IV

Hatcher's second in command said: "He has got through the first

survival test. In fact, he broke his way out! What next?"

"Wait!" Hatcher ordered sharply. He was watching the new specimen and

a troublesome thought had occurred to him. The new one was female and

seemed to be in pain; but it was not the pain that disturbed Hatcher,

it was something far more immediate to his interests.

"I think," he said slowly, "that they are in contact."

His assistant vibrated startlement.

"I know," Hatcher said, "but watch. Do you see? He is going straight

toward her."

Hatcher, who was not human, did not possess truly human emotions; but

he did feel amazement when he was amazed, and fear when there was

cause to be afraid. These specimens, obtained with so much difficulty,

needed so badly, were his responsibility. He knew the issues involved

much better than any of his helpers. They could only be surprised at

the queer antics of the aliens with attached limbs and strange powers.

Hatcher knew that this was not a freak show, but a matter of life and

death. He said, musing:

"This new one, I cannot communicate with her, but I get--almost--a

whisper, now and then. The first one, the male, nothing. But this

female is perhaps not quite mute."

"Then shall we abandon him and work with her, forgetting the first one?"

Hatcher hesitated. "No," he said at last. "The male is responding well.

Remember that when last this experiment was done every subject died; he

is alive at least. But I am wondering. We can't quite communicate with

the female--"

"But?"

"But I'm not sure that others can't."

* * * * *

The woman's voice was at such close range that McCray's suit radio made

a useful RDF set. He located her direction easily enough, shielding the

tiny built-in antenna with the tungsten-steel blade of the ax, while

she begged him to hurry. Her voice was heavily accented, with some

words in a language he did not recognize. She seemed to be in shock.

McCray was hardly surprised at that; he had been close enough to shock

himself. He tried to reassure her as he searched for a way out of the

hall, but in the middle of a word her voice stopped.

He hesitated, hefting the ax, glancing back at the way he had come.

There had to be a way out, even if it meant chopping through a wall.

When he turned around again there was a door. It was oddly shaped and

unlike the door he had hewn through, but clearly a door all the same,

and it was open.

McCray regarded it grimly. He went back in his memory with meticulous

care. Had he not looked at, this very spot a matter of moments before?

He had. And had there been an open door then? There had not. There

hadn't been even a shadowy outline of the three-sided, uneven opening

that stood there now.

Still, it led in the proper direction. McCray added one more

inexplicable fact to his file and walked through. He was in another

hall--or tunnel--rising quite steeply to the right. By his reckoning it

was the proper direction. He labored up it, sweating under the weight

of the suit, and found another open door, this one round, and behind

it--

Yes, there was the woman whose voice he had heard.

It was a woman, all right. The voice had been so strained that he

hadn't been positive. Even now, short black hair might not have proved

it, and she was lying face down but the waist and hips were a woman's,

even though she wore a bulky, quilted suit of coveralls.

He knelt beside her and gently turned her face.

She was unconscious. Broad, dark face, with no make-up; she was

apparently in her late thirties. She appeared to be Chinese.

She breathed, a little raggedly but without visible discomfort; her

face was relaxed as though she were sleeping. She did not rouse as he

moved her.

He realized she was breathing the air of the room they were in.

His instant first thought was that she was in danger of asphyxiation;

he started to leap up to get, and put her into, the small, flimsy space

suit he saw slumped in a corner. At second thought he realized that

she would not be breathing so comfortably if the air were full of the

poisonous reek that had driven him out of the first room.

There was an obvious conclusion to be drawn from that; perhaps he could

economize on his own air reserve. Tentatively he cracked the seal of

his faceplate and took a cautious breath. The faint reek of halogens

was still there, but it was not enough even to make his eyes water, and

the temperature of the air was merely pleasantly warm.

He shook her, but she did not wake.

He stood up and regarded her thoughtfully. It was a disappointment.

Her voice had given him hope of a companion, someone to talk things

over with, to compare notes--someone who, if not possessing any more

answers than himself, could at least serve as a sounding-board in the

give-and-take of discussion that might make some sort of sense out of

the queerness that permeated this place.

