Chapter I: Front Matter

THE STAR-MASTER

By RAY CUMMINGS

Docile, decadent Venus was easy
pickings for that twenty-first century
Hitler's dream of cosmic empire.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1942.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

My name is Arthur Frane. You who read this story now, of course are familiar with momentous events into which I was unexpectedly plunged--momentous for all mankind.

I write this narrative now to add the true details to what you have all read and heard blared by the newscasters around the world. I have been extolled as a hero although I did nothing except try to keep from getting killed.

I was twenty-six years old last summer, in June of 2003, when fate so strangely brought Venta and me together. My family is wealthy, as you have heard. Do not envy me for that. An income of ten thousand decimars, however nice it may seem in theory, is in reality no advantage to a young man of twenty-six. I am a big blond fellow whom the newscasters have been pleased to call Viking-like and handsome as a god. I'm much obliged. But whatever truth there is in it, that too has been a disadvantage.

The weird events began in July, last summer, when with Jim Gregg I went hunting in that Adirondac forest. Jim and I were in Government College together. I left to spend my income and become a dawdler--the disadvantage of money; and Jim joined the Crime Prevention Bureau of the New York Shadow Squad. We got a one-day hunting permit. Jim took his official crime-tracker equipment, with an extra flash-gun for me; we flew to the Adirondac mountain slope which our permit named and hopefully set out on foot to try our luck.

But we had no luck. A few birds, which even the minimum pencil-ray flash had all but burned to a crisp, were all we had bagged. Evening came, with twilight settling so that the forest glades were deepening into purple. And then suddenly it seemed that we heard a rustling in the underbrush--a rustling which ought to be a deer.

We crouched in a thicket, waiting. The sound stopped. "Let's try the listener," I whispered.

Jim got out his little eavesdropping gadget. But he had no time to connect it. The rustling began again. It was obviously up a short slope no more than a hundred feet from us--some wild animal which seemed now to be retreating.

"I'll take a chance," I muttered. "If that's a deer, we'll lose it if I can't drill it now."

We knew it could not be a human, since our permit for today barred anyone else from the twenty square miles of Government preserve allotted to us. I fired at the sound, with my violet pencil-flash eating through the underbrush at the top of the slope.

There was a startled, weird outcry; and from the summit of the little rise a shape broke cover. A girl! She came bursting from a thicket no more than three feet to the side of the swath my flash had burned, and for a second or two she stood poised on a rock with the open evening sky a background above and behind her. A slim shape of bare legs and arms with a brief drape from shoulders to her thighs. The starlight and fading daylight gleamed on her bronzed skin as though she were a metal statue.

"Well--I say--" Jim muttered.

* * * * *

Thoughts are instant things. There was in my mind the vague idea that here, by some wild circumstances, was a girl in a fancy-dress party costume or something of the kind. But the thought, and Jim's muttered words of astonishment, were in another second stricken away. She paused for that instant on the rock, and then she leaped. Amazing, incredible leap! It carried her in a flat arc some ten or fifteen feet above the ground and twenty feet away, where light as a faun she landed on the toes of her bare feet. Nearer to us now; and seeing us, perhaps for the first time, she stood and stared.

I could see the silvery streaks running through the black hair that framed her face. It was a queerly beautiful face, apparently devoid of normal cosmetic-make-up. Negroid? Oriental? In that second I had the thought that it was neither--nor anything else that I could name. A girl with a mysterious wild beauty which stirred my pulses.

"Well--good Lord--" Jim muttered again. He too was staring, with a hand in his shock of bristling red hair, and I can imagine the look of numbed astonishment on his freckled, pug-nosed face. "Good Lord, how did she jump like that?"

I heard myself stammering, "You--up there--what in the devil--"

Like a terrified fugitive the girl abruptly swept a look behind her; and then she leaped again, and landed almost beside us.

"You--you--Oh you mus' help me! There was a flash that tried to kill me--"

English! With weird, indescribable intonation, she gasped the English words.

"I--shot at you," I stammered. "Sorry--we thought you were an animal. No human is allowed here today but us."

