DISTRESS SIGNAL

The years passed relentlessly, ticked off—one, two three, four—by the big lone planet Worta as it moved with ponderous sureness around the dying red star. Sometimes, in the first year after they were marooned, the two runaway boys, Carl Wyant and Rex Oberling, crawled from the grottoes, chambers and labyrinthine tunnels which the Wortans had driven deep beneath the planet's crust, and with a chill lonesomeness looked out into the vastness of space where the stars brooded. One of those stars, thirty-five light-years away, was Sol, around which swung the planet Earth! They could not think of Earth without a brightness coming to their eyes.

Sometimes the younger boy, then seventeen, would whisper, "I wish we'd never left home, Carl."

And Carl would say, "But we left. So let's take our medicine like men."

Yes, their leaving home, leaving their parents, their friends, their whole world, could not be changed. Yet it seemed to them that their punishment was out of all proportion to their crime. Thinking back on it, Carl Wyant no longer remembered the petty grievance against his parents which made him decide to run away.

Mainly, of course, it had been because his father dropped his keys to the interstellar space-ship he had recently requisitioned from the Space Council. Both Carl and his buddy, Rex, the young fellow who lived next door and belonged to the same Scout Troop, had been caught up with the idea of visiting the stars, without parental supervision. To visit the stars! That was a thrilling thought.

At first they planned to be gone a month. But after landing on one of the Centaurian planets, four and a half light-years away, the tremendous excitement that gripped them burned away thoughts of their parents, who must certainly be suffering agonies because of their disappearance. Beyond Centauri were other stars—and others beyond them .

They never tired as the sub-etheric warp hurled them through the dark reaches of infinity at several times light-speed. For the first time, they were living.

By this time, the alarm had gone throughout the known universe. Two boys on the loose. Carl, an expert at Morse Code, deciphered the wild dit-dit-da's.

"Boy, are they looking for us!"

Rex's deep chest came out. "We'll be pretty famous when we get back, I guess." The thought pleased him. "Those smart alecs that always picked on me at school will change their tune."

"Ah, Rex, nobody ever picked on you." Carl was slimmer than Rex, though a year older. He added, "All you had to do was join in the fun and you'd have got along swell."

A dangerous flush crept up from Rex's thick, powerful neck. "I say they picked on me."

Carl said hastily, "Okay, okay." He dropped the subject. Sometimes Rex could be pretty touchy. But he was handy to have around and most of the time was a good guy. Both fellows had studied celestial navigation and mechanics, but Rex had it all over Carl when it came to handling the small ship, so Carl let him take the controls most of the time.

Suddenly the ship had gone haywire. Neither Carl nor Rex was technician enough to understand that the etheric warp engines had been overdriven. The engines, down to the last accumulator cell, exploded with a mighty, tearing roar that blew gaping holes in bulkheads, deck-plates, and overheads. Carl was knocked out, but Rex held on.

He crash-landed the ship—on Worta, the lone planet of the unlisted, dying red star. The ship landed in a snow-bank, and the heat of the landing turned tons of snow into steaming, boiling water. By the time they had inventoried the situation, there was a smooth lake of ice around them and the ship was frozen in up to the edge of the airlocks.

Rex said shakily, "We'll have to use the auxiliary engines."

Which was a bit optimistic. The auxiliaries weren't etheric warpers. They were rocket engines. The fuel a ship like this carried would take it a few billion miles, but what was that in the vastness of interstellar space, with the nearest solar system two light-years away?

Carl's long slim fingers bit mercilessly into the palms of his hands. His voice was a thin cry of protest, drifting out over the sterile vistas of Worta, the ice planet.

"Rex, we're done for. We can't get back. We're marooned."

They were marooned, but not done for. The Wortans found them one day and took them to their city a thousand feet under the planet. These Wortans, the few of them that remained, were quiet, kindly people. Ages ago, they had fought their last retreat from the bitter surface cold. They had dug beneath the crust. They were savages now, their former mighty civilization forgotten, and were unlearned, save in agriculture and the skillful breeding of such fur-and-meat-producing animals as the col , the friga , the hask-nor . And, since they were human in form, themselves, they accepted these strangers that came among them.

