He had thought of a thousand things that she might be, but he had never pictured her like this. He had even begun to doubt the reality of her existence. Now he had found her he didn't know what he was going to do.
She was slender and sweet, and she could not possibly be the mistress of death and insanity that was sweeping through the planets and outposts. Surely she could not be the lure that enticed men into the gripping tentacles of the drug, harmeena.
But every clue he had picked up bore a thread that linked with the Queen of the Silver Stars. Miners with shattered minds had spoken in their last hours of Alayna, and in their croaking voices had tried to sing her songs before they died. Because of her they died with smiles upon their lips.
But, because of her, many of them died.
The SBI had a hundred agents scattered in every part of the System. No one took seriously the miners' and spacemen's yarns of a phantom tavern where a golden-haired girl sang songs that lured them into a dream world from which they could never return.
No one, that is, except Roal Hartford. He knew that somewhere in the tales repeated by a thousand dying throats there must be a thread of truth, regardless of how fantastic it might be. Somewhere there must exist the phantom tavern, Starhouse, though one spaceman told of visiting it in Heliopolis and another spoke of its existence in the swamp city, Tarma, while still others swore that it was in Vegrath across the planet from Heliopolis.
Roal had placed investigators at every point where Starhouse had been reported, but nothing had ever come of it.
Nothing—until he had walked along the night streets of Heliopolis and suddenly seen Starhouse there where it seemed to him that it had always been.
And the moment that he had entered and heard the first note of Alayna's song he knew he had found the Queen of the Silver Stars.