The Star Beast Read Online Free Page A

Johnnie.”
    “You won’t go out of the yard again, not ever, unless I take you.”
    “All right, Johnnie.”
    “Promise? Cross your heart?”
    “Cross my heart.”
    “He hasn’t really got a heart,” Johnnie went on. “He has an uncentralized circulatory system. It’s like…”
    “I don’t care if he has rotary pumps, as long as he stays home.”
    “He will. He’s never broken ‘Cross my heart,’ even if he hasn’t got one.”
    Dreiser chewed his thumb. “All right. I’ll leave a man out here with a portophone tonight. And tomorrow we’ll put some steel I-beams in there in place of that wood.”
    John started to say, “Oh, not steel,” but he thought better of it. Dreiser said, “What’s the matter?”
    “Uh, nothing.”
    “You keep an eye on him, too.”
    “He won’t get out”
    “He had better not. You realize that you are both under arrest, don’t you? But I’ve got no way to lock that monstrosity up.”
    John Thomas did not answer. He had not realized it; now he saw that it was inevitable. Dreiser went on in a kindly voice, “Try not to worry about it. You seem like a good boy and everybody thought well of your father. Now I’ve got to go in and have a word with your mother. You had better stay here until my man arrives…and then maybe sort of introduce him to, uh, this thing.” He passed a doubtful eye over Lummox.
    John Thomas stayed while the police chief went back to the house. Now was the time to give Lummox what for, but he did not have the heart for it. Not just then.

II
The Department of Spatial Affairs
    CHAPTER II
    The Department of Spatial Affairs
    TO John Thomas Stuart XI the troubles of himself and Lummox seemed unique and unbearable, yet he was not alone, even around Westville. Little Mr. Ito was suffering from an always fatal disease—old age. It would kill him soon. Behind uncounted closed doors in Westville other persons suffered silently the countless forms of quiet desperation which can close in on a man, or woman, for reasons of money, family, health, or face.
    Farther away, in the state capital, the Governor stared hopelessly at a stack of papers—evidence that would certainly send to prison his oldest and most trusted friend. Much farther away, on Mars, a prospector abandoned his wrecked sandmobile and got ready to attempt the long trek back to Outpost. He would never make it.
    Incredibly farther away, twenty-seven light years, the Starship Bolivar was entering an interspatial transition. A flaw in a tiny relay would cause that relay to operate a tenth of a second later than it should. The S.S. Bolivar would wander between the stars for many years…but she would never find her way home.
    Inconceivably farther from Earth, half way across the local star cloud, a race of arboreal crustaceans was slowly losing to a younger, more aggressive race of amphibians. It would be several thousands Earth years before the crustaceans were extinct, but the issue was not in doubt. This was regrettable (by human standards) for the crustacean race had mental and spiritual abilities which complemented human traits in a fashion which could have permitted a wealth of civilized cooperation with them. But when the first Earth-humans landed there, some eleven thousand years in the future, the crustaceans would be long dead.
    Back on Earth at Federation Capital His Excellency the Right Honorable Henry Gladstone Kiku, M.A. (Oxon,) Litt.D. honoris causa (Capetown), O.B.E., Permanent Under Secretary for Spatial Affairs, was not worried about the doomed crustaceans because he would never know of them. He was not yet worried about S.S. Bolivar but he would be. Aside from the ship, the loss of one passenger in that ship would cause a chain reaction of headaches for Mr. Kiku and all his associates for years to come.
    Anything and everything outside Earth’s ionosphere was Mr. Kiku’s responsibility and worry. Anything which concerned the relationships between Earth and any part of the