"Oh, yes I do! She saw you crossing the skyport with scanner beams
trained on you; she saw you playing hide and seek with annihilation. I
had to give her a sedative injection to quiet her."
Langford did not move. Something in Crendon's face told him he was not
expected to say anything.
"So that makes me an accessory!" Crendon said, the smile still on his
lips. "Her vision went blank when I decided she'd seen enough for her
own peace of mind."
He nodded. "I didn't know whether you managed to escape or not; it kept
me on the tetherhooks until you showed up in my office twenty minutes
ago. I've always liked you, Langford; I flatter myself I know an honest
man when I see one."
His hand went out and tightened on Langford's palm. "Come on, now!
We've got to remove those bandages before she reads my thoughts, and
knows how scared I get when I operate. Mutants know what humbugs we all
are, Langford; they can see all the flaws in us, and if they can still
trust us and believe in us despite that, they must be the forerunners
of a new humanity in more ways than we dream!"
If Joan Langford had eavesdropped, using her strange sight, she gave
no sign when her husband returned to her side. The conversation in
the corridor had taken him from her for the barest instant, but that
instant had seemed like an eternity to Langford and the inner vision of
his wife.
For how could 'time' be measured in minutes or hours by a woman wearing
a blindfold, shut away in the dark, and waiting a verdict that could
cause the future to slough away into chill gulfs? And how could 'time'
have any meaning when the stars faded out of the sky and a sunset gun
boomed farewell to the joys of the physical world? And to one who loved
and hoped--could 'time' be measured by the moving hands of a clock?
Quickly Langford's fingers interlocked with those of his wife. "This is
it, darling!" he said.
Crendon's fingers fumbled a little as he turned Joan's head gently from
the light and began to unwind the bandages.
"Don't open your eyes until I've removed the gauze pads," he warned.
"And don't look directly at the light. At first you may not see at all;
you must be prepared for that."
* * * * *
Crendon hated himself for his sternness, but experience had taught
him that it was best to arouse a faint antagonism in his patients; it
prevented them from regarding him as a miracle worker. He wanted them
to face reality with courage, for healing depended on many things and
was often a matter of blind, fanatical trust.
"Now then!" he said.
As he spoke he raised the last fold of the bandage, and carefully
removed the small, moist pads beneath, one from each eye. He
straightened, his back to the light.
Langford looked away quickly. As though from a great distance he heard
Crendon say: "Now you may open your eyes. Remember, you may not see at
all for five full minutes!"
Mentally he added: _Or ever! I shouldn't be discouraged. A man does
what he can. Ten years of it, ten years of trying to save human
sight. And every day I learn something. And every day I envy men who
endure merely the loneliness of space. Why pretend? I have never felt
compassion for humanity in the abstract. It is only when I look into
eyes that I have failed to heal and realize that I can do nothing at
all._
"Dr. Crendon, I can see! Everything--clearly."
And so it was that Dr. Crendon--moody, skeptical Dr. Crendon--received
the greatest shock of his life. He had anticipated an agonized
outcry--or a joyous one. But Joan had spoken hardly above a whisper,
in a tone of quiet assurance, as if she had known all along that she
would see.
And suddenly Crendon realized that she _had_ known! For mutants could
see into the most probable future! Not too clearly, but clearly enough!
How could he have been so blind?
As Crendon turned he saw that Langford had fallen to his knees beside
his wife and was sobbing convulsively, his head cradled in her arms.
He tiptoed softly out of the room. He felt curiously hollow inside,
as though all capacity for emotion had been burned out of him by the
corroding acid of his own skepticism.
3
Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan's
eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen
antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No--not a room. As he
bent above his wife, his hand on her tumbled hair, the space about him
seemed to fall away into darkness. And now he was gazing straight down
the interplanetary deeps at a green world swimming in a nebulous haze.
The haze dissolved, drifted away, and he saw the green hills of his
native land.
He saw the earth, and crouching shadows covered the face of the land.
The crouching shadows of enormous insects. He could not escape from
them because they were everywhere; when he broke into a run the mantis
shapes followed him. They towered above him, sinister, horrible. He
felt like a man caught in an invisible trap, the sky hemming him in,
the ground beneath his feet a dissolving quagmire.
