Rebellious Stars

  KEY MAN IN A GALACTIC EXPLOSION!

  To select just one among many favorable reviews of this thrilling future adventure, the South Bend Tribune says:

  “The Earth had been made hopelessly radioactive and useless by atomic warfare, but young Biron Farrill, a student in the University of Earth, nevertheless found himself involved in a struggle that was worse because of the mystery in it, His father, on another planet, had been murdered and the young man himself was marked for violent death.

  “The only certainty was that his pursuers, whose identities were unknown to him, were agents of would-be conquerors of everything and everybody in the galaxy. But young Farrill had to find out why he and his father had been marked for destruction. How he fought and what he found out while he even went into the blackness of a nebula to save himself make a suspenseful story.

  “This is a Grade A item in the science-fiction category.”

  More reviewer applause on the following page.

  Turn this book over for

  second complete novel.

  More quotes from the nation’s reviewers:

  “Another excellent science-fiction novel from the galactic pen of Isaac Asimov good adventure too.” —Springfield (Mass.) Republican

  “A full quota of flashing space ships, super weapons, and strange worlds all adds up to a fast-moving adventure.“ —Hartford Times

  “A lot of fascinating trips to remote and mysterious fastnesses of the galaxy.”

  —Denver Post “The author has magically achieved a thoroughly stirring piece of light fiction.” —Startling Stories

  “Should more than satisfy anyone who looks at the moon with thoughts of rocket ships.” —Columbian Missourian

  “Top writing, with a welcome, interspersion of humor often rare in the field.” —Virginia Kirkus Bulletin

  “Topnotcher in science-fiction field.” —Los Angeles Times

  The

  Rebellious

  Stars

  Original Title: The Stars, Like Dust

  by ISAAC ASIMOV

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  The Rebellious Stabs (The Stabs, Like Dust)

  Copyright, 1950, 1951, by World Editions, Inc.

  Copyright, 1951, by Isaac Asimov

  An ACE Book, by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., Inc.

  All Rights Reserved. All of the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Dedication To Gertrude

  To Whom I Have Been at the Moment,

  Very Contentedly Married for:

  12 Years, 4 Months, 1 Week, 6 Days,

  19 Hours, 2 Minutes and a Few Seconds.

  An Earth Gone Mad

  Copyright, 1954, by Ace Books, Inc.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The bedroom murmured to itself gently. It was almost below the limits of hearing—an irregular little sound, yet quite unmistakable, and quite deadly.

  But it wasn’t that which awakened Biron Farrill and dragged him out of a heavy, unrefreshing slumber. He turned his head restlessly from side to side in a futile struggle against the periodic burr-r-r on the end table.

  He put out a clumsy hand without opening his eyes and closed contact.

  “Hello,” he mumbled.

  Sound tumbled instantly out of the receiver. It was harsh and loud, but Biron lacked the ambition to reduce the volume.

  It said, “May I speak to Biron Farrill?”

  Biron said, fuzzily, “Speaking. What d’you want?”

  “May I speak to Biron Farrill?” The voice was urgent.

  Biron’s eyes opened on the thick darkness. He became conscious of the dry unpleasantness of his tongue and the faint odor that remained in the room.

  He said, “Speaking. Who is this?”

  It went on, disregarding him, gathering tension, a loud voice in the night. “Is anyone there? I would like to speak to Biron Farrill.”

  Biron raised himself on one elbow and stared at the place where the visiphone sat. He jabbed at the vision control and the small screen was alive with light.

  “Here I am,” he said. He recognized the smooth, slightly asymmetric features of Sander Jonti. “Call me in the morning, Jonti.”

  He started to turn the instrument off once more, when Jonti said, “Hello. Hello. Is anyone there? Is this University Hall, Room 526? Hello.”

  Biron was suddenly aware that the tiny pilot light which would have indicated a live sending circuit was not on. He swore under his breath and pushed the switch. It stayed off. Then Jonti gave up, and the screen went blank, and was merely a small square of featureless light.

  Biron turned it off. He hunched his shoulder and tried to burrow into the pillow again. He was annoyed. In the first place, no one had the right to yell at him in the middle of the night. He looked quickly at the gently luminous figures just over the headboard. Three-fifteen. House lights wouldn’t go on for nearly four hours.

  Besides, he didn’t like having to wake to the complete darkness of his room. Four years’ custom had not hardened him to the Earthman’s habit of building structures of reinforced concrete, squat, thick, and windowless. It was a thousand-year-old tradition dating from the days when the primitive nuclear bomb had not yet been countered by the forcefield defense.

  But that was past. Atomic warfare had done its worst to Earth. Most of it was hopelessly radioactive and useless. There was nothing left to lose, and yet architecture mirrored the old fears, so mat when Biron woke, it was to pure darkness.