What he had instead was another burden to carry, for she was unable to

care for herself and surely he could not leave her in this condition.

* * * * *

He slipped off the helmet absently and pressed the buttons that turned

off the suit's cooling units, looking around the chamber. It was bare

except for a litter of irrelevant human articles--much like the one in

which he himself had first appeared, except that the articles were not

_Jodrell Bank's_. A woven cane screen, some cooking utensils, a machine

like a desk calculator, some books--he picked up one of the books and

glanced at it. It was printed on coarse paper, and the text was in

ideographs, Chinese, perhaps; he did not know Oriental languages.

McCray knew that the _Jodrell Bank_ was not the only FTL vessel in this

volume of space. The Betelgeuse run was a busy one, as FTL shipping

lanes went. Almost daily departures from some point on Earth to one of

the colonies, with equal traffic in the other direction.

Of course, if the time-lag in communication did not lie, he was no

longer anywhere within that part of the sky; Betelgeuse was only a few

hundred light-years from Sol, and subspace radio covered that distance

in something like fifty minutes. But suppose the woman came from

another ship; perhaps a Singapore or Tokyo vessel, on the same run.

She might easily have been trapped as he was trapped. And if she were

awake, he could find out from her what had happened, and thus learn

something that might be of use.

Although it was hard to see what might be of use in these most

unprecedented and unpleasant circumstances.

The drone from _Jodrell Bank_ began again: "Herrell McCray, Herrell

McCray, Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_ responding--"

He turned the volume down but did not dare turn it off. He had lost

track of time and couldn't guess when they would respond to his last

message. He needed to hear that response when it came. Meanwhile, what

about his fellow-captive?

Her suit was only a flimsy work-about model, as airtight as his but

without the bracing required for building jet propulsors into it. It

contained air reserves enough, and limited water; but neither food nor

emergency medical supplies.

McCray had both of these, of course. It was merely one more reason why

he could not abandon her and go on ... if, that is, he could find some

reason for going in one direction preferably to another, and if a wall

would conveniently open again to let him go there.

He could give her an injection of a stimulant, he mused. Would that

improve the situation? Not basically, he decided, with some regret.

Sleep was a need, not a luxury; it would not help her to be awakened

chemically, when body was demonstrating its need for rest by refusing

to wake to a call. Anyway, if she were not seriously injured she would

undoubtedly wake of her own accord before long.

He checked pulse and eye-pupils; everything normal, no evidence of

bleeding or somatic shock.

So much for that. At least he had made one simple decision on his own,

he thought with grim humor. To that extent he had reestablished his

mastery of his own fate, and it made him feel a touch better.

Perhaps he could make some more. What about trying to find a way out of

this place, for instance?

* * * * *

It was highly probable that they would not be able to stay here

indefinitely, that was the first fact to take into account. Either his

imagination was jumpy, or the reek of halogens was a bit stronger. In

any case there was no guarantee that this place would remain habitable

any longer than the last, and he had to reckon with the knowledge that

a spacesuit's air reserve was not infinite. These warrens might prove a

death trap.

McCray paused, leaning on the haft of his ax, wondering how much of

that was reason and how much panic. He knew that he wanted, more than

anything to get out of this place, to see sky and stars, to be where no

skulking creatures behind false panels in the walls, or peering through

televiewers concealed in the furnishings, could trick and trap him. But

did he have any reason to believe that he would be better off somewhere

else? Might it not be even that this place was a sort of vivarium

maintained for his survival--that the leak of poison gases and heat in

the first room was not a deliberate thrust at his safety, but a failure

of the shielding that alone could keep him alive?

He didn't know, and in the nature of things could not. But

paradoxically the thought that escape might increase his danger made

him all the more anxious to escape. He wanted to know. If death

was waiting for him outside his chamber, McCray wanted to face

it--now--while he was still in good physical shape.

While he was still sane. For there was a limit to how many phenomena

he could store away in the back of his mind; sooner or later the

contradictions, the puzzles, the fears would have to be faced.