He shook the illusion off, for he did not want Joan to see the shadows
as he saw them. What was it Crendon had said? She must be made to feel
that you need her. Well, he did; he knew now that more than his own
honor was at stake. If the alien ship could not be located his fears
would not remain subjective. The fate of humanity hung in the balance.
His imagination had been stimulated abnormally by the events of the
past few days; now it was leaping ahead of developments. For all he
knew to the contrary the alien ship had foundered in the void or
crashed on one of the inner planets in a red swirl of destruction.
Interstellar exploration was not without its risks and those risks
would mount steadily to an alien intelligence as unfamiliar landmarks
loomed up out of the void.
"You do not need the bandages," Langford said, a deep solicitude in his
voice. "If you simply shut your eyes you would see the ship clearly. My
thoughts would guide you to it."
"My vision is sharper when my eyes are bandaged," Joan replied. "You
must trust me, darling; I know. When my eyes are sealed there is no
emotional block and my inner vision has free play. I am prevented from
using my eyes by an actual physical impediment. So I strain all of my
faculties to see as far as I can in the dark. Call it a psychological
quirk if you wish; I only know that it helps."
"If it helps that's all that matters," Langford assured her. "Forget I
put my oar in."
"Don't think about the ship for a minute," Joan said. "Make your mind
a blank. Then visualize yourself standing before the viewport staring
out, just as you stood when you first saw the alien ship. Visualize
the ship coming toward you through the void. If you can visualize it
clearly I'll be able to locate it, no matter where it is now."
Joan paused, as though she didn't quite know how to make the complexity
of the problem clear to her husband. "I can't explain the power," she
said; "I know so little about 'time', far less than the physicists
think they know. Mutants, they tell us, can visualize 'time' as a
stationary dimension, freezing all event objects in 'the past' and in
the 'probable future'. They can travel along 'time' in either direction
at will."
"But you do not think of it as an actual journey?" Langford asked;
"you merely shut your eyes and see?"
Joan shook her head. "It isn't quite as simple as that. Clairvoyance is
never simple; it's accompanied by an intense inward illumination. It's
a little like staring at something through a long vista of converging
prisms. Objects get in the way and there's doubt, uncertainty.
Sometimes it's sheer torment.
"Sometimes I can't see at all. And even when I can see there's a
curious, almost terrifying sense of _wrongness_ about it."
"You mean you feel guilty?"
Joan smiled slightly. "Did Alice feel guilty when she went through
the looking glass? Perhaps she did! But I didn't mean that kind of
wrongness, not a moral wrongness. It's as though the strange tensions
will get you if you don't watch out. Rush in upon you and project
you forcibly into another place. As though you were a jet of steam
imprisoned in a bottle that's much too tight and forced in the wrong
direction by a power you can't begin to understand.
"You keep fearing you'll get caught in the neck of the bottle and wake
up screaming."
"Good Lord!" Langford muttered.
"I've never got caught," Joan said. "Now make your mind a blank,
darling. _We're going to find that ship!_"
* * * * *
A moment later Langford stood holding his wife's hand, a sharp
apprehension in his stare. Joan seemed slightly agitated. She sat
gripping the arms of her chair, her bandaged eyes turned from the light.
Suddenly her lips moved. "Ralph, I can see the ship! It's coming
straight toward the viewport. You didn't tell me it was so beautiful,
so--so huge!"
"I was waiting for _you_ to tell _me_!" Langford said, quickly.
"Well, I'm telling you, darling! I'm glad you didn't completely
visualize it. Now I'm sure I'm not just reading your mind. It must be
three hundred feet long; it's hard to tell where the illumination
comes from."
Joan straightened suddenly. "It's no longer just a ship," she said.
"I'm still outside, but I've moved closer to it. And I can sense a
rustling deep inside the hull, a vague stir of activity that's not
entirely physical."
While Langford held his breath Joan pressed her palms to her temples.
"The rustling is becoming clear. There are swift, abrupt movements,
accompanied by thoughts. But I'm not sure whether the thoughts come
from one mind or many minds. The thoughts are swift, piercing.
_Darting_ thoughts. That's the only way I can describe them."
Her voice rose slightly. "I can sense a living presence deep inside the
ship. More than one, I think. There's a kind of swarming."
