The Project Gutenberg EBook of McIlvaine's Star, by August Derleth

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Title: McIlvaine's Star

Author: August Derleth

Illustrator: Bob Martin

Release Date: October 7, 2009 [EBook #30199]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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McILVAINE'S
STAR

By August Derleth

[Illustration: _McIlvaine sat down to his machine, turned the complex
knobs, and a message flamed across the void._]

_Old Thaddeus McIlvaine discovered a
dark star and took it for his own. Thus
he inherited a dark destiny--or did he?_

"Call them what you like," said Tex Harrigan. "Lost people or strayed,
crackpots or warped geniuses--I know enough of them to fill an entire
department of queer people. I've been a reporter long enough to have run
into quite a few of them."

"For example?" I said, recognizing Harrigan's mellowness.

"Take Thaddeus McIlvaine," said Harrigan.

"I never heard of him."

"I suppose not," said Harrigan. "But I knew him. He was an eccentric old
fellow who had a modest income--enough to keep up his hobbies, which
were three: he played cards and chess at a tavern called Bixby's on
North Clark Street; he was an amateur astronomer; and he had the fixed
idea that there was life somewhere outside this planet and that it was
possible to communicate with other beings--but unlike most others, he
tried it constantly with the queer machinery he had rigged up.

"Well, now, this old fellow had a trio of cronies with whom he played on
occasion down at Bixby's. He had no one else to confide in. He kept them
up with his progress among the stars and his communication with other
life in the cosmos beyond our own, and they made a great joke out of it,
from all I could gather. I suppose, because he had no one else to talk
to, McIlvaine took it without complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard
of him until one morning the city editor--it was old Bill Henderson
then--called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow
named Thaddeus McIlvaine who cla