Falken looked at the lovely shimmering cloud, coming toward them.
"It won't be easy," he said grimly, "to concentrate."
Sheila's eyes were savage and feral, watching that foam of living
flame. Hilton's face was hidden. He said,
"Switch on your radios."
Power hummed from the batteries. Falken felt a queer tingle in his
brain.
The Sun-child hovered over them. Its mind-voice was silent, and Falken
knew that the electrical current in his helmet was blanking his own
thoughts.
They linked arms. Falken set his brain to beating out an impulse, like
a radio signal, opposing the negative of his mind to the positive of
the Sun-child's.
* * * * *
Falken stood with the others on spongy, yielding soil. Dim plant-shapes
rose on all sides as far as he could see, forming an impenetrable
tangle of queer geometric shapes that made him reel with a sense of
spatial distortion.
Overhead, in a sea-green sky, three tiny suns wheeled in mad orbits
about a common center. There was a smell in the air, a rotting stench
that was neither animal or vegetable.
Falken stood still, pouring all his strength into that single mental
command to stop.
The tangled geometric trees wavered momentarily. Dizzily, through
the wheeling triple suns, the Sun-child showed, stabbed through with
puzzled, angry scarlet.
The landscape steadied again. And the ground began to move.
It crawled in small hungry wavelets about Falken's feet. The musky,
rotten smell was heavy as oil. Sheila and Hilton seemed distant and
unreal, their faces hidden in the helmets.
Falken gripped them together and drove his brain to its task. He knew
what this was. The reproduction of another world, remembered from the
Sun-child's youth. If they could only stand still, and not think about
it....
He felt the earth lurch upward, and guessed that the Sun-child had
raised its creation off the floor of the cavern.
The earth began to coil away from under his feet.
* * * * *
For a giddy instant Falken saw the true world far below, and the
Sun-child floating in rainbow light.
It was angry. He could tell that from its color. Then suddenly the
anger was drowned in a swirl of golden motes.
It was laughing. The Sun-child was laughing.
Falken fought down a sharp despair. A terrible fear of falling
oppressed him. He heard Sheila scream. The world closed in again.
Sheila Moore looked at him from between two writhing trees.
He hadn't felt her go. But she was there. Hairy branches coiled around
her, tore her vac-suit. She shrieked....
Falken cried out and went forward. Something held him. He fought it
off, driven by the agony in Sheila's cry.
Something snapped thinly. There was a flaring shock inside his helmet.
He fell, and staggered up and on, and the hungry branches whipped away
from the girl.
She stood there, her thin white body showing through the torn vac-suit,
and laughed at him.
He saw Miner Hilton crawling dazed on the living ground, toward the
thing that looked like Sheila and laughed with mocking golden motes in
its eyes.
A vast darkness settled on Falken's soul. He turned. Sheila Moore
crouched where he had thrown her from him, in his struggle to help the
lying shell among the trees.
He went and picked her up. He said to Miner Hilton,
"Can we fix these broken wires?"
Hilton shook his head. The shock of the breaking seemed to have
steadied him a little. "No," he said. "Too much burned out."
"Then we're beaten." Falken turned a bitter, snarling face to the green
sky, raised one futile fist and shook it. Then he was silent, looking
at the others.