"A swarming?"
"I'm not sure about that," Joan said, quickly. "I don't think they're
moving about much. The thoughts seem to come from one direction. I can
just make out a shape now; it's tall, and very slender."
"Winged?" Langford whispered.
"No, no, don't prompt me!" Joan was excited. "The important thing is
that I can see it. I may never see it clearly. Gauzy--yes, it _is_
winged. It has gauzy, shining wings, folded on its chest. Two clawlike
appendages, raised in a praying attitude. Perhaps I saw that in your
mind; you mustn't interrupt again."
"I won't!" Langford promised.
"The creature is horribly agitated!" Joan said. "It looks upon your
ship as a menace. Its brain is humming with fear; it is preparing to
contact you, warn you. It's getting ready to warn you in a strange way.
It has prepared something for just such an emergency. Something small,
glistening. I can't make it out, but it's putting the object into a
luminous shell!"
"That's right!" Langford said, forgetting his promise. "They shot the
shell into the void; we picked it up with a magnetic trawl."
There was a brief silence as Joan thought that out. Then her lips
twisted in a strained smile. "If you say another word--"
"Sorry!"
"It's bad; it hinders." She raised her arms in a gesture of grim
urgency. "Now the ship is moving swiftly away from your ship. I can
dimly sense vast distances rushing past. And there's a feeling of
loneliness, of utter desolation. No despair, exactly; it's as though I
were sensing the utter desolation of deep space through a mind filled
with a bitter nostalgia!
"If the feeling wasn't so intense, so strange and bewildering, I'd say
it was a '_Carry me back to old Virginia_' feeling! Does that make
sense to you? It's like--someone thrumming a guitar a billion miles
from home, whistling to keep up his courage, remembering something very
precious and beautiful lost forever. I can't explain it in any other
way."
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: "Now a planet is taking
shape in the darkness. It's pale green and crossed by a long, wavering
streamer of light. I can make out continents and seas."
Joan stiffened. "Ralph! There's only one planet in the Solar System
that catches the sunlight through great swarms of meteors in the plane
of its ecliptic. The lights of the Zodiac! It must be the Earth!"
* * * * *
Langford dared not speak for fear of breaking the spell. Joan was
trembling now, as though thoughts from the past were impinging with a
tormenting intensity on her inner vision.
"The ship's out of control!" came suddenly. "It's plunging down through
the lower atmosphere toward a vast expanse of jungle. A tropical rain
forest. A mist is rising over the trees and a burst of flame is coming
from the ship. It's zigzagging as it descends."
Emotion seemed to quiver through her. For a moment she remained
silent, her lips slightly parted.
Then more words came in a rush. "The ship lies on an island in a
forking river. Above it the foliage is charred, blackened. There are
three rivers and just below the island the water is white with foam.
There's a tremendous cataract about five miles below the island. It's
the largest cataract I've ever seen."
There was an eagerness on Langford's face, but he remained silent.
"There's a man swimming in the river above the cataract," Joan went on.
"A brown-skinned man with straggly hair, his shoulders gleaming in the
sunlight. I'm going to try to read his mind."
Langford did not move. For a moment there was no sound in the room save
Joan's harsh breathing. Then, suddenly, she straightened and ripped the
bandage from her eyes.
"Brazil!" she exclaimed, exultantly. "Darling, I've located the ship
for you. That island is in the interior of Brazil, in the deep jungle,
close to the headwaters of the Amazon!"
Langford stood very still, scarcely daring to breathe. In his mind's
gaze he saw a slender space cruiser lying unguarded in a suburban
hanger close to the dark waters of the great Northwestern Canal.
Commander Gurney's own private cruiser, the _White Hawk_!
How much of his mental audacity was inspired by sheer desperation
Langford could not guess. But he suddenly saw himself climbing out of
a thrumming jet plane in deep shadows and running straight toward the
cruiser with Joan at his side.
He saw the cruiser ascending, saw himself at the controls, with the red
disk of Mars dwindling beyond the viewport. He saw the myriad stars of
space and the rapidly expanding disk of the Earth pierced by wavering
banners of light.
And then it dawned on him that in some strange way Joan had seen the
vision first and was sharing it with him. He knew then that he could
not fail.
