"Doc Candle. He won't let them know you're alive."
Nancy rubbed her forehead with both hands. "Sam, you don't know what
you're doing. You don't--know what you're getting yourself into. Just
let me show myself to someone. They'll know I'm not dead. Really they
will."
"Okay," he said. "Let's find somebody."
He led her toward a more nearly completed building, showing rectangles
of light. They looked through the windows to see several men in uniforms
bending over blueprints on a desk jury-rigged of sawhorses and planks.
"Sam," Nancy said, "one of those men is Terry Elston. He's a Waraxe boy.
I went to school with him. He'll know me. Let's go in...."
"No," Collins said. "We don't go in."
"But--" Nancy started to protest, but stopped. "Wait. He's coming out."
Collins slid along the wall and stood behind the door. "Tell him who you
are when he comes out. I'll stay here."
They waited. After a few seconds, the door opened.
Nancy stepped into the rectangle of light thrown on the concrete from
the window.
"Terry," she said. "Terry, it's me--Nancy Comstock."
The blue-jawed young man in uniform frowned. "Who did you say you were?
Have you got clearance from this area?"
"It's me, Terry. Nancy. Nancy Comstock."
Terry Elston stepped front and center. "That's not a very good joke. I
knew Nancy. Hell of a way to die, killed by some maniac."
"Terry, _I'm_ Nancy. Don't you recognize me?"
Elston squinted. "You look familiar. You look a little like Nancy. But
you can't be her, because she's dead."
"I'm here, and I tell you I'm _not_ dead."
"Nancy's dead," Elston repeated mechanically. "Say, what are you trying
to pull?"
"Terry, behind you. A maniac!"
"Sure," Elston said. "Sure. There's a maniac _behind_ me."
Collins stepped forward and hit Elston behind the ear. He fell silently.
Nancy stared down at him.
"He refused to recognize me. He acted like I was crazy, pretending to be
Nancy Comstock."
"Come on along," Collins urged. "They'll probably shoot us on sight as
trespassers."
She looked around herself without comprehension.
"Which way?"
"_This way._"
Collins did not say those words.
They were said by the man with the gun in the uniform like the one worn
by Elston. He motioned impatiently.
"This way, this way."
* * * * *
"No priority," Colonel Smith-Boerke said as he paced back and forth, gun
in hand.
From time to time he waved it threateningly at Collins and Nancy who sat
on the couch in Smith-Boerke's office. They had been sitting for close
to two hours. Collins now knew the Colonel did not intend to turn him
over to the authorities. They were being held for reasons of
Smith-Boerke's own.
"They sneak the ship in here, plan for an unscheduled hop from an
uncompleted base--the strictest security we've used in ten or fifteen
years--and now they cancel it. This is bound to get leaked by somebody!
They'll call it off. It'll never fly now."
Collins sat quietly. He had been listening to this all evening.
Smith-Boerke had been drinking, although it wasn't very obvious.
Smith-Boerke turned to Collins.
"I've been waiting for somebody like you. Just waiting for you to come
along. And here you are, a wanted fugitive, completely in my power!
Perfect, _perfect_."
Collins nodded to himself. Of course, Colonel Smith-Boerke had been
waiting for him. And Doc Candle had driven him right to him. It was
inescapable. He had been intended to escape and turn up right here all
along.
"What do you want with me?"
Smith-Boerke's flushed face brightened. "You want to become a hero? A
hero so big that all these trumped-up charges against you will be
dropped? It'll be romantic. Back to Lindbergh-to-Paris. Tell me,
Collins, how would you like to be the first man to travel faster than
light?"
Collins knew there was no way out.
"All right," he said.
Smith-Boerke wiped a hand across his dry mouth.
"Project Silver _has_ to come off. My whole career depends on it. You
don't have anything to do. Everything's cybernetic. Just ride along and
prove a human being can survive. Nothing to it. No hyperdrives, none of
that kind of stuff. We had an engine that could go half lightspeed and
now we've made it twice as efficient and more. No superstitions about
Einstein, I hope? No? Good."
"I'll go," Collins said. "But what if I had said 'no'."
Smith-Boerke put the gun away in a desk drawer.
"Then you could have walked out of here, straight into the MP's."
"Why didn't they come in here after me?"
"They don't have security clearance for this building."