They never came to the surface of Worta, but that unexplainable sense of theirs which enabled them to perceive disharmony, much as one flinches at a sour discord, brought them up to investigate.

Carl was grateful to them for their simple wisdom, their understanding. From the first, however, Rex was a "sour chord" among them. An inner conceit, perhaps growing out of a race consciousness, painted him with an unmasked hostility.

But it was all of a year after their arrival before M'hort, chief of the Wortans, revealed his feelings to Carl. He drew Carl into his meegan —his rock-dwelling—one day. M'hort was tall as Carl, but his eyes were faceted and insect-like, great horny reptilian lumps stood out on his bony-joints, and his smoothly-scaled skin reflected the eternal fluorescence of this underground land like a polished mirror.

Carl's smile was rueful when M'hort explained about Rex. "Rex never was one to get along with people. He told me you people don't like him."

"How sad!" said M'hort.

"He's never stopped dreaming that we might get back to Earth."

"If only," said M'hort, "he would join us at our festivals as you do! If only he would laugh when we gather for meals! But, ah, he will do none of these things. Many times he sits in his meegan and broods. You say he insists there is a way to return to your planet?"

Carl was embarrassed for his friend. "When we first landed," he explained, "Rex thought that somehow we could use the auxiliaries."

"Ah, yes," said M'hort, trying hard to understand these things which were strange to him. "The auxiliaries."

"You see, we can manufacture unlimited quantities of rocket fuel with the fuel-generator that most ships carry. It's a catalytic process, the raw material being any fairly dense rock.

"The auxiliaries were a sort of obsession with Rex. I couldn't control him. In the few days before you found us, he manufactured seven or eight tons of merbohydrate. He filled the ship full. I let him have his way. We lifted the ship and left Worta. Rex was certain we could find another planet and get back to Earth by a stepping-stone method."

"Ah, but there are no other planets near enough," said M'hort, recalling this fact which Carl had previously taught him.

"Within light-years. As I say, I let Rex have his way until half the fuel was used up. Then I had to fight him."

Carl looked ashamedly at his fists. "I knocked him out as we came back to Worta. But somehow he never gave up the idea that we could use the auxiliaries somehow."

"How very sad! And you say there is little chance of the Earth people coming for you?"

"Very little. Worta and its sun aren't even entered in the Star Catalogue . It's an unlisted system, although the Stellar Survey Institution has been working like crazy the past hundred years to survey the whole works."

M'hort touched the boy's hand sympathetically. "Someday they will come for you! But, in the meantime, it would be wonderful if your friend saw the futility of his ways."

During the first year of their stay on Worta, Rex stayed close to Carl, confiding in him, making those trips to the surface of the snowed-under world. Then he took to wandering the great winding corridors and chambers and dead underground cities of Worta alone. Carl would have liked to explore with him, for there was an unending fascination in this dying civilization. Once upon a time the Wortans had been great. The quaint webbed architecture of the spired and domed buildings, the delicate traceries, on the walls and the sculptured figures standing in the squares—these were a timeless wonder. But Rex didn't want Carl along, for Rex had closed up clam-like, his broad, square face held a sullen fanaticism, and Carl knew he had his mind set on escape.

Carl went to Rex's meegan and sat on his spider-silk chair and whiled away the time by reading a scroll from the Wortan library until Rex should return. Both Carl and Rex had learned the complex language, the reading, the writing, the speaking of it, though Carl was much the more proficient.

Rex came in silently, a big man-size fellow with pale, beardless cheeks, dressed Indian-like in the thin, cured leather of the col . His moccasins padded and Carl looked up from the scroll with a start.

Rex said shortly, "Hello, Carl." He threw himself on the pile of sleeping-furs in the corner, locked his hands behind his head and stared straight up at the fluorescent ceiling with hard, unblinking eyes.