4
Beneath the descending cruiser the roof of the forest gleamed in russet
and emerald splendor above a labyrinth of wooded archipelagoes.
It still seemed a little like a dream to Langford, but he knew that it
wasn't. The vision that he had experienced three days before, standing
beside his wife in a white-walled room, had taken on the bright, firm
texture of reality.
He stood before the controls, with a thrumming deck under him, and
studied the shifting landscape through the _White Hawk's_ viewport. He
had never before flown directly over the Amazon Basin, and a river of
shining wonder seemed to flow into his mind as he stared.
It was Joan who broke the spell. She tugged gently at his arm, her face
anxious. "I don't see any sign of the three rivers!" she exclaimed. "Do
you?"
Langford swung about. "We haven't passed the great cataract of
Itamaraca yet," he said. "It rushes straight along for five or six
miles. Then it becomes the most impressive waterfall in South America.
A few miles below the falls the river spreads out into a lake."
Langford turned back to the viewport. "When we see the lake we can look
for another branching and the island. The island is right in the middle
of the three rivers you saw in your vision. But it's just a dot on the
electrograph. Are you sure it has a distinctive shape?"
"It has a high, rocky shoreline," Joan assured him. "The central
tributary cuts it in half and the other rivers flow around it. It's
heavily forested, but the rent in the foliage where the ship came down
is so wide you should be able to see it from ten thousand feet. The
treetops are charred over a half mile radius."
Langford smiled and squeezed her arm. "I bet you'd be happy mapping the
Amazon in a bark canoe like a twentieth century explorer," he said.
He grinned wryly. "A big rock island, mysterious as a cave of vampire
bats, bisects the largest tributary west of the Tocantins, and it's
just a dot on an electrograph to us. We've explored every crevice of
every world in the System, but sometimes I envy our ancestors; they had
elaborate pictorial maps to guide them."
After a moment the ship leveled off, and the Great Cataract swept into
view. It was a shining whiteness between two towering walls of foliage
festooned with hanging vines, and flame-tongued flowers upon which the
red sunlight seemed to dance.
It foamed and cascaded over jagged rocks, swept around little clumps of
submerged vegetation, and tore at sloping mud banks glimmering in the
sunlight.
Then the cataract became a receding blur and the wide river split up.
Langford heard Joan cry out.
* * * * *
The island which loomed below was about eight miles in circumference
and so heavily forested that it resembled a single shrub of wilderness
proportions growing from a cyclopean stone flowerpot.
Its high banks were almost vertical, its summit a charred mass of
foliage cleft by an enormous rent which funneled the sunlight downward
to a circular patch of bare, scorched earth.
Something glittered on the forest floor, far below the blackened
foliage. But whether it was the alien ship, or merely the glint of
sunlight on the river which flowed completely through the island
Langford could not determine from his aerial vantage point.
A divided island was really two islands, but Langford was in no mood
for geological hair-splitting. Erosion had failed to efface the
original, hoary uniqueness of that towering mass of jungle, and for
all practical purposes it was one island still, its high banks and
far-flung aerial traceries hemming it in, and sealing its teeming life
in eternal solitude.
Langford turned and looked at Joan with eyes that were meshed in
little wrinkles of confidence. "I'm going to gun her down through that
gap!" he said. "We could crash through anywhere, but the best way to
locate a wreck is to hew close to the cinder line!"
He bent grimly over the controls, in his mind a vision of a great host
of alien creatures rushing toward him through the forest, swarming over
the ship, refusing to let him emerge.
He feared their weapons, which he had never seen. He remembered the
little statue with its suicidal impulses, and its ability to shed
force-shell replicas of itself.
The ship thrummed as it swept downward, the lights in the control room
blinking on and off. Lower it swept and lower. The blood was pounding
in Langford's temples when a black-rimmed funnel of swirling brightness
yawned suddenly before the viewport. The same instant the cushioning
pressure of the anti-gravity jets made itself felt, holding the ship
suspended above the roof of the forest until its atomotors ceased to
throb.
The ship descended under its own weight amidst a slowly dissolving
pressure field. Sweeping down between the fire-blackened trees, it
circled slowly about and settled to rest on the soggy forest floor.
