• Published: 1961
• Language: English
• 35,893 words

Synopsis

Somewhere on the jungle world of Jumala, there is a man in hiding -- a man whose mind has been reconditioned with another's brain pattern and for whom there is a fabulous reward. Star Hunter is the thrilling account of an other-worldly game of hide-and-seek between a man who does not know all his own powers -- and an interstellar safari that seeks something no man has a right to find....

Excerpt

Nahuatl’s larger moon pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl. Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike–flowers on the top terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He understood. Mankind’s age–old hatred, brought from his native planet to the distant stars, was evil symbolized by a coil in a twisted, belly–path across the ground. And on Nahuatl, as well as a dozen other worlds, Wass was the serpent.

A night wind was rising, stirring the exotic, half–dozen other worlds' foliage planted cunningly on the terrace to simulate the mystery of an off–world jungle.

"Hume?" The inquiry seemed to come out of thin air over his head.