Free The Whipping Star by Frank Herbert Page A

medium potency.  It cleared the air around his face whenever a swarm approached, dropped jittering patches of stunned insects behind him.
    He grew aware of a noise -- low, indistinct booming.  Something being pounded.  Something hollow and resonant.  It originated out there in the distance where the smoke stood on the air.
    It could be a natural phenomenon, McKie told himself.  Could be wild creatures.  The smoke might be natural fires.  Still, he brought the raygen from his kit, kept it in a side pocket where he could get at it quickly.
    The noise became louder in slow stages, as though it were being amplified to mark consecutive positions of his approach.  Screens of thornbush and gentle undulations in the plain concealed the source.
    McKie trudged up a gentle rise, still following the road.
    Sadness transfixed him.  He'd been cast away on some poverty-stricken backyard world, a place that stiffened the eyes.  He'd been given a role in a story with a moral, a clipped-wing fairy story.  He was a burned-out wanderer, his thirst a burnished yearning.  Anguish had lodged in him somewhere.  He pursued an estranged, plodding dream which would dissolve in the awakening doom of a single Caleban.
    The toll that Caleban's death would bring oppressed him.  It turned his ego upside down and drained out all the lightness.  His own death would be a lost bubble burst in such a conflagration.
    McKie shook his head to drive away such thoughts.  Fear would pluck him of all sensibility.  He could not afford it.
    One thing sure now; the sun was setting.  It had descended at least two widths toward the horizon since he'd started this stupid trek.
    What in the name of the infinite devils was that drumming?  It came at him as though riding the heat:  monotonous, insistent.  He felt his temples throbbing to an irritating, counterpoint -- beat, throb, beat, throb. . . .
    McKie topped the low rise, stopped.  He stood at the brim of a shallow basin which had been cleared of the thornbush.  At the basin's center, a thorn fence enclosed twenty or so conical huts with grass roofs.  They appeared to be made of mud.  Smoke spiraled from holes in several of the roofs and from pit fires outside others.  Black dots of cattle grazed in the basin, lifting their heads occasionally, with stubby whiskers of brown grass protruding from their mouths.
    Black-skinned youths carrying long poles watched the cattle.  More black-skinned men, women, and children went about various occupations within the thorn enclosure.
    McKie, whose ancestry contained blacks from the planet Caoleh, found the, scene curiously disturbing.  It touched a genetic memory that vibrated to a wrong rhythm.  Where in the universe could people be degraded to such primitive living standards?  The basin was like a textbook scene from the dark ages of ancient Earth.
    Most of the children were naked, as were some of the men.  The women wore string skirts.
    Could this be some odd return to nature? McKie wondered.  The nudity didn't bother him particularly.  It was the combination.
    The narrow track led down into the basin and through the thorn fence, extending out the other side to disappear over the crest of the opposite side.
    McKie began the descent.  He hoped they'd let him have water in this village.
    The booming noise came from within a large hut near the center of the cluster.  A two-wheeled cart with four great two-horned beasts yoked to it waited beside the hut.
    McKie studied the cart as he approached.  Between its high sidewalls were piled jumbles of strange artifacts -- flat, boardlike things, rolls of garish fabric, long poles with sharp metal tips.
    The drumming stopped, and McKie noted that he had been seen.  Children ran screaming among the huts, pointing at him.  Adults turned with slow dignity, studied him.
    An odd silence settled over the scene.
    McKie entered the village through a break in the thorn fence.  Emotionless black faces turned to