Somehow it seemed futile, incongruous that I should try to explain anything rational to a girl so weird as this.

But she smiled. "Oh--I thought--I thought--"

"Someone is after you?" Jim said quickly.

"Yes. I thought--but I guess not now. Oh you are good Earthmen--not like Curtmann. I escaped, and I have come long long a way from my poor terrified people."

I saw Jim glance at me significantly. We both had the same thought, of course. A girl demented; with painted skin and fancy dress--trappings of insanity; and she had escaped from some asylum?

But those leaps were far beyond the power of any trained athlete!

"What's your name?" I murmured.

"Venta. I was a prisoner--and now I have to tell someone of importance here on Earth. I did escape when I was brought here by Curtmann." She babbled it out, breathless, terrified. "I did not know what to do, he is so bad to my people--to the Midge--to all of us. And I--I do not love him. I am afraid of him. In Shan he rules--and my family now are all in the great Forest City. And Curtmann will capture that too."

Blankly Jim and I exchanged glances. And suddenly with a muttered oath, Jim gasped,

"My God, Art! Look at that--thing! There--behind you!"

I whirled. But whatever he had seen, or thought he saw, was gone.

"Behind me? What?"

"Why--why--" Jim could only gasp. The girl was staring at us blankly. Jim was stupified into incoherency. "Why--why--a little thing--it ran--" And then he raised his left wrist with another muttered gasp.

"What in the devil?" I demanded. "Are you crazy too?"

"Electro-eavesdropper on us! Look--" An eavesdropper detector was on his wrist, connected with his watch. Part of his S.S. equipment and he always wore it. The underplate was glowing now, its warmth against his flesh attracting his attention.

An eavesdropper being used against us! I knew it was illegal for anyone but a Federal Man to have one; but criminals had them, and most of the other S.S. devices and weapons, of course. Some criminal was near here, listening to us now!

"Someone not far away!" Jim gasped. "Look at that dial!"

His little detector-needle was swaying violently, in the range of one to two hundred feet. Then it swung back to normal as the ray evidently was shut off.

I snatched out my flash-gun. Jim and I crouched with the numbed, terrified girl between us.

"Oh--" she muttered. "They have come, and they will kill us."

"There it is again!" Jim's hand gripped my arm. "My God--that little thing!"

* * * * *

The purple shadows of night were deepening in the forest now. But in the gloom I saw it. On the bole of a tree no more than six or eight feet from us a tiny figure stood peering at us. The glistening, brown-bronze figure of a man; a broad-shouldered, stocky little figure no more than a foot high! I had an instant glimpse of a powerfully-muscled body, a tiny hairless round head, then the creature leaped to the ground, recovered its balance and ran. In another second it was lost in the gloom.

The girl too, had seen it. "A Midge! Here? Why--then Curtmann's men are here, too!"

She stopped abruptly. From the leafy darkness something hurtled into a tree beside us. There was the faint tinkling of fragile glass, then a sickening sweet smell assailed us, and sticky liquid splattered on us.

"Anesthesia-bomb!" Jim gasped. "Get away from here--grab the girl!"

My head was reeling, with senses fading so that the dim scene was blurring around me. Jim and I dragged the girl through the thickets. Then came a shot at us, the sizzling flash just missing us, shriveling the foliage over our heads. Jim's shot answered it. I saw a skulking figure by a nearby tree, and fired quickly. My shot caught him full; he went down.

In front of me, Jim had dropped prone into the brush. His voice warned: "They're here. Get down."

We had no chance to fight them off. I drilled a shape that appeared in front of me; but another pounced on my shoulders as I crouched. Blurred by the drug, I squirmed, reached up and grabbed him by the throat. But another man was on us. Jim's shot sounded again; and then as I fought, I saw several dark shapes leaping on him. His panting oaths mingled with the girl's scream.

In the melee glass hit my face, breaking with the sticky drug oozing out on me. A man's fist followed it, with a crack that made my head burst into roaring light before I drifted off into an abyss of nothingness....