Carl uncomfortably put the scroll away. "Rex, I want to have a talk with you."

"Shoot," said Rex.

"You're not making it very easy for yourself, Rex."

"Oh! You're going to start moralizing again!"

"I wouldn't call it moralizing. I'm getting fed up with the way you act, if you want it straight. The Wortans are swell people and I get along with them fine. But it's just as if I was marooned alone. What I mean is, I don't have anybody to talk to."

Rex's lips curled in a half-smile. "Maybe you haven't treated me half-decent, either, if you want to know it."

" I haven't!"

"Nope. You want to stick here the rest of your life in these crummy, cold, underground rat-holes. No soap. I'm going to get back to Earth somehow."

"The auxiliaries," Carl said sarcastically.

Rex came to his knees with a violent motion, eyes burning. "Don't talk to me like that, Carl! I've got a way to get out of here."

"Yeah?" Carl refused to be intimidated. "How's the master-mind going to work it?"

Rex paused and then said slowly, "I'm going to create a distress signal."

"Distress sig—" Carl stiffened incredulously. "Rex, you're nuts!"

Rex smiled a slow, secret, satisfied smile. "I don't think so. 'Member when we were scouts? 'Member that time we got lost in the Big Neck Valley? We burned green wood and got a smoky fire started and used a blanket to send up a smoky SOS signal. We knew the rest of the troop was somewhere near and would see the signal. They came and got us.

"Well, this is the same thing. We're lost. This solar system never has been discovered, but we both know we're still in the known universe. All around us, maybe no more than fifty or sixty light-days off, are traffic lanes. Passenger ships, freighters. Then there's the SSI. It has ships everywhere. I figure if we send out a distress signal they're bound to see it over the sub-etheric, fifth-order ray detector. They'll see that signal as soon as I get started."

Carl was quiet. He was worried. This was a turn of affairs he hadn't expected. He remembered how fixed Rex's mind was on the subject of escape. Too fixed. Almost fanaticism. He hoped with all his heart Rex wasn't sick. Yet that the kid should kneel there, with that brightness in his eyes, and suggest sending up a distress signal which was to be sent across billions of miles of space—

"All right, Rex," he said gently. "I'm listening. You're to send up a distress signal and attract the attention of a Stellar Survey ship."

A derisive smile grew on Rex's lips. "You're listening," he scoffed. "Liar. You think I'm bats. But I'll show you."

He lay down again and turned his face to the wall and shortly Carl heard his deep breathing. Carl left.

That was in the second year. But another year passed. Carl found himself growing up. He had the shoulders of a man, and he could look back with a whimsical ruefulness on the immaturity which had led him and Rex to run away from home like callow ten-year-olds.

Carl longed for Earth, no less than Rex. Unlike Rex, he subdued the longing, but whenever his lonesome thoughts threatened to engulf him he diverted himself by climbing the thousand feet to the planet's surface. It was on such a voyage that he found the space-ship gone.

Carl and Rex had agreed to leave the ship on an eminence, so that if anybody did come they would see the ship and investigate. But the ship was undeniably gone, and Carl knew Rex had taken it.

He stood on the icy mesa where they had parked it, and Carl looked out on the drear vastness of Worta with sick eyes. He refused to believe Rex had gone away and left him. He stayed there for hours, waiting, then reluctantly went back into the bowels of Worta.

Rex showed up for the evening meal, though, taking his place at the great long yee —the festival table—where the forty-odd Wortans who remained had their meals. After the meal, Carl cornered him.

Rex twisted away from Carl's detaining hand. "I've got a right to take a ride if I want to, haven't I?"

Carl felt guilty at having even asked, the way Rex put it. Rex did have that right. Carl let it slide. But the frequent disappearance of the ship troubled him increasingly. Every time he stood hip-deep in snow on the upper world and saw the ship was gone, a chill worked through his heart. He would find himself looking into the lowering dark sky at the impersonal stars. Fastening his gaze on the dying red star around which Worta revolved. It was not a large sun. In another million years it would burn out. Then Worta would truly be dead.

