Read Star quest for Free Online Page B

croaked. It was like dragging a rake across tarpaper. "Well, what do you want?"
    The renting wall had made only a soft screeching sound, so the person was unaware that he hadn't come in through the door. But what person? He didn't see anyone. It began asking him again, and it proved a £0od beacon to home on. He followed it among the crates and came finally to a cage. He jumped back. There was a face looking out of the cage at him. A face and nothing more. The thing was a head with a lump of ugly gray tissue beneath its pate where a neck ordinarily would have been. Several tentacles snaked out from that lump.
    "Well?" the face asked
    One of the tentacles smashed down onto the floor of the cage.
    Slap-crackity!
    He now knew where the sound had been coming from.
    "What the Hell do you want?" the face screamed.
    "Shhh," he said, forcing himself to go closer to the cage, bending down, finally hunkering on the floor. "They don't know I'm in here."
    The gray eyes looked at him calculatingly. "Who are you?"
    "Wait. If I tell you, will you answer some questions for me?"
    The tentacles slapped about in annoyance. "Okay, okay. God, let's not quibble."
    "Then I am called Tohm."
    "What do you do on the ship?"
    "Nothing. I'm a passenger. I'm trying to get to the capital to hunt for my woman."
    "Your woman?"
    "Yes. She was kidnapped, as I was, by the Romaghins. I feel she will soon be sold. I must find her." To the other's further questioning, he recounted his history as a Jumbo and now as a man again.
    "Why does this crew help you?"
    "They think my father is a wealthy trader of concubines."
    "Hah," the face said, puckered with glee. "Good. They deserve it."
    "Now," Tohm said, leaning forward but not too close, "who are you?"
    "They call me Hunk."
    "Well," he said hesitantly, "what… what are you?"
    There was silence a moment.
    "You mean you've never seen a Mutie before?"
    "What's a Mutie?" Tohm asked, relieved that now he would finally find out.
    "By the gods, you are a stoical bastard, aren't you! Very few people would have reacted so calmly to seeing a Mutie for the first time."
    "Then you're a Mutie?"
    "Yeah. I'm the result of all the nuclear wars the Romaghins and Setessins fought before atomics went obsolete and the laser cannon came into use. Radiation changed me as a fetus. I have a heart stuffed up here in my necks, a brain, and the digestive system of a bird, simple and compact."
    Tohm swallowed, but found there was no saliva. His mouth was perfectly dry. "Then you're all—"
    "No, no. Each is different from the last. I'm a very severe case. At least, I'm unique."
    Tohm sighed. Things were beginning to clear in some corners. Still, most of his concepts were confused and incomplete. "What happened to the city?"
    "Hah," the head said. It slapped tentacles against the floor and laughed again. Finally, tears rolling down its cheeks, it said, "That was good, wasn't it? Maybe we didn't carry through a complete exchange, but we came close. Damn close. That'll give them something to worry about for a while."
    "But what did you do to it?"
    "We put it eight hundred miles up the coast!"
    "What were you
trying
to do with it?" Tohm asked exasperatedly.
    "Exchange it boy, transfer it. Oh, we had the Fringe all shook, let me tell you. For a moment there, you could have transferred the whole damned universe through. But we weren't fast enough. Besides, I've discovered you can't hold the Fringe and transfer at the same time."
    "I don't understand."
    "What do you mean?"
    "I come from a primitive world, remember. I don't even know what the Fringe is."
    "It's the quasi-reality—"
    "Between the realities," Tohm finished.
    "There, see, you know."
    "I know how to say it, but I don't know what it means."
    "Well," Hunk said, crossing his tentacles in consternation, "I'll be damned! I thought everyone knew."
    "I don't. Everyone knows but me."
    Hunk moaned, rolled around a bit. "Look, for eight centuries the Romaghins and Setessins have been fighting