Star Hunter | Page 2

Alexbut, and a badly injured pilot had
brought her in by will, hope and a faith he speedily lost.
He received a plasta-hand, the best the medical center could supply and a pension for life,
forced by the public acclaim for a man who had saved ships and lives. Then--the sack
because a crazed Tors Wazalitz was dead. They dared not try to stick Hume with a
murder charge; the voyage record tapes had been shot straight through to the Patrol
Council, and the evidence on those could be neither faked nor tampered with. They could
not give him a quick punishment, but they could try to arrange a slow death. The word
had gone out that Hume was off pilot boards. They had tried to keep him out of space.
And they might have done it, too, had he been the usual type of pilot, knowing only his
trade. But some odd streak of restlessness had always led him to apply for the rim runs,
the very first flights to newly opened worlds. Outside of the survey men, there were few
qualified pilots of his seniority who possessed such a wide and varied knowledge of the
galactic frontiers.
So when he learned that the ships' boards were irrevocably closed to him, Hume had
signed up with the Out-Hunters' Guild. There was a vast difference between lifting a liner
from a launching pad and guiding civ hunters to worlds surveyed and staked out for their
trips into the wild. Hume relished the exploration part--he disliked the
leading-by-the-hand of nine-tenths of the Guild's clients.
But if he had not been in the Guild service he would never have made that find on Jumala.
That lucky, lucky find! Hume's plasta-flesh fingers curved, their nails drew across the red
surface of the table. And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden

oval on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped through to the
floor.
The newcomer was small compared to the former pilot, but he had breadth of shoulder
which made the upper part of his torso overbalance his thin hips and legs. He was dressed
most conservatively except for a jeweled plaque resting on the tightly stretched gray silk
of his upper tunic at heart level. Unlike Hume he wore no visible arms belt, but the other
did not doubt that there were a number of devices concealed in that room to counter the
efforts of any assassin.
The man from the mirror spoke with a flat, toneless voice. His black hair had been shaven
well above his ears, the locks left on top of his skull trained into a kind of bird's crest. As
Hume, his visible areas of flesh were deeply browned, but by nature rather than exposure
to space, the pilot guessed. His features were harsh, with a prominent nose, a
back-slanting forehead, eyes dark, long and large, with heavy lids.
"Now--" He spread both his hands, palm down and flat on the table, a gesture Hume
found himself for some unknown reason copying. "You have a proposition?"
But the pilot was not to be hurried, any more than he was to be influenced by Wass'
stage-settings.
"I have an idea," he corrected.
"There are many ideas." Wass leaned back in his chair, but he did not remove his hands
from the table. "Perhaps one in a thousand is the kernel of something useful. For the rest,
there is no need to trouble a man."
"Agreed," Hume returned evenly. "But that one idea in a thousand can also pay off in
odds of a million to one, when and if a man has it."
"And you have such a one?"
"I have such a one." It was Hume's role now to impress the other by his unshakable
confidence. He had studied all the possibilities. Wass was the right man, perhaps the only
partner he could find. But Wass must not know that.
"On Jumala?" Wass returned.
If that stare and statement was intended to rattle Hume it was a wasted shot. To discover
that he had just returned from that frontier planet required no ingenuity on the Veep's
part.
"Perhaps."
"Come, Out-Hunter Hume. We are both busy men, this is no time to play tricks with
words and hints. Either you have made a find worth the attention of my organization or
you have not. Let me be the judge."

This was it--the corner of no return. But Wass had his own code. The Veep had
established his tight control of his lawless organization by set rules, and one of them was,
don't be greedy. Wass was never greedy, which is why the patrol had never been able to
pull him down, and those who dealt with him did