He was convinced there was more to Rex's use of the ship than the loneliness of a nineteen-year-old wanting to take a ride. Rex had a purpose. Yet he let it slide until the end of the fourth year. Then his interference was not his doing. He was wandering far underground when a runner came panting up.

"M'hort must see you in his meegan ," the runner panted.

Carl went at once, heart constricted. Nothing ever happened in these underground caves. Whatever M'hort wanted to see him about was urgent.

M'hort met him at the entrance and gripped his arm. His eyes bored into Carl's. "I sense that something is wrong, friend Carl," he said. "It is a great terror in my breast. It is about Rex, of course. I see—I see a great flame. Now tell me what you know!"

Carl blurted out the story. "He's making plenty long trips someplace," he said huskily. "He's been caving in a big hillside of rock these past couple years. Making merbohydrate."

M'hort's fear showed in his eyes. "There is no place for him to visit?"

"Not a planetary body within countless billions of miles."

M'hort paced. "We should not have this trouble," he said fretfully. "I am most annoyed with Rex. Look at us of Worta. Do we not know we are doomed, that the unhealthful conditions beneath Worta are producing a sterility that will soon destroy us as if we had never been? Yet we are gay and take what there is of life. Why must Rex make us all unhappy? And I feel he is planning—something that can never be undone."

He hesitated. "Carl, this merbohydrate—it is dangerous?"

Carl laughed. "Just about the peppiest explosion known to the human race." He touched M'hort's arm. "I'll find out what he's planning."

Carl went straight to the surface and stood in the cave opening, his breath hanging in puffy clouds of white. Rex was at that moment letting down the ship's gangplank. He wheeled the fuel-generator out on its short tripod.

All day Carl watched as Rex set "pills" of merbohydrate into the rock face of the snow-shorn, worked-over hill and detonated them. Tons of chipped rock cascaded toward the mouth of the generator. Rex panted as he worked with a square-point shovel. The twenty-pound merbohydrate ingots came rolling out at the rate of one a minute. Rex carried the ingots into the ship.

As the red star was about to settle for the night behind the sharply-silhouetted horizon, Rex wheeled the generator back into the ship. About that time, Carl panted up the hill to the mesa level. "Rex!" he called.

Rex stood scowling near the airlock. Plainly, Carl was not welcome.

Carl panted, "Going for a ride?"

Rex's shoulders—broader by far than Carl's—bunched up. He growled, "Yeah. I'm taking a ride. "

"Swell. I'll go with you."

"Nope."

"Why not?"

Rex turned and, with a single motion, jumped to the edge of the airlock. He jeered, "I don't want any boy scouts along with me this trip. G'bye!"

Carl felt a rage he had never really shown Rex. He leaped. All it got him was a bad fall on the slippery ice underfoot. When he finally got to his feet, the airlock door was whining shut. A few seconds later, the ship leaped away, the rocket apertures throwing out their blatting swords of energy. The ship roared skyward.

Carl stood looking after it, a wet crawling on his skin. He was terribly frightened. The worst part of it was, he didn't know what was frightening him. He turned and started back down the ladders to the underground city.

Four years, he thought, as he climbed the ladders down. Four years we've been here. It seems forever since we ran away that night. And for two of those years, Rex has been busy with something. Manufacturing merbohydrate and taking trips out into space. Why?

Distress signal!

The two words hit him with smashing impact. He wrapped both hands around the ladder, to keep himself from falling down the shaft. He trembled and shook and dizzy spots grew in his eyes.

He raised his head and shouted, "The fool!"

The lonesome echoes of his own madness came crashing back at him. He hugged the ladder and wept. He could not say why he was crying, except he felt he had been betrayed somehow. He knew he was young, too young to deal with this tremendous horror Rex was planning. And M'hort had sensed that horror.