  Biron rose on his elbow again. That was strange. He waited. It wasn’t the fatal murmur of the bedroom he had become aware of. It was something perhaps even less noticeable and certainly infinitely less deadly.

  He missed the gentle movement of air that one took so for granted, that trace of continuous renewal. He tried to swallow easily and failed. The atmosphere seemed to become oppressive even as he realized the situation. The ventilating system had stopped working, and now he really had a grievance. He couldn’t even use the visiphone to report the matter.

  He tried again, to make sure. The milky square of light sprang out and threw a faint, pearly luster on the bed. It was receiving, but it wouldn’t send. Well, it didn’t matter. Nothing would be done about it before day, anyway.

  He yawned and groped for his slippers, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. No ventilation, eh? That would account for the queer smell. He frowned and sniffed sharply two or three times. No use. It was familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

  He made his way to the bathroom, and reached automatically for the light switch, although he didn’t really need it to draw himself a glass of water. It closed, but uselessly. He tried it several times, peevishly. Wasn’t anything working? He shrugged, drank in the dark, and felt better. He yawned again on his way back to the bedroom where he tried the main switch. All the lights were out.

  Biron sat on the bed, placed his large hands on his hardmuscled thighs and considered. Ordinarily, a thing like this would c
all for a terrific discussion with the service staff. No one expected hotel service in a college dormitory, but, by Space, there were certain minimum standards of efficiency one could demand. Not that it was of vital importance just now. Graduation was coming and he was through. In three days he’d be saying a last good-by to the room and to the University of Earth; to Earth itself, for that matter.

  Still, he might report it anyway, without particular comment. He could go out and use the hall phone. They might bring in a self-powered light or even rig up a fan so he could sleep without psychosomatic choking sensations. If not, to Space with them! Two more nights.

  In the light of the useless visiphone, he located a pair of shorts. Over them he slipped a one-piece jumper, and decided that that would be enough for the purpose. He retained his slippers. There was no danger of waking anybody*, even if he clumped down the corridors in spiked shoes, considering the thick, nearly soundproof partitions of this concrete pile, but he saw no point in changing.

  He strode toward the door and pulled at the lever. It descended smoothly and he heard the click that meant the door release had been activated. Except that it wasn’t. And although his biceps tightened into lumps, nothing was accomplished.

  He stepped away. This was ridiculous. Had there been a general power failure? There couldn’t have been. The clock was going. The visiphone was still receiving properly.

  Wait! It could have been the boys, bless their erratic souls. It was done sometimes. Infantile, of course, but he’d taken part in these foolish practical jokes himself. It wouldn’t have been difficult, for instance, for one of his buddies to sneak in during the day and arrange matters. But, no, the ventilation and lights were working when he had gone to sleep.

  Very well, then, during the night. The hall was an old, outmoded structure. It wouldn’t have taken an engineering genius to hocus the lighting and ventilation circuits. Or to jam the door, either. Arid now they would wait for morning and see what would happen when good old Biron found he couldn’t get out. They would probably let him out toward noon and laugh very hard.

  “Ha, ha,” said Biron grimly, under his breath. All right, if that’s the way it was. But he would have to do something about it; turn the tables some way.

  He turned away and his toe kicked something which skidded metallically across the floor. He could barely make out its shadow moving through the dim visiphone light. He reached under the bed, patting the floor in a wide arc. He brought it out and held it close to the light. (They weren’t so smart. They should have put the visiphone entirely out of commission, instead of yanking out the sending circuit.)

  He found himself holding a small cylinder with a little hole in the blister on top. He put it close to his nose and sniffed at it. That explained the smell in the room, anyway. It was Hypnite. Of course, the boys would have had to use it to keep him from waking up while they were busy with the circuits.

  Biron could reconstruct the proceedings step by step now. The door was jimmied open, a simple thing to do, and the only dangerous part, since he might have wakened then. The door might have been prepared during the day, for that matter, so that it would seem to close and not actually do so. He hadn’t tested it. Anyway, once open, a can of Hypnite would be put just inside the door and the door would be closed again. The anesthetic would leak out slowly, building up to the one in ten thousand concentration necessary to put him definitely under. Then they could enter—masked, of course. Space! A wet handkerchief would keep out the Hypnite for fifteen minutes and would be all the time needed.

  It explained the ventilation system situation. That had to be eliminated to keep the Hypnite from dispersing too quickly. That would have gone first, in fact. The visiphone elimination kept him from getting help; the door jamming kept him from getting out; and the absence of lights induced panic. Nice kids!

  Biron snorted. It was socially impossible to be thin-skinned about this. A joke was a joke and all that. Right now, he would have liked to break the door down ana have done with it. The well-trained muscles of his torso tensed at the thought, but it would be useless. The door had been built with atom blasts in mind. Damn that tradition!

