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Ebook has 134 lines and 7345 words, and 3 pages

THE STAR BEAST

They called this strange tentacle-headed blob that had floundered into the System Oscar. They were to learn a better name.

The body was sprawled in the curve of the deck about midway between two of the entrance wells. It had arms and legs, if you looked closely enough at the limp tangle of garments; it had a gray beard and a purple face.

The other figure had neither limbs nor a face. It was black, and it looked more like a pile of mud than anything else: a five-foot lump of black mud, slightly flattened at either side, with a cluster of black, stumpy filaments at the top. It moved slightly, dropping the filaments a little toward the dead body; then it flowed away again, and the filaments pointed straight up, toward the stars.

Phil Horitz came up at the forward end of the deck. He let the levitor push him gently clear of the well then stepped over to the glassine and looked out at the tiny blue disk that was Earth. His back was to the body and its watcher. He struck a cigarette, inhaling deeply, then turned around.

He swore and threw his cigarette away, leaping forward at the same instant. He skidded to a halt in front of the corpse and fell to one knee beside it. "Dead," he said. "Oh, Lord."

He searched the body swiftly, and came up with a flat metal box, attached by a silver chain to the body's middle. He tried the lid; it opened easily. The box was empty.

Horitz sighed and lifted the dead man's chin. Under the grey beard was a deeply-indented red line that encircled the throat.

A deep voice swore fervently in his ear. He didn't wait for it to finish. He made an adjustment on the transceiver and said, "Captain Tooker, please. This is Philip Horitz." A querulous male voice spoke: "Yes, Horitz? What do you want?"

Horitz repeated his message, and added, "I'm bringing the body down to Thomasson's stateroom. Get the ship's doctor and meet me there."

Two figures exploded out of the levitor well a dozen yards away; one bulky and grey-haired, the other lean and young. They ran up to Horitz, panting. The bulky one, Walsh, was still swearing.

"Save it," said Horitz. "He did. I'll take his head, Sommers, you take his feet. Walsh, think you can carry Oscar?"

"Listen, Phil," said Sommers abruptly, "are the Equations gone?"

"Yes," Horitz told him. "They're gone."

Walsh grunted and, stooping, wrapped his arms around the black thing. He lifted it without apparent effort. The stumpy tendrils waved down toward him, then stood upright again, ignoring him. The other two picked up the body of Thomasson, and all three walked back to the levitor well from which they had come.

Captain Tooker and the medical officer, Dr. Evans, met them at the door of the dead man's stateroom. Tooker was boiling over. "Do you call yourselves Security agents?" he shouted. "Three of you, to protect one man, and you couldn't do it. I'll raise hell about this, Horitz, see if I don't."

Horitz and Sommers put the body down on the bed, and Dr. Evans fell quietly to examining it. "We'll find the killer," said Horitz grimly, "or else any hell you can raise will be a sneeze in a gale of wind. You don't know the half of this yet."

"I know that a man has been murdered on my ship," said Tooker.

"A man!" said Sommers, staring at him. "A whole planet may have been murdered, unless we get the Equations back."

"What equations?" said Tooker. "What the devil are you talking about?"

"The Thomasson Equations," said Sommers, "are the answer to the problem of faster-than-light space travel. Prof. Thomasson derived them from observations he made on the space shell this thing--" he gestured at Oscar--"landed on Pluto in, last year."

Captain Tooker glanced at Oscar with evident dislike. "Well," he said, "what are you going to do about it?"

"Have the ship searched," said Horitz quietly; "but that won't do any good. There are a hundred ways the killer could hide the Equations so that no search would ever find them. Our one chance, I'm afraid, is to get the only witness to tell us who garroted Thomasson."

"The witness?" said the captain, staring. "Who?"

Horitz turned to look at the black, five-foot lump, with its gently waving tendrils. "Oscar," he said.

Oscar had come whirling out of interstellar space almost a year ago, in a thin, cloudy shell hardly bigger than himself. The shell was partly wrecked and put out of control; but by sheer luck, a supply ship had picked it up and hauled it in to Pluto. The newspapers had labeled its occupant a Centaurian, since he came from that general sector of space; but actually, no one knew. The scientists at the Pluto Station who had sweated over him for a year had found out exasperatingly little. He had no eyes or ears, and yet he was aware of things around him. He had no recognizable brain; he had no skeleton, no lungs, no circulatory system and no excretory system. He got his energy, they thought, from cosmic radiation; but they didn't know for sure.

