The Stars, My Brothers

The Stars, My Brothers

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.


Genre: Science Fiction