They did not quite comprehend his words, their own translators functioning shy of the comprehensiveness needed to fully interpret the human’s comment, but they would understand soon enough.
“Did you then have particular routing in mind?” the male inquired tentatively.
Walker considered. Untutored and undereducated in astronomy, he would have been forced to confess an ignorance of his own homeworld’s immediate galactic neighborhood. That there was much to experience in its vicinity he had no doubt. The galaxy, as he had already involuntarily seen, was replete with endless wonders. A tug at his leg made him look down. As he did so, George released the grip his jaws had taken on a pants’ leg.
“I don’t know about you, man, but as for myself, I’ve always had a serious urge to see the Dog Star.”
Walker smiled. Not too many years ago, and regardless of source, such a request would have been no more than a mild joke. Not, he reflected as he contemplated his astounding and astoundingly familiar starship surroundings and the three aliens who waited on his reply, anymore.
Nor for him and his small and inordinately loquacious furry friend, ever again.
Jeron was very proud of the telescope his parents had given him two birthdays ago. In the time since then, he had mastered its use and added one accessory after another to the basic unit. He’d spent hours and days photographing the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, working his way out to those of Uranus and Neptune as well as distant nebulae and star clusters.
But this morning he was confused. The tiny section of night sky he had set his scope to automatically scan had come back with an anomaly. It was one of those distant areas of the solar system where nothing was supposed to exist. Which was precisely why he had been scanning it. Amateur astronomers tended to find the most interesting things where nothing was supposed to be, and thus where the professionals did not bother to look.
The sequence of photographs showed a mass of incredibly small objects where none ought to be. Furthermore, they appeared and disappeared over an all too brief series of sequential images. Present and gone, far too rapidly to be wandering asteroids, or cometary fragments, or anything else for which he could think of a reasonable, rational explanation. Despite checking and rechecking his scope and its attendant devices and finding them in perfect working order, he knew that the objects’ appearance had to be the result of a functional irregularity. Had to be, because they could not be anything else. He could just see himself forwarding and reporting to one of the professional organizations that vetted the thousands of reports turned in by dedicated amateurs such as himself a sighting of a tightly packed cluster of baffling, inexplicable objects located somewhere in the vicinity of Neptune’s giant moon Triton.
Especially when the number of them totaled thirteen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAN DEAN FOSTER has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Approaching Storm and the popular Pip and Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films including Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners’ brothel. He is currently at work on several new novels and media projects.
By ALAN DEAN FOSTER
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
The Black Hole
Cachalot
Dark Star
The Metrognome and Other Stories
Midworld
Nor Crystal Tears
Sentenced to Prism
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
Star Trek® Logs One–Ten
Voyage to the City of the Dead
…Who Needs Enemies?
With Friends Like These…
Mad Amos
The Howling Stones
Parallelities
The Icerigger Trilogy:
Icerigger
Mission to Moulokin
The Deluge Drivers
The Adventures of Flinx of the Commonwealth:
For Love of Mother-Not
Orphan Star
The End of the Matter
Bloodhype
Flinx in Flux
Mid-Flinx
Flinx’s Folly
Sliding Scales
Running from the Deity
Trouble Magnet
The Damned:
Book One: A Call to Arms
Book Two: The False Mirror
Book Three: The Spoils of War
The Founding of the Commonwealth:
Phylogenesis
Dirge
Diuturnity’s Dawn
The Taken Trilogy:
Lost and Found
The Light-Years Beneath My Feet
The Candle of Distant Earth
The Candle of Distant Earth is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Thranx, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-46132-2
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