Table of Contents CHAPTER 1—CASTAWAY CHAPTER 2—GAME-PLAY CHAPTER 3—TINDER SPARK CHAPTER 4—EYE OF THE STORM CHAPTER 5—THE VUDU GLADE CHAPTER 6—BLUE RIVER CHAPTER 7—NIGHT SONG Star Man 1: Supermen of Alpha [First Empire Series] by Stuart J. Byrne CHAPTER 1—CASTAWAY “Ping!” The sound was sharp, quick, metallic. And final. There was no reversing it. No taking it back or praying it hadn't happened. Thirty-two years of life, hard-packed with training, just at the peak of career—and “ping!” The end. Of course there were a few swift impressions that went with it, but very swift. The air thudded out instead of screaming. He remembered a futile motion to grab for oxygen. There was an axe in his head. A stake crushed through his ribs. Even if he had reached the oxygen mask it wouldn't have been enough. For this he needed his suit, but who had twenty minutes when life was a matter of seconds? The axe in his head was his arteries trying to explode. The stake through his chest was instant asphyxiation. To sum it all up, the last thing Steve Germaine remembered was the meteor.... That is, the meteor was the last thing he remembered that made any sense. There were things much more vaguely remembered. An endless nightmare of drifting ... a dreamless, frozen waiting ... unable to move, buried in a tomb of time... In the distant heart of darkness was a lonely star. It made a spiked cross of light on a circle as though seen out of focus through an imperfect lens. As the seeming eons passed, the star drew nearer and was brighter. Sometimes there was blinding light everywhere with shadows and shapes moving through it—and at times the sensation of sound. Voices, the clink of steel instruments, the high whine of generators or the arcing of high-tension electricity. At other times, the gulfs of blackness again ... a peace of eternal silence. But after ages the star would reappear, and each time it would stay longer. Finally, an awareness grew that he would awaken, that he would one day open his eyes and learn the mystery of the star... His first conscious sensation was that of heaviness. An invisible hand pressed him down against the bed. He tried to raise his arm, but it was made of lead. Either it had gone to sleep and was numb or he was under many Gs of acceleration. But where was the metal-transmitted roar of rocket engines? Ionic drive had no thrust like this. Was he on board a ship at all? He opened his eyes and the star smote him blindingly. He rested several minutes, then experimentally lifted his eyelids again. The star gradually resolved itself into a broad, open window and a view of clear blue sky. At the same moment he heard the long-trilling song of a bird. Earth! He was back home again...! He tried to sit up, but the invisible hand shoved him back. Frustrated, he lay there in a large rustic bed and stared at the ceiling. A vague panic stirred in him and he fought it stubbornly by willing himself to reason—to pick up all the pieces and fit them together and then make a judgement. It had always been his tactic before, whether running a team play or facing the unknown. It had to work now. Just prior to the meteor impact, he'd been trying to contact the Cape, Jodrell Bank, the Canary Islands, Johannesburg, Woomera, Hawaii—anybody. At his tremendous distance from home a one-way transmission required an elapsed time of 31 minutes. As his speed increased and the time between contacts stretched out, a sense of vast isolation came with it—a burden of loneliness never before experienced by the human psyche. Lesser men might have cracked up by now, but that's why he was here in spite of his extra big frame and his quarter-back weight. He was the only astronaut engineer whose physical stamina could pass the “window” test of the centrifuge—the window of physiological survival that said he could take the slingshot maneuver past Jupiter. He was on his way to Saturn and was trying to tell them he had it made. Suddenly the bulkheads had “pinged” open showing a frosting of stars through foot-wide holes. He had blacked out—as if someone had snapped a switch. Therefore, if he had been half a billion miles from home in a ruptured ship, there simply was no logical explanation for his present situation. Here he was in a king-size bed looking at blue sky through an open window and listening to the song of birds. Maybe he was dead and this was Heaven? But why in Heaven should they make beamed ceilings out of rough-hewn logs? Or for that matter, if he were dead, why would he be all tied up to an intricate array of medical gadgets? He had a tube through his nose. A fairly recognizable intravenous setup ran a line to his left arm. In addition, there were anodes attached to his head and chest, very similar to the hookups he had experienced during space-medical