The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Star Hyacinths, by James H. Schmitz

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Title: The Star Hyacinths

Author: James H. Schmitz

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release Date: August 12, 2008 [EBook #26292]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_the STAR HYACINTHS_

By JAMES H. SCHMITZ

Illustrated by FINLAY

_On a bleak, distant unchartered world two ships lay wrecked and a
lone man stared at a star hyacinth. Its brilliance burned into his
retina ... and he knew that men could easily kill and kill for that
one beauty alone._

The robbery of the Dosey Asteroids Shipping Station in a remote and
spottily explored section of space provided the newscasting systems of
the Federation of the Hub with one of the juiciest crime stories of the
season. In a manner not clearly explained, the Dosey Asteroids Company
had lost six months' production of gem-quality cut star hyacinths
valued at nearly a hundred million credits. It lost also its Chief
Lapidary and seventy-eight other company employees who had been in the
station dome at the time.

[Illustration]

All these people appeared at first to have been killed by gunfire, but a
study of their bodies revealed that only in a few instances had gun
wounds been the actual cause of death. For the most part the wounds had
been inflicted on corpses, presumably in an attempt to conceal the fact
that disaster in another and unknown form had befallen the station.

The raiders left very few clues. It appeared that the attack on the
station had been carried out by a single ship, and that the locks to the
dome had been opened from within. The latter fact, of course, aroused
speculation, but led the investigators nowhere.

Six years later the great Dosey Asteroids robbery remained an unsolved
mystery.

* * * * *

The two wrecked spaceships rested almost side by side near the tip of a
narrow, deep arm of a great lake.

The only man on the planet sat on a rocky ledge three m