Yet what could he do with the woman? Conceivably he could carry her;

but could he also carry her suit? He did not dare take her without

it. It would be no kindness to plunge her into another atmosphere of

poison, and watch her die because he had taken her from her only hope

of safety. Yet the suit weighed at least fifty pounds. His own was

slightly more; the girl, say, a hundred and thirty. It added up to more

mass than he could handle, at least for more than a few dozen yards.

The speaker in his helmet said suddenly: "Herrell McCray, this is

_Jodrell Bank_. Your transmission received. We are vectoring and

ranging your signal. Stand by. We will call again in ten minutes." And,

in a different tone: "God help you, Mac. What the devil happened to

you?"

It was a good question. McCray swore uselessly because he didn't know

the answer.

He took wry pleasure in imagining what was going on aboard _Jodrell

Bank_ at that moment. At least not all the bewilderment was his own.

They would be utterly baffled. As far as they were concerned, their

navigator had been on the bridge at one moment and the next moment

gone, tracelessly. That in itself was a major puzzle; the only way off

an FTL ship in flight was in the direction called "suicide." That would

have been their assumption, all right, as soon as they realized he was

gone and checked the ship to make sure he was not for some reason

wandering about in a cargo hold or unconscious in a closet after some

hard-to-imagine attack from another crewman. They would have thought

that somehow, crazily, he had got into a suit--there was the suit--and

jumped out of a lock. But there would have been no question of going

back to look for him. True, they could have tracked his subspace radio

if he had used it. But what would have been the good of that? The first

question, an all but unanswerable one, would be how long ago he had

jumped. Even if they knew that, _Jodrell Bank_, making more than five

hundred times light-speed, could not be stopped in fewer than a dozen

light-years. They could hardly hope to return to even approximately the

location in space where he might have jumped; and there was no hope

of reaching a position, stopping, casting about, starting again--the

accelerations were too enormous, a man too tiny a dust-mote.

And, of course, he would have been dead in the first place, anyway. The

transition from FTL drive to normal space was instantly fatal except

within the protecting shield of a ship's engines.

So they would have given him up and, hours later--or days, for he had

lost track of time--they would have received his message. What would

they make of that?

He didn't know. After all, he hardly knew what he made of it himself.

The woman still slept. The way back was still open. He could tell

by sniffing the air that the poisons in the atmosphere were still

gaining. Ahead there was nothing but blank walls, and the clutter of

useless equipment littering the floor. Stolidly McCray closed his mind

and waited.

The signal came at last.

"Mac, we have verified your position." The voice was that of Captain

Tillinger, strained and shaking. "I don't know how you got there, but

unless the readings lie you're the hell of a long way off. The bearing

is identical with Messier object M-42 and the distance--" raggedly--"is

compatible. About a thousand light-years from us, Mac. One way or

another, you've been kidnaped. I--I--"

The voice hesitated, unable to say what it could not accept as fact but

could not deny. "I think," it managed at last, "that we've finally come

across those super-beings in space that we've wondered about."

* * * * *

Hatcher's detached limbs were quivering with excitement--and with more

than excitement, because he was afraid. He was trying to conceal from

the others just how afraid he was.

His second in command reported: "We have the second subject out of

consciousness. How long do you want us to keep her that way?"

"Until I tell you otherwise! How about the prime subject?"

"We can't tell, Hatcher. But you were right. He is in communication

with others, it seems, and by paranormal means." Hatcher noted the

dismay in what his assistant said. He understood the dismay well

enough. It was one thing to work on a project involving paranormal

forces as an exercise in theory. It was something else entirely to see

them in operation.

But there was more cause for dismay than that, and Hatcher alone knew

just how bad the situation was. He summoned one of his own members to

him and impressed on it a progress report for the Council. He sent it

floating through the long warrens of his people's world, ordered his

assistants back to their work and closed in his thoughts to consider

what had happened.

These two creatures, with their command of forces in the

paranormal--i.e., the electromagnetic--spectrum, seemed able to

survive in the environments prepared for them. That was step one. No

previous team had done as well. This was not the first time a probe

team of his race had snatched a warmblooded biped from a spaceship for

study--because their operation forces, psionic in nature, operated in

non-Euclidean ways, it was easiest for them to make contact with the

crew of a ship in the non-Euclidean space of FTL drive.

