hands, and the Starhope lifted up from the roof, silent and soft as a bird.

He brought her to rest, balancing attraction nicely against repulsion, above the storm area, and turned to the teleradio.

He put out his hand to the switch. It clenched sharply into a fist He stood there, swearing in slowly mounting fury.

He'd been in too much of a hurry to notice before. Now he looked around the cabin. With the exception of the control panel, protected by steel bulkheads, and the heavy-duty cables that operated the shields, everything in the cabin had been smashed.

Hjan must have done it. And it was Quintal's own fault, he knew le should have tied her, or locked her in the sleeping cabin. But she was so tiny, and there was no weapon she could use. Moreover, had been so desperately busy that he had almost forgotten her existence.

He found the thing she had used in her destructive rage, and smiled wryly. It was his own pipe, looted from a drowned city on the other side of Mars – a heavy thing, of some petrified, vanished wood.

There was nothing for it now but to take the Starhope south, Quintal gave Larkin his orders direct.

Quintal realized all at once that he ached in every nerve. His head seemed to weigh as much as the Starhope. He had driven himself hard for too long. He needed rest, before he did anything else.

He inspected the bulkhead door. It was locked, the handle set in a one-way latch. The ventilator was open, as usual, but nothing larger than Butch could crawl through its louvres.

Butch wouldn't. He hated Quintal too much to want to be around him if he didn't have to. And a man might as well fear a blown dandelion as fear Butch.

Quintal stretched out on the cabin couch and slept heavily.

He woke before he was ready, drawn by some queer uneasiness He sat up stiffly and cursed, and knew that nothing could be wrong. But something was. The bulkhead door was open.

It swung icily, just a little, showing only darkness beyond. The faint

double light of Mars' little moons came in through the ports. Quintal could see Jupiter, blazing gold against the black sky.

He scowled, sitting tense on the couch. Not afraid, for there was nothing to fear. Just puzzled.

Butch, moving slowly on the retractible suckers of his four paws, could have come through the ventilator. He could have walked down the door and inched the lock handle over, clinging to it with two paws while he pulled himself around with the others.

But why? Suppose he had established mental contact with Hjan? Suppose they had planned this together. What did it get them?

There was no sound from beyond the lazily swinging door.

Quintal rose. He crossed the cabin softly and went through the door. He was a tall man. The opening was low. He stooped, slightly, to clear his head.

Something dropped across his neck from over the door.

"Butch!" he yelled, startled. Then angrily he reached up.

Hands caught his wrists in the darkness. Small furry hands, four of them, strong with the strength of hate. There was a sudden searing pain in his neck, just over the spine. He roared and plunged backward into the open space of the cabin, where he could shake himself free.

HE KNEW what was happening. Butch was sinking those prehensile, hungry fibres into his neck!

The desperate little hands clung to his wrists. Small hard thighs locked around his own. He could see faces now, in the moonlight.

Hjan's face – and Chika's.

Hideous acid fires ate into his neck. He bunched his shoulders. Nails tore through his flesh, and then his hands were free. He reached up, to rip Butch away.

Now that it was too late, he remembered the vac suit that had seemed heavier than the other, back in the lock chamber. Chika must have hidden there, when he saw that his people were lost, beyond help. Then he had slipped through into the after part of the ship while Quintal was struggling with Hjan, blinded by her wings.

They blinded him now.Wiry bodies darted and plunged, dragging at his frantic hands. The pain ran down his spine from his neck, and up into his skull.

Butch said in his mind, "You're finished, Quintal." There was something horrible in the calm, unexcited finality of his thought.

"Yeah?" Quintal laughed, in spite of the agony. He struck out, aiming craftily. Chika whimpered and flopped away, and there was blood on the Earthman's knuckles. Hjan he caught in mid-leap and hurled her to the deck. His hands were free.

He took hold of Butch.

The stiff transparent hairs pricked his palm, Hjan got up, with Chika following. Quintal crouched, fending them off with one arm I Iis fingers locked under Butch's abdomen.

He could feel the fibres, crawling out like worms from their pouches.They weren't just quiescent roots, like those of a plant. They were mouths, as active and alive as his own.

He set his teeth against the pain, and pulled. The stickers held, stubbornly. Butch's mind said to him, "It's too Quintal." And he laughed, a little mocking quiver of thought Quintal's brain.

Quintal snarled, feeling the bruise of the suckers on his flesh.

