Things that he didn’t want to do!

  Acting almost instinctively, he slammed out one hand toward the control panel. His finger touched a stud, and the ship’s mass-time converter died, its power cut off. The ship, deprived of the supernal power that drove it at ultralight velocities across thousands of millions of light-years of empty space, stopped dead. The star in the forward plate ceased to grow.

  Hammill rubbed his temples with his palms. What had happened? Where was he? What was he doing?

  It was as though he had been drugged for five days and was only now coming out of it.

  Think back! Back! What had happened?

  Slowly, the fog seemed to lift from his memory. He began to remember what had happened.

  The Earth fleet had suffered for nearly twenty years under the ruthless invasion of the Starlord’s Armada. The alien ships had come from somewhere—no one knew where—and had begun to blast Earth ships out of the sky. It had taken twenty years to trace the enemy to another galaxy—M-33 in Andromeda.

  Every habitable planet in that Galaxy was ruled by one of the Starlords—near-human, but evilly alien beings who ruled their planets with an iron hand. And the Fleet had stationed itself outside the M-33 galaxy, floating in the dead, empty blackness of intergalactic space, sending in spies to find a weak spot—a chink in the Starlords’ armor.

  Hammill rubbed his fingertips over his eyes. He had landed on Denerix, one of the most powerful worlds of the M-33 galaxy, the galaxy which the Starlords called Shanador.

  And then he’d been captured, and—And what? He couldn’t remember.

  He lifted his eyes to the viewplate. The star was still there, shining brightly against a sprinkling of dimmer stars. Rhodanas. That was the name of the star. But where had he heard it before? Why was he here? Nothing seemed to make any sense.

  He remembered vaguely that someone—some thing—had invaded his mind. That was it! He hadn’t been able to resist the power of that mind, but he had been able to throw if off after five days of blindly following the orders he had been given.

  But what those orders were, what he was supposed to do, eluded him. He reached out and flicked on the astronomical plates. He was near a star called Rhodanas—but where was it? The last five days were so hazy he could not recall how he had arrived here. He tuned the astro-plates into the computer banks. There was a faint hum as the computer figured his location, then the astroplates glowed with little letters which marked off the stars.

  He was within a globular cluster of stars nearly a million light-years from Shanador! Smiling a little, Laird Hammill glanced admiringly at the ship he had come in. He didn’t know how he’d gotten the ship, but, brother, it could really travel!

  And now, by Heaven, it was going to travel right back! He had no idea why he had been sent to a mysterious star called Rhodanas, but he was dead certain that he wasn’t going to stay there! He touched a control, and the ship began to pivot in space, turning her nose back toward the Shanador galaxy.

  Then, without warning, the ship lurched, throwing him out of the pilot’s seat. He leaped to his feet almost instantly. The star of Rhodanas was getting brighter again!

  Something was pulling him toward it!

  Hammill jammed his finger down on the drive button. The mass-time converters should have come on, but they didn’t. None of the controls would function as they should.

  He looked at the forward plate bleakly, knowing what had happened. Someone or something had trained a paramagnetic beam on the ship, and like a bit of iron being drawn toward a powerful magnet, he was being drawn helplessly toward Rhodanas!

  Then he saw a planet. It was only a tiny speck at first, a glowing pinpoint of light. But as the ship approached it, it seemed to grow larger, until it was a perceptible disc. It kept on growing until it was a huge ball, filling and overflowing the edges of the viewplate.

  And then he was dropping toward the surface of the green world. He could see great seas and broad continents covered by fleecy clouds. And then he was dropping through the clouds toward the ground beneath. Below him was a broad spaceport landing field surrounded by shining spires and towers, a magnificiently beautiful city that gleamed in the bright sunlight.

  The ship settled gently to the surface of the field.

  Hammill balled his fists. He wasn’t going to be easy to take.

  * * * *

  The airlock door slid slowly open.

  A figure stepped into the ship. He was a tall, youthful-looking man clad only in a gleaming web of metallic mesh. Hammill poised himself on the catwalk and hurled himself downward toward the newcomer.