  But there had to be some way out. He couldn’t let them get away with it. First, he would need a light, a real one, not the immovable and unsatisfactory glow of the visiphone. That was no problem. He had a self-powered flashlight in the clothes closet.

  For a moment, as he fingered the closet-door controls, he wondered if they had jammed that too. But it moved open naturally, and slid smoothly into its wall socket. Biron nodded to himself. It made sense. There was no reason, particularly, to jam the closet, and they didn’t have too much time, anyway.

  And then, with the flashlight in his hand, as he was turning away, the entire structure of his theory collapsed in a horrible instant. He stiffened, his abdomen ridging with tension, and held his breath, listening.

  For the first time since awakening, he heard the murmuring of the bedroom. He heard the quiet, irregular chuckling conversation it was holding with itself, and recognized the nature of the sound at once.

  It was impossible not to recognize it. The sound was “Earth’s death rattle.” It was the sound that had been invented one thousand years before.

  To be exact, it was the sound of a radiation counter, ticking off the charged particles and the hard gamma waves that came its way, the soft clicking electronic surges melting into a low murmur. It was the sound of a counter, counting the only thing it could count—death!

  Softly, on tiptoe, Biron backed away. From a distance of six feet he threw the white beam into the recesses of the closet. The counter was there, in the far corner, but seeing it told him nothing.

  It had been there ever since his freshman days. Most freshmen from the Outer Worlds bought a counter during their first week on Earth. They were very conscious of Earth’s radioactivity then, and felt the need of protection. Usually they were sold again to the next class, Dut Biron had never disposed of his. He was thankful for that now.

  He turned to the desk, where he kept his wrist watch while sleeping. It was there. His hand was shaking a little as he held it up to the flashlight’s beam. The watch strap was an interwoven flexible plastic of an almost liquidly smooth whiteness. And it was white. He held it away and tried it at different angles. It was white.

  That strap had been another freshman purchase. Hard radiation turned it blue, and blue on Earth was the color of death. It was easy to wander into a patch of radiating soil during the day if you were lost or careless. The government fenced off as many-patches as it could, and of course no one ever approached the huge areas of death that began several miles outside the city. But the strap was insurance.

  If it should ever turn a faint blue, you would show up at the hospital for treatment. There was no argument about it. The compound of which it was made was precisely as sensitive to radiation as you were, and appropriate photoelectric instruments could be used to measure the intensity of the blueness so that the seriousness of the case might be determined quickly.

  A bright royal blue was the finish. Just as the color would never change back, neither would you. There was no cure, no chance, no hope. You just waited anywhere from a day to a week, and all the hospital could do was to make final arrangements for cremation.

  But at least it was still white, and some of the clamor in Biron’s thoughts subsided.

  There wasn’t much radioactivity then. Could it be just another angle of the joke? Biron considered and decided that it couldn’t. Nobody would do that to anyone else. Not on Earth, anyway, where illegal handling of radioactive material was a capital offense. They took radioactivity seriously here on Earth. They had to. So nobody would do this without overpowering reason.

  He stated the thought to himself carefully and explicitly, facing it boldly. The overpowering reason, for instance, of a desire to murder. But why? There could be no motive. In his twenty-three years of life, he had never made a serious enemy. Not this serious. Not murder se
rious.

  He clutched at his clipped hair. This was a ridiculous line of thought, but there was no escaping it. He stepped cautiously back to the closet. There had to be something there that was sending out radiation; something that had not been there four hours earlier. He saw it almost at once.

  It was a little box not more than six inches in any direction. Biron recognized it and his lower lip trembled slightly. He had never seen one before, but he had heard of them. He lifted the counter and took it into the bedroom. The little murmur fell off, almost ceased. It started again when the thin mica partition, through which the radiation entered, pointed toward the box. There was no question in his mind. It was a radiation bomb.

  The present radiations were not in themselves deadly; they were only a fuse. Somewhere inside the box a tiny atomic pile was constructed. Short-lived artificial isotopes heated it slowly, permeating it with the appropriate particles. When the threshold of heat and particle density was reached, the pile reacted. Not in an explosion, usually, although the heat of reaction would serve to fuse the box itself into a twist of metal, but in a tremendous burst of deadly radiation that would kill anything living within a radius of six feet to six miles, depending on the bomb’s size.

  There was no way of telling when the threshold would be reached. Perhaps not for hours, and perhaps the next moment. Biron remained standing helplessly, flashlight held loosely in his damp hands. Half an hour before, the visi-phone had awakened him, and he had been at peace then. Now he knew he was going to die.

  Biron didn’t want to die, but he was penned in hopelessly, and there was no place to hide.

  He knew the geography of the room. It was at the end of a corridor, so that there was another room only on one side, and, of course, above and below. He could do nothing about the room above. The room on the same floor was on the bathroom side, and it adjoined via its own bathroom. He doubted that he could make himself heard.