But it was the first time that the specimens had survived. He

reviewed the work they had already done with the male specimen. He

had shown himself unable to live in the normal atmospheric conditions

of Hatcher's world; but that was to be expected, after all, and

the creature had been commendably quick about getting out of a bad

environment. Probably they had blundered in illuminating the scene for

him, Hatcher conceded. He didn't know how badly he had blundered, for

the concept of "light" from a general source, illuminating not only

what the mind wished to see but irrelevant matter as well, had never

occurred to Hatcher or any of his race; all of their senses operated

through the mind itself, and what to them was "light" was a sort

of focusing of attention. But although something about that episode

which Hatcher failed to understand had gone wrong, the specimen had

not been seriously harmed by it. The specimen was doing well. Probably

they could now go to the hardest test of all, the one which would mean

success or failure. Probably they could so modify the creature as to

make direct communication possible.

And the other specimen?

Hatcher would have frowned, if he had had brow muscles to shape such

an expression--or a brow to be shaped. The female specimen was the

danger. His own people knew how to shield their thoughts. This one

evidently did not. It was astonishing that the Old Ones had not already

encountered these bipeds, so loosely guarded was their radiation--when

they radiated at all, of course, for only a few of them seemed to

possess any psionic power worth mentioning.

Hatcher hastily drove that thought from his mind, for what he proposed

to do with the male specimen was to give him that power.

And yet there was no choice for Hatcher's people, because they were

faced with disaster. Hatcher, through his communications from the

Council, knew how close the disaster was. When one of the probers from

the Central Masses team disappeared, the only conclusion that could be

drawn was the Old Ones had discovered them. They needed allies; more,

they needed allies who had control of the electromagnetic forces that

made the Old Ones so potent and so feared.

In the male and female they had snatched out of space they might have

found those allies. But another thought was in Hatcher's mind: Suppose

the Old Ones found them too?

Hatcher made up his mind. He could not delay any longer.

"Open the way to the surface," he ordered. "As soon as possible, take

both of them to where we can work."

* * * * *

The object Captain Tillinger had called "M-42" was no stranger to

Herrell McCray. It was the Great Nebula in Orion, in Earth's telescopes

a fuzzy patch of light, in cold fact a great and glowing cloud of

gas. M-42 was not an external galaxy, like most of the "nebulae"

in Messier's catalogue, but it was nothing so tiny as a single sun

either. Its hydrogen mass spanned dozens of light-years. Imbedded in

it--growing in it, as they fed on the gas that surrounded them--were

scores of hot, bright new suns.

_New_ suns. In all the incongruities that swarmed around him McCray

took time to consider that one particular incongruity. The suns of

the Orion gas cloud were of the spectral class called "B"--young

suns, less than a thousandth as old as a Sol. They simply had not

been in existence long enough to own stable planetary systems--much

less planets which themselves were old enough to have cooled, brewed

chemical complexes and thus in time produced life. But surely he was on

a planet....

Wasn't he?

McCray breathed a deep sigh and for one more time turned his mind away

from unprofitable speculations. The woman stirred slightly. McCray

knelt to look at her; then, on quick impulse, opened his medical kit,

took out a single-shot capsule of a stimulant and slipped it neatly

into the exposed vein of her arm.

In about two minutes she would be awake. Good enough, thought McCray;

at least he would have someone to talk to. Now if only they could find

a way out of this place. If a door would open, as the other door had,

and--

He paused, staring.

There was another door. Open.

He felt himself swaying, threw out an arm and realized that he

was ... falling? Floating? Moving toward the door, somehow, not as

though he were being dragged, not as though he were walking, but

surely and rather briskly moving along.

His feet were not touching the ground.

It wasn't a volitional matter. His intentions had nothing to do with

it. He flailed out, and touched nothing; nor did he slow his motion at

all. He fought against it, instinctively; and then reason took over and

he stopped.

