The wailing shriek rose to a crescendo, and then it died. Earth was
gone. They had stepped away from it. Even its sky was behind them. A
weight like to the weight of mountains lay on Trehearne, and he was
horribly afraid.
He waited for the pressure to ease. His temples were bursting, it was
an agony to breathe, and he thought, It can't go on like this, it's got
to let up! But it did not. There was a change in the pitch of the motor
vibration. He listened to it climb, higher and higher, until it slipped
over the threshhold of hearing, and as it climbed, the pressure grew.
The bones of his chest crushed in upon his lungs. Everything around him
began to waver and grow vague, to recede slowly into a reddish twilight.
And still the pressure grew.
Something was happening to him. Something unearthly and strange. He was
a flier, a test-pilot. He had known pressure before. He had taken all
the gravs a power-diving plane could bear and he had never come near
blacking out. But this was different. He felt it in the fibres, the
very atoms of his being. This was velocity beside which the velocities
of the fastest jets was as nothing. This was the speed of interstellar
flight. And he could feel it tearing at the separate cells of his
flesh, riving them apart, rending the tissues of physical existence. _A
difference, a condition of the flesh. With us there is no doubt, but
you...._
Anguish became terror, terror turned into blind panic. His body was
shredding apart, dissolving toward a tattered ruin, a heap of bloody
rags. This body he had been so proud of, this star-born self that was
only a mockery, a sham. The mutation hadn't bred true. He was going to
die, to cease utterly from being. He was....
Far, far away, a voice, Shairn's voice, crying, "I've killed him. Poor
Michael, I didn't mean for him to die!"
Poor Michael. A mongrel, a walking deceit. Proud Michael, who thought
he was so damned good, and wasn't anything. Idiot Michael, who had run
after a witch. And she hadn't meant for him to die. She hadn't really
been that angry because he had treated her like an equal--not nicely,
perhaps, but like an equal, which he wasn't. That was kind of her, not
really to want him killed. He began to be able to see her face again.
He wasn't sure whether it was true sight, or only the memory of how
she had looked before he began to die. But he could see her, pale,
distorted. He was glad he could see her. She was sitting in front of
him, and she wasn't far away. Somehow, pressure or no pressure, he was
going to get to her. He was going to put his hands around her white
throat, and then they could forget about starflight together, and it
wouldn't matter that he was a mongrel and she was not. He began to
fight against the pressure.
He wanted so little. Only to get up, to move the short distance
and lock his fingers at the back of her neck, with his two thumbs
lying over the great pulses. So little. He was filled with a raging
determination to have it. He fought. He had nothing to fight with but
will-power and the instinctive desire of the organism to claw onto life
as long as there was a flicker of it left. He wanted to get up, and
he fought, an inner struggle without sound or motion, a blind battle
to regain control of his own flesh. His face contorted, like the face
of a man who lifts something far too heavy, and the sweat ran on it.
Slowly, slowly, his hands moved on the chair arms, contracted, became
fists. The muscles of his arms tightened, and then the great muscles of
the chest and belly, and they labored, and the breath came painfully
into his lungs--came, and went, and came again, and his flagging heart
stumbled, steadied, and began to beat more evenly. The red mist that
wrapped him cleared away a bit and he could see Shairn more distinctly.
She was staring at him. Her mouth and eyes were wide open, ludicrous,
startled. Then Edri's head came between them and blotted her out, and
he was shouting, but the blood was pounding so loud in Trehearne's
ears that he could not hear what he said. He raised a hand and tried
to thrust Edri away. He did not want to lose sight of Shairn. There
was a tremendous exaltation on him. He was winning. He was going to
get up and do the thing he wanted to do. The sinews coiled and tensed
along his thighs. The pressure didn't hurt so much, and the terrible
vibrations of speed were not tearing at him quite so hard. He leaned
forward a little, breathing in deep harsh gasps, and his body strained
and tightened....
"_He's going to live, he's made it. Michael...._"
Shairn's voice, thin and shrill through the tumult in his ears. For
a moment the meaning didn't penetrate. Then slowly it dawned on him
what she had said. And then, more slowly still, he realized that
it was true. He could feel the life flowing back into him. He was
getting the hang of it now, a simple matter of tensing the muscles in
a certain way, and the agony of the vibration lessened, the atoms of
his body stopped their ghastly dissolution. It was only a matter of
strength--not the kind that can move great weights, but a more subtle
kind, a tensile strength that knit the fabric of the flesh together and
made it impervious as steel. In an infantile way he had been using it
for years without knowing it, in his testing of fast planes. That was
why he had never blacked out, why he had never been tortured as other
men were by the spectre of inertia waiting for them at the end of a
dive. Now he had found at last the purpose his body was made for. He
forgot about Shairn. She didn't matter any more. He had won, he was
alive, he was going to live, and he was not a sham nor a mockery, he
was not even a mongrel. The mutation had bred true. His vision was
clearing fast. He raised his head and looked around, and they were all
staring at him, the Vardda, the Starmen, who had been so sure he was
going to die. They were talking back and forth in excited voices, they
were getting up and coming toward him, and Edri was pounding him on the
shoulder. He thrust them all away and stood up.
