Plot Summary
The story concerns two couples, the Brookses and the Van Hornes, who go on a six month space tour in a "flivver" owned by Holden Brooks. When the flivvers suffers a malfunction, they land on an uninhabited planet with a nitrogen-argon atmosphere to make repairs. The planet, it turns out, is not uninhabited after all. A race of energy beings lives there, and a group of them take over the humans' bodies and begin manipulating their emotions, leading to a sexually charged encounter between Holden Brooks and Celestine Van Horne, and an attempt by Holden to murder Celestine's husband. Holden realizes that the energy beings are actually children, and he manages to use an open flame (which they have never seen before, and which is the "portable star" of the title) to frighten them away long enough to regain control of himself and flee the planet.
Read more about this topic: The Portable Star
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