  He struck and rebounded off. It was as if the man were made of chrome steel and he of soap-bubbles; he made no effect on the other whatsoever.

  Hammill sprang to his feet and launched a blow at the silent, strange-looking man, who had yet to take any definite action. The blow landed solidly—but again, to no effect. The tall man only stared curiously at him, smiling warmly.

  “Are you finished resisting, Hammill?” he asked suddenly, in a vibrant, resonant voice that seemed to fill the small spaceship.

  “Who are you?” Hammill demanded.

  “That does not matter. I have come to escort you.”

  Hammill scowled and darted back away from the other. “Escort me where?”

  The tall man smiled sadly. “We knew you would be troublesome, Laird Hammill.” He advanced, and at that moment three men of similar appearance stepped through the airlock.

  Hammill swung wildly as they closed in on him, fighting with desperation born of the nightmarish-ness of the situation. But the fight was over in a moment. Each of the four laid a firm hand on him, and a sudden, wordless surge of power ran through him. Suddenly, he did not want to fight them anymore.

  “Who are you?” he asked again—but this time his tone was no longer aggressive.

  “We are of the world of Rhodanas. At the moment, that is all that should concern you. Come with us, now.”

  Unprotestingly, Hammill let them lead him through the airlock and out into the clean, fresh air of Rhodanas. A thousand unanswered questions flooded through his mind as he followed them through a rolling, wooded valley toward a high-vaulting rose-colored domed building that was visible beyond.

  He was on Rhodanas—that much was definite. The Starlords had sent him to Rhodanas with some post-hypnotic command implanted in the subliminal levels of his mind. He was on some sort of mission for them—but what?

  And had the Starlords figured on his being captured by these strange, invulnerable people? He had been snared like a small child, with hardly a struggle.

  That meant he had fallen into the hands of an advanced race—a race millennia ahead of even Earth. Who were they? What did they want with him? Hammill shook his head puzzledly as his captors led him along. He was a pawn in some three-cornered galactic chess game involving the Earth Federation, the Starlords of Shanador, and these mysterious Rhodanans, and he didn’t care for his status at all.

  * * * *

  As he walked with them, Laird Hammill studied the men of Rhodanas. They were handsome, tall, and well-built, but somehow they reminded Hammill of someone else—it was as though he had seen one of these men somewhere before, but he couldn’t recall where or when.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it. It still seemed foggy. What the devil had happened to him?

  He wanted to ask the men with him, but he knew they wouldn’t tell him anything until they were ready.

  As they approached the great, iridescent, rose-colored dome, he saw that it was merely a part of the great city behind it. It was different from any city he had ever seen before; no Earth city had ever seemed so clean, so bright, so peaceful, so quiet. There were occasional murmurs of sound, like sweet strains of music that echoed hauntingly through the air and faded again, but there was no blare of horns, no rumble of heavy transportation, no roar of motors, no thunder of great rockets. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful.

  They crossed the soft, green lawn toward the building. Hammill could see no opening in the smooth flawless beauty of the wall, but when they were within a few yards of it, a spot appeared and quickly dilated to reveal a round opening. From it stepped the loveliest girl Hammill had ever seen. She was wearing a close-fitting tunic, and the figure beneath was subtly rounded and desirable-looking. Her lustrous blonde hair was swept up in a chignon, reminding Hammill of the ancient carvings of the Grecian Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

  She turned her cool blue eyes on him, and her soft, red mouth smiled faintly. “Your thoughts are flattering, Laird Hammill, but somewhat intimate.”

  Hammill was not the blushing kind, but he came near to it as he realized that the girl had read the thoughts on the surface of his mind. “I apologize,” he said.

  Her smile brightened just a little. “There is no need. I’m not offended.” She glanced at the tall man standing next to the Earthman. “We’ll speak aloud for his benefit, Karr. The Council is waiting for him.”

  “Council?” asked Hammill. “Your rulers?”