telemetry testing. That he was under some kind of intensive care was both obvious and logical—as far as logic went. But he shouldn't be here at all. He should be a frozen corpse drifting away into Infinity at about 85,000 miles per hour. This wasn't Cape Kennedy. It wasn't a rescue ship. It was more like a summer lodge in the mountains of the American West. In fact he heard a familiar rustling outside that sounded like waves on a pebbly beach—ripples against dock pilings and the hulls of boats. A lake! He could even smell it in the air. Steve knew that his own stubborn nature was going to give him trouble in a situation like this. Years of team competition in high-school and college athletics had built in some habits he'd never be rid of—such as knowing he could win any game if he used his head. With logic, that is; by figuring all the factors and matching wits against the odds. But just now he was bugged by not having all of those factors. There was just no use trying to reason out the causes of his rescue, at least not now. He was alive and apparently in friendly, competent hands. The only other mystery—that concerning the extreme sensation of weight—could probably be chalked up to a cardio-vascular reaction to months in space under only about an ounce and a half of acceleration pressure. He was simply convalescent. It was at least some relief to tidy up the world around him to this extent. A few items fit into a natural order, after all, and so he finally relaxed into a prolonged period of sleep. During the next period of wakefulness, much of the medical equipment was gone except for the intravenous tube. Just as he was reasoning that this was a sign of improvement, he heard low-volume piped-in music: “Drink to me only with thine eyes...” It was like a G.I. homecoming. Surprised at his unsuspected softness, he fought back a self-pitying lump in his throat. For two years during his training for Project Neptune he had hardened himself to the idea that he might never come back. Not that he was the suicidal type—far from it. But the gamble had seemed justified in view of the priceless data he would be able to furnish science by means of a manned, directly observed mission. And then again, there was that irresistible challenge of fighting the odds. However, when he passed the orbit of Mars at an exponentially increasing velocity and climbed toward regions of the Einstein equations that were as yet only theory to Man, he subconsciously renounced the planet where his flesh and spirit had been born. Out there in the unbelievable emptiness beyond the asteroid belt, every ghost of his past came to sit with him in a silent mockery. Even his heredity, the memory of his father and grandfather and tall tales of his lineage before that. He knew that a long tradition of seafaring and adventure was in his blood, and even in his own brief life he had seen many horizons. But would he ever see them again? In wakeful waiting, drifting like a castaway through a greater “ocean” than a dozen grand-dads would ever have imagined, he was tortured by memories which became the more painful as he receded into the Abyss. He remembered white gulls gliding over the wide blue bay of Mazatlan, the distant smoke funnel of a tramp ship in the tropical straits of La Paz, colored sails in the sunset off Waikiki ... the blinding whiteness of eternal snow mantling the Andean cordillera, and towering Illimani across the blue expanse of Titicaca. But there was also San Fernando Valley in the early morning, the smell of fresh coffee, and the fresher smell of a blond, brown-eyed girl—Madge Hagan, his fiancee. He had a persistent feeling he would never see these things again. Far, far beyond Earth the unwinking stars were like the raven, saying “Nevermore!” And yet—the music was playing and he heard waves lapping under the dock. Suddenly he was sharply aware of a presence in the room! He had traversed vast distances and come through an impossible gamut of survival. It was painfully vital now to look once more upon a human face. With his eyes still closed, he listened carefully. House-keeping sounds ... dusting, the adjustment of the window curtains, and the straightening of the covers on his bed. The presence was close to him now. He heard its breathing. It was there beside him, looking at his face. Steve Germaine opened his eyes abruptly to see a dwarfish, warty-skinned, frog-faced creature with bulging chameleon eyes. He shouted, momentarily out of control. The shock was too far from what he had expected, and the implications were something his mind couldn't take. His cry was a prolonged, hoarse shriek of anguish. There was a moment of red haze and imbalance. Being dumped suddenly into this unreality was a thunde...
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