"_Don't_ leave me alone," Nancy said urgently. "I don't understand
what's happening. I feel so helpless. I need help."
"You're asking the wrong man," Collins said briefly.
* * * * *
Collins felt safe when the airlock kissed shut its metal lips.
It was not like the house, but yet he felt safe, surrounded by all the
complicated, expensive electronic equipment. It was big, solid,
sterilely gleaming.
Another thing--he had reason to believe that Doc Candle's power could
not reach him through metal.
"But I'm not outside," Doc Candle said, "I'm in here, with you."
Collins yelled and cursed, he tried to pull off the acceleration webbing
and claw through the airlock. Nobody paid any attention to him. Count
downs had been automated. Smith-Boerke was handling this one himself,
and he cut off the Audio-In switch from the spaceship. Doc Candle said
nothing else for a moment, and the spaceship, almost an entity itself,
went on with its work.
The faster-than-light spaceship took off.
At first it was like any other rocket takeoff.
The glow of its exhaust spread over the field of the spaceport, then
over the hills and valleys, and then the town of Waraxe, spreading
illumination even as far as Sam Collins' silent house.
After a time of being sick, Collins lay back and accepted this too.
"That's right, that's it," Doc Candle said. "Take it and die with it.
That's the ticket."
Collins' eyes settled on a gauge. Three quarters lightspeed. Climbing.
Nothing strange, nothing untoward happened when you reached lightspeed.
It was only an arbitrary number. All else was superstition. Forget it,
forget it, forget it.
_Something_ was telling him that. At first he thought it was Doc Candle
but then he knew it was the ship.
Collins sat back and took it, and what he was taking was death. It was
creeping over him, seeping into his feet, filling him like liquid does a
sponge.
Not will, but curiosity, caused him to turn his head.
He saw Doc Candle.
The old body was dying. He was in the emergency seat, broken, a ribbon
of blood lacing his chin. But Doc Candle continued to laugh triumphantly
in Collins' head.
"Why? Why do you have to kill me?" Collins asked.
"Because I am evil."
"How do you know you're evil?"
"_They told me so!_" Candle shouted back in the thundering silence of
Death's approach. "They were always saying I was bad."
_They._
* * * * *
Collins got a picture of something incredibly old and incredibly wise,
but long unused to the young, clumsy gods. Something that could mar the
molding of a godling and make it mortal.
"But I'm not really so very bad," Doc Candle went on. "I had to
destroy, but I picked someone who really didn't care if he were
destroyed or not. An almost absolutely passive human being, Sam. You."
Collins nodded.
"And even then," said the superhuman alien from outer space, "I could
not just destroy. I have created a work of art."
"Work of art?"
"Yes. I have taken your life and turned it into a horror story, Sam! A
chilling, demonic, black-hearted horror!"
Collins nodded again.
_LIGHTSPEED._
There was finally something human within Sam Collins that he could not
deny. He wanted to live. It wasn't true. He did care what happened.
You do? said somebody.
He does? asked somebody else, surprised, and suddenly he again got the
image of wiser, older creatures, a little ashamed because of what they
had done to the creature named Doc Candle.
He does, chorused several voices, and Sam Collins cried aloud: "I do! I
want to live!" They were just touching lightspeed; he felt it.
This time it was not just a biological response. He really wanted help.
He wanted to stay alive.
From the older, wiser voices he got help, though he never knew how; he
felt the ship move slipwise under him, and then a crash.
And Doc Candle got help too, the only help even the older, wiser ones
could give him.
* * * * *
They pulled him out of the combined wreckage of the spaceship and his
house. Both were demolished.
It was strange how the spaceship Sam Collins was on crashed right into
his house. Ed Michaels recalled a time in a tornado when Sy Baxter's car
was picked up, lifted across town and dropped into his living room.
When the men from the spaceport lifted away tons of rubble, they found
him and said, "He's dead."
No, I'm not, Collins thought. I'm alive.
And then they saw that he really was alive, that he had come through it
alive somehow, and nobody remembered anything like it since the airliner
crash in '59.
A while later, after they found Doc Candle's body and court-martialed
Smith-Boerke, who took drugs, Nancy was nuzzling him on his hospital
bed. It was nice, but he wasn't paying much attention.
I'm free, Collins thought as the girl hugged him. _Free!_ He kissed her.
Well, he thought while she was kissing him back, as free as I want to
be, anyway.