"You'll never see Venus again," he said. "Your mate will die alone "

He hardly felt the lashing of wings against him, so great was the hurt inside. He knew that his wrist was clawed and bleeding, but they couldn't shake his grip. He was strong, too strong for them. He felt the waves of suffering in Butch's mind, and he grinned, a mirth less baring of the teeth.

"I have no right to see Venus again," whispered Butch. "I have no right to anything, after what I've done for you. And my mate is better to die alone, never looking into my mind again."

One sucker paw tore free. Another. The fibres tautened, into the flesh of Quintal's neck.

"My sin is worse than yours, Quintal," said Butch softly. "I knew better. You never did. You were born without a heart. But I — I was only selfish and afraid."

"Ah!

"The last two paws came loose. The fibres strained and broke. Quintal heard the scream in Butch's mind, though he had no mouth make it. He lurched up, triumphant, and the wings fell from him and there was silence in the Starhope.The Earthman laughed harshly. "You aren't so smart, Butch. It was a nice trick , trying to feed on me like a vampire. But it didn't work." He looked at the Martians.

I have a pair of 'em, now. And all I have to do is find Larkin, take him to the city, and wait until he fits out the big ship. I'll still have Jupiter, even if I'm not alone. And you, Butch you know what happens to you you with your feed line broken."

Years of training had made his mind sensitive enough to hear, faintly, Butch's laughter.

"Yes, I'll die, Quintal. And you'll have Jupiter."

Quintal scowled, not understanding the laugh. The pain was fading a little. It had settled now into a single ball of flame in his neck.

He was suddenly anxious to find Larkin. There was a doctor with the base ship.Those broken root-fibres ought to come out of him as soon as possible.

QUINTAL moved toward the controls. His legs seemed distant and detached. He watched his boots scuff over the deck plates, and it was as though they were someone else's boots.

Quite suddenly, he fell.

Butch rolled out of his hand. Quintal could see the fingers of it, lying open on the deck, and he could not close them.

He whispered, "What have you done to me, Butch?"

The answer came faintly to his mind — a mind clear and sharp now, with the iron frost of fear.

"Human tissue contains the same substances that I draw from the earth — organic phosphorus, potassium, magnesium. My 'roots,' as you call them, secrete chemicals that dissolve these substances and make them available to me.

"I wasn't trying to feed on you Quintal. I knew that you could pull me off in a few moments. Chika and Hjan knew that they could hold you helpless for only a very short time.

"But it was all I needed. The chemicals are at work inside you. You know my perceptions — I could see exactly where to go. You understand now, Quintal? The nerves of your spine are dissolving."

The tiny furry thing lay beyond Quintal's open fingers. He could see the Martians with their drooping wings, watching, and he could see Jupiter, a golden lamp beckoning beyond the port.

Butch went on, "I watched what you could not. I saw the city buried. I saw Chika's people die.

"It will be many years before the city, and its secret, are found again. All men are not as you, Quintal. Perhaps the next one who comes will use the gift of anti-gravity for good instead of evil. In the meantime, the little folk of the outer planets are free to live without chains and cages. There was a long pause. Then, very faintly, very wearily: "It will be good to die. It will be an end to thinking."

Chika stooped. His childish face was battered, the pale fur dark with blood. He picked Butch up and laid him gently across his neck, so that their two brains were close together. As though acting under instructions from Butch, he and Hjan turned and tugged at the controls. The Starhope settled toward Mars.

They didn't touch Quintal. They left him where he was, twisted awkwardly, his broad head dropped back so that he stared forward, out the visiport.

He watched them bring the Starhope down close over the desert. He watched them set the automatic controls of the airlock. He saw Butch shudder and slip, and be taken in Hjan's hands.

They opened the valves of the lock, and set the shields for full repulsion. Then, for a brief instant before diving with open wings, they looked at Quintal, their great eyes glowing, their bodies slim and poised, with Butch a tiny still puff of fur in Hjan's hands.

They turned and dropped through the airlock. In the instant before the valve doors closed, Quintal heard the beat of their wings on the thin, cold air.

Starhope lifted up from Mars, silent and soft as a bird. The atmosphere fell away, and the moons. Jupiter was a flame, a burning jewel on the dark breast of space.

Quintal lay inert on the cabin floor, his eyes wide open. A new frontier lay before him, vast and unexplored. A new world, a new horizon. Its name was not Jupiter. Its name was Death.

Weightless, joyous, swift, the Starhope bore him on.