The woman's form lifted from the floor ahead of him. She was still

unconscious. From the clutter on the floor, her lightweight space suit

rose, too; suit and girl, they floated ahead of him, toward the door

and out.

McCray cried out and tried to run after them. His legs flailed and, of

course, touched nothing; but it did seem that he was moving faster. The

woman and her suit were disappearing around a bend, but he was right

behind them.

He became conscious of the returning reek of gases. He flipped up the

plate of his helmet and lunged at the girl, miraculously caught her in

one hand and, straining, caught the suit with the other.

Stuffing her into the suit was hard, awkward work, like dressing a

doll that is too large for its garments; but he managed it, closed her

helmet, saw the flexible parts of her suit bulge out slightly as its

automatic pressure regulators filled it with air.

They drove along, faster and faster, until they came to a great portal,

and out into the blinding radiance of a molten copper sky.

* * * * *

Gathered in a circle were a score or more of Hatcher's people.

McCray didn't know they were Hatcher's people, of course. He did not

know even that they were animate beings, for they lacked all the

features of animals that he had been used to. No eyes. No faces. Their

detached members, bobbing about seemingly at random, did not appear to

have any relation to the irregular spheres that were their owners.

The woman got unevenly to her feet, her faceplate staring toward the

creatures. McCray heard a smothered exclamation in his suit-phones.

"Are you all right?" he demanded sharply. The great crystal eye turned

round to look at him.

"Oh, the man who spoke to me." Her voice was taut but controlled. The

accent was gone; her control was complete. "I am Ann Mei-Ling, of the

_Woomara_. What are--those?"

McCray said, "Our kidnappers, I guess. They don't look like much, do

they?"

She laughed shakily, without answering. The creatures seemed to be

waiting for something, McCray thought; if indeed they were creatures

and not machines or--or whatever one might expect to find, in the

impossible event of being cast away on an improbable planet of an

unexplored sun. He touched the woman's helmet reassuringly and walked

toward the aliens, raising his arms.

"Hello," he said. "I am Herrell McCray."

He waited.

He half turned; the woman watching him. "I don't know what to do next,"

he confessed.

"Sit down," she said suddenly. He stared. "No, you must! They want you

to sit down."

"I didn't hear--" he began, then shrugged. He sat down.

"Now lie stretched out and open your face mask."

"_Here?_ Listen--Ann--Miss Mei-Ling, whatever you said your name was!

Don't you feel the heat? If I crack my mask--"

"But you must." She spoke very confidently. "It is _s'in fo_---what do

you call it--telepathy, I think. But I can hear them. They want you to

open your mask. No, it won't kill you. They understand what they are

doing."

She hesitated, then said, with less assurance, "They need us, McCray.

There is something ... I am not sure, but something bad. They need

help, and think you can give it to them. So open your helmet as they

wish, please."

McCray closed his eyes and grimaced; but there was no help for it, he

had no better ideas. And anyway, he thought, he could close it again

quickly enough if these things had guessed wrong.

The creatures moved purposefully toward McCray, and he found himself

the prisoner of a dozen unattached arms. Surprised, he struggled, but

helplessly; no, he would not be able to close the plate again!... But

the heat was no worse. Somehow they were shielding him.

A tiny member, like one of the unattached arms but much smaller,

writhed through the air toward him, hesitated over his eyes and

released something tinier still, something so small and so close that

McCray could not focus his eyes upon it. It moved deliberately toward

his face.

The woman was saying, as if to herself, "The thing they fear is--far

away, but--oh, no! My God!"

There was a terrible loud scream, but McCray was not quite sure he

heard it. It might have been his own, he thought crazily; for that tiny

floating thing had found his face and was burrowing deep inside; and

the pain was beyond belief.

* * * * *

The pain was incredible. It was worse than anything he had ever felt,

and it grew ... and then it was gone.

What it was that the spheroidal aliens had done to his mind McCray had

no way of learning. He could only know that a door had been open. An

opaque screen was removed. He was free of his body.

He was more than free, he was extended--increased--enlarged. He was

inside the body of an alien, and the alien was in him. He was also

outside both, looking at them.