When Langford and Joan emerged a warm breeze, laden with jungle scents,
swept toward them. They stood for an instant close to the air-lock,
staring about them.
No sound broke the stillness except the insistent hum of insects and
the rustling of the vegetation on both sides of the ship. A few yards
from where they were standing the ground sloped to the brown waters of
a swift-running river, its surface flecked with white foam, and studded
with little whirlpools that swirled with a darkly writhing turmoil as
dry leaves fluttered down, twisting and turning in the breeze.
Twisting and turning above a limp form that lay sprawled on the
riverbank, its bare shoulders horribly hunched, its head immersed in
the muddy brown water.
Joan screamed when she saw it.
She broke from Langford's restraining clasp and went stumbling forward
until she was knee-deep in the swirling current. She was stooping and
tugging in desperation at the half-submerged figure when Langford's
hand closed on her shoulder.
"Let me handle this," he said, firmly; "it's no job for a woman."
On the bank Joan swung about to face him. "It's a job for a mutant!"
she protested, her lips shaking. "You don't know how close he is to
death. He's still breathing, but if we don't get him out--"
She broke off abruptly when she saw that Langford needed no urging. He
was already on his knees, tugging at the sprawled form. For a moment he
tried to succeed from the bank, his knees sunk deep into the mud, his
neckcords swelling. Then, with a gesture of fierce impatience, he waded
deep into the water and lifted the unconscious man on his shoulders.
* * * * *
Langford carried the man up the sloping bank, eased him to the ground
and rolled him over. A small, wiry man, darkly bearded, his mouth
hanging open! Staring down at the familiar face, Langford experienced
a sense of irony so sharp and over-whelming it interfered with his
breathing.
He leaned forward, and started working the man's arms slowly up and
down. He knelt in the soft mud, a murk of depth and shadow looming
behind him, a grim anticipation in his stare.
Suddenly the man on the riverbank stirred, groaned and opened his eyes.
"Hey, cut that out!" he grunted. "What in blazes are you trying to do,
you devil? Wrench my arms from their sockets?"
"Good morning to you, Commander!" Langford said, chuckling.
"Langford!" Commander Gurney's eyes began to shine, as though lit by
fires from unfathomable depths of space. A convulsive shudder shook
him. Digging his fists into the mud, he sat up straight.
"You stole my ship!" he rasped, staring at Langford accusingly. "What
made you think I couldn't trace my own cruiser? You can't rip out
infra-radiant alarm installations unless you know where to look. Didn't
you know I'd follow you in a fast auxiliary cruiser and get here ahead
of you?"
"I was afraid you might, sir!" Langford smiled ruefully. "But it was a
chance I had to take."
Gurney's eyes narrowed. "Your ship was sending out more automatic alarm
rays than a chunk of radium. My men had orders to close in the instant
you brought her down."
"Just where are your men now, sir?" Langford asked.
Something happened to Gurney's face. His features twitched and the
strained intensity of his stare increased so sharply he seemed to be
staring right through Langford into space.
"Those devilish things attacked us!" he muttered. "Exactly as that
little statue did! There were dozens of them, ten feet tall, and they
kept coming. We blasted, but the charges went right through them; they
lifted my lads up in their devilish preying arms and dumped them in the
river!"
Sweat gleamed on Gurney's brow. "It was ghastly, Langford. In the
river--like pieces of dead timber. The current carried them downstream.
I was helpless. I--I kept blasting, but I couldn't save them!"
"How did you save yourself?" Langford asked.
Gurney passed a dripping hand over his brow. "I was struggling with one
of them when everything went blank. That's all I remember."
Langford stood up. "I don't understand it. Why did that creature go
away and leave you with your face submerged? Why didn't it make sure
you'd drift downstream too?"
"I'm sure I don't know, Langford!" Gurney jerked a tremulous hand
toward the wall of foliage on the opposite bank. "Why don't you swim
over to their ship and ask them? You'll find the ship in a clearing
about three hundred yards from the bank. They've cleared a path to it."
"That's just what I intend to do!" Langford said.
Joan paled and moved swiftly to his side, her eyes wide with alarm.
"Ralph! You're not going alone--"
Langford nodded. "I'm a pretty good swimmer," he said.