The three sunlets of flame merged together and dripped yellow blobs of
light into the darkness. They grew into a great soap bubble that turned
to topaz.
Like something moving in a dream it gained upon The Nebula, until it
was pacing beside them--a little larger now and still growing--dwarfing
them and filling half the screen.
A shadow--no, two shadows--were growing within it, Odin tried to
make them out. But they were dark and wavering. Still, they looked
something like a high priest standing above a prone victim stretched
out upon some sacrificial altar.
Odin was working the screens like mad. Keeping their entire crew before
his and Ato's eyes and at the same time watching the topaz bubble.
The bubble cleared. Over the loudspeakers came Grim Hagen's shriek of
wild laughter.
Odin turned another knob and the bubble loomed larger.
Grim Hagen stood there, one lean hand rubbing his chin as he laughed at
them.
And the figure lying prone upon a couch beside him was swathed by a sheet
which came almost to its eyes. But the shadows were leaving the bubble now.
And Odin saw that it was Maya. Asleep. Statuesque. Like a carving upon a
tomb--but it was Maya.
Then he cried out in alarm. For upon another screen he saw Gunnar and his
crew swing their weapon into action. Shell after shell of greenish fire
burst about the globe. Green flame thrust out tiny rootlets that crawled
over it, outlining it in garish light. Another shell seemed to burst upon
Grim Hagen's chest, tearing the bubble of light apart. And as Jack watched,
horrified and sick, the shards of flame came back together. And there was
the globe again--with Grim Hagen and Maya as whole as ever. And a green
streak of fire--one of Gunnar's misses--went careening off into space until
it shrank to a pinpoint of light and then vanished.
At a signal from Ato, the firing stopped.
Grim Hagen was still laughing.
"You are wasting your energy, Ato. I am only a projection. And so is this
that is with me. I have Maya." He bowed mockingly. "See, Odin. Come and get
her, Odin, so I can kill you. I had thought I was done with you but it is
just as well. Out here, somewhere, somewhen, I can kill you slowly. Look,
she sleeps."
Shrouded there within a bubble of changing light, Maya looked like a
bronze statue. Lying upon her back with her arms folded across her breasts,
and with half of her face covered by the flowing folds of a coverlet, she
was like a bride of death, waiting the end of eternity.
Hagen laughed again. "Here in Trans-Einsteinian space there is neither size
nor time as we once knew it. I could leave her on a giant planet, a statue
ten miles long for the ages to marvel at. Or I could cast her adrift to
make the trillion-mile-long trip with the suns until the last explosion
when space will dissolve and be born again. So give up now. Bother me no
more. Space and its treasures are mine for the taking, and I have waited
too long."
Then the topaz globe twitched as a bubble vanishes. And it was gone. Out
there was nothing but the night.
* * * * *
Ato set a course for Aldebaran. His watch finished, Jack Odin sat alone in
the lounge and watched the star upon the screen. It did not seem to be much
larger. A single brilliant jewel of flame that beckoned them on.
Gunnar had long since gone to bed, grumbling that the way order and
military discipline were maintained aboard ship they probably couldn't whip
their way out of a child's wading pool. Odin was thinking of all the things
that had happened to him since that night when Maya and the dwarfs had
brought the helpless Grim Hagen to the old Odin homestead. Lord, how long
had it been? Out here, where time could not be measured, and perhaps did
not exist at all, it seemed futile to count the weeks and the months.
He stared at the single star upon the screen until he was half asleep.
Behind it Maya's face, outlined in black curls, seemed to peer at him--and
her pouting lips parted as she smiled.
He stared and shook his head. The dream-vision vanished from the screen.
Someone had entered the room.
It was Nea. Dressed in slacks once more, she slouched over to his chair and
drew a hassock up beside it. As she looked at him, Jack Odin saw that her
eyes were tired--tired--tired. As though they had not rested for months.
"You ought to be asleep," he warned. "Now that your work is finished--"
"And is it finished?" she asked. "Is anything ever finished?" Nea drooped
upon the hassock. Resting her chin upon her hands she looked up at the
screen.