"I'm one of you now," he said. "I passed your test." He was suddenly
exhausted and shaken, but he would not show it. He stood erect and
faced them.
Shairn took him in her arms and kissed him. Trehearne said, "You're
glad I didn't die."
"Yes. Oh, yes!"
"You would have felt just a little guilty, wouldn't you?" He held her
off and looked at her. She was very beautiful. Her throat was warm and
white. He studied it, thinking what he had wanted to do only a short
few minutes ago, and then he shook his head. He said slowly, "I owe you
something, Shairn. I won't forget it."
She did not like his tone, and her brows drew into a dark line. She
turned away, and over her shoulder Trehearne saw Kerrel looking at him
in such an intent, strange way that he challenged it. "You don't look
very happy, Kerrel. Does my survival upset you?"
Kerrel shook his head. "I don't enjoy condemning a man, particularly
when I have nothing against him. But it brings up other problems. You
have no conception of them now, Trehearne, but the thing you have just
done brings you automatically into conflict with the most basic tenet
of Vardda law, and how the Council will decide the question I don't
know." He shifted his gaze to Edri and said in a curiously soft tone,
"It could have the most dangerous consequences."
If it was bait, Edri refused to take it. He laughed and said,
"This is no time to worry about consequences. I'm going to find
Trehearne a cabin and me a bottle, and put the two together for a
small celebration. A man doesn't become a Vardda every day." He took
Trehearne's elbow and started him toward the door. "Come on."
Trehearne's new-found strength had not deserted him--it was,
apparently, automatic when it was once started, like the
heart-beat--but the ordinary kind was running out of him like water
from a sieve. He made it out into the passageway without staggering,
but a few steps farther on he clung to the bolt-heads in the wall and
said unhappily, "I think I'm going to fall over."
"Reaction," said Edri. "Don't let it bother you. We all get it, first
time out. Here, hang on."
The passage seemed a mile long, but eventually there was a cabin,
small, compact, and functional, and there was a bunk, and Trehearne
sat down on it. Edri went away somewhere, and came back again after a
minute with a bottle. The stuff, whatever it was, went down like white
fire, and Trehearne felt better. He set the cup aside and then began to
look at his hands, turning them over as though he had never seen them
before.
"They seem like everybody else's," he said.
"They're not. You're not. As Kerrel told you, you have no idea yet of
what you've done, but as time goes by you will."
"It's quite true, then--about the mutation?"
"Oh, yes, quite. The form and structure of your body cells, and
mine, are different from other people's. Due to that altered form
and structure, your tissues, and mine, possess a tensile strength in
their cell-walls that can withstand incredible acceleration pressure
without collapse. And I hope you never know how lucky you were that
the mutation was a recessive that finally bred true in you." He filled
the glasses again, slowly, withdrawn for a moment into some brooding
thought of his own. Then he added sombrely, "Some day I'll tell you
the story of Orthis, who found the secret of the mutation. And a grand
proud story it is, but with a shameful ending. He.... No. Forget it.
The less you know about that, the better. Besides, we're celebrating.
Drink up."
Trehearne drank. His head was swimming, and he felt hollow inside. The
glass was heavy in his hands. He said, "There'll be trouble when I get
to--to Llyrdis?"
"Sufficient unto the day, Trehearne. Worry about that when you come to
it."
But he had already ceased to worry. Llyrdis. He said the name again,
and it felt strange on his tongue. Llyrdis. A name and a world he had
never heard of until a few short hours ago, and now.... The hollow
spaces inside him were filled suddenly with homesickness, with a
longing, with something akin to horror. He stared at the iron walls
that closed him in, and he knew where he was, in an impossible ship
with alien people, flying faster than light across nothingness to an
alien star.... His stomach contracted, sending up a bitter fluid to
burn his throat, and his hands were cold as a dead man's. Earth was
gone. His Earth, sky, mountains, sunrise, city streets, country roads,
the faces and voices of people, the men he had worked with, the women
he had had or wanted to have, all the familiar things--the currency,
the bars, the names of nations, books, pictures, shirtmakers,
history--what was the use now of all the history he had learned, where
did Caesar rank among the stars? Earth was gone, and even the sun had
gone with it, and it was in a way as though he had died--and how do
you start life again afterward, a stranger? There was this cabin, and
outside its walls there was no world, no sunlight, nothing. Nothing.
_Nothing...._
Edri led him swiftly to a tiny adjoining cubicle and left him alone
with his misery while he used the intercom by the cabin door. Presently
the ship's doctor joined him. They got Trehearne back into the bunk,
and a needle glittered briefly in the light, sending him to a place
where there were not even any dreams.
On Number Four screen in the ship's control room, the pinpoint fleck
that represented an isolated yellow sun flickered, faded, and went out.