SPACEROGUE By WEBBER MARTIN Illustrated by ED EMSH _The proteus could change its shape to anything at all--and Herndon discovered it made a perfect red herring!_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity November 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] CHAPTER I They were selling a proteus in the public auctionplace at Borlaam, when the stranger wandered by. The stranger's name was Barr Herndon, and he was a tall man, with a proud, lonely face. It was not the face he had been born with, though his own had been equally proud, equally lonely. He shouldered his way through the crowd. It was a warm and muggy day and a number of idling passersby had stopped to watch the auction. The auctioneer was an Agozlid, squat and bull-voiced, and he held the squirming proteus at arm's length, squeezing it to make it perform. "Observe, ladies and gentlemen--observe the shapes, the multitude of strange and exciting forms!" The proteus now had the shape of an eight-limbed star, blue-green at its core, fiery red in each limb. Under the auctioneer's merciless prodding it began to change, slowly, as its molecules lost their hold on one another and sought a new conformation. A snake, a tree, a hooded deathworm-- The Agozlid grinned triumphantly at the crowd, baring fifty inch-long yellow teeth. "What am I bid?" he demanded in the guttural Borlaamese language. "Who wants this creature from another sun's world?" "Five stellors," said a bright-painted Borlaamese noblewoman down front. "Five stellors! Ridiculous, milady. Who'll begin with fifty? A hundred?" Barr Herndon squinted for a better view. He had seen proteus life-forms before, and knew something of them. They were strange, tormented creatures, living in agony from the moment they left their native world. Their flesh flowed endlessly from shape to shape, and each change was like the wrenching-apart of limbs by the rack. "Fifty stellors," chuckled a member of the court of Seigneur Krellig, absolute ruler of the vast world of Borlaam. "Fifty for the proteus." "Who'll say seventy-five?" pleaded the Agozlid. "I brought this being here at the cost of three lives, slaves worth more than a hundred between them. Will you make me take a loss? Surely five thousand stellors--" "Seventy-five," said a voice. "Eighty," came an immediate response. "One hundred," said the noblewoman in the front row. The Agozlid's toothy face became mellow as the bidding rose spontaneously. From his vantage-point in the last row, Barr Herndon watched. The proteus wriggled, attempted to escape, altered itself wildly and pathetically. Herndon's lips compressed tightly. He knew something himself of what suffering meant. "Two hundred," he said.