  The girl’s silvery laughter rang in the warm air, blending with the warm grins of the men.

  “No. Laird,” the girl said, “we have no need of rulers here. We are not like other worlds.”

  “I don’t understand,” Hammill said. “What sort of planet is this?” “You’ll find out,” she said. “There are many things you will find out.” Hammill grinned. “I’ll say. I don’t even know your name, you know.” “Nita,” she said. “And now, let us go. The Council is waiting for you.”

  * * * *

  They sat behind a curving, translucent arc of glowing plastic that provided illumination for the great room. There were eight of them, men neither old nor young, their deep-set eyes warm with a wisdom and a benignity that Hammill accepted immediately. As he stood before them, Nita at his side, the pain and terror of the last weeks seemed to wash away. “You are Laird Hammill, of Earth,” said the foremost of the eight.

  “Welcome to Rhodanas.”

  Hammill faced him squarely. “Just where am I and what is going on?” “Patience,” the Councilman said. “First—may we have permission to enter your mind? Speaking aloud is clumsy and inefficient.”

  Hammill stared uncertainly at him for a long moment, remembering the flaming agony of the moment when Lord Kleyne of Denerix had broken through his barriers and probed his mind. He did not want that to happen again. But—somehow, he trusted the Rhodanans.

  “Very well,” he said.

  It was like stepping into a soothing raybath. The mental energy of the Rhodanans seeped into him, washed over him, left him feeling calmed and refreshed. His perceptions were heightened; he could see Nita, at his side, take on a glowing beauty that he had not known it was possible for a woman to possess, while the members of the Council grew in dignity and authority.

  “Welcome to Rhodanas a second time,” the elder said. Only now his voice was an unspoken thought, and Hammill knew not only that he was Lorkan, nominal head of the Council of Rhodanas, but that he was Nita’s father, and that he was on a world which far surpassed in mental power any that the galaxy had ever known.

  “You could have destroyed me,” he said. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “We do not destroy unless we are directly threatened,” Lorkan said. “And, as usual, our friends of Shanador bungled the job when they planted the command in you.”

  “Command?” Hammill groped for the information he lacked. “You were sent here to steal the hsrorn,” Lorkan said quietly. Immediately awareness came flooding back. Hammill rocked diz-

  zily as the pieces fell into place, as the whole picture took form and meaning and coherence.

  The minds of the Rhodanans meshed with his own, and Nita’s warm hand tightened in his as the dams broke and the data tumbled through him. He saw a sweeping vista of Galactic history in an instant, a record of millenia-long eras.

  He knew why he was here.

  * * * *

  It had begun millions of years in the distant cosmic past, here on the world of Rhodanas. The Rhodanans, who had sprung from the same hardy stock that had gone on to give rise to the peoples of the Earth federation, had, through untold centuries of evolution, reached a state of near-perfection. They had mastered the ability of controlling the hsrorn.

  Which was, Hammill learned in that blinding instant, the key to the conflict that threatened to consume the civilized galaxy. The hsrorn was a semi-living entity that resided in the hearts of suns, a light-being which existed at incalculable temperatures, neither fully alive nor totally inanimate.

  The Rhodanans had mastered the skill of snapping their minds across space to the star in which lived the hsrorn, seizing a microscopic fragment of the light that composed the entity, and crystallizing it instantly into a lambent jewel. Hammill noticed the hsrorn for the first time—a tiny bead that glistened brilliantly at the throat of each of the Rhodanans.

  Mastering the hsrorn had been the final step in the Rhodanans’ path toward perfection. Its peculiar property was its ability to act as a focus for the mental powers, to allow them to project their thoughts to one another, to enter into each other’s minds, to live in perfect harmony and utter balance with each other.

  Only—not all the Rhodanans were capable of using the hsrorn. In some, the genes of evil still lurked. And they, these inferior Rhodanans, were consumed with jealousy, cut off as they were from the wondrous mental blending the hsrorn afforded. Bitter, thwarted, twisted and warped, they banded together and attempted to steal the hsrorn from those Rhodanans who rightfully possessed it.

