The girl stared at him without making a sound. Saxon realized that her
eyes were amber as topaz, large and strangely lambent. Then a faint
smile twitched the corners of her lips. She made no move to escape, not
even to cover her breasts and shoulder.
"_You!_" the thought reached Saxon tinged with amusement. "_It would be
you who discovered me!_"
She touched a tiny instrument strapped to her wrist, which Saxon
noticed for the first time.
"_Who are you?_" he thought again, then narrowed his eyes with crazed
disbelief.
He could see the bulkhead through the girl. She gave a low laugh. The
flexoplas coverlet, which had lain so lightly over her lap, collapsed
slowly.
The girl was gone, dissolved. Only her throaty laugh lingered in the
still air.
Saxon rubbed his eyes. He felt Ileth trembling against him as if she
had a chill. Setting his jaw, he stepped up to the bunk, felt the
sheets. They were warm and still held the impression of the girl's body.
He straightened, realized that the tingling in his scalp had ceased.
The alien telepath was gone. But where?
"Let's get the hell out of here," Ileth said vehemently.
Saxon followed her into the passage, switched off the lights, closed
the door softly behind him.
"I don't believe it!" said Ileth. "I don't want to believe it." Her
fine patrician features were paper white, making her black lashes
and eyebrows stand out like heavy strokes of a crayon. Her lips were
bloodless.
Saxon shook his head in bewilderment.
"Couldn't you read her mind?" asked Ileth.
"She had the most perfect mental barrier I've ever encountered. I
couldn't read a thing. Only...."
"Only what?"
"Nothing," he said abruptly, shaking his massive shoulders as if to
free them from a burden. "Nothing. I think we'd better keep our mouths
shut about this too. If we went around telling what we've seen, they'd
throw us in the psychopathic ward."
Ileth shuddered.
"Maybe it was an hallucination," she suggested. "Maybe we're nutty as a
fruit cake, I hope."
V
"You've been through the Little Death before," said Saxon. He and
Murdock, the T.I.S. agent, were in the control room, Murdock's eye
glued to the scanner. "What's it like, Murdock?"
The gaunt, frosty T.I.S. agent took his eyes from the scanner, faced
Saxon.
"Not so bad," he replied laconically.
"I've heard it's a pretty rugged experience."
Murdock allowed himself a tight smile. "That depends on how active a
social consciousness you have. You're a non-Newtonian physicist. You
know the Pachner conception of the space-time continuum better than I
do. Villainowski's stellar drive inverts the Newtonian concept that a
vehicle travels through space during a passage of time. It operates
through time during a passage of space.
"Yes, yes," Saxon interrupted impatiently. "But the effects of the time
field.... What do you experience while the ship is in the time field?"
"That's the Little Death," replied Murdock in a dry voice, "though the
name is misleading. Actually you experience a segment of your own life,
either the past, the future, or the present. As Villainowski would
explain it, time is co-existent, while in the time field our lives are
spread out around us, but because we're equipped with three-dimensional
sense organs we're restricted to a single series of episodes anywhere
along our life span."
Saxon frowned and said, "In other words, it's just as if we returned to
the past and relived some incident that occurred to us before?"
"Right. Or into the future and experienced something that hasn't
happened yet."