After awhile, he started climbing up again. There was a flame in his heart, a heat that rived him, made him something less than human. He was going to kill Rex if Rex didn't talk, didn't tell him the details of the plan. As for the main plan, Carl already knew it.

On the surface, he waited. The sun came up, moved redly toward noon. The space-ship came back. As Rex appeared in the opening airlock, face perspiring, lips set with a cruel satisfaction that did not belong to youth, Carl jumped him. It was over in a moment. Rex lay unconscious.

When Rex came to, Carl had the ship in the sky again, driving toward the dying red sun. He left the controls again, and stood over Rex, who was rope-bound to a chair.

"I think," Carl said, his eyes burning, "I've put two and two together at last. Took me a whale of a long time to do it, too. Now go ahead and talk."

Rex's square face was set into a disinterested mold. He looked Carl up and down, shrugged. "Sure, I'll talk. But it won't do any good, Carl. It's already fixed. Nothing you can do can change it. And it's funny you picked out today to check up on me."

"Just today?" Carl asked hollowly.

"Just today." Rex spoke so calmly it was as if all the acid bitterness in him had been alkalized in one moment. For the first time in many months, he was a kid again, without a secret thought, without an equivocation on his lips.

Rex said, "There's two hundred thousand tons of merbohydrates out there, Carl. It's taken me two years to manufacture the stuff. The most powerful explosive ever invented.

"You see, Carl, I wasn't as crazy as you thought when I said I was going to send up a distress signal. It's a matter of nine or ten hours. And you can't stop it."

Carl stood with eyes closed, muscles iron-hard. "Rex," he said, "give me the position coordinates of that two hundred thousand tons of merbohydrate."

Rex gave him the coordinates. Carl set the ship on a slightly different course. An hour passed. The Wortan sun grew until it was a red globe glued to space.

Carl operated the photo-amplifiers, set the telescopic perilens into position. Space expanded. In the vision plate grew a tiny dot that seemed to rush rapidly into sight though it was still several hundred thousand miles away. It resolved itself into detail—countless neatly stacked and baled ingots of merbohydrate, each bale in turn attached to another by short lengths of wire. The mass was a thirty-foot cube.

In the vision plate grew a tiny dot....

In the matter of size, it was a speck in space.

In the matter of explosive potentialities, it was a bomb of untold violence, falling toward the dying red star.

Carl got another notch of speed from the ship. He was abruptly aware that sweat had formed stickily on his body. A blast of furnace heat was already radiating from the bulkheads.

Behind him, Rex said derisively, "Save yourself the trouble. You can't catch up with it. It's inside the boiling zone, you idiot.

"For two years, Carl, that mass of merbohydrate was on an orbit about the sun. Every once in a while I'd come out and add more to the main mass. Today I figured I had enough. I hauled it out of its orbit, took it as close as I could to the sun. Right smack to the edge of the boiling zone. Then I gave it a running start and let go. The sun and the merbohydrate will meet at the convergence of their trajectories."

"Then what?"

Rex laughed. "Distress signal!"

It was hotter as they moved toward the sun. Carl was sopping. The very air danced. Under him the chair was beginning to burn him. The cosmic bomb was a full three hundred thousand miles inside the boiling zone. Carl could never catch up with it. He wordlessly banked the ship in a long half-circle that put it a hundred miles inside the boiling zone, and then on the road out.

He poured in every ounce of power he could, while thoughts zig-zagged crazily in his head. He had gone beyond rage. He had ascended the scale of human emotion and he was numb.

When the ship was near Worta, he turned on Rex. "What," he said, "do you expect to gain by this?"

"Rescue."

"What about the Wortans?"

A simmering violence burst in Rex's eyes. His muscles bulged against his bonds. "The Wortans!" he mimicked. "The Wortans! If you love those Wortans so much why don't you plan to live with them the rest of your life? They never did like me, and that goes double."

Carl said gently, "You don't murder people you don't like."

"Murder?" the word came sharply. He relaxed. "They don't use their sun. They won't miss it."

