S.T.A.R. FLIGHT Read Online Free PDF Page A

strength. Lassiter forgot that. Did he imagine that he could win the secret of the Gates merely by passing through? Do you?”
    “No,” said Preston, and added, “Is that what you want?”
    She was emphatic. “It’s what we all want, STAR, UNO, everyone. It’s worth a million,” she said casually. “One million in cash if you can win for us the secret of the Gates.”
    “And?”
    “Another million if you can discover the secret of the longevity treatment. STAR doesn’t expect you to work for nothing,” she said. “What do you say?”
    Preston rose to his feet. “Do I get out alive or do you gun me down as I reach the door?”
    “You refuse?”
    “I don’t play a guitar,” he said. “But I’ve got a use for my hands. Yes, I refuse.”
    Oldsworth coughed, this time using a fresh handkerchief. It seemed as if his lungs were tearing loose from his chest. Preston looked at him.
    “You’d better go for a treatment,” he suggested. “Leave it much longer and you’ll be too late. Even the Kaltich can’t resurrect the dead.”
    Oldsworth managed to get himself under control. “I’ve been for a treatment. I was refused.”
    “That’s tough.” So that’s why there’re millions floating around, he thought. You’ve cheated the grave for fifty years. Now it stares you in the face. Now you’re getting desperate. Desperate enough to take any kind of a risk as long as it’s only a financial one. Preston felt disappointed, for a moment he’d imagined the old man had recovered his pride. “Lassiter?”
    “I don’t know. He may have talked, we can’t be certain. If he did most of us in this group are branded. He knew a lot of us,” said Oldsworth. “You too,” he pointed out.
    Preston shrugged.
    “We have a plan,” said the woman suddenly. “It won’t just be a matter of going blindly into the unknown. We think that we can win.”
    “Sure,” said Preston. “You and Lassiter all over again. But it was his hands which came back, not yours.” He crossed to the door. “Sorry. Get yourself another boy.”
    “Call me if you change your mind,” she said. “I’m in the book.”
    Outside it was a bright day, though still early. Too early forthe normal rush of morning commuters. A few hopeful derelicts wandered the streets, picking over the trash, looking for something they could turn into food and drink. A wagon drove past looking for any night-born dead. A zany, eyes glazed with dope, staggered back to his pad.
    Preston walked slowly to where he’d planted the bug. A casual walk past showed that it was still there. He checked the area for watchers but the place was clean. He lit a cigarlet and waited, hiding behind a paper he’d picked up, looking through a tiny hole punched in one of the pages. He was nothing. A man killing time. Someone waiting to start work, someone out of work, someone on his way home, lingering until it was time to go to his share of a communual bed.
    He smoked five more cigarlets and was about to give up when the car arrived. It was a big, black-painted job, the rear compartment hidden behind opaque windows. It stopped where he’d planted the instrument. A girl left the vehicle. She no longer wore a sleeveless dress, sandals and beads. She didn’t even wear paint, at least not much, and he would have bet his life that she now wore underclothes. But he couldn’t mistake her hips. They were clearly visible as she stooped, plucked out the bug and returned to the car.

FOUR

    Cherry Lee ducked her head as she entered the car and handed the bug to the man sitting in the rear compartment. Chung Hoo took it, looked at it, slowly shook his head. “That wasn’t very wise of you, my dear,” he said mildly. “Now the young man must be suspicious.”
    “I doubt it,” she said. She gasped as the car moved forward, the acceleration throwing her against the cushions. “He can’t know that it was I who planted it,” she insisted. “Even though he found it he could only guess.