The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Stars, My Brothers, by Edmond Hamilton

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Title: The Stars, My Brothers

Author: Edmond Hamilton

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release Date: March 18, 2008 [EBook #24870]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE STARS,
MY BROTHERS

By
EDMOND
HAMILTON

Illustrated by FINLAY

_He was afraid--not of the present or the future,
but of the past. He was afraid of the thing
tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless
thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon,
companion to dead worlds and silent space._

[Illustration]

1.

Something tiny went wrong, but no one ever knew whether it was in an
electric relay or in the brain of the pilot.

The pilot was Lieutenant Charles Wandek, UNRC, home address: 1677
Anstey Avenue, Detroit. He did not survive the crash of his ferry into
Wheel Five. Neither did his three passengers, a young French
astrophysicist, an East Indian expert on magnetic fields, and a
forty-year-old man from Philadelphia who was coming out to replace a
pump technician.

Someone else who did not survive was Reed Kieran, the only man in Wheel
Five itself to lose his life. Kieran, who was thirty-six years old, was
an accredited scientist-employee of UNRC. Home address: 815 Elm Street,
Midland Springs, Ohio.

Kieran, despite the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor, was in Wheel
Five because of a woman. But the woman who had sent him there was no
beautiful lost love. Her name was Gertrude Lemmiken; she was nineteen
years old and overweight, with a fat, stupid face. She suffered from
head-colds, and sniffed constantly in the Ohio college classroom where
Kieran taught Physics Two.

One March morning, Kieran could bear it no longer. He told himself, "If
she sniffs this morning, I'm through. I'll resign and join the UNRC."

Gertrude sniffed. Six months later, having finished his training for the
United Nations Reconnaissance Corps, Kieran shipped out for a term of
duty in UNRC Spa