The Stars Look Down (by Lester del Key) Erin Morse came down the steps slowly without looking back, and his long fingers brushed through the gray hair that had been brown when he first entered the building. Four years is a long time to wait when a man has work to do and the stars look down every night, re- minding him of his dreams. There were new lines in his face and little wrinkles had etched themselves around his dark eyes. But even four years had been too few to change his erect carriage or press down his wide shoulders. At sixty, he could still move with the lithe grace of a boy. The heavy gate opened as he neared it and he stepped out with a slow, even pace. He passed the big three-wheeled car parked there, then stopped and breathed deeply, letting his eyes roam over the green woods and plowed fields and take in the blue sweep of the horizon. Only the old can draw full sweetness from freedom, though the young may cry loudest for it. The first heady taste of it over, he turned his back on the prison and headed down the road. There was a bugling from the car behind him, but he was barely conscious of it; it was only when it drove up beside him and stopped that he noticed. A heavily built man stuck out a face shaped like a bulldog's and yelled. "Hey, Erin! Don't tell me you're blind as well as crazy?" Morse swung his head and a momentary flash of surprise and annoyance crossed his face before he stepped over to the car. "You would be here, of course, Stewart." "Sure. I knew your men wouldn't. Hop in and I'll ride you over to Hampton." At Erin's hesitation, he gestured impatiently. "I'm not going to kidnap you, if that's what you think. Federal laws still mean something to me, you know." "I wouldn't know." Erin climbed in and the motor behind purred softly, its sound indicating a full atomic generator instead of the usual steam plant. "I suppose the warden kept you well informed of my actions." The other chuckled. "He did; money has its uses when you know where to put it. I found out you weren't letting your men visit or write to you, and that's about all. Afraid I'd find out what was in the letters?" "Precisely. And the boys could use the time better for work than useless visits to me. Thanks, I have tobacco." But at Stewart's impatient gesture, he put the "makings" back and accepted a cigarette. "It isn't poisoned, I suppose?" "Nor loaded." Erin let a half smile run over his lips and relaxed on the seat, watching the road flash by and letting his mind run over other times with Stewart. Probably the other was doing the same, since the silence was mutual. They had all too many common memories. Forty years of them, from the time they had first met at the institute as roommates, both filled with a hunger for knowledge that would let them cross space to other worlds. Erin, from a family that traced itself back almost to Adam, and with a fortune equally old, had placed his faith in the newly commercialized atomic power. Gregory Stewart, who came from the wrong side of the tracks, where a full meal was a luxury, was more conservative; new and better explosives were his specialty. The fact that they were both aiming at the same goal made little difference in their arguments. Though they stuck together from stubbornness, black eyes flourished. Then, to complicate matters further, Mara Devlin entered their lives to choose Erin after two years of indecision and to die while giving birth to his son. Erin took the boy and a few workers out to a small island off the coast and began soaking his fortune into workshops where he could train men in rocketry and gain some protection from Stewart's thugs. Gregory Stewart had prospered with his explosives during the war of 1958, and was piling up fortune on fortune. Little by little, the key industries of the country were coming under his control, along with the toughest gangs of gunmen. When he could, he bought an island lying off the coast, a few miles from Erin's, stocked it with the best brains he could buy, and began his own research. The old feud settled down to a dull but constant series of defeats and partial victories that gained nothing for either. Erin came to the crowning stroke of Stewart's offensive, grimaced, and tossed the cigarette away. "I forgot to thank you for railroading me up on that five-year sentence, Greg," he said quietly. "I suppose you were responsible for the failure of the blast that killed my son, as well." Stewart looked at him in surprise which seemed genuine. "The failure was none of my doing, Erin. Anyway, you had no business sending the boy up on the crazy experimental model; any fool should have known he couldn't handle it. Maybe my legal staff framed things a little, but it was manslaughter. I could have wrung your neck when I heard Mara's son was dead, instead of letting you off lightly with five years?less one for good