"That is where we are going?" she asked.
"Ato is certain that Grim Hagen is headed for Aldebaran," Odin answered.
"One star out of millions. What difference does it make?"
"You have been working too hard--"
"Oh, damn!" she said angrily. "There is more to the work than you and the
others guessed. Now, we are going to rescue a cousin of mine and to punish
another cousin. The old rat-race. Tell me why don't people just go sit in
a corner and enjoy themselves. So far, we have done nothing but increase
our scurrying a thousand-fold."
* * * * *
He tried to make a joke of the matter. "You sound like a beatnik."
"Perhaps," she answered slowly, still looking up at the screen. "They
considered my father beat--dead-beat. But I know more of this science than
you do, Jack Odin. What if I told you there was little chance of finding
Maya. Or, if you found her, she might be an old, old lady."
"Well, I'd say 'Nuts.' We would keep on looking. But why such gloomy
thoughts?"
"You do not understand. Here, flashing through Trans-Space, we are in
another time. Oh, it goes by. But not as the clocks of Opal. Once a ship
slides out of here to a planet it is caught in a web of time and space. The
clocks resume their old work of grinding the minutes and the hours to bits.
The black oxen of the sun take up their measured march. Oh, I could show
you the mathematical formula to prove this, but it would take a blackboard
larger than the screen. Don't you see! While we search through Trans-Space,
it is highly possible that Grim Hagen, Maya, and all their crew are growing
old on some planet that you might never find."
Odin drew his hand across his face in dismay. "You make all this sound
like a mad voyage. Why, this is insane!"
"Check with Ato if you wish." Her sad smile was almost a sneer. "And men
talk of going to the stars. Where is the clock they will use? Where is
their yardstick? Where is the concept? Why, out there, for all you know,
Huckleberry Finn is still floating down the river, and Macbeth walks
through the halls of Dunsinane. And the last man, in the year one-million
AD, may be squatting over a fire, watching his last stick of wood turn to
ashes."
Lithely she got to her feet and reached a dial upon the screen. The lone
star vanished. A thousand pinpoints leaped out.
"There is but a segment," she said, sitting back upon the hassock again. "I
have known Maya all my life. I was the poor relation. I envied her, but I
did not hate her. And so with Grim Hagen. I should hate him, but I remember
him as a frustrated cousin who always ran second in the races. And all
that--even my father--seems far away and long ago. Why do you bring love
and hate with you out here to the stars, Jack Odin?"
"Because I am a man, I suppose."
She sighed again. "There is much more to this invention of mine that I
showed you. Upon that screen there must be ten thousand worlds. Let us pick
one, you and I. We can glide out of here at any time. And we can make that
world over as we please. We might even eat of the fruit of life and become
as gods--"
As though it came from the dark corridor of the years, Jack Odin seemed
to hear the resounding echo of slow footsteps, and a deep voice that
thundered: "For I, thy God, am a jealous God--"
She had almost hypnotized him with her weary, earnest voice. For a moment,
it had seemed that all this frantic quest was nothing. That it would be
far, far better to find a home with Nea and build a world of his own than
to go on searching the stars.
Then he answered slowly, trying to measure his words, for he did not want
to hurt her feelings. "No, Nea. If I go wandering forever, it will be no
worse than my fathers did before me. For a man is vagrant and restless.
What he gets, he loses. And if he is lucky, he can hold fast to his
dreams."
For a moment dark anger blazed in her eyes. Then they were calm and sad
again. She got to her feet, as though she were very tired.
She smiled. "If I followed all the books, I would make a scene now. I have
offered myself and a world to you and have been refused. But I wish you and
your dreams well, Jack Odin."
She bent over him, and her lips brushed his. Faintly, like the touch of a
rose petal, and the perfume of her hair seemed to fill the room.
Then she was gone.
Jack Odin sat there, looking long and long at the swarm of stars upon the
screen, thinking of the unseen worlds about them--the worlds that he had
just renounced.
Until finally he got up and went to bed.