distance of five diameters from the globe of Kaidor V, Aram paused to see the death of a world.

Like a savage animal, the Fleet continued to worry the trembling planet with a vicious hail of bombs. The pair in the Serpent could see bright internal fires as the crust of the world split under the hideous attack. Like a stricken thing, Kaidor V seemed to totter on its axis. Great chunks of rock were blown clear by the pressure of expanding inner fires.

For hours, the death agonies of the planet continued, until finally, like a bursting bubble, the globe expanded. Huge slashes appeared from pole to pole. The ice caps vanished into twin clouds of superheated steam. Fragments peeled off as gravitational balances were disturbed. Globules of molten lava fanned out, like strings of beads. Kaidor V trembled with a cosmic delirium—great prominences of atomic fire leaping far into space. And then, quite suddenly, it was over. With its heart ripped out by the violent fission of its inner substance, the hollow shell collapsed into a swirling, nebulous cloud of cosmic rubble, rapidly spreading out into a belt of tiny planetoids spanning the place where once a mighty world circled the parent star....

The Serpent settled softly into a wooded glade and grew still. Within, Aram Jerrold fought the wracking pains in his head, screaming aloud with the agony of it. Deve lay unconscious on the steel deck, moaning softly.

Aram knew that the antidote he had injected into their veins was not enough. Vaguely, he recalled that once—long ago, it seemed—he had been told that a small amount of specific would prevent physical damage. But the virus was claiming him, nonetheless. The pounding agony in his head was streaked with delirious phantasms. Kant Mikal's words echoed through his brain, though he no longer recognized them as other than his own. His screaming madness took the shape of those words as he lifted Deve in his arms and staggered out of the ship.

Driven by some deep seated racial memory, he stumbled toward the sea—the mother—the giver of life. The sheer brutal agony of the virus increased with every step, blinding him with its intensity, until at last he could bear it no longer and sank to his knees on the white sand of a beach and pitched forward across the still form of the woman he carried, hands outstretched toward the shallows of a restless sea that laved him ... laved him....

Deve stood nude in the glory of the morning sunlight and lifted her arms to the sky in an ecstacy of 

 Prev. P 39/41 next