  But the hsrorn was a weapon as well as a source of eternal harmony. Gathering their united powers and focussing their thoughts through their hsrorn, the Rhodanans had risen to what would be their final act of violence for all time, and in a mighty battle had swept away the outcasts. They had been hurled from Rhodanas forever.

  “And now they are the Starlords,” Hammill said quietly, still shaken by the force of the experience that had poured into him.

  “Yes,” Lorkan said. “When we drove them away, they settled in a distant cluster, gathering themselves together in defeat. They have remained there ever since, scheming against one another and against us, caught forever in their web of destruction.”

  “We have nothing but pity for them,” said Nita.

  “They do not dare return to Rhodanas,” Lorkan went on. “They fear us and they know our might. They are well aware that we could hurl them back just as easily a second time as a first.

  “But you—an Earthman—they had hoped somehow to send you to us and have you steal the hsrorn for them. It was a mad plan—but they are madmen, the Starlords.”

  Hammill nodded. “Yes. But suppose I did succeed in stealing the—

  the hsrorn. What then? Do they think they could defeat you?”

  “No. Not us. They want the hsrorn to focus their hatred against the peoples of the Earth Federation, who even now threaten to smash them.” “So they sent me here to snaffle the super-weapon that would smash my own people,” Hammill said. He smiled. “But if you should give me the hsrorn, and I take it to the Earth fleet to use against the

  Starlords—”

  “No,” Lorkan said gravely. “That would be impossible. We do not interfere in cosmic struggles.”

  Hammill frowned, then. “Now wait just a second. If you don’t intend to do anything, why did you bring me here?”

  “I will be frank with you, Laird,” the Rhodanan said. “We wouldn’t have brought you here ordinarily. The so-called Starlords have sent a good many emissaries here under hypnotic compulsion. None of them have ever landed. We stopped their vessels in space long before they reached us. And, much as we dislike violence, even on a mental level, we blanked their minds and sent them away.”

  “Why am I so special?” Hammill asked.

  Lorkan smiled. “You are the first being we have ever known who had the innate mental ability to break the mental compulsion of a Starlord. Our race—and that includes the Starlords—is one of vast mental powers, vaster than you know, even yet. The Starlords are the weakest of us, but no one has ever been able to break away from their mind control—until you did.

  “That’s why we brought you here, Hammill. We wanted to see what kind of man you were.”

  Hammill was astounded. “Me? Strong mind? Why, I hardly was able to resist him more than a fraction of a second. He—Lord Kleyne— went through my mind block like a hot knife through butter.”

  “True. But you did resist him. Even though your block only held for a short time, it was more than anyone else has ever done. And, too, you were able to break the compulsion after five days. And that takes strength—real strength!”

  Hammill felt a chill run up his back. If the Starlords were actually that strong, Earth and her Federation didn’t stand a chance against the combined might of Shanador!

  “Look, Lorkan,” Hammill said, “you’ve got to help us! You’re the people who drove those men off of Rhodanas! Now they’ve enslaved a whole Galaxy and are going on to more! They’ve got to be stopped, and you’re the only one who can do it!”

  Lorkan shook his head. “You don’t understand. Each race must work out its own destiny; we have worked out ours, we will let others work out theirs. We do not interfere!”

  “You won’t help then?”

  “We cannot. I’m sorry, Hammill.”

  Laird Hammill’s teeth were clenched. “I presume I’m free to go at any time?”

  “As soon as your ship is repaired,” Lorkan said. “The paramagnetic beam jammed the controls, but they will be ready soon.” He asked no question; there was no need to. He knew exactly what the Earthman was thinking, and he didn’t seem to care.

  “You’re snobs,” said Hammill. “Every one of you. You sit here on this tight little world of yours and pay no attention to what’s going on in the rest of the Universe. One of these fine days, when the Starlords have conquered themselves enough territory, they’ll turn on you—and you can’t fight physical force with a little telepathic compulsion!”