World without Stars Read Free Page A

most carefully with his present captain. You can’t take an unbalanced
     man out between the galaxies.
    On the other hand, we’re each a bit eccentric, one way or another. That goes along with being immortal. Sometimes we’re a
     bit crazy, even. We don’t have the heart to edit certain things out of our memories, and so they grow in the psyche till we
     no longer have a sense of proportion about them. Like my own case—but no matter.
    One thing we have all gained in our centuries is patience. Could be that Hugh Valland simply had a bit more than most.

III
    W E WERE nine aboard the
Meteor
, specialists whose skills overlapped. That was not many, to rattle around in so huge a hull. But you need room and privacy
     on a long trip, and of course as a rule we hauled a lot of cargo.
    “Probably not this time, however,” I explained to Valland and Yo Rorn. They were the only ones who hadn’t shipped with me
     before; I’d hastily recruited them at Landomar when two vacancies developed for reasons that aren’t relevant here. To make
     up the delay, I hadn’t briefed them in detail before we started. But now I must. They’d need days of Study to master what
     little we knew about our goal.
    We sat in my com chamber, we three, with coffee and smokes. A steady one gee of acceleration gave weight, and that soft engine-pulse
     which goes on and on until finally it enters your bones. A viewscreen showed us Landomar’s sun, already dwindled, and the
     galaxy filling half the sky with clots and sprawls of glow. That was to starboard; the vector we wanted to build up ran almost
     parallel to the rim. Portward yawned emptiness, here and there the dim spindles of Other stellar continents.
    “Mmm, yeah, don’t look like we could find a lot of useful Stuff on a planet where they breathe hydrogen and drink liquid ammonia,”
     Valland nodded. “I never did, anyway.”
    “Then why are we going?” Rorn asked. He was a lean, darky saturnine man who kept to himself, hadn’t so much as told us where
     in the cosmos he was born. His psychograph indicated a tightly checked instability. But the readings alsosaid he was a good electronician, and he had recommendations from past service. He stubbed out his cigaret and lit another.
     “Someone from a similar planet would be logical to deal with the—what did you say their name was?”
    “I can’t pronounce it either,” I replied. “Let’s just call them Yonderfolk.”
    Rorn scowled. “That could mean any extragalactic race.”
    “We know what we mean,” said Valland mildly. “Ever meet the natives of Carstor’s Planet?”
    “Heard of them,” I said. “Tall, thin, very ancient culture, unbearably dignified. Right?”
    “Uh-huh. When I was there, we called ’em Squidgies.”
    “Business, please,” Rorn barked.
    “Very well,” I said. “What we hope to get from our Yonderfolk is, mainly, knowledge. Insights, ideas, art forms, possibly
     something new in physics or chemistry or some other science. You never can tell. If nothing else, they know about the intergalactic
     stars, so maybe they can steer us onto planets that will be profitable for humans. In fact, judging from what they’ve revealed
     so far, there’s one such planet right in their home system.”
    Valland looked for a while into the blackness to port. “They must be different from anybody we’ve met before,” he murmured.
     “We can’t imagine how different.”
    “Right,” I said. “Consider what that could mean in terms of what they know.”
    I cleared my throat. “Brace yourself, Yo,” said Valland. “The Old Man’s shiftin’ into lecture gear.” Rorn looked blank, then
     resentful. I didn’t mind.
    “The galaxies were formed by the condensation of monstrous hydrogen clouds. But there wasn’t an absolute vacuum between them.
     Especially not in the beginning, when the universe hadn’t yet expanded very far. So between the proto-galaxies there must
     have been smaller condensations of