McCray had never felt anything like it in his life. It was a situation

without even a close analogue. He had had a woman in his arms, he had

been part of a family, he had shared the youthful sense of exploration

that comes in small, eager groups: These were the comparisons that came

to his mind. This was so much more than any of these things. He and the

alien--he and, he began to perceive, a number of aliens--were almost

inextricably mingled. Yet they were separate, as one strand of colored

thread in a ball of yarn is looped and knotted and intertwined with

every other strand, although it retains its own integrity. He was in

and among many minds, and outside them all. McCray thought: This is how

a god must feel.

* * * * *

Hatcher would have laughed--if he had lips, larynx or mouth to laugh

with. He would have laughed in pure exultation, and, indeed, his second

in command recognized the marionette quivering of his detached limbs

as a shout of glee. "We've done it," cried the assistant, catching his

delight. "We've made the project work!"

"We've done a great deal more than that," exulted Hatcher. "Go to the

supervisors, report to them. Pass on the word to the Central Masses

probe. Maintain for the alien the pressure and temperature value he

needs--"

"And you, Hatcher?"

"I'm going with him--out in the open! I'm going to show him what _we_

need!"

* * * * *

Hatcher. McCray recognized that this was a name--the name of the entity

closest to himself, the one that had somehow manipulated his forebrain

and released the mind from the prison of the skull. "Hatcher" was not a

word but an image, and in the image he saw a creature whose physical

shape was unpleasant, but whose instincts and hopes were enough like

his own to provide common ground.

He saw more than that. This Hatcher was trying to persuade him to move.

To venture farther. To come with him....

McCray allowed himself to be lead and at once he was outside not only

of his own body but of all bodies. He was free in space.

The entity that had been born of Herrell McCray was now larger than a

sun. He could see, all around him, the wonder and beauty of the great

gas cloud in which his body rested, on one tiny planet of one trivial

star. His sense of time was not changed from what it had been--he could

count the pulses of his own body, still thudding in what, however

remote, was his ear--but he could see things that were terribly slow

and vast. He could see the friction of the streamers of gas in the

cloud as light-pressure drove them outward. He could hear the subtle

emanations of ion clashing with hurtling ion. He could see the great

blue new suns tunneling through the cloud, building their strength

out of the diffuse contaminated hydrogen that made the Orion nebula,

leaving relatively clear "holes" behind them. He could see into the gas

and through it. He could perceive each star and gassy comet; and he

could behold the ordered magnificence of the galaxy of stars, and the

universe of galaxies, beyond.

The presence beside him was urging him to look beyond, into a denser,

richer region of suns. McCray, unsure of his powers, stretched toward

it--and recoiled.

There was something there which was terrifying, something cold and

restless that watched him come toward it with the eyes of a crouched

panther awaiting a deer.

The presence beside him felt the same terror, McCray knew. He was

grateful when Hatcher allowed him to look away from the central

clusters and return to the immediate neighborhood of his body.

Like a child's toy in a diminishing glass, McCray could see the planet

he had left.

But it was no planet. It was not a planet, but a great irregular sphere

of metal, honeycombed and warrened. He would have thought it a ship,

though huge, if it had had engines or instruments.... No. It _was_ a

ship. Hatcher beside him was proof that these creatures needed neither,

not in any Earthly sense, at least. They themselves were engines, with

their power to move matter apart from the intervention of other matter.

They themselves were instruments, through the sensing of force, that

was now within his own power.

A moment's hesitant practice, and McCray had the "planet" in the palm

of his hand--not a real palm, not a real hand; but it was there for his

inspection. He looked at it and within it and saw the interior nests of

Hatcher's folk, found the room where he had been brought, traced his

course to the surface, saw his own body in its spacesuit, saw beside it

the flaccid suit that had held the strange woman's body....

The suit was empty.

The suit was empty, and in the moment of that discovery McCray heard a

terrible wailing cry--not in his ears, in his mind--from the aliens

around him. The suit was empty. They discovered it the same moment

as he. It was wrong and it was dangerous; they were terrified. The

companion presence beside him receded into emptiness. In a moment

McCray was back in his own body, and the gathering members let him free.