DS02 Night of the Dragonstar Read Online Free PDF Page A

science. I think I even got a degree in it somewhere.”
    After checking the equipment, Nurse Jane Wilkins was satisfied that the spry life she was charged with would rant on a while longer. “What are you working on, Mr. Neville?”
    “Call me ‘Doctor’ today, dear. I’ve just remembered about my degrees.”
    “Certainly, Doctor.” She glanced at the CRT. “Oh, the Dragonstar.” Her eyes shone. “Aren’t those Sauries cute?”
    “Cute! Bunch of smart lizards, that’s all they are. Stupid public is making them out to be Jesus’s babies or something, when they’d probably eat you soon as look at you.”
    “Now now, Mr... . Dr. Neville. That’s hardly the attitude you’ve promoted in most of your books concerning extraterrestrials. Certainly you’ve had any number of antagonistic aliens, but you’ve always explored the possibility with an open mind — and the sharpest mind in science fiction.”
    “Goddamn it, woman, I’m old, and I deserve to be cranky and cantankerous if I want. Now, I’m not going to die before I finish this article, so you can just leave me be.”
    Nurse Wilkins made sure the sensor field keyed to Neville’s vital functions was fully operational, then departed.
    Neville took another drink of his vitamin-packed brew, then rekeyed for dictation.
    He started his essay off with his usual “This reminds me of the day I ...” anecdote, this one concerning his first first-contact story, “Streaking Eyeballs of Neptune,” for Thrilling Astounding Tales, an instant classic, then proceeded to narrate the story of the Dragonstar, Neville-style, intending to finish the article up with his lengthy opinion on the subject.
    “We almost had a ‘Boucher’s comet.’
    “That’s what the young IASA fellowship student Robert Boucher thought late one night at the Copernicus Base Observatory. The lunar telescopes had been running routine measurements on the Tarantula, the Great Looped Nebula in the Magellanic Cloud in the constellation Doradus, diameter eight hundred lightyears, which is mighty big, folks.
    “The observatory project was in photometric analysis. An array of aligned photometers was focused on a nebula feature, comparing hard UV to near infrared radiation with a three-micrometer cutoff, each photometer covering a small arc of the sky.
    “Boucher noted an unexpected series of peaks at regular intervals. He called in Professor Andre Labate, Director of the Observatory. It didn’t take long for Labate to figure out what was going on.
    “Since the photometer array was aimed so far off the ecliptic, Labate knew it couldn’t be an asteroid. The possibility of a new comet arose, since the object was following a nearly parabolic orbit, but spectrographic analysis showed Fraunhofer absorption lines. Doppler shift on sodium D line was checked, and the spectrum proved to be only slightly shifted from the solar spectrum, which meant that solar radiation was being reflected off a spinning object, heading down the gravity well toward the sun.
    “By the time Colonel Phineas Kemp, Chief of Operations on Copernicus Base, was called in, Labate and Boucher had the specifics.
    “The large unidentified body was entering the main plane of the solar system at an oblique angle near the orbit of Jupiter, approximately forty degrees to the ecliptic. Measurements revealed that it had a cometary orbit with a period of about two hundred and ten years, and a velocity of thirty kilometers per second, increasing as the object approached perihelion, its closest position to the sun.
    “Measurements also showed the object was not a comet but a cylinder sixty-five kilometers in diameter and three hundred and twenty kilometers in length.
    “Sure as hell, nobody from Earth had shot that thing up there, and it was a spaceship of some kind.
    “Because of the delicate political situation on both the Earth and the Moon, Kemp immediately put a top-secret classification on the information. The closest ship