His tendrils or filaments--the stumpy, fingerlike organs on top of his shapeless body--had no function that they would discover. They did not respond to sound, to light, to heat or any other known radiation--but they followed moving objects, in a dark room as well as in a light one.

"That's the whole difficulty," explained Dr. Y. Ilyanov, running her fingers through her thick yellow hair. Dr. Ilyanov was one of the two assistants Thomasson had brought along, and very beautiful. The other was Dr. Hugh Meers, who was bald and not beautiful at all.

"You understand, he perceives--but he doesn't perceive with human senses or think in human patterns. Undoubtedly, he saw Professor Thomasson killed; but he saw it--differently."

"If we could only get some scrap of description," said Walsh. "Surely he can tell size, for instance? If we knew whether the murderer was a big man or a little man, even that would help."

"You're thinking, I'll venture, of a particularly big man," said Dr. Meers. "Carson Jahore, the ambassador from the Jovian Federation."

Horitz nodded. "A prime suspect. The Federation has always been too big for its planets. They'd give anything for a space-drive that would let them beat Earth to the punch in interstellar colonization."

"Well," said Walsh, "what about my question? Can't Oscar tell the difference between a big man and a little one?"

Dr. Meers' brow wrinkled. "Not in the way a man could," he said. "If you put them side by side, then perhaps yes. Perhaps, mind you. But--don't you see, he hasn't got one of our senses, except touch. Instead, he probably has a whole gamut of his own. Lord only knows how he differentiates between one man and another, or between one apple and another. He doesn't do it our way, anyhow."

"Look here," said Captain Tooker impatiently, "we're wasting time. Why can't we just search everybody on board?"

"Have you got authority," asked Horitz carefully, "to strip Ambassador Jahore and his wife to the skin and put them and all their belongings through five hundred and twenty different chemical solutions? For a starter, that is? If you have, go ahead. I haven't."

The captain shuddered.

"Just the same," said Horitz, standing up, "you're right; we are wasting time. Have you got that passenger list, Captain?"

"Yes; here," Tooker said, producing it. "I've got to get back. If anything happens, buzz me. And it had better be soon!" he added as he left.

"All right." Horitz turned to the two scientists. "Dr. Meers, can you and Dr. Ilyanov make Oscar understand this much: that he's to signal when he sees the man who was with Thomasson on the observation deck this morning?"

Meers shrugged. "We can try," he said. "I don't promise anything." He pulled his chair over to the crude Morse set on the table and began clicking the key.

Oscar's tendrils waved slowly back and forth, as if he were interested in anything in the world but radio clicks.

Meers stopped, waited a moment, then tried again.

Meers nodded. "He says yes. Whether he really knows what we want, or not, I can't say."

Horitz spoke into his transceiver: "Central. Will you please page Mr. Abbot, Miss Acheson, Mr. and Mrs. Adler and Mr. Aguirez? Ask them to come to stateroom B39."

One by one, the passengers whose names began with A were let into the stateroom and presented to Oscar. Oscar said nothing. The passengers, bewildered or indignant, were ushered out and a new batch came in.

They went through the B's, the C's, the D's, the E's, the F's, the G's, the H's, the I's.... The whole list numbered about 150, some of whom had been shuttled aboard at the Jovian System, others at Mars. Finally Horitz called a halt for lunch. Dr. Meers, pleading indisposition, had gone to lie down in his stateroom. The three Security men were alone with Dr. Ilyanov--and Oscar.

Walsh, munching a corned-beef sandwich, stared at the black lump balefully. "Honestly, Dr. Ilyanov," he said, "doesn't he ever give you the creeps?"

She smiled slightly. "Honestly--yes. I dream about him sometimes."

Sommers glanced at her curiously. "What do you dream?" he asked.

"Well--" she hesitated. "It's really silly, but--Last night, you see, I was thinking of something poor Professor Thomasson had said, half-jokingly, when we were discussing Oscar. He said that Oscar might not be a complete organism." She gestured toward the black thing on the table. "You know--his flat underside, that he walks with, and those curious flat areas along his sides? He can grip with those. If you put your hand there, he grips it."

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