behavior." "I didn't send him up." Erin's soft voice contrasted oddly with Stewart's bellow. "He slipped out one night on his own, against my orders. If the whole case hadn't been fixed with your money, I could have proved that at the trial. As it was, I couldn't get a decent hearing." "All right, then, I framed you. But you've hit back at me without trying to, though you probably don't know it yet." He brushed Erin's protest aside quickly. "Never mind, you'll see what I mean soon enough. I didn't meet you to hash over past grievances." "I wondered why you came to see me out." They swung off the main highway into a smaller road where the speed limit was only sixty and went flashing past the other cars headed for Hampton. Stewart gunned the car savagely, unmindful of the curves. "We're almost at the wharf," he pointed out needlessly, "so I'll make it short and sweet. I'm about finished with plans for a rocket that will work?a few more months should do the trick?and I don't want competition now. In plain words, Erin, drop it or all rules are off between us." "Haven't they been?" Erin asked. "Only partly. Forget your crazy ion-blast idea, and I'll reserve a berth for you on my ship; keep on bucking me and I'll ruin you. Well?" "No, Greg." Stewart grunted and shrugged. "I was afraid you'd be a fool. We've always wanted the same things, and you've either had them to begin with or gotten them from under my nose. But this time it's not going to be that way. I'm declaring war. And for your information, my patents go through in a few days, so you'll have to figure on getting along without that steering assembly you worked out." Erin gave no sign he had heard as the car came to a stop at the small wharf. "Thanks for picking me up," he said with grave courtesy. Stewart answered with a curt nod and swung the car around on its front wheels. Erin turned to a boy whose boat was tied up nearby. "How much to ferry me out to Kroll Island?" "Two bucks." The boy looked up, and changed his smile quickly.. "You one of them crazy guys who's been playing with skyrockets? Five bucks, I meant." Erin grimaced slightly but held out the money. II There was nobody waiting to greet him on the island, nor had he expected anyone. He fed the right combination into the alarm system to keep it quiet and set off up the rough wooden walk toward the buildings that huddled together a few hundred yards from the dock. The warehouses, he noticed, needed a new coat of paint, and the dock would require repairs if the tramp freighter were to use it much longer. There was a smell of smoke in the air, tangy and resinous at first, but growing stronger as he moved away from the ocean's crisp counteracting odor. As he passed the big machine shop, a stronger whiff of it reached him, unpleasant now. There was a thin wisp of smoke going up behind it, the faint gray of an almost exhausted fire. The men must be getting careless, burning their rubbish so close to the buildings. He cut around the corner and stopped. The south wall of the laboratory was a black, charred scar, dripping dankly from a hose that was playing on it. Where the office building had stood, gaunt steel girders rose from a pile of smoking ashes and'half-burned boards, with two blistered filing cabinets poking up like ghosts at a wake. The three men standing by added nothing to the cheerfulness of the scene. Erin shivered slightly before advancing toward them. It was a foreboding omen for his homecoming, and for a moment the primitive fears mastered him. The little pain that had been scratching at his heart came back again, stronger this time. Doug Wratten turned off the hose and shook a small arm at the sandy-haired young husky beside him. "All right," he yelled in a piping falsetto, "matter's particular and energy's discrete. But you chemists try and convince an atomic generator that it's dealing with building-block atoms instead of wave-motion." Jimmy Shaw's homely, pleasant face still studied the smoldering ashes. "Roll wave-motion into a ball and give it valence, redhead," he suggested. "Do that and I'll send Stewart a sample?it might make a better bomb than the egg he laid on us. How about it, Dad?" "Maybe. Anyhow, you kids drop the argument until you're through being mad at Stewart," the foreman ordered. "You'll carry your tempers over against each other." Tom Shaw was even more grizzled and stooped than Erin remembered, and his lanky frame seemed to have grown thinner. "All right," he decided in his twangy, down-East voice. "I guess it's over, so we. . . Hey, it's Erin!" He caught at Jimmy's arm and pulled him around, heading toward Erin with a loose-jointed trot. Doug forgot his arguments and moved his underdone figure on the double after them, shouting at the top of his thin voice. Erin found his arm aching and his ears rin...
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