"How about their planet?"

Rex looked at him. Then his eyes shifted. He muttered, "The explosion won't touch Worta. Too far away."

Carl said, "The explosion will rip that planet crossways and endways. It'll turn it inside out. It'll tear it up into little pin-size lumps, roast and boil the lumps, and dissipate the lumps into gases made of dancing free electrons. That big gob of gas will puff itself out over a few light-years of space, and that will be the end of Worta. Maybe you didn't think of that. Or maybe you convinced yourself it wouldn't happen."

A trapped expression grew on Rex's face. "It won't happen!" he shouted. He screamed, "Let me alone! Stop badgering me! You can't change anything. I didn't know if it'd hurt Worta or not. I didn't care any more. I came back to Worta to get you, just in case something happened I didn't figure on. All I cared about was getting home. I want to go home!"

He dropped his head, drawing in great tearing sobs, his broad shoulders quaking.

Carl said calmly, "Well, we're going back to Worta to get the Wortans."

Rex raised his head, his face violent with protest. "We haven't got time."

"We'll take time."

Rex cursed him viciously.

"In the meantime," Carl continued without change of tone, "sit there. Start thinking. Think about M'hort and the other Wortans. Think of how they saved our lives and accepted us as if we're part of them. Think of all the hospitality you accepted at their yee ."

Carl's voice was rising. "Think of their dead cities. Think of all the dead men who built those cities and the artists who made those cities beautiful with their statues and paints. Then think how you will have destroyed all that."

Rex said nothing. Color was flooding from his face, his lips thinning until they formed one pale slash across his face. Carl looked at him with wordless contempt, then swung about to maneuver the ship for the final thousand miles to a landing.

A gong sounded from the instrument board.

It came so suddenly that Carl jumped halfway from the bucket-seat. He gripped the edge of the board, eyes forced open so wide they hurt. He waiting, knowing he had misheard. The gong came again.

Behind him, Rex made an insane gurgling noise. "They've come! They've come!"

Carl's hands were shaking violently as he adjusted the teleview, snapped in the audio. In the teleview gray clouds formed, took on shape, and that shape became the head and shoulders of a man in the trim, pale blue uniform of the Stellar Survey Institution.

Small muscles around the man's eyes and mouth contracted as he saw Carl. He frowned. He said, "You are Carl Wyant and Rex Oberling?"

"Yes, sir," Carl said humbly.

"You will stay where you are. We will pick you up in seven hours. You may consider that a command."

"Yes, sir," replied Carl. "But we can't obey it. I'd advise you, sir, not to come within ten billion miles of the dwarf-red star. It's a potential super-nova. We will meet you at—"

The officer's glance sharpened. "You're talking nonsense. Why is Oberling bound in that chair?"

Carl said wearily, "It's a long story, sir. May I ask your present position?"

The Stellar Survey man's image grew a little in the plate as he leaned forward, as if to get a better look at Carl's face. He drew back. He said, "We are at present roughly twenty-two light-days distant, viewing you by instantaneous fifth-order reception."

"That's even better than ten billion miles, sir. If you stay where you are and keep your beam on, we can signal you when we get a billion miles from Worta. Then you can come forward and pick us up."

Before the officer could say what was starting on his lips, Carl banged his hand excitedly on the instrument board and shouted hysterically, "I'm warning you, sir. I'm warning you!"

The man looked unsettled. His glance wavered. "Very well, Wyant. It's a strange proceeding, but I trust you. We will expect you." The screen blanked.

Fifteen minutes later Carl landed the ship. He got up stiffly. Rex sat motionless, eyes turned straight ahead, unblinking, unseeing.

"I'm leaving you here until I get the Wortans," Carl told him. "Don't try anything silly."

Rex moved his head until his eyes rested on Carl's. He said quietly, "Carl, for your own good, don't bother. Do you think for a minute the Wortans are going to leave their planet at this stage of the game? They're done for anyway. You wouldn't expect a bunch of corpses to get out of their coffins and try a different coffin, would you? That's the way it is with the Wortans."

