THRALLS of the ENDLESS NIGHT By LEIGH BRACKETT The Ship held an ancient secret that meant life to the dying cast-aways of the void. Then Wes Kirk revealed the secret to his people's enemies--and found that his betrayal meant the death of the girl he loved. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him. He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet. The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully, "I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their families." His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled, "Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to freeze?" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking child. She added sharply, "Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's talk, and only gets the sucking-plant." "Who's to hear it?" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain. The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms, guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust that burst when touched. Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again. Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.