When Carl said nothing, Rex said, in that same quiet voice, "Carl, I know ."

Carl turned uncertainly away, moved to the instrument board. His own voice sounded far away. "I'll convince them," he said. "I'll bring them back. They've got to come."

Carl took all the keys out of the instrument board. Without the keys, the ship was inoperable. He left the ship, stumbled as in a dream across the dreary wastes of lifeless snow. Then, as the cold struck deep at his lungs, his thoughts clarified, and he went with quick, driven panic.

How soon the merbohydrate would strike the red star he had no idea. But it would be soon. He made a break-neck descent. He burst into that small section of one of the underground cities where the Wortans lived, went straight to the meegan of M'hort.

He told M'hort the whole story.

M'hort sat cross-legged. A resigned sadness lidded his eyes. Carl knew his answer. He dropped to his knees. "No! You can't speak for the rest of your people. They want to live. And the Wortans can still be great. Why—why, we'll give you a planet in our own system!"

M'hort smiled as if at a secret, foolish thought, his eyes averted. Then he arose and drew Carl up with him. His eyes glittered with the reflected fluorescence of the underground. Carl was held rigid.

M'hort said, "You are youth, and you answer as youth would answer. I am age, Carl, and I answer as only age can answer. We will stay.

"What is there to fear? What is there to grieve for? It is a great providence that sent you here to us. You see! Soon we would all have died, but lingeringly. Now there is glory to dying, for there will be no ugly pain. And we will not be unknown to the other peoples of the universe, Carl, for you will carry our immortality."

"That," said Carl, bitterly, "is a hell of an immortality."

M'hort laughed. "It is better than we expected. Now go."

And Carl went, blindly.

He reached the ship in less than an hour. He entered, dogged the airlocks shut, went slowly toward the transparent door of the control room. He threw open the door and stood looking at the empty chair and the tattered strands of rope which had held Rex. He was drained of emotion, though, and he leaned weakly against the door jamb. Finally he moved, left the ship, and spent another hour looking for Rex.

He didn't find him. Rex had consciously obscured his tracks. He went back to the ship, smiling without mirth. That was funny. Rex drove himself crazy figuring out a way to get back to Earth for four years. Then he backed out. He had chosen the same path as the Wortans, and maybe for as good a reason....

He drove straight away from the dying red sun. A billion miles out, he was picked up by the stately ship of the Stellar Survey. He was ushered into the presence of the officer who had appeared in the teleview plate. That individual was cold in his welcome.

"You've cost the tax-payers a mint of money," he growled. "They've had ships on the lookout for you for four years. Where's the other young fellow?"

Carl told the story while the officer slowly tensed. Then he looked annoyed. "It seems a little extreme for Oberling to have committed suicide."

"Maybe, sir. Except that one doesn't go around destroying solar systems without a good reason. If you hadn't shown up when you did—"

"There would have been a good reason?" The officer sat silent. "Yes, I suppose so. A classical bit of irony, that. Destroying a sun to attract rescuers—then the rescuers spoil the drama of it by showing up ahead of time. And the funny part of it is that it would have worked."

He seemed to recollect. He hastily snapped in the teleview, motioned Carl to come around to his side of the desk.

"Chances are," the officer said, consulting some figures, "We'll see a merry hell-fire in the next few minutes."

Ten minutes later, the red star exploded.

It cracked into three separate pieces. They held that position, each section racing from red to violet. That changed blindingly to magnesium white. The glare smashed at the eyeballs. The three pieces in turn shattered each other as they puffed up. Then the whole spurted into a violence that lighted all the black sky with recurring, silently throbbing sheets of shattering luminescence.

The stars were blotted out in that primeval surf of untamed energy.

The planet Worta was caught, flamed in glory for the small part of a second.

The big space-ship trembled in every beam and partition as the wave-front of exploding light reached it.

Distress signal!